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.

Kenneth Marcus has paper published: “Jurisprudence of the new anti-semitism”

Kenneth Marcus

Abstract: What is wrong with the new anti-Semitism which is now resurgent across the globe, including on American college campuses? The question is deceptively simple, but it carries considerable resonance. Numerous governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, scholars, and civil rights practitioners have documented the dangers inherent in anti-Semitism’s recent manifestations, both globally and on United States college campuses. Yet many critics still deny its existence, severity, newness, anti-Semitism, or difference from mere criticism of Israeli policies. Moreover, some argue that it is a stratagem devised to silence opposition to these policies. For this reason, it is necessary to demonstrate that persons subjected to the new anti-Semitism are harmed in a manner which should be cognizable to the law. Specifically, it must be shown how some incidents of the new anti-Semitism, which may appear to target Israel rather than individual Jews as such, nevertheless constitute prohibited forms of discrimination against Jewish Americans. Under the conventional rubrics, the question amounts to whether the new anti-Semitism abrogates anti-differentiation or anti-subordination principles. Ultimately, the answer will turn on the extent to which this new phenomenon demeans Jews, encourages anti-Jewish prejudice, and derogates Jews as morally inferior. This Article argues that the new Anti-Semitism achieves these results in part through reracialization processes which stigmatize Jews as morally blameworthy and which mark them for reprisal.

Keywords: Anti-Semitism, Judeophobia, Jewish, Discrimination, Harassment, Civil Rights, Anti-Zionism, Israel JEL Classifications: J71, J78 Accepted Paper Series

Marcus, Kenneth L., Jurisprudence of the New Anti-Semitism (April 10, 2009).  Wake Forest Law Review, Vol. 44, 2009. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1376592

Bob from Brockley sums up the Cafe Crema boycott affair

Here.

The Militant: boycott and divestment a cover for antisemitism

The Militant is a socialist periodical connected to the US SWP and based in New York. This week you can read a piece by Paul Pederson reflecting on the boycott campaigning around Israel Apartheid Week, and the sacking of Starbucks in London. Dreaming of Israel subsumed into a “democratic, secular Palestine in which both Palestinians and Jews can live without state-supported religious restrictions”, he rejects boycott and divestment outright because they empower Palestinian groups whose values are antithetical to those of socialism, and because they are welcomed by workers’ class enemies as a diversion:

“Starbucks, whose owner is Jewish, has become a target of this campaign internationally. On January 10 some 200 protesters looted a Starbucks coffee shop near the Israeli embassy in London and attacked a number of businesses in the area. One proud participant posted a video of the looting on YouTube under the header “How to really boycott Israeli products.”

Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism, a centuries old form of racism, has been used by ruling classes throughout history when their system faced a crisis. Modern anti-Semitism often comes draped in an anticapitalist and even socialist cloak. The real exploiters—the billionaire ruling families, whose great majority is non-Jewish—are replaced by a racist conspiracy that paints the Jews as the source of society’s problems.”

and

“Support for the anti-Israel boycott effort among radicals – like the members of the Workers World Party and the ISO – often goes along with increasingly open support for Hamas. As ISO leader D’Amelio said of Khaled Meshal, the Hamas political bureau leader in Damascus, “There is little in what he says that I disagree with.”

The Hamas covenant, written in 1988, outlines the aims of that organization.

Speaking of the Jewish people, the document states, “With their money, they took control of the world media… . [T]hey stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution… . With their money they formed secret societies… . They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources.”

Fatah likewise has renounced its former revolutionary democratic demand for a democratic, secular Palestine. Its leadership reflects the wealthy layer of Palestinians increasingly seeking an accommodation with imperialism and with Tel Aviv.

In the absence of any revolutionary perspective, campaigns such as the anti-Israel boycott can appear to be a radical substitute. But, as the crisis of capitalism deepens, the “anti-Israel” character of these campaigns is simply a modern form of Jew-hatred. All who genuinely support the battle for Palestinian national rights must oppose it.”

Pederson sets out solidly socialist reasons not to boycott Israel.

But for ISO leader Lichi D’Amelio, the piece is an affront. She responds in the Socialist Worker, casting aspersion on Pederson’s socialist credentials and asking “whose side is he on”. She refers to her movement in revealingly self-centred terms as “perhaps the most exciting and positive development pro-Palestine activists have seen in a long time”. She also correctly refers to support for the boycott as a “no-brainer”, justifying it only with reference to other boycott examples, spurious authority figures and their decades-old writing. She is tolerant of Hamas’ antisemitic Charter, as charged by Pederson. There is no political vision in her self-defence – or rather it is a vision for, as an end in itself, bonding the workers of the world with Israel as the pretext:

“a movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel can play such an important role. It can help to build international working class solidarity–which we caught a glimpse of, thanks to the brave dockworkers in Durban.

How’s that for “charting a revolutionary course forward”?”

In other words, uniting against a scapegoat. Pederson was right.

For most others, it’s clear that that BDS is part of a movement to force the dismantlement of the state of Israel through total isolation and exclusion and that (unless you favour simply swapping an occupation for an all-out conflict) this is a moribund strategy. It’s significant that the pro-SWP organ has given Pederson a voice – it suggests that the antisemitism of the Palestine solidarity campaign has reached levels impossible for the SWP to ignore, and that it continues to finds antisemitism unhelpful to its movement.

Joel Braunold, member of the NEC of the National Union of Students, Proud Jew, Proud Zionist

Joel Braunold

“Why I have nothing to be ashamed of”- Joel Braunold – from www.officeronline.co.uk

When I was campaigning to get elected at conference last year, I would go up to delegates and give them my election speech which revolved around my ARAF work and campaign on student housing. After speaking to one delegate, though, I was asked a question that I thought had nothing to do with my election. “Well, are you a Zionist?” A little taken a back, I said, “Yes, I believe in the concept of the state of Israel alongside the concept of the state of Palestine.” The delegate shook their head and said, “Sorry, I can’t vote for a racist,” and walked away.

At the time I shrugged this off as the ignorance of a single delegate and went on to try and persuade more people to vote for me. What I have discovered, though, is that whether in a students’ union or a seminar, the word Zionism is seen as a slur, something you say to make someone feel ashamed or embarrassed.

It’s important at this point to state that I am a proud Jew and a proud Zionist. I believe in the national self determination of the Jewish people in the same way that I believe in the national self determination of the Palestinian people. There is nothing shameful in this belief, nothing that makes me a racist. I am utterly perplexed and at times frustrated by people insisting that I am a morally corrupt person for believing in the above.

What I find astonishing is that it is becoming an acceptable view in the student movement that my belief in national self determination means that I am a legitimate target for hate. If I were to denounce any wish for self government, be happy with the concept of being a minority in every country, with no place to call home, then people would stop hating me and all would be well. If only I could understand that it was my belief in a homeland that leads people to the slip from anti-Zionism into antisemitism then I would see that the best way of avoiding being a victim of racism was to give up the concept of me being a people and settle for me being only a member of a religion – then I too could be a member of the progressive student community and no one would have to wonder if I have a sinister Zionist agenda.

Over the past two months there have been things said to me by students and colleagues, both in formal NEC meetings and informal ‘chats’, that range from offensive to outrageous. I have been told that I am an immoral Jew, that I am one of the bad ones who do not march against Israeli oppression and that there are good moral Jews who march and Zionist Jews who don’t (of course this was said by someone who is not Jewish). I have been told that rather than being a victim of antisemitism, I am the cause of antisemitism, I and my fellow nasty Zionists are responsible for everything that happens to the Jewish community in the UK. Not the people who attempt to burn down synagogues, attack school children on buses, graffiti over Jewish community buildings or who call for death to all Jews; not any of them, but I am the one responsible for the historic rise in antisemitism, I, a member of a people who deserve the homeland that the UN granted us sixty years ago. Lastly I was told that I do not understand how to fight antisemitism and, rather then oppose a rally that intertwines a swastika with a Star of David, I should march alongside that banner to educate the people there….

Sometimes clarity is very important so let me be clear. I have never heard of anyone in the student movement blaming a victim of racism for the abuse they get. I have never heard people justify racism when in pursuit of a political cause (whether legitimate or not). Anyone who racially abuses me because I am a Zionist is wrong as racial abuse is wrong. This is not about me smudging a line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, but rather pointing out that clear cases of antisemitism such as speakers going around saying it is a rational thing to blow up a synagogue or people actually trying to burn down synagogues, are being explained away by motivations that lie in the Middle East. I don’t give a damn how angry you are about what happens in another part of the world, there is no excuse for people putting up the names and addresses of people’s places of worship on a protest group. Yet it is justified and absolved because the Jews were asking for it – what do they expect if they have a prayer for the safety of the state of Israel in their services. Antisemitism is not contentious and I’m sick of people ringing their hands over it and making excuses.

My aim here is not to open a can of worms, that was done at the last EGM, but to state a message loudly and clearly. To those who feel that it is a slur to accuse someone of being a Zionist I stand up proudly as a Zionist, unashamed and willing to defend it passionately. To those who are disheartened with what they have seen, who are feeling intimidated and low, you have nothing to feel bad about. Though some people like shouting louder and will use more underhand tactics, tactics that they should have to apologise for, to achieve their goals, you have a legitimate voice that should and will be heard.

Joel

“Why I have nothing to be ashamed of”- Joel Braunold – from www.officeronline.co.uk

At the Goldsmiths Gaza debate

We spread the word about ‘The Great Debate – The Gaza Issue’ at Goldsmiths last week – I took some notes. Somebody made a video recording – might be worth checking the SU Middle Eastern Society page in a few days.

This debate was envisioned by its organisers (an unprecedented and positive parnership between Goldsmiths Middle-Eastern Society, Jewish Society and the Palestine & Israel Peace Society) as a departure from the kind of Israel/Palestine event Goldsmiths is used to. But something untoward happened with the way the panellists were recruited and fairly late in the day the organiser who had arranged Eric Lee and John Strawson found out that the other two speakers were known provocateurs. John Rose in particular practically lives in Goldsmiths Student Union as a guest of the Goldsmiths Palestine Twinning Campaigners.

Maybe the clue is on the Facebook event page – four panellists “two representing each ’side’”. The dichotomy which disrupts so many campus debates about Israel and Palestine was also present here.

Consequently there were last minute worries on the part of the Student Union (the event was promoted as public on Facebook) who briefly attempted to limit the audience to Goldsmiths staff and students in the hope of avoiding the seemingly-inevitable controversy due to the choice of Israel-eliminationist panellists. During this last-minute flip-flopping about this, John Strawson cancelled (with the offer to return another time). In the end, the event remained public.

However there was a lot which was good about this event. The chair in particular was principled, firm, bright and something else – concerned that the audience should leave in a positive frame of mind. The mood was relatively tolerant despite some revolting statements from one ’side’ of the panel. Eric Lee, being without anybody else on his ’side’, was allocated the appropriate amount of extra time. The format was also good – three questions interspersed with panellists’ responses and questions from the floor. These well-conceived measures kept the toxicity which dogs SWP/RESPECT-organised events out of this one and distinguished the co-organisers as SU societies committed to improving general understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Hopefully they will organise more events.

The notes I took at the time [pdf]. Worth noting is Ghada Karmi’s “extremely generous offer” to allow Jews to live alongside Palestinians in “my country”, and Eric Lee’s response. Karmi’s main argument was to insist that it was simple: Jews came, stole my country and threw me out. John Rose defended suicide bombing and Islamism as resistance to imperialism which deserve our “unconditional but critical support”. This deeply appalled Eric Lee on behalf of the Iranian workers who were betrayed by the Islamist counter-revolutionaries. For John Rose, the inclusion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Hamas charter was a “mistake”. He went on to evade a question on whether he’d condemn suicide bombing against innocent Israeli civilians by reading from a Darwish poem about a suicide bomber, making (regardless of Darwish’s intentions) the facile connection between suicide bombing and desparation. He closed with advice to “engage with the Jewish students” in order to change their minds as his mind had been changed. The SWP has been failing at this for decades.

PrawfsBlawg on institutional responses to IAW and boycott campaigning

Paging Stanley Fish – a piece by Paul Horwitz on PrawfsBlawg about incendiary (in both senses) Israeli Apartheid Week posters, academic freedom, normal political discourse, and human rights. He opposes banning the posters:

“The posters, inflammatory as they may be, are clearly standard political speech.  They may not be civil, but they’re certainly well within the norms of “civil discourse in a free and democratic society” – or at least the kinds of free and democratic societies that value robust, uninhibited and wide-open debate.”

The kinds we need, even while we make objections to those norms.

He goes on to note a lightness in the student campaigning around free speech:

“The students apparently shy away from the obvious conclusion that the use of human rights codes in situations involving speech are generally suspect; rather, they argue that the “poster depicts a situation that has a factual basis and its intention is clearly to invite people to a lecture series,” so the poster is neither an incitement nor a violation of civil discourse.  (I hope they will be equally forgiving of similar posters that meet the same conditions, but with the names reversed!)”

Most importantly in its promotion of a debate about academic boycott, concluding:

“The university is a “community” in some important senses, but it isn’t a democracy, and even to the limited extent that it is, there is no universal suffrage … Academic freedom is a substantive value, and that value includes opposing academic boycotts; academic freedom does not, on the other hand, require democratic deliberation by all the stakeholders in a university.”

I’m new to Stanley Fish on the politics of the university.

Portrait of a campus anti-Zionist twinning

My UCU branch has decided that acknowledging antisemitism on British campuses doesn’t strengthen its twinning with a Palestinian university.

Last week, at a relatively well-attended meeting, my branch Executive seconded a motion to support a twinning with a Palestinian university, building on existing Student Union work. A  few of us decided to propose an additional note about “the increase in antisemitic atmosphere on British campuses associated with Israel’s conflicts”. We are all broadly supportive of the twinning but conscious that in our institution it has been a vehicle for intensifying calls for the ostracisation and dissolution of Israel. Our intervention was fairly puny and didn’t say what needed to be said about this twinning – in retrospect since it was almost certain to fall we should have made more amendments. Five of the student twinning organisers had taken a break from their occupation of our administration building to attend the meeting and were lined up at the front. The chair (who is also the branch Secretary and an Israel boycotter) interrupted me hastily as I began to explain the problems with the current twinning. He then told the branch that acknowledging antisemitism on British campuses wouldn’t strengthen the motion and that they should reject our note. They duly voted against it. Some of us went on to vote for the twinning motion anyway.

The report of the meeting was circulated the next day made no mention of this discussion. On the branch site:

“We acknowledge that the actions of the Israeli state (such as the invasion of Gaza) could lead to an increased climate of anti-Semitism”.

For how much longer is my union going to push this fallacy that Israel is primarily responsible for British antisemitism? Where is its sense of responsibility to Jewish members? For years it’s been blatantly obvious that antisemitism lodges in the language and practice of prevalent forms of Palestine solidarity activism, and that this morphs with alarming ease into familiar allegations of Jewish conspiracy and dual loyalty. To pass over this so lightly is a shocking failure for a trade union which calls itself anti-racist.

“However, it should also be pointed out that anti-Semitism is a separate issue than support for twinning with a Palestinian university and these issues should not be conflated.”

I argue here that our twinning harbours and promulgates antisemitic ways of thinking about Israel, that this is long-standing and ongoing, and that my branch has voted to go along with it.

The twinning is an ongoing project (‘campaign’) in the Student Union. In 2006 students here began seeking a Palestinian twin. They hoped to link with An Najah, famous for the Sbarro suicide bomb art installation. I understand that An Najah was much admired and received far more invitations than it could handle. Goldsmiths’ overtures came to nothing and consequently the organisers linked with a place which had been overlooked so far (this in itself is reassuring) – Al Quds Open University, a distance learning institution with branches in the UAE and Saudi. Al Quds don’t need much from us. They hope that people will visit and report back, and they also propose post-graduate scholarships. Who wouldn’t support this? But as well as being a project to extend solidarity and material support to occupied Palestinians, the twinning is also a campaign about something else.

At Goldsmiths Debating Society last week, a twinning coordinator told the floor that Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas, “wasn’t antisemitic at all, actually”. But Haniyeh leads a Jew-hating organisation whose charter confirms the validity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. If he’s not antisemitic, then nobody is.

On the twinning Facebook group, the front page for a while declared that the campaign was “under surreptitious attack from three very vocal Zionists”. ‘Zionist’ is used to mean ‘dissenter’, so perhaps one of them was me. At any rate, my posting rights were suddenly withdrawn after I criticised the aggressive anti-Zionist nature of an event I went to and warned that it would alienate Jews from becoming involved in the twinning. The correspondence that followed was grim, summarised by the coordinator’s “it doesnt alienate jewish students, just maybe zionists. and i’m not in the business of catering to racists”, and on Hamas: “it’s simply they are the palestinian resistance”. Simple is right. My ideas weren’t welcome but I was invited, or rather challenged, to donate my money instead. Not to them, I decided.

So when my local UCU Executive decided to give the twinning £200 of our subs, I notified the branch secretary of my experiences. I got a bland reply with no reassurance and certainly no undertakings. I sent a few polite messages to twinning coordinators asking to be reinstated. Some time later I found myself slung out altogether. By then I no longer wanted to get back in.

The same coordinator is an administrator of the ‘I Support the University Occupations in Solidarity with Gaza’ group on Facebook. She permitted an article containing the following to remain conspicuously for weeks – it was still there when she turned up at my union meeting last week and it took a letter from J-Soc to get it removed:

“The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.”

It was a satirical piece about Jewish Power from the LA Times, but it had been reposted unsatirically under a thread titled “Boycotting Hollywood”. There was no mention of Israelis or Zionists at all, just Jews.

The anti-Zionism of our twinning tends to antisemitism because it is avidly and viscerally anti-Israel rather than soberly critical of Jewish nationalism and prepared to engage with its origins and argue alternatives. This selective blindness and its corollary, antisemitism minimisation, is characteristic of the SWP and RESPECT, with whom a number, if not most, of the twinning organisers have affinity. Indeed every Palestinian speaker at twinning events is flanked by somebody with SWP-compatible views on Israel, insulting our intelligence with hollow ideology, mendacious analogy and vacuous code words – Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, apartheid, Nazi. There are no speakers who diverge from these eccentric and limited politics. You’re not supposed to think, you’re supposed to swallow the ideologies of John Rose, Sabby Sagall, Suzanne Weiss.

Suzanne Weiss (who never went near the Warsaw Ghetto, contrary to explicit statements on her publicity) was invited by the twinning campaign to tell a packed theatre that Jewish people are naturally hated, we should think of Gaza as a latter day Warsaw Ghetto, Israel as apartheid and Israelis as Nazis. This perverted set of equivalences paved the way for the assertion that Israelis intend to enact a holocaust on the Palestinians, and effortlessly on to demanding that we boycott Israel and work to end its existence.  David Hirsh and I explain how Suzanne Weiss’ analysis promotes antisemitism. And yet she was invited, warmly endorsed and funded by the Student Union. At the vigil afterwards (later talked of as a march)  another coordinator informed me that the twinning was completely free of antisemitism and we were all welcome at the meetings. Given what had gone before, the former statement cancelled out the latter.

The Student Union is split by the twinning. Many students recognise it as anti-Israel activism cynically posing as concern for Palestinians, the work of a small, but loud, voice in the SU. There is also widespread disapproval at the way it was pushed through on an Executive rather than membership vote. The most recent challenge to the current status quo, which proposed a three-way including Israel, fell by only two votes. There are likely to be further challenges, although not to the existing links with Al Quds – these are generally recognised as positive.

It’s hard to know what to make of the fact that my UCU branch finds antisemitism cosmically unimportant. How could a motion in support of twinning be weakened by an additional acknowledgement that antisemitism is on the rise? Perhaps it’s because this ostensibly peaceful twinning is in fact so hate-inspiring that, having harried Jews into defending Israel, it then treats them as proxy Israelis, Zionists and therefore fascists. The bottom line seems to be that if you support or defend Israel it doesn’t matter whether you also support Palestinians – you are going to have a credibility problem when you try to voice concerns about antisemitism. Quite possibly, your comrades believe that antisemitism is your fault and your problem.

Anyone tempted to write me off as a sly and bloodstained Zionist waving my antisemitism shroud to divert attention from Israel as it finishes off the Palestinians should ask themselves, what does she want? I support links with Palestinians, oppose the settlements, and if at any time in the future Israelis and Palestinians feel secure enough about each other to melt their borders, fine. But what seems to be much more immediately my business – because it’s something uncontained which affects where I live and work – is that things are going in the wrong direction for Jews here at the moment.

As I said at the meeting, I want a better twinning. Last week I was at an unedifying talk about what British Jews should do about Gaza. I went because my friend was an invited speaker. Afterwards he rounded up a small group of us with whom he was friendly and took us back to his home. The way it ended up, Palestinians, peace activists, former IDF soldiers, one or maybe two refuseniks, a person who found it very hard to be around to former IDF soldiers, an Israeli peace activist who was converted to boycotting, and an activist against British antisemitism talked and listened together, asked questions, disagreed, drew lines, talked sharply, reached agreements, put some things to one side. As David Hirsh puts it, they were reshaping the broad narratives of Israeli and Palestinian so that they were compatible with each other. This is a requirement of coexistence. The reason that group of people could come together is the kind of atmosphere my friend created – one in which Israelis and Palestinians, in Britain as equals, can grope towards the mutual understanding and trust which is so badly needed whether you support two states, one state or none.

And our twinning? Worlds away.

Update 12th March: Goldsmiths UCU racialises itself by advertising an unnamed “Jewish speaker” for the upcoming Palestine Solidarity Campaign meeting.

“With national speakers from Palestine Solidarity Campaign(PSC), a Jewish speaker on Jewish support for the Palestinian cause and student campaign activists.”

You can only assume that somebody thinks touting speakers as Jewish is a good shield against charges of antisemitism. Well it isn’t. It’s what is said and done that counts.

“Shame on the Zionists” – York University, Canada

Mira adds: Things are bad for Jews on that campus, but only the other day a York University student Independent Jewish Voices member said “the Jews who feel afraid on campus, I think, are afraid of the extreme pro-Israeli lobby”. Jews who didn’t want to campaign against Israel thought otherwise. Some have been threatened and assaulted. Some went to an earlier rally dressed as the IDF, which you can view as both inflammatory and defensive at the same time. The schism is profound, Haniyeh and Lieberman must be thrilled – if they are looking. The Students Against Israeli Apartheid say:

“Palestinians are not questioning a Jewish homeland. They just want equal rights just like Jewish people want … we are trying to say that Zionism is different from Judaism. Zionism is a political ideology that hinges on the expulsion of the indigenous people of Palestine, who are the Palestinians. It is not rooted in religion; it uses religion to further political ambition.”

These things together constitute an untenable position. Isn’t it obvious that condemning Zionism involves, if anything, rejecting the idea of a Jewish homeland? But this acceptance of a Jewish homeland is something to build on.

Will you defend Jews?

David T is organizing a picket.  Will you be there?