It apparently merited only a tiny squib in this morning's New York Times. But the report by Times correspondent Alan Cowell was given the full treatment in yesterday's International Herald Tribune. To tell the truth, it was no surprise that the British Union of Journalists, with 40,000 members and 150 delegates to its annual meeting, would make explicit and formal its bias against Israel. All you have to do is read the British press and listen to the BBC to grasp that there is a pervasive hostility towards the Jewish state and, if you dig down just a little, towards the Jewish people, as well. The equivalences were made not so subtly. The vote of 66-54 (which meant that some 30 delegates did not want their union to go on record) voted to call for "a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid in South Africa." The resolution did not call, as Cowell points out, "for a boycott of contacts with Israeli journalists similar to previous academic efforts to ostracize Israeli university teachers." The reason is clear. British journalists, even the most hostile of British journalists, are fully welcome in Israel...and fully free, and they depend as all reporters do on the cooperation of locals. This contrasts with the paranoid policies of the Arab states that either don't let them in at all, tail them when they do and threaten them to guarantee what they do or do not say. No journalist has ever been kidnapped in Israel. But every month or so a western reporter is kidnapped in the Palestinian territories. Right now, for example, BBC correspondent Alan Johnston is thought to be dead some place in Gaza. In any case, he hasn't been heard from in many weeks. On the other hand, there's been no video displaying his severed head. Some journalists do have an easy time, even in Syria. Patrick Seale and Robert Fisk, for example, have the freedom of the land. But they are flacks, nothing more (and nothing less) than utter flacks. There are at least two explanations for the unprecedented official rage of the N.U.J. against Israel. One is that they are playing cozy with the multiplying Muslim population in England. The other is that they hate Jews and the very fact of Jewish sovereignty. After all, the union has not passed any resolution against genocidal Sudan. But there was another resolution that passed at the national meeting of the union. One that condemned Israel's "slaughter of civilians" in Gaza and last year's "savage pre-planned attack" against Lebanon. This resolution, says the IHT, "was approved by a wider margin."