The Board of Deputies has raised concerns over a public body’s funding of an academic conference on Israeli “settler colonialism in Palestine”.
Board CEO Gillian Merron wrote to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) about the conference, which is due to take place at Exeter University in October.
The council has given more than £16,600 in funding to the conference.
Ms Merron said the event was “a disingenuous attempt to politicise” issues surrounding Israel’s Bedouin community “in the wider context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
Fiona Sharpe, of Sussex Friends of Israel, has urged Israel supporters to write to the AHRC, which provides around £98 million from the government every year to support research in the arts and humanities.
The conference would be biased and one-sided, she believed.
The director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, the anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, is listed as one of the speakers.
A statement from the council said it had decided to fund the conference based on “academic grounds”.
