The Inverted Image of Antisemitism on the Israeli Left.

By Saul.

The writings of the Israeli left have finally come of age; and is to be welcomed as a sign of Israel’s maturity. Yet, at the same time, they express a continuation of Israel’s well-known parochialism and of a failure to adequately grasp the world outside its borders.

In this category we have a range of interesting and scholarly works that sets out to debunk many of Israel’s founding national myths. One of those founding myths that is currently under critique is that Israel is a bastion against what is presented as an all-pervasive global antisemitism. This was the theme of an award-winning documentary, Defamation, shown at the recent Jewish Film Week. The antisemitism it presented was anachronistic and, to a large extent, now spent. It focused mainly, but not exclusively, on a few comments by one or two aging Central European antisemites and one or two aging Jews (including the director’s aging grandmother and an equally aged Holocaust survivor), the aftermath of the “Crown Heights” conflict of over 15 years ago and one or two incidents in the US that, at worse, could only be evaluated as causing minor offence. Apart from a brief interview with one of the authors of ”The Israel Lobby” the sites and narratives of contemporary antisemitism did not figure at all, not even in passing.

In Israel itself, the question of antisemitism has now become part of the battleground of the progressive left and the reactionary right and so has become part of the politics of how to move forward on the question of the Settlements and the Occupation of Palestinian lands. It is in this context that it is the right that is leading the charge against what it sees as antisemitism.

Much as the Israeli right’s understanding of what is and what is not “antisemitism” is seriously flawed. Reading the literature on the “new” antisemitism, one is immediately confronted with the paradoxical finding that what is “new” about this antisemitism is precisely just how “old” it is.

Yet, as much as the Israeli right’s reading of antisemitism is crude and unhelpful, the Israeli left falls into the same trap. This left mirroring of the right is evidenced in the belief to the effect that there is little (or in the opinion of Uri Averny in the film Defamation that there is no) antisemitism outside of Israel.

If, for the Israeli right, antisemitism is everywhere, then for the Israeli left, it is virtually non-existent. Both left and right are, of course, empirically wrong.

In the increasingly bitter fight between the left and right in Israel, the issue of antisemitism has become a central signifier of where one belongs in this political divide. In Israel, this is fully understandable and, indeed, in the context of Israel’s maturity, is to be welcomed.
However, whilst this conflict is a sign of Israel’s political maturity, it also signifies its parochialism.

Neither the left nor the right appear to consider for a moment just how their viewpoints play out in the world beyond Israel. They appear not to think for a moment how the arguments that make sense in the context of Israeli internal politics are exploited elsewhere.

One need only think of Walt and Mearsheimer’s exploitation and distortion of Haaretz’s story about right-wing pro-Israel lobbying groups that a poster discussed on Engage recently. One need only think of the idea that is common in the UK and elsewhere that “Zionists” and “Jews” “cry wolf/antisemitism” every time someone “dare criticize” Israel, even where, or rather especially where, such “criticism” takes the form of the myth that Jews/Zionists “control the world’s media” or the BBC or the Liberal Democratic party, to name but a few.

As between the Israeli left and Israeli right, I stand with the left. I welcome the debunking of the founding national myths in Israel as I would and do for any other country. I remain critical, though, with the left’s corresponding lack of understanding and lack of awareness, not of the “new” antisemitism, but of contemporary antisemitism, of the blurring between antizionism and antisemitism, of what some people believe is “mere” “criticism of Israel” and antisemitism.

Eye to eye with their right-wing domestic opponents and unable to see beyond them, the Israeli left’s vision on the question of antisemitism, cannot but be severely limited. Parochialism has always appeared as an Israeli trait, it is pity that, for all its maturity, this is one trait the Israeli left has yet to grow out of.

Because of the boycott campaign, UCU turns a blind eye to antisemitism

The Human Rights Commission is a national institution of post apartheid South Africa.  Part of the antidote to the old racist system, and independent of government, this institution functions as the linchpin of the new constitution which endows the rainbow nation with a set of legal and democratic guarantees.

The Human Rights Commission ruled last week that the statements of Mongani Masuku on the subject of Israel amounted to antisemitic hate speech.  He is a senior official in the South African trade union movement and is currently in the UK on a trip paid for by the University and College Union to promote the exclusion of Israelis, and only Israelis, from the global academic community.

This is the full text of the ruling of the South African Human Rights Commission.

The Human Rights Commission does not makes its judgments frivolously.  The Human Rights Commission is aware of the distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism.  The Human Rights Commission is not pro-Israel and is not concerned with defending the reputation of Israel.  It is concerned with racism.

Masuku has openly and repeatedly stated that South African trade unions would target Jewish supporters of Israel in South Africa and “make their lives hell”.  He urges that “every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine”.

The Human Rights Commission recognized unequivocally that using anti-Israel rhetoric, Masuku has attempted to mobilize South African trade unionists against Jews in South Africa – against the vast majority of them anyway, those who do not identify themselves as anti-Zionist.  Masuku believes that Jews who are not anti-Zionist are “agents of apartheid and friends of Hitler” and he proposes to relate to them as though they were both.

UCU has paid for this man to tour Britain’s campuses to make the argument for a boycott of Israeli universities.

Surely, when it is explained to UCU that Masuku is here to use antisemitic hate speech then it will realise that it has made a mistake?

But no.  The distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism has been explained to UCU countless times over the past decade but UCU is not interested and it continues to turn a blind eye to antisemitism.

A UCU spokesperson told a journalist from the Jerusalem Post that the sources of the evidence against Masuku was not credible.

“We don’t comment on stuff doing the rounds on the Internet and in the blogosphere and never will,” he told the Post.

The UCU spokesperson does not understand who the South African Human Rights Commission is or the significance of what it has judged.

But there is nothing new about this.  UCU has demonstrated repeatedly that it is simply not bothered by antisemitism if it comes packaged in the language of criticism of Israel.

Click here for a long and diverse list of evidence and opinion to which UCU has been unwilling or unable to respond in a normal antiraicst way.

Jews in UCU have been bullied, have resigned, have been pushed out and have been silenced.  The situation is so serious that at the last UCU Congress there were no Jews left who were prepared to oppose the boycott campaign.

For more details and argument on UCU and Masuku click here.

David Hirsh

Hate speech ruling against Bongani Masuku, guest of BRICUP and UCU

Background on Engage:

• BRICUP’s guest Bongani Masuku falls foul of Human Rights Commission
• BRICUP meeting Leeds – Bongani Masuku no longer speaking?
• UCU holding a secret boycott strategy conference. Bongani Masuku to be a guest of UCU

The British Commission for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) with the University and College Union (UCU), plan to host a speaker, Bongani Masuku, who has been under investigation by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) for a complaint of hate speech lodged by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) on March 26th 2009. The SAHRC recently ruled to uphold the complaint, finding that statements Bongani Masuku had made did amount to hate speech.

Copied to the SAJBD, here is the ruling of the South African Human Rights Commission.

From it:

“21. On the day in question Mr Masuku was speaking to students who included both Jewish Zionists and Palestinian supporters. There appeared to already have been noted tension between these two groups. Therefore by Mr Masuku making those remarks he surely intended to incite violence and hatred that was already potentially imminent amongst these two groups. COSATU members of Palestinian supporters present at this rally could easily have been incited to hate, and even attack their Jewish counterparts. This is exactly what Section 16(2) of the Constitution seeks to prevent.

22. Mr Masuku’s heated statements made amidst an already tense audience appeared to advocate hatred against Jews and all other supporters of Israel. This is inciting violence based on religion, an area which freedom of expression does not protect.

23. Mr Masuku in his response to the allegations put to him by the South African Human Rights Commission, states that he was heckled by what he refers to “as a particular section of the audience – most of whom seemed to be members of the South African Union of Jewish Students”. This statement leave little doubt that the references made by him referred to Jews.

24. The statement that “it will be hell” for any group of students, taken in its proper context is intimidatory and threatening. It is conveyed as a warning to the effect that should one support Israel, one would suffer harm. Harm for the purposes of Section 16(2), as confirmed in the Freedom Front decision is wider than mere physical harm.

25. In responding to the allegations relating to the emails sent by him, Mr Masuku fails to deal with the context in which he used the words “…whether Jew or whomsoever does so, must not just be encouraged but forced to leave…” These words in effect come across that unless South Africans agree with his views they should be forced to leave South Africa.

26. In view of the content of the speech made and emails sent by Mr Masuku it is clear that the expressions amount to the advocacy of hatred and thus would not fall under the protection of Section 16(1) of the Constitution.

27. The comments and statements made are of an extreme nature that advocate and imply that the Jewish and Israeli community are to be despised, scorned, ridiculed and thus subjecting them to ill-treatment on the basis of their religious affiliation. A prima facie case of hate speech is clearly established as the statements and comments by Mr. Masuku are offensive and unpalatable to society.

Finding:

28. In light of the above, the Commission hereby finds that the statements made by Mr. Bongani Masuku amounts to hate speech.”

The University and College Union is willing to sacrifice its anti-racist credibility to welcome and host a person who unashamedly, as an anti-racist and without a trace of irony, demands that his country’s Jews be menaced. This is a perversion of the necessary and valid campaign for Palestinian rights and a perversion of anti-racism.

Update: Harry’s Place – Bongani Masuku’s claimed constitutional right to hate speech. South Africa’s Palestine Solidarity Committee alleges gullibility on the part of their country’s Human Rights Commission, accuse it of issuing “a pack of lies”, accuse South Africa’s organised Jewish community of “constant, frivolous, and false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’”, and declare their intention to appeal against the ruling above.

BRICUP’s guest Bongani Masuku falls foul of Human Rights Commission

The South African Human Rights Commission found that Bongani Masuku’s statements amounted to hate speech.

This post is by Alana Pugh-Jones of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.

Bongani Masuku, International Relations Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), will be one of the speakers in the upcoming BRICUP seminar series entitled, ‘Israel, the Palestinians and Apartheid: The Case for Sanctions and Boycotts’.

BRICUP, a an organisation of UK based academics set up in response to the Palestinian Call for Academic Boycott and with the mission to ‘support Palestinian universities, staff and students’ and ‘to oppose the continued illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands’, is hosting numerous talks at universities across the UK. Speakers on the line up include amongst others the former South African Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils and Omar Barghouti of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

But it is the inclusion of Bongani Masuku in a public lecture series, run by a self described academically orientated organization, which is cause for concern.

Mr Masuku currently has a case of hate speech being reviewed against him at the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC). The SA Jewish Board of Deputies laid a formal complaint with the SAHRC against Masuku in March, on the basis of “numerous inflammatory, threatening and insulting statements” he has made against the South African Jewish community. In a press statement, the Board accused Masuku of using “overtly threatening language” in reference to the mainstream Jewish community because of its support for the State of Israel.

Specifically, Masuku had openly and repeatedly stated that COSATU would target Jewish supporters of Israel and “make their lives hell” and urged that “every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine”. He had explicitly demonised South African Jews who, unlike Ronnie Kasrils and others, had not “risen above the fascist parochial paranoia of Israel”, writing that such people could not be expected to be regarded as human beings by people like himself.

Masuku’s various statements were believed to constitute serious breaches of the Prohibition of Hate Speech as contained in the South African Constitution. Public pronouncements declaring that Jews who support Israel are not welcome in South Africa and should be forced to leave, as well as calling on COSATU’s members to target Jewish businesses and to confront Jews who support Israel wherever they might be even if this means doing something that in his own words, “may necessarily cause what is regarded as harm”, prompted the SA Jewish Board of Deputies to take action.

This week, the HRC released its finding, in which it unequivocally found that Masuku’s statements amounted to hate speech and recommended that the matter would best be resolved through litigation before the Equality Court to seek a public apology from him. Whatever the findings may be, inviting someone who openly and consistently promotes threatening action towards a community instead of employing factually based arguments to forward their cause, is a dangerous move which not only serves to undermine whatever merits may exist in the event but will only provide a platform for furthering hatred and tension around the Israel and Palestine debate.

Alana Pugh-Jones
Johannesburg, South Africa

Mira adds:

University and College Union boycotters and BRICUP members, including Mike Cushman, Hilary Rose, Steven Rose, John Chalcraft and Jonathan Rosenhead have ushered anti-Jewish racism into their movement. Their organisation’s uncritical hosting of Bongani Masuku shows that, for them, hatred of Israel is an acceptable substitute for powers of analysis. This is why BRICUP cannot be effective on behalf of Palestinians and why it’s reasonable to speculate that BRICUP’s main concern isn’t Palestinian emancipation, but hatred of Israel.

Update: see Ami’s guest post on Harry’s Place and background from Ben Cohen on Z-Word blog.

Update 2: According to the Facebook group page for Israel, the Palestinians and Apartheid, UCU is co-hosting the Leeds event.

Historical Materialism Conference 2009 : A DEBATE ON ZIONISM, ANTISEMITISM AND THE LEFT

Chair: Sebastian Budgen
John Rose
Robert Fine
Shlomo Sand

Here’s Robert Fine’s Speech.

I want to speak today not so much about Zionism and antisemitism themselves but rather about how we think and talk about antisemitism and Zionism. I want to speak more about ourselves and our place in the world than about the rights and wrongs of the existential struggles taking place in the Middle East.
My point of departure is a familiar refrain among critics of Israel that antisemitism is raised as a problem only by those who wish to invalidate criticism of Israel. Let me illustrate this refrain through a few quotations – three from my union, two from academics, two from politicians:

Antisemitism charges are just part of the deal for anyone who speaks out for Palestine.  The important point in all this is that we keep speaking out for Palestine… no one is fooled by this demonizing of all opposition to Israel…  (UCU activist). 

Criticism of Israel cannot be construed as antisemitic (UCU motion 2007)

Criticism of Israel or Israeli policy is not, as such, antisemitic (UCU motion 2008).

The charge of antisemitism is used to translate what one is actually hearing, say a protest against the killing of children and civilians by the Israeli army, into hatred of Jews. (Judith Butler)

By shouting antisemitism every time someone attacks Israel or defends the Palestinians, defenders of Israel rob the word of its universal resonance. If you criticise Israel too forcefully, they warn, you will awaken the demons of antisemitism. Indeed, they suggest, robust criticism of Israel doesn’t just arouse antisemitism. It is antisemitism. (Tony Judt)

For far too long the accusation of antisemitism has been used against anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government, as I have been. (Ken Livingstone)

I am sick of being accused of anti-Semitism when what I am doing is criticising Israel and the state of Israel. (Jenny Tongue)

What is common to these quotations is a deep scepticism about the alarm Jews and non-Jews express about the growth of antisemitism and about the ties that sometimes bind the growth of antisemitism to negative representations of Israel and Zionism. The argument that the charge of antisemitism serves only to invalidate criticism of the Israeli occupation and human rights abuses is a way of saying that people only raise fears of antisemitism in bad faith. An emphatic insistence that antizionism is not antisemitic, but is labelled antisemitic by ‘defenders of Israel’, presupposes that antisemitism is no longer real, it has become (at least in this context) a political ploy. In some quarters the charge of antisemitism is now almost a badge of honour rather than an occasion for self-reflection. Quite often individuals speak ‘as Jews’ and offer the authority of being Jewish to confirm that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic either in its motives or effects.

From the perspective of the left, a refusal to take antisemitism seriously seems to me a problem for a movement that wishes to be consistently antiracist. From the perspective of a European the idea that it is no longer antisemitism that is troubling Europe but talk of antisemitism seems to me an equally troubling notion.
Let me illustrate my argument through two reports on antisemitism issued by the EU Monitoring Commission (now called the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights) and more saliently through responses made to them by critics of Israel. The European commissioners fully accepted that criticism of Israel is not as such antisemitic, but warned that criticism of Israel can and sometimes does overlap with antisemitism. No one who looks at David Duke’s website should need further persuasion on this issue. The commissioners also argued, however, that liberal and left wing criticism of Israel can also turn into antisemitism if such criticism takes a particular shape or form: for example, if Israel is selected as uniquely evil or violent among nations; or if all Jews or all Israeli Jews are held collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel; or if the military occupation of Palestine is compared with the Nazi extermination of Jews; or if Israel is represented through long established antisemitic myths of world conspiracy, control of the media and murder of non-Jewish children. The commissioners maintained that in such cases substitution of the word ‘Zionist’ for ‘Jewish’ may make little substantial difference to the hostility in question.

These reports raise the question of where legitimate political criticism of Israel stops and antisemitism kicks in. They may or may not have got it right but we should not deny the validity of these concerns. However, the more critical responses to these reports argued that the commissions that produced them were influenced by the Israel lobby, grossly exaggerated the threat posed by antisemitism in Europe, gave excessive weight to the subjective claims of Jews to suffer from antisemitism, and most important gave spurious credence to the notion that criticism of Israel is a form of antisemitism. I think we would all agree that some kinds of ‘criticism’ of Israel – for example, that Jews are congenitally indifferent to the suffering of others or have a blood lust for murdering non-Jewish children or that Jews have no right to live in the Middle East – are antisemitic. It all depends on here we draw the line.

Inside Europe denial of antisemitism in connection with ‘criticism’ of Israel has been closely linked with a rewriting of the post-history, if we can call it so, of the Holocaust. It is said that commemoration of the Holocaust is too exclusive, that it is all about Jewish suffering, that it ignores the millions of non-Jewish civilians also murdered under Nazi rule. It is said that that no universal meaning is drawn from collective memory of the Holocaust, that we suffer from a surfeit of Holocaust museums, films and histories as if this were the only injustice we need to remember. It is said that it is inconsistent to make Holocaust-denial illegal but not denial of other genocides. Why for instance does the Armenian genocide not receive the same attention? It is said finally that memory of the Holocaust serves as an alibi or excuse for current Israeli human rights abuses, or that Jews have collectively become so self-obsessed by their own suffering that they are constitutionally blinded to the suffering of Palestinians.

The normative premises of this kind of criticism of the uses of the Holocaust are unexceptionable. Memory of the Holocaust ought not privilege the suffering of Jews at the expense of other sufferings. The cry of ‘Never Again’ ought not to be converted into an injunction that this crime should never again be done to Jews. The memory of the Holocaust ought not protect Israel from criticism. Concern over antisemitism ought not blind us to other racisms. In brief, those to whom evil is done should not do evil in return. This normative standpoint appears consistently universalistic.

But who says otherwise? Who is it that does not share this universalistic view on life? We are told: ‘they’ are sensitive only to the mass murder of Jews, ‘they’ turn the Holocaust into an excuse to ignore other crimes, ‘they’ shout antisemitism every time someone attacks Israel or defends the Palestinians. Who are ‘they’? The amorphousness of the designated enemy is part of the problem, but the target is clear enough: they are the ‘Zionists’. Zionists are said to instrumentalise the Holocaust for their own purposes.

Now it may be true of certain right-wing Jewish nationalists that they think only or mainly of Jewish suffering and ignore or downplay the suffering of others. But I would wish to make two points. First, it is generally true of nationalists that they respond to racism against their own people in their own nationalistic ways. This is a common enough phenomenon. There is nothing that marks out Jewish nationalists here from the general phenomenon that opposition to racism against ones own people may not be consistently antiracist. Second, to move from a critique of right wing nationalism to the notion that Jews or Israeli Jews only think of their own people is perilously close to a move from a political argument to an antisemitic argument. I think we would all agree on this. And if we move to the notion that ‘Zionists’ only think of their own people, we are not much better off since the term ‘Zionist’ serves more as a term of abuse than as one with any political referent.
Collective memory of the Holocaust does not of course consume our capacity for compassion or makes us blind to the suffering of others. Compassion is not a fixed quantity of capital and memory of the Holocaust equally serves as a ‘fire alarm’ alerting us to other atrocities. Emphasis on the particularity of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust does not subvert its universal meaning.

I would agree that there has been a tendency since the 1960s to sacralise the Holocaust, a tendency to indulge in a kind of ‘Holocaust piety’, as Gillian Rose memorably put it. This should be resisted. The Holocaust is a historical event, part of European history. Indeed, there are ties that bind what Europe did to others outside Europe (colonised peoples) to what Europe did to others in Europe (Jews). But does this mean that Holocaust commemoration is invalid if it does not refer to what ‘the Jews’ are doing to Palestinians or does not draw parallels between the Warsaw ghetto and Gaza? Surely not.

I never cease to be amazed at the ability as Europeans to recreate ourselves as the civilised continent – the ones who have learnt the universal lessons of the Holocaust – and to treat the Jews as those who have failed to learn the lesson. This European hubris can take the form a liberal narrative of progress which pays tribute to the success of the new Europe in transcending its so-called ‘longest hatred’. It usually acknowledges that antisemitism was a monstrous feature of Europe’s past, but insists that the conditions that gave rise to genocidal antisemitism have now come to an end with the defeat of Nazism, the rise of the European Union and the reunification of Europe.

While the strength of the Left is to resist this faith in progress and to explore the ways in which European racism is a recurring phenomenon, it also shares with liberals the conviction that antisemitism has run its course. What many on the left say is that antisemitism has been replaced by Islamophobia as the ‘real racism’ of the moment. The race question, we are told, is no longer whether Jews can be good Germans or good Brits but whether Muslims can be good Europeans.

Either way, either in its liberal or radical forms, the factual claim that antisemitism is no longer a problem in Europe serves to exclude antisemitism from the list of racisms Europe now has to confront if a new (non-racist) Europe is to be built. It deadens the nerve of outrage.

This rewriting of European history leaves out the multiple ways in which the past weighs upon the present. Far too much weight is placed on the assumption that antisemitism has been overcome by the rise of the new Europe. On the one hand, we see the re-emergence of ultra-nationalist parties in Europe. We might think, for example, of the Tories’ new friends in the EU, the Conservatives and Reformists grouping, led by the Polish politician, Michal Kaminski, who began his political journey in a neo-Nazi organisation, wore fascist antisemitic symbols and continues to hold that Poles should not apologise for the 1941 pogrom at Jedwabne until Jews have apologised for the wrongs they inflicted on Poles. Or we might think of the Latvian affiliate to this grouping, the For Fatherland and Freedom party, that has been a prime mover behind annual parades celebrating the Latvian legion of the Waffen-SS. We know that Kaminski and the For Fatherland and Freedom party are but the tip of a large and ugly iceberg of a growing nationalist politics in Europe.

On the other hand, the liberal establishment of the new Europe is not exempt from its own exclusions. The conceptual dichotomy between an allegedly postnational Europe and its nationalistic Others re-creates a moral division of the world between us and them, which can stigmatise the other as much as it idealises ourselves. It is not inevitable that the new Europe must be exclusionary in this way but the urge is internal to it. The representation of Israel as the incarnation of the negative properties Europe has succeeded in overcoming is a case in point. ‘Israel’ and ‘Zionism’ serve as vessels into which the European can project all that is bad in European history – its colonial past, ethnic divisions, institutionalised racisms, excesses of superfluous violence – and preserve the good for ourselves.

In European thought there has long existed a conviction that if we can only rid ourselves of some alien element – be it the bourgeoisie, parasites, terrorists or Jews – then all will be well. Representation of Israel as a pariah state or pariah people can perform a similar mythic function for a European consciousness anxious to divest itself of the legacy not only of its own past but also its present.

The denial of antisemitism cannot be explained by any conspiracy to forge an anti-Israel alliance. Its roots are more mundane. They lie in the genuine sense of outrage many of us rightly feel about human rights abuses committed by Israelis and about the need for justice for Palestinians. They lie in the experience most of us have that antisemitism is not a day to day problem in the UK. They lie in a politics of identity in which radical Jews declare that we are not like them and that what the Jewish state does is done ‘not in our name’. They lie in a politics of anti-imperialism which divides the world between oppressor and oppressed nations without allowing any complication or intersubjective dynamic to enter this binary picture. They lie in an idealist philosophy that leads us to measure the constitution and actions of a particular political state against the ideal of what a rational state ought to be. When we discover that the Jewish state falls short of the democratic secular ideal, we make our judgments on this basis rather than compare the justice and injustices of the Jewish state against the material practices of other states. They lie in the dynamics of political argument itself which tends to divide the world into opposing camps and leads us to caricature the beliefs of the other camp. It lies, as I have intimated, in the old European hubris of idealising ourselves by projecting onto others the barbarities (past and present) we cannot face up to.

I have focused in this polemic on Europe but let me end on this note. The struggle for justice for Palestinians and the struggle against antisemitism are not worlds apart. They belong to one another and draw from the same sources. As far as justice for Palestinians is concerned, the antisemitism question is not a red herring. It is a key to breaking out of the current impasse. Antisemitism does no good whatever for the Palestinian cause. In Europe it diminishes support for Palestinian rights. In Israel it reinforces the grip of nationalistic right wingers who know very well how to exploit antisemitism for their own ends. In Palestine it reinforces the grip of fundamentalist leaderships that threaten the freedom of Palestinians from within as well as the existence of Israel from without. In Arab states it allows reactionary rulers to divert social and political opposition into hatred of Jews. In the Middle East more generally it blames Israel and Israel alone for the suffering of Palestinians as if the end of Israel and beginning of justice for Palestinians were one and the same thing. It diverts from the real responsibilities of power that Israel has and is failing to meet.

We have to be careful not to invert the problem we are addressing. If some ultra-nationalists in Israel or elsewhere racialise Arabs and turn them into a unitary category, the temptation we must resist is to respond with an act of reversal that turns ‘Zionists’ into an equally otherised unitary category. We have also to be careful not to place Palestinians in a single identity script as victims of Israel and hear only the voice we want to hear. I am not suggesting that Palestinians are not victims but they are not only victims and not only victims of Israel. The problem we need to tackle is that our sense of injustice about the treatment of Palestinians can incline us to see that injustice as the formative experience in their lives and replace recognition of their agency with our contempt for the people we charge with excluding and oppressing them.
The critical space I am calling for has to include a concern for our common humanity alongside a concern for inequality and power. No human being is entirely ‘other’ than another, even where unequal social structures make this hard to see. Gillian Rose put it well:

The ‘other’ is equally the distraught subject searching for its substance, its ethical life.

Green councillor and candidate Rupert Read pushes Gilad Atzmon

On Greens Engage.

Dressing chauvinistic hatred up as ‘class warfare’ or ‘anti-imperialism’ does not make it a good thing.

This is a guest post by Marko Attila Hoare, Reader at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University, and European Neighbourhood Section Director for the Henry Jackson Society. Marko blogs at Greater Surbiton.

One of the most insidious things about the radical left-wing discourse of class warfare and imperialism is the way in which it is increasingly providing a cover under which the worst forms of bigotry, even murderous or genocidal bigotry, can masquerade as something ‘progressive’. So effective is this propaganda technique that today it is increasingly being adopted by members of the right and far right as well. Indeed, right-wing and left-wing opponents of our contemporary, cosmopolitan, global civilisation are increasingly resembling each other, dressing up anti-Semitism and other forms of racism as resistance to imperialism or capitalism.

Take the example of anti-immigrant racism. The BNP regularly presents its racism in class-warfare terms: ‘The only political party in Britain that is opposed to the immigration racket and its devastating effect on British jobs is the British National Party. We are poised to throw the entire weight of our campaigning machinery into action in support of striking British workers. We, unlike the unions and Lib-Lab-Con, will stand by our own people no matter what the cost. For decades we have had a simple slogan explaining our position: BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH WORKERS!’

But even less crude opponents of immigration are ready to play the class-warfare card. In the words of Jeff Randall, writing a couple of years ago in the Daily Telegraph: ‘By lowering wages, migrants enable the middle classes to hire more home-caterers, dog-walkers, house-cleaners and hedge-trimmers for less cost than before. Very nice, if you’re an investment banker in Kensington. Not so hot, if the last job you had was polishing his Bentley.’ Of course, working-class families might also benefit from Polish plumbers charging less than British plumbers, but this particular Telegraph columnist has learned the value of dressing up his right-wing viewpoint in quasi-Marxist clothes.

He is far from alone. Writing in the Yorkshire Post, Bernard Dinneen complains that in permitting mass immigration, ‘Labour politicians were the culprits; they betrayed the working class. ’[] Sue Reid, in the Daily Mail, wrote an article entitled ‘The great white backlash: Working class turns on Labour over immigration and housing’. She argued that in light of increasing ‘white working-class’ receptivity toward the BNP, ‘Perhaps this should serve as a timely warning to Hazel Blears and the rest of the New Labour hierarchy, who many feel have let down the ordinary people who put them in power.’

The problem is not that the language of the left is being cynically misused by racists and right-wingers, but that the links between left-wing discourse of ‘class warfare’ and ‘anti-imperialism’ on the one hand, and racism and anti-Semitism on the other, are much deeper than leftists are often ready to admit. When Ukrainian peasants rebelled against their Polish aristocratic landlords in 1648, their ‘class warfare’ was directed in particular against the landlords’ Jewish estate-managers; in practice against Jews in general, tens of thousands of whom were slaughtered. I hope it is unnecessary to point out that anti-Semitic slaughter of this kind does not become acceptable simply because it is an expression of ‘class struggle’.

For modern socialists and anarchists, hostility to capitalism frequently went hand in hand with hostility to Jews, as evidenced by the anti-Semitism of Proudhon, Fourier, Bakunin and others, including Marx himself. Fascism itself had radical socialist origins, as the brilliant historian of fascism Zeev Sternhell has demonstrated. Early fascists replaced the class struggle with the national struggle as the weapon for attacking liberalism and democracy; they believed redistribution of wealth and power should occur between nations, rather than – or in addition to – between social classes.

The most radical ‘national socialist’ experiment was, of course the one undertaken by Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party. As Hitler said: ‘We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.’ Hitler saw the task of his National Socialists as freeing the German workers from the influence of ‘Jewish’ international socialism, and of freeing the German economy from the control of ‘Jewish’ international capital. In power, the Nazis expropriated the wealth of Jews and of other nations, redistributing it in favour of Germany and German ‘Aryans’.

Yet genocidal impulses are scarcely an aberration in the revolutionary left’s tradition. Notoriously, Marx and Engels believed in the existence of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’ fit only to be exterminated. In 1849 Engels called for a ‘war of annihilation of the Germans against the Czechs’ as the ‘only possible solution’; he described the Croats as a ‘naturally counter-revolutionary nation’ and looked forward to the day when the Germans and Hungarians would ‘annihilate all these small pig-headed nations even to their very names.’

Left-wing radicals, unrestrained by any belief in the virtues of moderation and restraint, will frequently slip down the slope from aggressive radicalism into outright chauvinistic hatred, with their radical ideology simply a means by which their inner rage against particular groups of people can find socially acceptable expression. And in recent years, the more the prospect of revolutionary social change in the direction of socialism has receded in the advanced capitalist world, the more radical leftists and their fellow travellers have been ready to descend into the gutter of chauvinism directed against ‘counter-revolutionary nations’.

During the Wars of Yugoslav Succession of the 1990s, a considerable portion of left-wing opinion in the West made it abundantly clear that it did not respect the right of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’ such as the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians even to exist, let alone to receive solidarity in their struggles for national survival. The genocidal campaigns of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic were invested with an ‘anti-imperialist’ content, so had to be defended against ‘Western media bias’ and ‘demonisation’. What was chilling at the time was that, once the nations in question had been marked as ‘pro-imperialist’, their only legitimate option – as far as the ‘anti-imperialists’ were concerned – was to lie down and die. Any attempt at resistance to their national destruction on their part was condemned as a crime equivalent to – indeed worse than – the original Serbian assault on them, while any expression of solidarity for them by others in the West was condemned as ‘support for Western intervention’.

The Western leftists who defended Milosevic’s genocidal campaigns internalised the Serb-nationalist ethnic stereotypes of Croats as ‘Ustashas’, Bosnian Muslims as ‘fundamentalists’ and Kosovo Albanians as ‘criminals and drug smugglers’. There were plenty of ironies in the sort of arguments used to deny the right of these peoples to national existence. Opportunistic anti-Semitic statements made by Croatian president Franjo Tudjman in his book Wastelands of Historical Truth were cited to tar the entire Croat nation with the brush of fascism by leftists who have consistently turned a blind eye to – if not actively apologised for – the far more extreme and integral anti-Semitism of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah or of the Iranian and other Muslim regimes. The Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic, who never expressed any chauvinism toward Christians or Jews and who presided over a secular state, was condemned as a reactionary Muslim by leftists who would soon be supporting ‘resistance’ to ‘imperialism’ and ‘Zionism’ in Israel, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan on the part of genuine murderous Islamists, or uniting with British Islamists to form the ‘Respect’ party.
Leftist stereotyping of Kosovo Albanians as drug smugglers and criminals is simply the same stereotyping as that employed by the BNP against Albanians and other immigrants or ethnic minorities. Thus, the Socialist Unity website cited popular left-wing blogger ‘Splintered Sunrise’ to back up its own opposition to Kosovo’s independence, quoting him as saying ‘I’m opposed to independence for Kosovo because the place is run by a bunch of mafiosi, its economy is based on the trafficking of drugs, arms and women, and giving this basket case the attributes of statehood will make a bad situation worse.’ The BNP, too, opposes Kosovo’s independence on similar grounds, arguing
‘Albanians are spread all over Europe and especially in the criminal underworld. They are notorious for their effectiveness, unpredictability and incredible cruelty. Their main advantage to the other organized crime [sic] is the fact that they speak language [sic] nobody understands, their organization is based on family ties and if someone dares to speak out that person is being brutally murdered. In Europe, today the Albanian mafia is the main engine of traffic of drugs and humans, theft and falsification of passports, weapons and human organs trade, abductions, extortions and executions. In London these people control the entire network of prostitution, in Italy and Greece they deal with weapons and drugs’ smuggling. There are entire towns in Italy where the business is controlled by Albanians.’
However, ‘Splintered Sunrise’ attributed the BNP’s support for Serbia over Kosovo not to anti-Albanian racism, but to the Albanians’ own alleged sins: ‘the new BNP position has its roots in Londoners’ fear and loathing of violent Albanian gangsters’.

What is horrifying is not that the leftists in question are accusing Croatian, Bosnian and Kosovar leaders of things they are often not guilty of, or that the leftists in question are inconsistent or hypocritical. It is that such accusations are simply so many pretexts to support the destruction of the nations in question. These leftists do not want to give solidarity to progressive Croats who oppose anti-Semitism, or progressive Bosnian Muslims who support secularism, or progressive Albanians who oppose organised crime, with the goal of making Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo better places. On the contrary, the leftists are seeking to provide ammunition to those who would like to wipe these countries off the map altogether.

But for all the venom directed by ‘anti-imperialist’ leftists at the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, there is one state that they hate even more. Israel, in their eyes, is the ‘counter-revolutionary nation’ par excellence; its Jewish majority citizens condemned as ‘settlers’ (unlike immigrants in the West, who are not so condemned); its academics boycotted. Such leftists will line up with the most murderous and bigoted elements in the Muslim world against even the most progressive nationally conscious Jews on an ‘anti-Zionist’ basis; their need to deny Israel’s legitimacy as a nation and state trumping any opposition to anti-Semitism, fundamentalism, misogyny or homophobia they might be expected to have. Once again, they oppose Israel’s settlement building in the West Bank or discrimination against its Arab citizens not because they wish to align themselves with progressive Israelis who also oppose these things, but because they would, fundamentally, like to see Israel destroyed altogether.

The pretext for this left-wing hatred of Israel is that it is a ‘hijack state’ based upon the dispossession of most of the Palestinians who lived there until the 1940s. But this ignores the fact that other states are based upon similar or even larger-scale dispossessions of national groups, without their right to exist being called into question. For example, the Czech Republic’s relative ethnic homogeneity stems from the Czechs’ expulsion, following World War II, of two and a half million ethnic Germans from what was then Czechoslovakia. Likewise, modern Turkey is founded upon the extermination of a million Armenians and hundreds of thousands of Greeks during the 1910s and 1920s, and the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands more. But nobody claims the Czech Republic or Turkey is an illegitimate nation-state. It is Israel alone which is deemed to have forfeited its legitimacy as a nation on account of its leaders’ crimes of decades ago.

In each of the examples presented here, extremists try to dress up their bigoted hatred of whole ethnic groups or nations in radically progressive clothes. So the BNP will present its hatred of immigrants in terms of ‘supporting the British working class’, and radical leftists justify their hatred of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’ on the basis of ‘anti-imperialism’. Chauvinistic hatred does not become progressive simply because it is dressed in progressive clothes, and it is always worth looking beyond the window dressing to see what the agendas of such groups and individuals really are. Equally, it is time to acknowledge the problematic nature of such radical left-wing concepts as ‘class warfare’ and ‘anti-imperialism’, and the reasons they lend themselves so readily to abuse. When they are increasingly becoming the justification for the most extreme reactionary politics, something is very wrong.

Does Israel “cause” antisemitism?

On holiday last week a fellow guest in our inn for the night mentioned that the behaviour of certain Eastern European immigrants to Lancashire “caused racism”. Our host sympathised and the conversation became somewhat tense. If racism, rather than a form of outrage appropriate to the transgression, is so easily “caused”,  then surely the objects of the racism are due our concern? Wrong – it seems we are to take racism for granted and, if we are Eastern European, abandon any claim to unracist censure.

Along these lines, Modernity draws attention to a typically dense New Statesman piece titled ‘Does Israel “cause” antisemitism?’ The author’s bad error is that he takes for granted that antisemitism would be easily provoked by Israel’s engagement in unjust conflict, and so suggests a very short chain of causation for antisemitism which ends – because he has decided it should – at Israel.

The enduring tendency of quite a lot of people to mistake antisemitism for righteous anger is the reason that Israel exists as a Jewish state.

Understanding racists

Ben White understands.

See also Rosie Bell on Ken Loach, who also understands.

York University, Ontario – mob ringleaders reprimanded

The President of Ontario’s York University, Mamdouh Shoukri, has taken an unambiguous stand for academic freedom. He has opposed the academic boycott of Israel, and is resolute against calls to intervene in the content of an upcoming conference, Israel/Palestine – Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace, an event which sounded promising but however has reportedly been commandeered to promote above all the idea of a single state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

After nearly three months, Shoukri has also reprimanded the ringleaders – one of whom was the popular York Federation of Students (YFS) incoming President Krisna Saravanamuttu – who mobbed their political opponents on February 11th. Jewlicious has background. Although the political differences here were ostensibly over YFS’ support for prolonged industrial action by contract teaching staff, some key ‘Drop YFS’ (opposition) members were also active in Israeli and Jewish student groups, and similar fault-lines had been observed over YFS’ response to Operation Cast Lead. This was exploited:

“A familiar political pattern  is repeating itself at York. Student groups associated with Israel and hostile towards anyone expressing concern for Palestinian human rights are anchoring a campaign against the undergraduate student union, the York Federation of Students (YFS) and the clubs and social justice organizations associated with it. The public positions put forward by this campaign cannot be taken at face value.

…

Critics of Israeli crimes face the baseless charge of “anti-Semitism” from those happy to have their voices go hoarse crying wolf. But those who back off in the face of such  intimidation merely pave the way for continued Western culpability in these crimes.”

Where there’s the opportunity, Israel is often invoked by anti-Zionist activists as a political wedge regardless of the discriminatory implications; read Ignoblus’ piece on anti-Zionism as an article of faith. It looks to have been like this at York. ‘Drop YFS’ supporters met to discuss the enthusiastic response to their petition to impeach the student executive for failure to represent the student body, and yet were subjected to calls of “Israelis off campus”, “racist Zionists”, “Die, bitch, go back to Israel”, “Die, Jew, get the hell off campus”, “Fucking Jew” and similar. Jewish students took refuge in Hillel House where they remained under siege until the police arrived. Saravanamuttu blamed Jewish campus groups (Jews comprise 10% of the student population) for the aggression of which Jews were the victims:

Shoukri’s reprimand came late and Saravanamuttu is – as you might expect – insisting he’s an impeccable anti-racist and seeking donations to pay his fine.

Shoukri and York University in general will have their work cut out. The situation is that York students who opposed the YFS leadership’s stance on their lecturer’s industrial action and who also are, or are associated with, students who opposed their YFS leadership’s stance on Israel, have been targeted as Jews, as supporters of the existence of a state for Jews and – as if one thing automatically followed from the other – as racists. Saravanamuttu’s comments amount to the sentiment that if Jews hadn’t been involved in the action then there wouldn’t have been an antisemitic response. In a climate like this the worry is that students who want to express themselves politically will be at a deficit if they are identified as Jews or with Jews. This smearing is type of identity politics often deployed by players who hope to create diversion and division.

This is another clear example where having “many Jews in our group” or even being Jewish, as was the other student who was reprimanded, is completely irrelevant. As Shalom Lappin a visiting professor at York University, an alumnus, pointed out:

“When I was an undergraduate at York in the late 1960s the University was home to lively political activity on a variety of issues. The Israeli-Palestininan conflict was one of these, and discussion was intense, occasionally heated. However, at no time did this discussion degenerate into systematic bullying, initimidation, or expressions of bigotry. Nor would the administration of that period have allowed it to do so. It is a source of great sadness to me that the current administration is either incapable or unwilling to insure the existence of a basic culture of decency, civility, and free speech on its campus.

This culture is a necessary feature of any serious institution of higher learning.”

In the absence of serious contemplation about why it is that the Israel/Palestine conflict, including its virulent racism, is being played out in a Canadian institution, fining the ringleaders will not get to the root of what is currently festering at York and what is threatening other campuses in other countries, including my own.