A great OP-ed over at The Jewish Daily Forward by Nathan Jeffay about the decision of the British National Union of Journalists to boycott Israel.

The first thing I did after I started working as a staff reporter at the London-based Jewish Chronicle was to join the National Union of Journalists. Those dependable union reps, I was told, would safeguard my every interest.

Holding on to that belief has become rather hard, now that the organization I had considered my ally in the effort to uphold informed and intelligent discussion in British society has taken its place at the front of the slogan-yelling, Israel-hating mob.

Earlier this month the National Union of Journalists voted to boycott Israeli goods. Some 40,000 journalists, including those on all the United Kingdom’s leading publications and channels, are meant to abide by the ban. The union is also committed to pressuring for “a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa, led by trade unions… to demand sanctions to be imposed on Israel by the British government and the United Nations.”

Already a range of unions, representing all sorts of trades and professions, have sacrificed nuance for the sake of cheap polemics. It seemed we had reached rock bottom when unions of teachers and academics, the people responsible for the education of our society, jumped on the bandwagon. But the tirade against accuracy has reached new levels if we journalists — the people who control the flow of information — are joining in.

The advancement by the National Union of Journalists of this black-and-white understanding of the Middle East conflict — this absurd notion that Israel is the absolute baddy of the Middle East and the Palestinians the fair innocents — is especially obtuse at a time when one of our own, the BBC’s Alan Johnston, is being held hostage by a Palestinian group.

Amen.

The hypocrisy is infuriating.