Israeli legal centre abandons lawsuit against Sydney academic
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Version 0 of 1. An Israeli legal centre has abandoned landmark legal action against a Sydney academic, Jake Lynch, over his support for a boycott of Israel. Lawyers for Lynch said they and a Tel Aviv-based legal centre, Shurat HaDin, reached agreement on Wednesday that a racial discrimination lawsuit against the academic should be summarily dismissed for lack of standing. They said Shurat HaDin would pay most of Lynch’s costs. Lynch said he welcomed the news that Shurat HaDin had “effectively thrown in the towel”. “I feel relief, and also determination to now make the most of this, because it removes a possible excuse as to why people should shy away from BDS [boycott, divestments and sanctions] activism. We’ve successfully got the prospect of court action off people’s backs,” he said. Shurat HaDin, whose mission is to “bankrupt terrorism one lawsuit at a time”, filed the lawsuit against Lynch in October, alleging that he had engaged in unlawful racial discrimination against Jewish people, businesses and organisations by refusing to endorse a fellowship application from a Hebrew University academic, Dan Avnon. Lynch, who is an advocate of the BDS movement, refused Avnon’s request on the basis that Hebrew University has a campus in the occupied West Bank and had close links to the Israel Defence Force. The case was billed as major test of the legality of the BDS movement, which seeks to pressure the Israeli government over its continuing occupation of Palestinian territories and advocate for a Palestinian right to return. But Shurat HaDin suffered a major setback in April when a federal court judge, Alan Robertson, struck out key parts of its original statement of claim against Lynch, which sought to frame the case as a class action on behalf of all Israelis, and included plaintiffs who Lynch had never dealt with. Avnon himself was never a party to the case. Among the grievances alleged in the original statement of claim was that the BDS movement had deprived some of the plaintiffs of the chance to see the performer Elvis Costello, who cancelled a 2010 tour of Israel in protest at the treatment of Palestinians. All the original plaintiffs except for Shurat HaDin withdrew from the revised lawsuit, which Lynch said “doomed” the case, because the legal centre was not a natural person and could not demonstrate how it was affected by his actions. Lynch said the agreement brought to an end “the quixotic attempt by Shurat HaDin to establish that any activism in the cause of [BDS] must perforce be motivated by some kind of anti-Semitism”. “They were absolutely rock solid certain at the outset, but all their attempts to prove it in court and to amass evidence and argument to back it up have completely crumbled,” Lynch told Guardian Australia. He accused Shurat HaDin of trying to paint his decision not to support Avron’s application for a fellowship as a denial of employment. “The proposition put to me [by Avnon] was that I permit him the favour of putting my name on his application for the fellowship,” said Lynch. “I had no power to grant him or withhold it from him. He needed two signatures out of the academic staff of Sydney uni, which is somewhere north of 3,000.” A solicitor for Shurat Hadin, Andrew Hamilton, did not respond to requests for comment. The Israel-based head of Shurat HaDin, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, told The Australian that Lynch had won on a technicality. “We are absolutely determined that Lynch committed an unlawful breach of Australian anti-discrimination law,” said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner on Thursday. A judge is expected to make the orders early next week. |