“Goldsmiths Made Me a Fundamentalist” – Noam Edry

On Thursday 14 July you are all invited to the opening of my show “Conversation Pieces: Scenes of Unfashionable Life”, a mini solo-show at the rear of the Baths Studios of Goldsmiths College as part of the MFA Fine Art Degree Show. It comprises of painting, sculpture, video and live performances all dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict from my own Israeli point of view. Call it a Zionist show, call it what you like. If anyone would have told me two years ago, when I came to London to start my MA in Fine Art, that I would be making a show about the conflict, I would have laughed straight away. I had always thought of myself as a-political. I never thought I had an opinion about politics, right, wrong, I only knew one thing: that I didn’t know. That things were not as simple or clear-cut as a black and white painting and that there were so many other issues I could address as an artist.

But then on my first day at Goldsmiths I was confronted by propaganda posters on the student union walls calling my country an “apartheid state”. It was the first time I had heard of it. Apartheid. How? In what way? I went to art school in Jerusalem with fellow Arab artists. We built our exhibitions together side by side, helping each other. I served in the Israeli army with Arabs and ate the same oily army food with them, and consoled myself with the same Arabic coffee that we brewed together in a small makeshift pot. My own army commander was Druze. All of a sudden I felt threatened and unwelcome here in Britain. I grew up in London from the age of five until I was seventeen but this was a very different London than the one I remembered so fondly.

In the first year at Goldsmiths I lay low, I tried fitting in, I refused to make work about my Israeli identity or anything that had to do with it. But it was simply not good enough. Because I was constantly confronted with questions, accusations, labels. It would happen on the way back from a party or over a casual cup of coffee. I saw more posters and protests and boycotts slandering my home, the place that made me who I am, a place that was barely recognisable in those posters. I saw the crass misrepresentation of my region and its de-legitimisation on a daily basis and I felt powerless. I did not have the words, I did not have the flashy slogans and the fashionable labels.

When I attended a meeting of the Palestine Twinning Campaign at Goldsmiths I felt like it was 1939 all over again. I was expecting a real dialogue but instead they were calling for academic boycotts of Israel, they were rallying young students who were desperate to be passionate about something to silence people like me; to silence artists and intellectuals who believe in human beings and mutual tolerance, who are the real hope for peace and for a bright future. I was horrified. What next? Would they start burning Israeli books? I promptly made the work “Save the Date” where I dressed up as a giant boycotted Israeli date and pleaded with my fellow artists to eat me. I performed it twice at Goldsmiths but the second performance was boycotted by the students. What utter absurdity, I thought: to boycott a performance about boycotting!

Documentation of the performance “Save the Date” will be screened at my upcoming show opening this Thursday. Also on show will be “Coffee Stand”, a work that challenges the demonising of Israel on UK campuses. The stand will be situated at the entrance to my show and manned by Israeli and Jewish volunteers, who will serve Arabic-Israeli coffee to members of the public. They will wear T-shirts designed and hand-printed by me with the text: “I come from the most hated place on earth” and on the back: “(second to Iran)”. Those who wish to take part by wearing a t-shirt at the show will be given one for keeps. You are all welcome to come and see it. There will also be a holistic therapist ready to rehabilitate your left side. Those who have tried it have felt the change.

I hope to generate real dialogue here, a conversation over a friendly cup of coffee, to show the faces of those directly affected by the hate-campaign, the demonization and the de-humanisation. Because, after all, what does it mean to hate a country? What is a country if not its people? What does it mean to hate a person simply because of the place where he/she was born? What good does it do?

I believe in human beings. I believe that each and every one of us seeks happiness.  If people want to be passionate about a cause they should know what it is they are rallying for. And make sure they are not trampling on someone else in the process. Passion is good when it is channelled in positive ways. When tolerance and well-being is the real goal and not the adrenaline rush of a good fight.

There is an Israeli voice in Goldsmiths. There is a Jewish voice in Goldsmiths. It is loud and it is here and it will not be silenced.

Noam Edry

 “Conversation Pieces: Scenes of Unfashionable Life” opens Thursday 14 July 6-9pm at the Goldsmiths MFA Degree Show

 Baths Building, Laurie Grove, New Cross, SE14 6NW

Opening times: Friday 15 – Monday 19 July 10am-7pm, Sunday 18 July 10 am – 4pm

 The Coffee Stand opens for the duration of the Private View, Thursday 14 July 6-9pm

And then every day Friday15-Monday 19 from 12noon – 3pm

 Hope to see you all there!

Why I am still in the dire UCU

“Now I’m going to explain why, in spite of this shocking state of affairs, I am not going to resign from the UCU.”

Geoffrey Alderman writes in the JC.

Why boycott culture? A debate, Sunday 10th July, London

Why boycott culture?

Ian McEwan’s acceptance of the Jerusalem Prize raised a storm of protest. We debate the motion ‘Cultural boycott can be an effective, indeed morally imperative, political strategy’.

Sunday 10th July, 7pm
Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London
Book tickets (£10 plus £1.75 booking fee for non-members; concessions half price)

Speaking for the motion:

• Omar Barghouti, human rights activist and author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights
• Seni Seneviratne, poet, author of Wild Cinammon and Winter Skin

Speaking against the motion:

• Carol Gould, broadcaster and author of Don’t Tread on Me – Anti-Americanism Abroad
• Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for the Guardian, and author of six books including Jacob’s Gift.

What is Engage?

For ‘About Engage’ click here.

Martin Bright on Ronnie Fraser’s Legal Action

 

Martin Bright

This piece, by Martin Bright, is from the JC.com

Pivotal moment for unions and Labour

For many years, too many trade union members have stood by as their officers expended significant time and money on international “solidarity” campaigns. The honourable cause of Palestinian national self-determination has thus been swallowed up in an ideological pudding that bundles together Venezuela, Chile and Cuba within campaign groups often run by the same small number of hard-left organisations.

Mr Fraser, director of Academic Friends of Israel, has been driven to this course of action by his treatment at the hands of his fellow trade unionists. This should be a matter of deep shame to all his comrades in the UCU. The union that represents the country’s intellectuals and thinkers should never have allowed itself to be drawn into this kind of fringe politics. Now it finds itself the subject of a harassment complaint under the Equality Act 2010.

As it has done so often over recent years, the trade union movement has provided the stick with which its opponents can beat it. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles was able to occupy the moral high ground when he wrote in the JC last week that the UCU was sending a “chilling message” to Jewish academics and students.

The labour movement and the party that represents it has been left flat-footed once more.

The TUC leadership has so far held the line against an all-out boycott on Israel but it will come under increasing pressure to harden its stance in the run-up to this year’s Congress in September. So far Ed Miliband has been silent on the issue. He has the rest of the summer to reflect, but then he must show some leadership.

This piece, by Martin Bright, is from the JC.com

SA Advertising Authority allows an advert which calls Israel apartheid

The South African Jewish Board of Deputies made a complaint against the South African Advertising Standards Authority concerning a radio commercial which was made by “Artists Against Apartheid”, calling for a boycott of Israel because it was an apartheid state.

The commercial features the voice of Dave Randall, lead singer of the group Faithless. He says,

Hi, I’m Dave Randall from Faithless. Twenty years ago I would not have played in apartheid South Africa; today I refuse to play in Israel. Be on the right side of history. Don’t entertain apartheid. Join the international boycott of Israel. I support southafricanartistsagainstapartheid.com.

The Complaint said that

the commercial is untrue, and not supported by any evidence to verify the implied claim that Israel is an apartheid state. Given that there is no finding that Israel is an apartheid state by the International Court of Criminal Justice. The commercial contains a lie which amounts to false propaganda.

The finding said:

The expression of the view that Israel is an apartheid state in contravention of international law is based on a sound factual matrix and the connection between apartheid South Africa and Israel has been made numerous times in the South African media. The claim is therefore justified and arguably capable of substantiation through this range of documentary sources.

The whole ruling is here.

Here are links to the debate from last october relating to the decision of the University of Johannesburg to cut its scientific links with Ben Gurion University in Israel.  Included here are pieces from Desmond Tutu, Robert Fine, Ran Greenstein, David Newman, Neve Gordon, David Hirsh and Farrid Essack.

Here is David Hirsh’s short critique of the apartheid analogy.

What’s wrong with PACBI’s “call” for a boycott?  click here.

For the Engage archive on the Israel / Apartheid analogy click here.

 

 

Irwin Cotler – on judging the distinction between legitimate criticism and demonization

From Cotler’s interview in Ha’aretz:

Since the start of the 21st century, the world has been “witnessing a new and escalating, globalizing, virulent, and even lethal anti-Semitism,” Cotler said, one which substitutes hate for the Jewish person with hate for the Jewish state. “We had moved from the discrimination against Jews as individuals, to the discrimination against Jews as a people, to Israel as the targeted collective ‘Jew among the nations.”

But he said not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.

“I think we’ve got to set up certain boundaries of where it does cross the line, because I’m one of those who believes strongly, not only in free speech, but also in rigorous debate, and discussion, and dialectic, and the like,” he said. “If you say too easily that everything is anti-Semitic, then nothing is anti-Semitic, and we no longer can make distinctions.”

The whole interview is here.

UPDATE

The following response from Irwin Cotler has been posted on Antony Lerman’s blog:

LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF HAARETZ

Your headline in the article “Canadian MP Cotler: Calling Israel an apartheid state can be legitimate free speech“ – as well as the inappropriate juxtaposition of disparate comments – suggest that the indictment of Israel as an apartheid state can be legitimate free speech.

As all of my writing, my talk at the President’s Conference and my follow up interview with Ha’aretz make clear: the indictment of Israel as an apartheid state is false, defamatory and hateful, but the right to be wrong, defamatory and hateful – however offensive it may be, can nevertheless be an exercise in free speech. Simply put, the fact that the indictment is hateful – and may cross the line into being anti-Semitic when it calls for the dismantling of the State – does not mean that we should prohibit the hateful speech to begin with.

It means, as I said in the interview, that we need to engage it, expose it, rebut it and thereby “delegitimize the delegitimizers” – not prevent their delegitimizing speech to begin with.

The main theme in my writings – and in the interview – was regrettably not referenced in the article itself: that the real concern is not the phenomenon of the delegitimization of Israel. That has always been with us – what is new, and particularly offensive, is the laundering of the delegitimization of Israel under all that which is good, for example: the struggle against racism, international law, human rights, and the like. The result is not only prejudicial to the State of Israel – as in the indictment of Israel as an apartheid state or the singling out of Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment in the international arena– but prejudicial to the case and cause of the struggle against racism and human rights.

To label Israel an apartheid state demeans the real struggle against apartheid – in which I was honoured to be at the forefront – as much as it falsely misrepresents Israel, however one may criticize Israeli policy and practice.

Irwin Cotler
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Norm – the Hunt elucubration 4

Norm with a  further UCU chestnut.

See 1, 2, and 3.

What would institutional Islamophobia look like if it took hold in UCU? Sarah AB

On Harry’s Place:

Instead of annual discussions of boycotts, the UCU might be trying with equal zeal to implement various measures against Islamic extremism.  As well as outlawing speakers with extreme views it might, rather like some governments in Europe, have ended up trying to pass motions to ban the niqab and even the hijab from campus.  It would be easy to imagine that, faced with such a sustained focus on Islam, even Muslims who thought the veil unnecessary and appreciated that *some* women were being coerced into wearing it, might begin to feel beleaguered.  Some might resign, others, worried about their jobs, wouldn’t but would find the atmosphere within the union unwelcome.  On the activists’ list ‘Islamism’ would slip into ‘Islam’ and fair points about hate preachers would drift into discussions of (for example) Cambridge being under the thumb of terrorists. When raising their anxieties Muslim UCU members would get accused of being apologists for HuT, or of wanting to close down debates about human rights abuses.

University societies might begin to devote whole weeks to campaigning against Islamism. Clearly some of their targets would be valid ones – yet the relentless and exclusive focus on Islam(ism) as the problem would make Muslim students feel still more beleaguered.  If they tried to point out a counterexample, or identify an exaggerated claim, they might get shouted down, or accused of being terrorists.

More resignations follow, But the UCU doesn’t seem that interested, and decides to arrange a conference on the subject of combatting extremism.  One invited speaker has been accused of stirring up hatred against Muslims in his own country, of implying that bad things will happen to them if they don’t denounce extremism, of suggesting that should move to countries more compatible with their (supposed) views. Although he claims to have Muslim friends, he said ‘Muslims are savage’ in an online discussion.  But the UCU still doesn’t seem that concerned.

Read the whole piece by Sarah AB.

Why is there antisemitism on the left? Phoebe and Moishe

What would Phoebe say?

A very smart piece from Phoebe Maltz, read the whole thing:

… Being on the left has always been about supporting the downtrodden, and since anti-Semitism is and always was about accusing Jews of being insufficiently downtrodden, there are only these rare moments when the obvious left-wing position is to get worked up about anti-Semitism – moments when anti-Semitism’s on-the-ground influence is so great (think the Dreyfus Affair, the Holocaust) that thinking of Jews as victims becomes uncontroversial.

Where does Israel fit into this? The idea that Zionism was and continues to be the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, a flawed movement but a legitimate liberation movement akin to the postcolonial ones all the same, this gets lost because Israel is a wealthy enough country with a white-ish population. The fact that Israel was founded by those Europe had rejected on account of their “Oriental” “race” and told to “go back to Palestine” gets lost and replaced by the idea that Israel’s a country dominated by a bunch of white Europeans – with all the global privilege that entails – who have no place in the Middle East. But the issue isn’t really Israel, or even the fact that the Palestinians are indisputably suffering, somewhat more disputably the non-white party in the conflict (disputably because, Ohad Knoller aside, Jewish Israeli’s aren’t all that white) – it’s about how Jews are perceived at home. I suspect that many in America picture Israel as basically a wealthy American suburb, a great big West End Avenue by the sea….

Read it all at What would Phoebe do?

And of course, Moishe Postone:

… The extensive and intensive spread of such global conspiratorial thought was dramatically revealed recently by the Egyptian television series Horseman without a Horse, which made use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a historical source, and the spread in the Arab media of medieval Christian blood libel charges — that Jews kill non-Jewish children in order to use their blood for ritual purposes.

Moishe Postone

This development should be taken seriously. It should neither be treated as a somewhat exaggerated manifestation of an understandable reaction to Israeli and American policies, nor should it be bracketed as a result of the dualistically grounded fear that focusing on it can only further Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Grasping its political significance, however, requires understanding modern anti-Semitism. On the one hand, modern anti-Semitism is a form of
essentializing discourse that, like all such forms, understands social and historical phenomena in biologistic or culturalistic terms. On the other hand, anti-Semitism can be distinguished from other essentializing forms, such as most forms of racism, by its populist and apparently antihegemonic, antiglobal character. Whereas most forms of race thinking commonly impute concrete bodily and sexual power to the Other, modern anti-Semitism attributes enormous power to Jews, which is abstract, universal, global, and intangible. At the heart of modern anti-Semitism is a notion of the Jews as an immensely powerful, secret international conspiracy.

I have argued elsewhere that the modern anti-Semitic worldview understands the abstract domination of capital — which subjects people to the compulsion of mysterious forces they cannot perceive — as the domination of International Jewry.
Anti-Semitism, consequently, can appear to be antihegemonic. This is the reason why a century ago August Bebel, the German Social Democratic leader, characterized it as the socialism of fools. Given its subsequent development, it could also have been called the anti-imperialism of fools. As a fetishized form of oppositional consciousness, it is particularly dangerous because it appears to be antihegemonic, the expression of a movement of the little people against an intangible, global form of domination.  It is as a fetishized, profoundly reactionary form of anti-capitalism that I would like to begin discussing the recent surge of modern anti-Semitism in the Arab World….

The whole piece by Moishe Postone is worth a read.

ht Ignoblus