Round-up of articles about antisemitism and anti-Zionism

This morning I saw a severe-looking woman in her late 60s wearing a keffiyeh in M & S and I thought ‘what are you doing in here? Aren’t you supposed to be BDSing?’

Maybe she was just following fashion, but it was a proper black and white chequered Arab-style keffiyeh with a straggly fringe, and her facial expression was definitely ‘from the river to the sea’.

Since antisemitism is  a hot topic at the moment, due to Jeremy Corbyn’s meteoric rise to prominence and other BDS-related developments, I feel another item on the subject wouldn’t be completely OT.

Oh, and I spotted a letter in the Times this morning from Tony Greenstein, objecting to a report in last Saturday’s Times (April 2nd) headed “Labour welcomes back blogger who compares Israelis to Nazis” . 

The blogger in question was, of course, Greenstein; his objection appertained to the report’s suggestion that his ‘political views are antisemitic’, when he is in fact a merely “a Jewish anti-Zionist”.

As I hadn’t read Saturday’s Times, I un-recycled it from the blue bag, and had a look. 

Here are the first few paragraphs:

An activist who has referred to his critics as “Zionist scum” and claimed that the state of Israel has informally forbidden mixed-race couples has been re-admitted to the Labour Party. 

Tony Greenstein, a campaigner from Brighton was allowed back after Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in September despite having been barred during an attempt to prevent ‘entryism’ from groups not sharing labour’s “aims and values”. 

On his blog Mr. Greenstein refers to himself as a “socialist, anti-Zionist, anti-racist” and accuses the state of Israel of “wanton murder of Palestinian civilians”. He also compares Israelis to Nazis, saying of a proposed military award for an Israeli soldier “It is the honour that used to attach to the SS”. 

In a post in November entitled “When Nuremberg Came to Israel” Mr Greenstein wrote: “Israel is a Jewish racial state and miscegenation, the mixing of the races, is strictly forbidden in Israel. Not legally, of course, because Israel has to formally adhere to western values, but in the accepted and unwritten Zionist consensus”

In his letter to the Times, Mr. G complains about being arbitrarily removed from the Labour Party and “refused all details of the allegations that led to my suspension”. He ”only found out about them when they were leaked to the Telegraph”. 

One might suspect that re-admitting him to the Labour Party will not be of much help to the current leadership’s pledge to root out the pesky antisemites in their party. 

What do we think a “Jewish anti-Zionist” really is? Perhaps it’s a member of Naturei Karta, the ultra orthodox sect “united against Zionism” described on Wiki as being “viewed as a cult on "the farthest fringes of Judaism" by mainstream Jews”.  Well, they are supposed to be Jews, so I imagine they can’t technically be antisemites, but they are known to “support notable anti-Semites and Islamic extremists”. 

I don’t think Tony Greenstein claims to be a member of that sect, in fact I think he aligns himself with common or garden anti-semites and Islamic extremists of the hard-left of all religions and none. 

So he must just be opposed to the concept of a Jewish state, perhaps because he sees that as a racist concept. (Then why would he identify as a “Jewish anti-Zionist”? Isn’t the concept “Jewish”, absent religious belief, itself just a tad racist?)

Anyway, at the moment questions about the definition of antisemitism and debates about anti-Zionism and antisemitism abound. 

This article has been highly praised. around the blogosphere: “The Holocaust, the Left, and the Return of Hate” by Jamie Palmer, who blogs as Jacobinism. His articles are sometimes cross-posted on Harry’s Place.

It covers a huge amount of ground, from pre WW ll to the present day. It should be read by all keffiyeh-wearing left-wingers who don’t know anything about the political history of the movement they support; they don’t really know why they support it, they just know that they support it, so there. 

Some passages are particularly pertinent here:

“...But the problem goes beyond the question of Israel itself. It also involves a general sense that the Left is unconcerned with Jewish interests and unwilling to take the matter of rising anti-Semitism seriously, preferring instead to dismiss it as a consequence of Israeli policies or a censorious attempt to close down discussion of the same. The horror with which many Jews greeted the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party was outstripped only by the realization that his supporters felt that his fondness for the company of anti-Semites was unworthy of their concern.”

“Writers on the Left have spilled an ocean of ink in support of the Palestinian cause, but it is striking just how little of it bothers to concern itself with Palestinian ideology and politics. Israeli crimes are picked over obsessively (not least in Israel’s own press), but Palestinian corruption, oppression, and rejectionism are either blamed on the Israelis or—more frequently—simply ignored.

This lecture at the University of Chicago Law School by William A. Jacobson (H/T EoZ) “When does Anti_Isrealism turn into Anti-Semitism?” illustrates the media’s delegitimisation and vilification of Israel with an analogy that goes something like this:

 “If I came to campus looking for everything I could find that was wrong or unpleasant, say, uncollected litter and neglected, unmaintained nooks and crannies in the campus grounds and filmed that alone, leaving out all the good things about the university, well, that’s what the media does with Israel” 

The sound on the recording doesn’t pick up the questions from the floor, which is a shame.

“Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are two distinct ideologies that over time (especially since the creation of Israel in 1948) have tended to converge, generally without undergoing a full merger” 

said the late Robert Wistrich in a quote in this piece by Ben Cohen, "Fighting Hate: Scholars of Anti-Semitism Target Anti-Zionism" who writes: 

“...most boycotters will, often at the same time, angrily deny that they are anti-Semites and insist that the charge of anti-Semitism is a meaningless smear designed to choke off free debate about the legitimacy of Israel. But what counts is how these political views are put into practice. Examine that and you will find, as recent research by the AMCHA Initiative watchdog group has revealed, a verifiable correlation between anti-Zionist activism and anti-Semitic outrages.”

Here is an article from yesterday’s Telegraph written by Tom Harris, formerly a Scottish Labour MP.

“Earlier this week Richard Angell, the big-brained head of the Blairite think tank Progress, published an eight-point plan to combat anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Rather wonderfully, it includes proposals for members of the party’s ruling NEC to undergo training in “modern anti-Semitism by the Jewish Labour Movement” and in “unconscious bias training”.

Richard Angell’s 8 steps could be a start. Worth a try, anyway. Even better, they could be imposed upon the labour supporters that make up the bulk of BBC personnel.

Here is an open letter from Denis McEoin to the Edinburgh University Students’ Association, which just voted in favour of BDS. He writes “as a concerned Edinburgh graduate”. 

I’m including several excerpts.

“It embarrasses me to say that your grounds for passing a boycott motion are unworthy of anyone who claims to be well educated, intelligent, or well informed. Sadly, the reasons given in your resolution are childish, ignorant, and based on nothing but a series of lies or at best misunderstandings. 

If you stop reading at this point, I call you out as traitors to the most basic principles of academic work: the need for open dialogue, critical debate, and readiness to change one's opinions in the presence of evidence. If you cannot abide by those principles, you are not fit to be at university at all. If your self-righteousness and your conviction that you are utterly right all the time cannot be changed, you will never understand what it is to take part in any intellectual debate. 

“If your government in Scotland or the UK banned books, imprisoned journalists, censored films, or prohibited campus meetings, you would be rightly outraged. You would march to defend those freedoms were there a threat to take them away. You depend on free libraries, uncensored newspapers and journals, and direct access to the Internet. 

“None of those freedoms exists in any Muslim country. Not in Egypt, not in Jordan, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Iran, not in Pakistan. Censorship is rife, secular views are everywhere condemned. Freethinking bloggers such as Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, several in Bangladesh, and many in Iran have been imprisoned, sentenced (in Badawi's case) to lashes, or (in Bangladesh) assassinated. The majority of newspapers in these countries are state-owned. Books are banned and burned across the region. Television stations are closed down for the pettiest of reasons, as happened recently in Egypt to MP Tawfiq Okasha. 

There is no freedom of speech in Gaza or under the Palestinian Authority, and those who breach the rules are, as often as not, found with a bullet in their head.” 

“Let me take this one step further. Are you aware that your motion is anti-Semitic? I want you to think about this carefully, too. What, you may ask, does boycotting Israel have to do with hating Jews? You are, I do not doubt, fiercely anti-racist, and for that I strongly commend you. 

Racism is still an ugly feature of modern life, not only in the West, but across a swath of other countries. It is ironic in the extreme, therefore, that your boycott motion was presented by the BME [Black and Minority Ethnic] Liberation Group. Ironic, because anti-Semitism has been and remains one of the most poisonous and genocidal forms of racist hatred. Across Europe, anti-Semitism is growing to levels reminiscent to that of the 1930s. The 2015 figure for anti-Semitic incidents was 53% higher than for 2014. Jews are leaving Europe and taking refuge elsewhere, most of them in Israel.

The Labour members of parliament who spoke at Westminster Hall in favour of local councils being allowed to practice BDS should be made to read Denis McEoin’s following passages in particular:

“Your motion states that "The actions of the State of Israel are in violation of international law," with some supposed examples but not a single piece of evidence. In fact, the State of Israel has an impressive record of full compliance with international law at all levels. Your statement contradicts the opinions of very large numbers of experts in international law, a body of men and women whose knowledge of this subject far surpasses that of undergraduates who spout claims that have no legal or factual or historical backing. 

“It is often said, for example, that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. In fact, the truth is just the opposite. Under the original partition plan advanced in UN Resolution 181 in 1947, Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza was permitted, just as Arab settlement in Israel was permitted. The law has not changed since then.

If only the BBC would educate itself. If only the Labour Party would do the same. If only keffiyeh-wearing middle aged ladies who think they’re signalling some form of virtue would get real and admit that they’ve been hoodwinked. Either that or let come out of the closet as unashamed antisemites.

The following passage from Jamie Palmer’s essay echoes something we have often lamented in this blog, namely the default assumption by most BBC Middle East correspondents that all Muslim Arabs - Palestinian Arabs included -  think like we do. They’re usually personalised (unlike the unnamed Israelis in reports) and given sympathetic face-value air time just as though they were residents of any London suburb. (Well, since mass immigration that might not be far from the truth) but I meant, of course, that they’re treated by the BBC  as though they abide by the same western, Judeo/Christian principles as we do in the west, and not the irrational antisemitic tenets of Islam. 

“The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks showed that large sections of the Western Left have difficulty comprehending the sincerity of irrational doctrines. If the attacks could not be explained as a rational and desperate response to some kind of monstrous injustice, then they were just acts of mindless slaughter. As a result, various explanations were offered for why terrorists might kill themselves and murder nearly 3,000 American civilians in a single morning, most of which concluded that America must have somehow brought this disaster on itself. For many, this was the only intelligible explanation for the atrocity. 

This was a profound failure of imagination on the part of people clinging to a belief that, deep down, everybody wants basically the same thing that broadminded Western liberals do. In the intervening years, observable reality has called this belief into serious question. The savageries released by the Arab Spring and the Islamist surge across the Middle East and Africa will no longer submit to the liberal demand for rationality. 

“One might have expected that the escalation of regional barbarism would directly correlate with an increase in sympathy for Israel’s predicament. But curiously, antipathy toward Israel has only intensified. Boycotts are demanded and lurid condemnations continue to mount. The assumption seems to be that, as an open society, Israel must be judged like other open societies, such as those in Scandinavia, that do not find it necessary to occupy land or go to war every two or three years. But Israelis live in the Middle East, and the politicians they elect to protect them calibrate their threat assessments and behavior accordingly. This distinction manages to pass by some otherwise highly intelligent people.”

Of the late British historian Tony Judt:

“Judt would likely be untroubled by today’s alarming uptick in anti-Semitic violence that is causing European Jews to seek sanctuary in Israel in unprecedented numbers, since he claimed it was the hateful behavior of Israel, not Arab and Muslim pogromists, that was responsible for endangering the lives of Europe’s Jews. 

But it was Judt’s apparent inability to imagine a reality different to the one he enjoyed in the West that was most astonishing. “

Astonishing indeed. 

I hope the length of this post doesn’t make you want to cry. I prefer short and concise pieces myself, but I didn’t have the time to write one.