UCU Scotland suspends support to SUTR until explicitly pro-Israel groups are excluded
01 April 2023 - SACC
Update 8 March 2024: SACC has been informed by UCU Scotland that its position is no longer as set out below
UCU (University and College Union) Scotland condemns the presence on the Stand Up To Racism march on 18th March 2023 of groups that defend Israel's racist colonisation of Palestine and says it will suspend all financial and other support to SUTR until explicitly pro-Israel groups are excluded. SACC urges other trade unions to take similar steps.
The following motion, tabled by the union's Queen Margaret University branch, was passed at the UCU Scotland Congress on Friday 31 March 2023.
Pro-Israel groups on Stand Up To Racism march (QMU)
UCU Scotland:
- Condemns the presence on the Stand Up To Racism march on 18th March 2023 of groups that defend Israel's racist colonisation of Palestine;
- Notes that, despite attempts to have explicitly pro-Israel groups and insignia excluded from SUTR, this did not happen in 2023;
- Condemns the infiltration into the anti-racist movement of apologists for Israeli apartheid;
- Commits to opposing antisemitism without condoning Israel’s racism;
- Notes the previous temporary suspension of UCU Scotland’s annual donation to SUTR because of collusion with pro-Israel groups;
- Resolves to take active steps to have explicitly pro-Israel organisations excluded from such events in future;
- Will suspend all financial and other support to SUTR until explicitly pro-Israel groups are excluded
The Friends of Israel groups operating in Scotland are pro-Israel lobby groups. They were not created and built by the Jewish community. On the contrary, they have relied heavily on Christian Zionists for their grassroots support. They are inspired and guided, directly of indirectly, by the Israeli government. They work to remove discussion of Israeli state racism from the political agenda. One of their key aims is to suppress BDS - a movement built on anti-racist principles and supported by anti-racists. They have no place in any anti-racist movement.
SACC has withheld support from the annual Stand Up to Racism march in Glasgow since 2017 because of the presence of explicitly pro-Israel groups on the march (see our statement from 2020). Organisations that actively support Israel while it continues the murder and racist oppression of Palestinian people are as out of place on an anti-racism march today as organisations supporting apartheid South Africa would have been on an anti-racism march in the 1970s.
SACC welcomes the UCU Scotland resolution and urges other trade unions to take similar steps.
Photo: COFIS on an anti-racism march, Glasgow, 18 March 2017
