Anti-Semitism – an issue for everyone

David Hirsh’s letter in the Jerusalem Post in response to this article.

Anti-Semitism – an issue for everyone

Sir, – David Newman expresses one facet of a complex reality (“Smoke screen strategies,” December 15) when he says that sometimes right-wing Jewish voices portray criticism as though it were anti-Semitism. Rabbi Eliezer Melamed’s blood libel accusation against Defense Minister Ehud Barak is a case in point.

But by failing to take seriously the anti-Semitic potentiality of the contemporary anti-Zionist movements, Newman does little to untangle the knotted relationship between anger with Israel and hostility toward Jews. We have seen how the campaign to exclude Israelis, and only Israelis, from the global academic, cultural and economic community brings anti-Semitic ways of thinking wherever it goes. We have seen activists accusing anti-boycott lawyers of being financed by stolen Lehman Brothers money. We have seen a man found guilty of hate speech in South Africa being hosted by trade unions in the UK. We have seen “critics of Israel” drawing on far-Right conspiracy theory. We have seen any attempt to raise the issue of anti-Semitism routinely howled down by the cry, “Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic!”

The threat of contemporary anti-Semitism, including when it comes packaged in the language of Israel criticism, is real. There will be a significant stream of opinion at the Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism, which is critical of both anti-Semitism and Israeli human rights abuses. Anti-Semitism ought not to be allowed to appear as a right-wing issue.

Of course, it does not help the fight against anti-Jewish racism that this conference is hosted by Avigdor Lieberman, a man who has done nothing to demonstrate an understanding of how best to oppose racist ways of thinking.

DAVID HIRSH

Delegate to the Global Forum

London

In support of the Jerusalem Quartet performance

After reading Gene’s reminder “Equally, boycott opponents have a right, and a duty, to express themselves as well”, I just sent this (which I’ve tweaked a bit since sending) to BBC and Cadogan Hall addresses listed on PACBI’s ‘call to action against the Jerusalem Quartet’s Proms Appearance’. I hope the links make it through their spam filter.

***

info at cadoganhall dot com
proms at bbc dot co dot uk
and the Quartet.

Hello,

I understand you are coming under pressure from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel to cancel the performance of the Jerusalem Quartet on August 29th.

Hopefully cancellation is out of the question, but given the intensity of PACBI’s campaign, I thought I should contact you with some reasons to go ahead.

If you look at the boycott, divestment and sanction calls PACBI references, it is clear that PACBI and other boycott campaigners such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign are not interested in establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Rather, they are interested in eliminating Israel. This was made clear when PACBI successfully cancelled joint simultaneous peace concerts in Israel and the West Bank. PACBI and the PSC cannot tolerate peace work and move to sabotage it.

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1479
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1547

Some Israeli political groups and human rights and peace-making NGOs draw a distinction between boycotting the occupation on the one hand, which they view as appropriate, and boycotting Israel in its entirety on the other hand, which they recognise as eliminationist. PACBI and other groups pursue the latter – the entire social, cultural and economic exclusion of Israel. PACBI seeks, indiscriminately, to break links between medical institutions and cultural ones alike. Nothing less than the total pariahdom of Israel will suffice. PACBI is attempting to end Israel’s existence.

Unlike the boycott of South Africa, to which the boycott of Israel is frequently compared, hardly any Israelis call for a boycott. Those who oppose boycott include the Israeli socialist party Hadash and peace-making NGOs such as Gisha (legal centre for freedom of movement), the Abraham Fund for coexistence, and Peace Now (for an end to the occupation). The boycott is widely seen by peace-makers on the ground as counterproductive to peace. It is inarticulate, it causes more of the difference and division which are exascerbating the conflict, and it abandons Israeli peace activists.

http://links.org.au/node/968
http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/en/peace.asp?pi=69&docid=3303&pos=0
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1715
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/a-cringe-making-boycott-letter/

Israeli authorities have attempted to disrupt Palestinian cultural and academic affairs; I and other anti-boycotters have spoken out against these politically-motivated acts, as I do here.

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/protesting-the-israeli-security-forces-disruption-of-palfest/
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1940
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1029
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/student-protester-arrested-on-israeli-campus/

Meanwhile even joint anti-war Jewish and Palestinian Israeli productions such as Plonter are prevented from staging performances in Israel’s neighbouring states; performances are held to ransom as if they could lever peace. And even joint Israeli and Palestinian Israeli relationships are the focus of PACBI’s ongoing attempts to drive a wedge into co-existence between Israel’s Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. Wafa Younis’s life was in danger after she took her youth orchestra, Strings of Freedom, to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/pacbi-drives-a-wedge-into-coexistence-inside-israel/
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/good-things/

This is the nature of the cultural boycott.

Israel is unlike South Africa in a crucial way: its neighbours have only recently formally accepted its existence, this acceptance cannot be taken for granted, and there are enduring armed movements which hope to eliminate Israel. In South Africa anti-apartheid activists sought majority rule. In Israel there is majority rule. Israel is the world’s sole Jewish state, which came into existence after the attempted genocide of the world’s Jews. Hamas, Hesbollah and other factions continually preach hatred of Jews, and call this resistance to Israel. Beyond Israel antisemitism is a regional norm.

A total boycott of Israel – the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions of which PACBI’s cultural boycott is part – assists Hamas and other eliminationists by posing an obstacle to peace-making. In short, Israel is not and never has been the sole aggressor in this conflict, nor does it act capriciously or sadistically, as you might think if you were to read only PACBI’s, or only the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s, narrative of the conflict. The settlers must leave the occupied land, reparations must be made to refugees, occupation must end, resources must be equitably distributed, infrastructure must not be used to control and subdue, and Israel’s neighbours must permit Israel to live in peace. In Israel and the occupied territories violence feeds on violence, extremism on extremism. The reason the conflict is intractable is because the causes endure, not because Israel is a brutal state.

Anti-Israel politics are frequently expressed as hostility to Jews. PACBI has been complicit in this, and seeks to diminish concerns about this.

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/hamas-threatens-to-kill-jewish-children-anywhere-in-the-world/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/04/gaza-jewish-community

Boycotters will insist otherwise, but hosting an Israeli orchestra does not amount to acceptance of the decisions and actions of the Israeli government. Nor does it amount to a solution to the conflict.

But societies in conflict are vulnerable to the prejudice, demonisation, dehumanisation and despair which haunts conflicts, and without cultural and social exchange there can be no coexistence. And yet cultural exchanges are under attack not from peace-makers but from those who wish to prolong division.

The last time the Jerusalem Quartet was targeted in the name of Palestine solidarity, the protesters were charged with a racially aggravated offence. Separately, protest leader Mick Napier of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign uses far right antisemitic materials in his arguments on behalf of Palestinians. He is part of a current of thinking that perceives anti-Jewish words and acts as a legitimate part of Palestine solidarity.

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1752

The attempt he led to disrupt the concert was met with boos from the large audience at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh.

http://www.edinburghguide.com/festival/2008/edinburghinternationalfestival/jerusalemquartet

I could think of many more reasons not to cancel the Jerusalem Quartet. Some of them would be to do with cultural exchange and some of them would be to do with art.  None of them would be to do with discrediting solidarity with Palestinians under occupation. Israel is engaged in a violent occupation and ongoing settlement of Palestinian lands beyond its own borders. Israel has demonstrated it is willing to turn large parts of Gaza to rubble and make security for ordinary Gazans meaningless in the name of protecting its own security. But the cultural boycott of Israel will not help end the occupation nor the violence – if anything it will exacerbate the division. Additionally I think (unlike boycotters) that the best way for international community to end the occupation is to learn about the conflict, represent it accurately, and demand and take action which addresses the causes of the conflict. The best way for artistic bodies in Britain to reach out to Palestinians living under occupation is to invite Palestinian artists and performers to this country and pursue their travel permits with the Israeli authorities. I would be more than happy to play a part here, should such an initiative arise.

Thanks for reading and best wishes,

Mira

PS.
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/tali-shalom-ezer-won’t-do-ken-loach’s-work-for-him/
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/msu-jewish-studies-welcomes-honour-to-tutu-but-calls-on-him-to-renounce-israel-boycott/
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/boycotters-target-leonard-cohen-as-a-bhuddist-jonathan-freedland/

Jon Pike, elected opponent of the boycott on UCU Executive, resigns

Open Letter from Jon Pike to Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the UCU

Dear Sally,

UCU Congress last week adopted resolutions in support of an academic boycott against Israel.  As you know very well, the adoption of that resolution is in defiance of the considered majority view of the membership of the union. Whether or not such resolutions can be implemented, or have been declared void, their adoption is a violation of the democratic principle that the union ought to represent its membership.

It will be said that the UCU, on behalf of its membership, and on behalf of the academic community in Britain, would wish to push for an academic boycott of Israel, but is prevented from doing so by legal means.

This claim is entirely false. The members have not supported such a proposal, and they have not been asked their views.

Both Congress in 2008 and 2009, and a senior committee of the union have rejected calls for a ballot of the membership.  An amendment from my branch, to this year’s conference, calling for a ballot of the membership on this proposal was ruled out as a ‘wrecking amendment.’  It seems there is something incendiary about asking the members directly to express their views.  The call for a ballot has been rejected in the knowledge that, and because, such a ballot would lead to the overwhelming defeat of the boycott proposals.

When proposals for boycott of Israeli universities have been considered by branches of the union and its predecessors, they have been overwhelmingly rejected. Members at Reading, Open, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Bath, Warwick, UCL, Strathclyde, Lancaster, Kingston, LSE, KCL, Birmingham, Bristol, UEA, Sussex, Cardiff, LSHTM, The Institute of Education, QMWL, Aberystwyth, Swansea, Southampton, and others, have voted, at branch meetings, to reject such proposals. Previous similar proposals have been repudiated by individual branches, and overwhelmingly rejected by branch ballots of their membership.

The resolutions in question have been rushed through, in a way that has actively prevented the membership from scrutinising them.  Papers concerning the resolution have been distributed extremely late, with no explanation.  Legal advice, paid for by the members concerning the resolution has been withheld from elected representatives, branch presidents, and the membership.

The leadership of the union, and its Congress, which are both controlled by the Socialist Workers’ Party, has exhibited contempt for the views of its members on this matter, and on others, such as the crazy decision to ballot for industrial action, and the dishonest cover up by the SWP that has followed the aborting of this ballot.

In National Executive elections, less than ten percent of the membership now vote.  The NEC cannot be said properly to represent either the membership of the union, or the academic community in Britain.

If the union was a democratic space, in which the majority of the membership was able to determine policy, then there would be a case for remaining active in the union, and working for a change of policy. In its predecessor union, democratic mechanisms were available which allowed the overturning of a similar policy on April 26^th 2005.

But the UCU does not provide such a democratic space, and the procedures available in the AUT were removed at the time of merger.

The UCU cannot be considered a democratic union, representative of its members.

This has the following consequences:

We have a union that is able to send its President on trips to the Caribbean, at the members’ expense, to “celebrate the Cuban revolution” but that is unable to organise a legal ballot on industrial action in defence of jobs.

We have a union that has produced misleading and dishonest statements to the membership, on matters of fact, about both the ballot for industrial action, and about its policy on Israel and Palestine, and in which opponents of such a policy are subject to threats of legal action, smears, personal attack, and exclusions.

We have a union that has consciously abandoned its role of representing academics professionally.

We have a union that has brought academics in Britain into disrepute, by its willingness to countenance and support violations of the Principle of Universality of Science and Learning, and by condoning and supporting attacks on academic freedom, such as the outrageous and discriminatory actions of Professor Mona Baker in dismissing two Israeli members of her editorial board.

We have a union that, since merger, has allowed the systematic distortion and violation of democratic norms.  This works through a complex system of reserved seats, fractional branches and unaccountable, unrepresentative ‘regional committees’ each of which helps to entrench an anti-democratic system of double counting into its decision-making.  All of this has been done in violation of the agreements made at merger.   The merger has been a disaster for academic trade unionism in Britain.

We have a union that has allowed the distribution of antisemitic material on its internal lists, and the peddling of antisemitic conspiracy theories by some of its members, whilst banning anti-racist and Jewish members who have objected to such material.

We have a union from which hundreds of members – many of them Jewish – have resigned in protest at the unwarranted exceptionalism of its attitude to Israel.  I believe that many more will do so.

We have a union that entirely refuses to investigate concern about institutional antisemitism when raised through the proper channels, by members. The UCU is now the most complacent public institution in Britain with respect to the current rise in antisemitism.

Members of the UCU will ignore the decisions of its Congress, and continue to engage in academic collaboration and research with Israeli and Palestinian colleagues, and Israeli and Palestinian Universities, and they will be right to do so.

Academics in Britain, will, of course, ignore the UCU’s policy on this matter, and they will, of course, be right to do so.

It would be good if academics had a democratic, effective, professional and serious union to represent them in negotiating with the employers and in protecting their terms and conditions of employment.

That is, sadly, no longer the case.

I therefore resign my seat on the NEC.

Dr Jon Pike

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy

The Open University

Formerly Nationally elected member NEC (Pre-92)
The Jewish Chronicle report of Jon’s resignation is here.

In response to attempts to cancel Israeli Science Day

A recent science_museum tweet reads:

“Israeli Day of Science at the museum today. Protestor’s outside. Come down for politics and potential terror, but not the IMAX as it’s shut.”

Also this letter in the Independent from leading scientists and academics:

Dear Sir,

We were saddened by attempts to cancel the “Israel Science Day” lectures and workshops for schoolchildren. Whatever our opinions on the actions of the Israeli Government, scientists and academics should not be punished simply for their nationality.

Science crosses borders, builds bridges and transcends national and political divides. It can unite people, but the protesters seek only to divide and exclude. At a time of high community tensions, these boycott calls are especially pernicious.

The group of protesters peddled a discredited academic boycott inside the University and College Union, which was widely condemned as discriminatory and was abandoned. After failing in their union, they have continued the boycott campaign in wider society, trying to prevent British schoolchildren from being inspired by scientific discovery and innovation.

We welcome the Science Museum’s principled position in refusing to cancel this event, and hope that the “Israel Science Day” events inspire British pupils to pursue a future of their own scientific innovations and successes.

Signed:

Baroness Greenfield Director, the Royal Institution

Lord May FRS President Elect, British Association for the Advancement of Science; previous President, Royal Society; former Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government,

Lord Haskel Member, Lords Committee on Science and Technology

Lord Winston

Baroness Deech former chair, Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority

Dr Stephen Ladyman MP a professional scientist before becoming an MP

Tim Boswell MP Member, Innovation Universities and Skills Committee

Professor Denis Noble CBE FRS University of Oxford

Professor Sir Walter Bodmer University of Oxford

Professor Sir Peter Lachmann FRS FMedSci founder President, the UK Academy of Medical Sciences; past president, Royal College of Pathologists

Lord Turnberg

Professor Raymond Dwek FRS University of Oxford

Professor Jeremy K. M. Sanders FRS University College London

Professor Sir Alan Fersht FRS University of Cambridge

Professor Felix Weinberg FRS Imperial College London

Professor Stephen Neidle University of London

Professor Sarah Annes Brown Anglia Ruskin University

Professor NH Freeman University of Bristol

Professor Shalom Lappin Kings College, London

Professor Ludwik Finkelstein OBE FREng City University

Professor Yan V Fyodorov University of Nottingham

Professor Richard Bell University of Nottingham

Professor Michael Yudkin University of Oxford

Sir Ian Gainsford King’s College London (retd)

Professor Norman Fenton Queen Mary, University of London

Professor J M Reese University of Strathclyde

Professor Naomi A Fineberg University of Hertfordshire

Professor Ashley Grossman FRCP FMedSci London School of Medicine

Professor Geoffrey Alderman University of Buckingham

Professor Peter Maitlis Sheffield University

Professor David R Katz University College London

Professor Anthony Warrens FHEA FRCP Imperial College, London

Professor Ruth Itzhaki University of Manchester

Professor Alan Zinober University of Sheffield

Professor John Friend University of Hull (retd)

Professor Matthew H. Kramer University of Cambridge

Professor Yehuda Baruch University of East Anglia

Professor Gregory Gutin Royal Holloway, University of Londojn

Professor Daniel Hochhauser University College London

Professor David Stone University of Glasgow

Professor Irving Taylor ChM FRCS FMedSci FHEA University College London

Professor Mervyn Singer FRCP University College London

Professor A. David Smith University of Oxford

Professor Bernard S. Jackson University of Manchester

Professor Mark Schankerman London School of Economics

Professor Naomi Chayen Imperial College London

Professor Efraim Karsh King’s College London

Professor Keith Willison Institute of Cancer Research

Professor Brian L Burrows Staffordshire University

Professor Dame Hazel Genn University College London

Professor Stanley Bleehen University of Sheffield

Professor D. H. Foster University of Manchester

Professor Adrian Hyde-Price University of Bath

Professor Michael Sternberg

Professor Bryan Reuben London South Bank University

Professor Clive Jones University of Leeds

Professor Simon Wesseley Institute of Psychiatry

Dr Patrick Carmichael University of Cambridge

Dr Bernard S. Kay University of York

Dr Raya Khanin University of Glasgow

Dr Eugene Avrutin University of York

Michael Krom University of Leeds

Leslie Reinhorn University of Durham

Dr Eldad Avital Queen Mary, University of London

Dr Michael Kandiah University of London

Dr Margaret Myers retd

Dr Teresa Tiffert University of Cambridge

Dr Virgilio Lew University of Cambridge

Dr N.E.Scott-Samuel University of Bristol

Sophie Garside University of Manchester

Dr SM Lewis Imperial College, London

Dr Yuri Bazlov University of Warwick

Dr Anna Zecharia Imperial College, London

Rob Stevens Sheffield Hallam University

Dr Howard Kahn Heriot Watt University

Derek Meyer St Georges, University of London

I.Lewis Chemist, English Electrical Company (retd.)

Dr Nina Collins University of Leeds

Dr Jeffrey Ketland University of Edinburgh

Dr Ray Noble University College London

Dr Shoshana Squires University of Cambridge

Dr Jennifer Mindell University College London

Dr Liz Lightstone FRCP Imperial College London

Louis Lyons Imperial College London

Mark Katz CEO, Mark-IT

Brian Kerner MRPharmS (retd)

Barry Landy University of Cambridge (retd)

Dr Jose Liht University of Cambridge

Dr Ariel Hessayon FRHistS Goldsmiths, University of London

Yael Benn student, University of Sheffield

Julian Love University of Derby

Dr Elijah R Behr St George’s University of London

Maria Toledo University of Nottingham

Dr Sygal Amitay Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham

Dr Norman Solomon University of Oxford

Dr Sharon Morein University of Cambridge

Dr Hillary B. Katz London South Bank University

Dr Alan Benster

Peter Fine University of Sussex

Dr Michael Bardill

Marta Carroni PhD Student, Imperial College London

Dr Jonathan Rosier University College London

Dr Federico Carafoli Imperial College, London

John Akins Imperial College, London

Also in The Independent, a piece about Israeli science and the difference it makes:

“International co-operation in science is near-universal because scientific research recognises few borders. Indeed, there have been attempts to forge more direct links between Israeli scientists and their Palestinian colleagues. An umbrella organisation called the Israeli- Palestinian Scientific Organisation was established in 2002 to distribute grants worth about £50,000 for joint research projects.

One British scientist who has close links with Israel said that many of his Israeli friends and colleagues strongly disapprove of the recent actions in Gaza. But his view is that it is counter-productive to call for a boycott of Israeli science and scientists: isolating the most liberal-minded Israelis would only make matters worse.”]#

UPDATE (DH)

See also yesterday’s Times editorial

Howard Jacobson on the “Israel Must Lose” letter

Howard Jacobson

This piece by Howard Jacobson is from The Independent.

How does he get that dimple in his tie? Obama, I mean. Who else? Obama the beautiful. Obama the sonorous. Obama the Messiah.

I don’t make a habit of admiring people younger than me, unless they are of another time and long dead, in which case their anteriority makes them older. You can love someone younger – for love is part protectiveness – but it is not seemly to admire them. That way dotage lies. The trouble is that after a certain age there isn’t anybody older than yourself left standing. So Obama it is. He’ll be pleased to know he enjoys my esteem.

In fact I know how he gets that dimple in his tie. He ties it by a method known as the four-in-hand, a phrase that might have something to do with the horse-drawn vehicle of that name. Maybe it describes the way coachmen tied their cravats or hitched their reins. Whatever the etymology I am taken with the effect, and spent most of last week following instructions on how to achieve it on YouTube. You start with the wide end (“W”) of your tie on the right, then cross it over the narrow end (“N”), ensuring that “W” is kept about a foot longer than “N”. Then you…

It was only when I’d completely mastered the four-in-hand, holding a mirror to my computer and getting my wife to check me over every step of the way, that I realised I was being taught how to tie a tie in the way I have always tied a tie. Only I can’t get the Obama dimple. The narrowness of the knot, yes. The insolent asymmetry of the knot, yes. But not the dimple in “W” just below the knot.

It still isn’t clear how he manages it, but I suspect the secret lies in hauling the tie tight into the hot V-shaped hollow of your collar, and for that you need exactly the right spread of collar – not English Bufton-tufton cut-away, and not with the points limp and close together in the manner of mafiosi and art dealers. It goes without saying that you also need exactly the right amount of neck. Too little and you concertina the collar (think Cameron), too big and the dimple is lost in pleats of flesh (think Kenneth Clarke).

Here again Obama is perfection. The neck slender, but not wasted. The shirt white. (Only a fool wears a shirt of any other colour and only a scoundrel wears stripes.) The suit black, two buttoned, with long lapels. And thus tailored he will set about solving the problems of the world. Don’t laugh. I attach immense significance to the tailoring of Messiahs. There lingers in the British psyche – particularly the left side of it – a sentimental belief that political conviction must come in an untidy package. Michael Foot overdid it even for a socialist, but there remains an ideological association of dishevelment with truth. You can’t go on a march in a black suit bought from Hartmax in Chicago and a dimple in your tie. You can’t go on a march in a tie full stop. And there, reader, is the rub.

I measure a man’s seriousness by the degree of moral ambivalence he is able to intimate in his appearance. Here is surface, the subtle politician and thinker says, here is my homage to gorgeousness, worldliness and good manners, but don’t suppose I do not have that within that passeth show.

Too much attention to exterior show and the man is trivial; too little and he is a fanatic. The person who cannot smile urbanely even when the world is falling apart is no better than the person who can do nothing else. And those who think they prove their integrity by looking shabby by the standards of their own society, or by adopting the dress of the oppressed (as though the oppressed are a model by virtue of their oppression), only demonstrate the narrowness of their sympathies.

Showing just the right amount of white shirt cuff – inviting them to tea, as it were, in the Oval Office – Obama addressed the world’s political villains – “We will extend a hand, if you are willing to unclench a fist.” The metaphor is good. In the midst of war it reinstates the civilities. I’ll dimple my tie, you dimple yours, and we will talk it over. But it contains the necessary threat within the wit as well, for if they don’t unclench their fists…

Well, we shall see. In the meantime, in the far less sophisticated moral world we call our own country, the intellectually challenged who staff our universities are down on their knees kissing every clenched fist that will consent to their sycophancy. Take as an example plucked at random – trust me, reader, it just fell to hand – the letter written to The Guardian last week, demanding that Israel lose. Not withdraw, not seek a truce, not radically change its thinking – as many of us wish – but lose. Lose to the clenched fist of Hamas.

It was signed by those who exist to sign such things – professors of Media and Communications, lecturers in Visual Cultures and Gender Studies (gender studies and Hamas: get that!), boycotters, sandal-wearers, banner wavers, professionally ashamed Jews. As an exercise in simple-mindedness – what else do universities teach now? – it could hardly be excelled.

Israel had been waging war against the Palestinians for 60 years it said, omitting to mention the war that Arab armies had been waging against Israel, 60 years ago promising “a war of extermination” – extermination, note, not a two-state solution – culminating in the joyous prospect of “feeding the fish of the Mediterranean with the bones of Jews”. (Imagine starting a history of the Second World War with the bombing of Dresden and you have the picture.) Thus decontextualised, Israel, the letter continued, must now accept that its security depends on “peaceful co-existence with its neighbours”. Gosh, why hasn’t anyone thought of that before. Peaceful co-existence. You hear that, Mr Obama?

There is no monopoly on compassion. Signing a letter doesn’t make you a humanitarian. I too don’t want to see another dead Palestinian child. Not a one. But peace won’t come just because, ignored and impotent in your campuses of moral simplicity, with only the young and the like-minded to address, you wish for it.

Regard Obama. You have to work at truth. What seems isn’t always what is. And what will be waits on more than the velleities of the ill-informed. In the taut and intricate resolution of Obama’s dimpled tie is our most realistic hope for peace.

This piece by Howard Jacobson is from The Independent.

More critique of the “Israel must lose” letter from David Hirsh here.

Some comments on the “Israel must lose” letter – David Hirsh

David Hirsh

[Correction: I apologize for having mistakenly claimed that this letter was also signed by the antisemite Gilad Atzmon. I misread the web page. In fact Atzmon signed the letter below in The Guardian - DH]

This letter, signed by a large number of academics, represents yet another milestone in the escalation of the demonization of Israel in British public life.

It is signed by a number of serious and well respected people such as Etienne Balibar, Conor Gearty, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernesto Laclau, Eyal Weizman, Nira Yuval-Davis, Slavoj Zizek and Paul Gilroy.

It is also signed by the usual list of people who spend their time spreading hatred of Israel and trying to have Israelis “boycotted”, such as Mona baker, Haim Bresheeth, Alex Callinicos, Keith Hammond,Ted Honderich, Ilan Pappe, Hilary Rose, and Richard Seaford.

The letter is incoherent. The final paragraph begins with the following:

We believe Israel should immediately and unconditionally end its assault on Gaza, end the occupation of the West Bank, and abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders.

This paragraph clearly favours a two state solution to the conflict and a peace between the two nations. In the previous paragraph the signatories articulate their concern for Israel’s security:

Israel must accept that its security depends on justice and peaceful coexistence with its neighbours, and not upon the criminal use of force.

So far so good. All this, the call for an immediate ceasefire, an unconditional withdrawal from the occupied territories, the characterization of its use of force as criminal – all this is within the bounds of serious and legitimate criticism. But it is incompatible with the sharp end of the letter.

The massacres in Gaza are the latest phase of a war that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years.

Here the signatories make it clear that they consider the State of Israel itself, not only the occupation, to be illegitimate. They make it clear that they believe that Israel’s use of force to sustain the occupation is part of the same war as the defensive wars with which Israel has managed to guarantee its survival. They, like the Israeli far right, deny any politically significant distinction between the occupied territories and Israel itself (see This is Really Two Wars).

Israel must lose. …we are obliged to take sides … against Israel, and with the people of Gaza and the West Bank. …We must do what we can to stop Israel from winning its war.

The signatories pledge to do what they can to ensure the military defeat of Israel.

Apparently they want Israel to be defeated militarily in Gaza and in the West Bank, they want Israeli troops to be sent home to Israel and they want that to be the basis for a new peaceful co-existence in the Middle East.

Here the signatories are imagining that the conflict is between an imperialist occupier on the one hand (the oppressors) and a national resistance movement on the other (the oppressed). They want to support the war of the oppressed against the oppressors. They want, modestly, to put their weight behind the movement for Palestinian national liberation without acting as imperialist outsiders, telling them how to fight their struggle.

But they are clever people, mostly, and they know full well that the conflict is more complicated than that.

They know that Palestine is politically divided between Hamas and Fatah.

They know that Hamas is, as well as being a nationalist movement, an antisemitic movement which is constitutionally and practically committed to killing the Jews in the Middle East and instituting an authoritarian Islamic state throughout Israel and Palestine.

They back some of this aspiration, insomuch as only half of them half believe that Israel has a right to exist, and they all know that if Israel did not exist then the Jews of Israel would be in grave danger.

They know that a military defeat for Israel would put the Jews of Israel at great risk. And yet they call for it.

They pretend to believe that a military defeat for Israel at the hands of Hamas or perhaps Hezbollah or perhaps Iran, could lead to a peace agreement which could guarantee Israel’s security. But most of these signatories are too clever and too well-read to believe that.

The letter is phrased in a curiously ‘quantitative’ language:

It is not enough to urge the renewal of dialogue and to acknowledge the concerns and suffering of both sides.

Dialogue, ceasefire, peace, a two state solution are not enough. They want to go further. Beyond dialogue is military victory for Hamas. Beyond ceasefire, beyond peace, beyond a two state solution, is war. Peace is not enough; they want victory. And they understand clearly how to build a movement against peace and for war:

We call on the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps to oblige Israel to comply with these demands, starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Boycott is war against Israel by other means.

And the global campaign for the military defeat of Israel is also a genocidal campaign. And these signatories know it. They know what the military defeat of Israel would mean. And yet they call for it.

David Hirsh

Goldsmiths, University of London

Editor, Engage

NB Bob from Brockley’s response to this letter is well worth reading too.

A contribution to the war of words about Gaza

Bob From Brockley comments on some of the protest about Gaza in today’s Guardian. He gives particular attention to the letter signed by 322 UK academics calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel:

“Many of the signatories profess one or another form of Marxism. Yet, in the utterly ahistorical framing of its argument, the letter violates one of Marx’s core principles: that politics is always historical, that categories are always in movement. A “a war that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The goal of this war has never changed…” Here, history dissolves. “Israel” becomes a mythical beast, frozen in the endless repetition of its evil actions. Did the Israel of 1948 use “overwhelming military force”? Or, rather, were not the weapons it had to hand those the Palestinians used in the First Intifada?

And what do “the principle of democratic self-determination” and “the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation” mean in concrete terms? What, specifically, is the democratic self-determination of one ethnic group, if it denies that to another? What, even more to the point, does “Israel must lose”? The obligation to take sides the signatories claim is no more pressing in this case than it is in the case of the Hutu and the Tutsi, where self-determination for one can mean extermination for the other in a zero-sum game. “Justice and peaceful co-existence” cannot spring from the defeat of Israel by Hamas, any more than justice and peaceful co-existence can be achieved by bombing Gaza into dust.

It is true, of course, that the conflict is not symmetrical, and that Gaza’s electorate voted for Hamas. But the signatories of the letter are stuck in the reality of the First Intifada, when the figure of “Palestinian resistance” was the child throwing stones at an Israeli tank. Since then, we have seen the militarisation of the Palestinian struggle, the evacuation of all social content from it: the suicide bomber rather than the stone thrower. And, now, in this Third Intifada, the stones have been replaced by rockets supplied by the Iranian theocracy.

So, when the signatories talk about “the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation” and say “Israel must lose”, the reality is the triumph of a fascist state, not the beginning of justice. The Hamas regime, which continues to fire on Israel, which continues to deploy its its children as human shields, which murders its political opponents, which brutalises its own population, does not represent “the people of Gaza and the West Bank”, any more than the Ayatollahs represent the people of Iran or the Nazi state represented the people of Germany.

What the people of Gaza need, rather than this sort of hollow gestural pseudo-solidarity, is precisely a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance. Cheering on their war-mongers will not bring them justice or peace.

The reason this letter is not just nonsense, then, but pernicious nonsense, as J Frank Parnell might have said, is…”

Read the whole thing.

Open letter to Gideon Levy from A.B.Yehoshua

Yesterday Gideon Levy had a piece in Ha’aretz titled The IDF has no mercy for the children in Gaza (reproduced in full for the UCU Activists list in the style of the SWP with the subject line “The blood of Gaza’s children is on our hands”). A.B. Yehoshua responds today in an open letter:

“The doleful thought sometimes crosses my mind that it is not the children of Gaza or of Israel that you are pining for, but only for your own private conscience. Because if you are truly concerned about the death of our children and theirs, you would understand the present war – not in order to uproot Hamas from Gaza but to induce its followers to understand, and regrettably in the only way they understand in the meantime, that they must stop the firing unilaterally, stop hoarding missiles for a bitter and hopeless war to destroy Israel, and above all for the sake of their children in the future, so they will not die in another pointless adventure.

After all, now, for the first time in Palestinian history, after the Ottoman, British, Egyptian, Jordanian and Israeli conquests, part of the Palestinians has gained a first and I hope not a last piece of land on which they are to maintain a full and independent government. And if they start building, developing and pursuing social endeavors, even according to Islamic religious law, they will prove to the whole world, and especially to us, that the moment we terminate the occupation they will be ready to live in peace with their surroundings, free to do as they wish, but also responsible for their deeds.

There is something absurd in the comparison you draw about the number of those killed. When you ask how it can be that they killed three of our children and we cause the killing of a hundred and fifty, the inference one can draw is that if they were to kill a hundred of our children (for example, by the Qassam rockets that struck schools and kindergartens in Israel that happened to be empty), we would be justified in also killing a hundred of their children.

In other words, it is not the killing itself that troubles you but the number. On the face of it, one could answer you cynically by saying that when there will be two hundred million Jews in the Middle East it will be permissible to think in moral terms about comparing the number of victims on each side. But that is, of course, a debased argument. After all, you, Gideon, who live among the people, know very well that we are not bent on killing Palestinian children to avenge the killing of our children. All we are trying to do is get their leaders to stop this senseless and wicked aggression, and it is only because of the tragic and deliberate mingling between Hamas fighters and the civilian population that children, too, are unfortunately being killed. The fact is that since the disengagement, Hamas has fired only at civilians. Even in this war, to my astonishment, I see that they are not aiming at the army concentrations along the border but time and again at civilian communities.”

It’s worth reading in full.