Sternberg is professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is coordinator of the SPME-University of Buffalo Chapter, a member of the SPME Board of Directors and Coordinator of SPME’s Strategic Planning Committee.
In 1933, philosopher and Nazi party member Martin Heidegger became rector of Freiburg University. Within months he permitted the burning of books on campus, rejected Jews from his own classes, dismissed Jewish professors, and banned from campus his own mentor, the elderly Edmund Husserl, who had been born Jewish. It was the same year in which Germans took part in a nationwide boycott of Jewish shops, lawyers, and doctors.
After decades of German economic failure and military defeat, against the background of ancient European anti-Semitism, the boycotts were a resounding success. Seven years before Auschwitz, they demonstrated that common national purpose could be forged, a totalitarian party kept in power, and old humiliations healed, through the abomination of Jews.
It is to this precedent we have to look to understand the decision by British labor radicals, including a union of university professors, to join most Arab and Muslim states in the boycott of Israel.
Yes, there is genocide in Sudan, occupation of Tibet by China, gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia, dispossession of Papuans by Indonesia, the imprisonment of professors in Iran, the suppression of Berber culture in North Africa, and so on and on, and none of these have caused an academic boycott. Yes, after the Oslo Peace talks and after enduring Palestinian terror attacks without reprisal, Israel in 2000 offered Palestinians a state, for which Israel suffered 1500 civilian deaths as its reward. This fact, too, should not be expected to sour the boycott.
The suicide attacks against Israel, the missiles thrown at it from Lebanon and Gaza, the Iranian promise to wipe it off the map, and Hamas’s constitutionally enshrined plan to annihilate it-such atrocities emit the sweet smell of popular resistance. They excite the boycotters all the more.
And let’s not bother pointing out that that Israel’s vibrant universities serve both Arabs and Jews and are models of excellence and academic freedom. It doesn’t matter, because the UK boycott is far more about radical anti-globalization politics than it is about anything Israel does or doesn’t.
To understand, we have to go back to the 1990s. The fall of communism and the revelations of the tens of millions killed under Stalin and Mao-who had only Hitler as their competitor in the magnitude of their crimes-temporarily disgraced the radical Left. What we see now is the fruit of a reinvented radicalism.
To the new and improved radicals, misery in the world is caused by a global capitalist Empire, led by America. This Empire dominates national governments. It exploits the world economy through multinational corporations. It manufactures popular consent through media manipulation. And it uses American soldiers, along with international mercenaries, as its enforcers.
But to inspire a new generation of college sophomores to radical activism, there has to be a way to fight Empire. Old-style class warfare won’t do, since Empire moves jobs around the world, suppressing workers’ revolt. The new revolutionary vanguard is made up, therefore, of transnational social movements. The poor, the failed, the ignored, the oppressed, the humiliated, the alienated, and the angry can all qualify, since their miseries flow from the depredations of Empire.
There is, however, a problem. The social movements make for a motley crew. In anti-globalization demonstrations in Europe, neo-communist atheists march alongside burqa-clad Islamists. Even neo-Nazi skinheads join in. Jihadists and pacifists, third-wordlists and high-wage western labor unionists, gays and proponents of their execution, environmentalists and oil barons, human rights groups and envoys of blood-drenched dictators all have to keep a common front.
That’s the ticklish problem: how to keep so much diversity in check. It would take a common enemy to do the job. But Empire is too large and abstract for that role, and anyway, boycotting America is inconvenient. What’s needed is a scapegoat manageable enough in size and devilish enough in popular imagination that it will elicit the requisite loathing.
Enter Israel, the only Western nation under long enough threat that it has had to fight ongoing wars to survive. Stripped of all context, Israel’s actions can be made to fit the needed image of aggressor, and its being Jewish is all the better. Should Israel, as it generally does, fail to act demonically enough to meet the needs of global solidarity, well that can be fixed well enough through anti-Zionist distortions, slanders, omissions, and lies, which the Internet provides in abundance.
What’s clear is that the boycotters are not targeting Israel for reasons about which reasoned argument is possible. They’re doing it because the new transnational radicalism necessitates it. They can take recourse in an option that Heidegger and compatriots couldn’t: to refer to Jews as Nazis.
So it is that a British academic journal editor returns a manuscript to an Israeli, scribbling on it that he won’t deal with “Nazis.” And Israeli professors come to the British academic union meeting to lobby against the boycott, to be met with the catcall “Nazi.” And a US supporter of the boycott, Professor Norman Finkelstein, comes to my own campus to claim that Jews concocted the Holocaust literature to make money and that Israelis want to turn themselves into an Aryan race.
The boycotters deny that they’re anti-Semites. Some are themselves Jews or say they have Jewish friends. And maybe they’re right. It’s not absolutely clear that even Heidegger was personally an anti-Semite; after all, he had a Jewish girlfriend, named Hannah. The boycotters in 1933 and the boycotters now need not carry hatred of Jews in their hearts. They must, rather, set up Israel as the world’s scapegoat simply because anti-Semitism is politically expedient.
