BDS in the NTEU: a case study in ideological extremism

PHILIP MENDES discusses what happens when ideological zealots infiltrate trade unions to attack academic freedom, citing Australia's National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) support of BDS.

In the 1980s and 90s, when I was active in various left-wing peace and social justice groups, we often joked about potentially being infiltrated by secret cabals of Trotskyist (i.e. followers of the famous Jewish Russian revolutionary leader) extremists. In fact, there is a technical term, "entryism", that has been used historically to refer to this practice whereby small groups of fanatical Trotskyists enter larger, more broad-based left-wing groups in an attempt to seize control of their political agenda irrespective of the adverse impact on the subverted organisation.

Not that "entryism" is just a joke. In the mid-1980s, there was considerable evidence that the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (later renamed the Democratic Socialist Party) had entered and seized control of the more mainstream Nuclear Disarmament Party then headed by Midnight Oil rock music legend and later Labor Party Minister Peter Garrett.

Regardless, there is a long history of small extremist factions attempting to capture the agenda of larger progressive parties, movements and unions. The latest example is the infiltration of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) by supporters of the bigoted Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. I have been monitoring and researching the activities of the Australian BDS movement since it first emerged in 2002, and have authored most of the recent academic outputs on this movement: a book jointly authored with social democratic academic and Labor Party activist Nick Dyrenfurth in 2015 and a chapter in a recent book co-edited by Robert Kenedy and colleagues.

The aims and objectives of BDS down under are the same as their malevolent agenda globally. They propose the abolition of the existing Jewish state of Israel (even within its internationally recognised Green Line borders), and its replacement by an exclusivist Arab state of Greater Palestine. In short, a BDS victory would almost certainly result in over six million Israel Jews being ethnically cleansed from their national homeland. But the BDS movement might generously permit some Jews to remain as a tolerated religious, but not national, minority.