There is a campaign to exclude Israelis – and nobody else – from the cultural and economic life of humanity.
English Jews have traditionally opposed antisemitism quietly. They have themselves behaved like English gentlemen and ladies, with stiff upper lips and phlegmatic stoicism.
The idea was that if you behaved well, if you used the correct knife and fork, and avoided being flash or gauche, then you wouldn’t give people reason to hate you.
But what can you do about the country cousins? Israel – Israelis – don’t behave like English gentlemen – and they keep getting into fights with their neighbours.
And they seem loud, cold and arrogant; and they have no idea how to queue for a bus.
Israel has been occupying and settling Palestinian land for forty years; and that is only possible with a regime of daily violence and racist humiliation. The Israelis too, it seems, found ways to ape the behaviour of the traditional English gentleman.
The occupation is wrong in itself and it is also against any decent conception of Israeli national interest. Israel should be unambiguous about wanting to end it.
Everybody serious understands that the only possibility of peace is an independent Palestine alongside Israel. We all know what the peace would look like even if many of us doubt that we will see it.
But there is a huge disconnect. Israel deserves severe criticism as it also deserves support and understanding; but it is getting something entirely different.
Increasingly Israel is being thought of as a unique evil on the planet.
• It is said to be the only apartheid state;
• it is compared to Nazi Germany;
• it is held to control the global media;
• it is accused of being responsible for the war in Iraq;
• it is accused of having a policy of murdering children;
• it is held to be definitionally racist;
• it is thought to play a key role at the very vanguard of global imperialism.
Who are these Israelis, who are to be excluded from the our theatres and sports stadiums, our universities and bookshops?
Most Israelis are Jews. There are other Israelis too – and I absolutely back their fight for equality – formal, legal, real.
But 80% of Israelis are Jews.
It is simply a matter of fate that I myself am not Israeli. My mother left Germany in 1938; out of all her extended family, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, 3 survived the Holocaust.
My grandfather helped them to London and in 1948 they went to Israel. They went there because they had been taught, close-up and intimate, the dismal, self-perpetuating and almost universal lesson of the 20th Century – “If you have no state then you have no rights.”
This, of course, is the same lesson that the twentieth century taught to Palestinians.
I hope the twenty-first century can teach better lessons.
My mum’s cousins loved England and Winston Churchill – and the Americans who rescued them – but they could only be at home in Israel.
My grandad had not experienced what they experienced. He visited Israel. It was very hot when he was there – and he was established in London – so he didn’t go.
But if you want to boycott Israelis then you are boycotting me. You are boycotting Jews.
But now I’ve done it now, haven’t it? I mentioned the Holocaust. It is not quite respectable, any longer, to mention the Holocaust.
• It is OK to talk about the Holocaust industry.
• It is OK to talk about the Holocaust as the explanation for Israel’s pathological condition.
• It is OK to talk about how the Holocaust is abused by Israel as a discourse of legitimation.
• It is OK to talk about Holocaust memorial day as an attack on British Muslims
But we are not allowed to say – to use Marxist terminology for a moment – we are not allowed to say that it was the Holocaust which transformed the material condition of Europe such that “Zionism” was transformed from a utopian minority idea into a nation state.
If you mention the connection between Israel and the Holocaust you are accused of waving the shrouds of victims of racism in order to justify the racist treatment of the Palestinians.
Listen to anti-Zionist narratives – a methodology of carefully selected and de-contextualized quotes forms a straight line from Herzl’s allegedly “racist” idea in the 1890s, through one-sided caricatures of Ben Gurion, Jabotinky, Meir, Begin, Sharon, to the so-called reality of a racist state today. A straight line from a 19th Century idea to a 21st century reality.
On the Holocaust? Silence. It’s denied. It’s not denied as historical fact. But as a decisive event in Jewish history and in the creation of a Jewish nation state, it is airbrushed out of history.
The Holocaust justifies nothing. But it explains a lot.
It is an irony that sends shivers up and down my spine, that the Holocaust has now become a stick with which to beat the Jews. But so many people’s spines are, nowadays, de-sensitized to this irony.
So if you want to boycott Israelis then boycott me.
“No no” the boycotters respond. This is a political matter – the boycott is not punishment, it is not a racist attack, it is a temporary measure designed to help create a just peace between Israel and Palestine – it is designed to encourage the Israelis to behave like civilized English people – like us – who are better than them.
I don’t buy it. The boycott campaign doesn’t have clear or achievable demands.
• Some say it is about ending the occupation;
• others say it is about dismantling the “apartheid” regime;
• some say it is because Israeli academics don’t fight for peace
• some say it is because Israeli universities aren’t real universities but are racially segregated machines for scribbling up legitimations of Zionist crimes.
In truth, a boycott:
• since it singles out only Israelis – for no morally relevant reason,
• since it is reminiscent of previous anti-Jewish boycotts,
• since it is motivated using language and concepts which mirror anti-Semitic ways of thinking,
…in truth a boycott of Israel would be experienceed by most Jews as an anti-Semitic attack.
So it is impossible that a boycott could help persuade Israelis – it could only push them into a defensive nationalist consensus and into the eager, xenophobic arms of Benjamin Netanyahu.
I am not against criticism of Israeli policy, I am in favour of it. But we’re not talking about criticism. We’re talking about
• a campaign of hate which holds Israel to different standards;
• child-killing rhetoric which harks back to antisemitic blood libel
• conspiracy theory which is reminiscent of the Protocols
• Holocaust analogies which paint the survivors of Auschwitz as the perpetrators of genocide.
• A dishonest apartheid analogy which is not used to shed light but is used as a short-cut to the boycott conclusion.
My Union, which is now mandated to support the boycott campaign, said, after due consideration, and in all seriousness that “criticism of Israel cannot be construed as antisemtic”.
This formulation protects any statement which resembles criticism of Israel or which takes the form of criticism of Israel – whether it is antisemitic or not.
In UCU, antisemitism which takes this form is now explicitly exempt from normal anti-discrimination policy.
Antisemitism has thus been neutralized as an issue in the so-called “debate” about whether to exclude Israelis from our campuses, journals and conferences.
Denial of antisemitism is tempting if you are a high profile, high status Jewish professor, leader of a think-tank or public intellectual.
It is temping because if you were to admit that there was a contemporary threat of antisemitism, and that it was centred in your own rather nice part of the world, amongst guardian and independent readers, in the humanities departments, in the trade unions, in the antiracist left – then you would have to recognise that your comfort and status – personal, political and professional – was much more fragile than you had assumed.
UCU congress would not have decided to throw its weight behind the boycott campaign if it had not been reassured by a succession of high profile Jewish intellectuals and political activists that antisemitism was not a factor in the debate.
Ironically, some Jews, who are on the left are now echoing the traditional Jewish English conservative approach to antisemitism. The same “radicals” who were furious with the Jewish establishment when they refused to fight fascism openly and politically, now constitute a new Jewish establishment. These new conservatives, whether they know it or not, are playing an indispensable role in normalizing anti-Zionist demonization as being entirely unconnected to the issue of antisemitism.
When respected intellectuals and well-liked celebrities on the British left stand up and reassure the intelligentsia that there is no problem – and when they do it collectively through groups like Independent Jewish Voices – and when they do it ‘as a Jew’ – we cannot be surprised that serious people take their assurances seriously.
When people used to scream about “Jewish capitalism” or “Jewish Bolshevism”, antiracists learnt to separate issues.
First defend yourself – Discuss the rights and wrongs of the Russian Revolution later.
Now people come screaming ‘Zionism!’ We must defend ourselves first and worry about Israel later.
But it must be an antiracist and an egalitarian defence, not one which seeks to re-direct demonization and bigotry in another direction.
The struggles against antisemitism and Islamophobia, against the occupation and against the destruction of Israel, are distinct. But they do belong to the same family.
Last summer Israel was wrong to hit out against Hizbullah. There was no urgency, it had no plan, it didn’t achieve what it set out to achieve, and it left lots of people dead and maimed. It was wrong.
But we can see what kind of a response there was in Britain. Overnight, everyone was suddenly an expert in international law – the terms “disproportional” and “collective punishment” peppered the discourse last summer. Israel was held to be murdering civilians, destroying Lebanon, punishing the Lebanese by killing their children. The word “Hezbullah” was painted outside a synagogue in Glasgow.
Israel was wrong – but one day it might really have to fight a war of survival against Hamas and Hizbollah – backed by Iran, deeply embedded in a civilian population – and the demonization Israel will face then – and we will face it too – will be considerable.
I hope I’m wrong, but in my judgment, things are going to get worse in the Middle East – and people are going to hate Israel more; and more people are going to hate Israel.
We should defend Jewish students against those self-righteous bigots who point them out and scream “Nazi!”
We oppose those who call for “scholarly debate” about whether the “Zionists” have the power to control US foreign policy, or Hollywood, or the global imperialist system.
We refute the accusation that we are against free speech because we don’t want to debate whether or not Israel is evil.
We expose those who say that we fight antisemitism dishonestly, and as part of a “Zionist” conspiracy to de-legitimize criticism of Israeli human rights abuses.
If we are not successful – then there will come a time when there will be a constituency in Britain – and further afield too – which will be ready to embrace the message that the problems of the world are caused by “the Jews”.
And we have seen, recently, little flashes, little previews, of how plausible, apparently credible intellectuals and ideologues will lead that constituency.
