Shifty antisemitism wars

Eric Pickles MP, UK Envoy for Post Holocaust Issues speaking at Holocaust Memorial Day event, FCO, London, January 2016. Wikicommons/ FCO. Some rights reserved.In 2005, a draft, working definition of antisemitism was
circulated by the European Union’s Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia
(EUMC). To the dismay of its critics, the document confused genuine
antisemitism with criticism of Israel, and was repeatedly, and erroneously,
promoted by Israel advocacy groups as the
EU definition of antisemitism.

By 2013, the EUMC’s successor body, the European Union
Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), had abandoned the politicised definition
as unfit for purpose. Just this week, in response to a motion passed at NUS
conference, the FRA explicitly denied
having ever adopted the definition. Yet on March 30, Eric Pickles, UK Special
Envoy for Post-Holocaust issues and chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, revived
the discredited definition by publishing it on the government’s website. Why?

Nine days previously, Pickles had spoken at a conference
on antisemitism in Berlin, where he described
the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign as akin
to the Nazi boycott of Jewish goods. “There’s nothing complicated to it,” he
told the audience. “It’s the same thing happening 70 years later. It’s the same
ideology, it’s the same language, it’s the same threats.”

So what is going on here?

Antisemitism – the
socialism of fools

Antisemitism can certainly be found amongst those who
claim to be Palestine solidarity activists, though the opportunism of a
marginal few has consistently been condemned by mainstream solidarity groups,
both here in the UK, and in North America. Twitter, of course, has made it easy
for anyone to (anonymously) say whatever they want, and has drawn attention to
various forms of bigotry that continue to have currency in the population at
large.

More broadly, the presence of antisemites or antisemitic
discourse amongst those who identify as being ‘on the Left’ is also real. The
reason why antisemitism has been described as the ‘socialism of fools’ is
that it purports to offer explanations for problems like inequality or economic
instability which are, for many people, pressing concerns. Antisemitism, however,
offers conspiracy theories in place of political analysis, and bigoted
scapegoating rather than political solutions.

The ‘new
antisemitism’ (again) 

So what is
antisemitism? Brian
Klug, an international expert on antisemitism and a Senior Research Fellow and
Tutor in Philosophy at St. Benet's Hall, Oxford, has defined
antisemitism thus: “A good, simple working definition of antisemitism,
according to a broad consensus of scholars, is this: hostility towards Jews as
Jews.” He continues: “It would be more accurate (if cumbersome) to define the
word along these lines: a form of hostility towards Jews as Jews, in which Jews
are perceived as something other than what they are. Or more succinctly:
hostility towards Jews as not Jews.”

This ‘broad consensus’, however, has broken down. When
Antony Lerman, Senior Fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International
Dialogue in Vienna, first started studying antisemitism 40 years ago, there
was, he tells me, “broadly speaking, a shared understanding of what antisemitism
was. And Israel was hardly ever mentioned.” Today, he says, “Israel is promoted
as the central recipient of antisemitic hate”, constituting nothing less than
“a fundamental redefinition of antisemitism” (a topic he wrote about for openDemocracy
last September).

This so-called ‘new antisemitism’ was the subject of a
searing critique
by Brian Klug as far back as 2004, in an important intervention published by The Nation. “The semantic question has been
politicized”, wrote the
Oxford academic. “This is why the definition matters. It is time to reclaim the
word ‘anti-Semitism’ from the political misuses to which it is being put.”

Anti-Zionism is
not antisemitism 

So why is it wrong to equate anti-Zionism and
antisemitism?

First, it is comparing apples and oranges. Indeed, there
have always been Jews opposed to
Zionism, for different reasons. See, for example, the current work of the International Jewish Anti-Zionism
Network (IJAN), or the new book by US
professor Dov
Waxman, which, among other things, shows how it was only after the Six-Day
War in 1967, “some two decades after Israel’s founding”, that “the American
Jewish pro-Israel establishment was built.”

For Rebecca Vilkomerson, Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace
(JVP), a group with more than 200,000 online members and 60 chapters across the
US, “equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism obscures the long history of
Jewish anti-Zionism and diasporism.” According to the UK-based group Jews for Justice for Palestinians,
fusing “Jewishness/Israel/Zionism” enables antisemitism to become “a weapon for
imposing conformity on dissidents within the Jewish community.”

Chicago-based Rabbi
Brant Rosen has described how “growing numbers of Jews” identify as
anti-Zionists for “legitimate ideological reasons”, motivated “by values of
equality and human rights for all human beings.” His words chime with those of
a former President of Edinburgh University’s Jewish Society, who recently wrote
of “the growing frustration felt by many millennial Jews about the default
positioning that support for Israel receives amongst Jewish civil society
organisations.”

But what about the claim that, since Zionism is simply
Jewish self-determination, anti-Zionism is anti-Jewish bigotry? This is also
misguided; put simply, “self-determination does
not equate to statehood.” As legal scholar Michael Kearney has explained,
self-determination is “less understood these days as a right to one’s own
exclusive state, and more as a right to non-discrimination and to democratic
participation in society.”

Israel’s supporters, however, are deliberately conflating
terms such as ‘homeland’, ‘home’, ‘state’, and ‘self-determination’. The
concept of a Jewish homeland is one thing; the creation and maintenance of a
‘Jewish state’, in Palestine, at the expense of its non-Jewish inhabitants, is
another. The right to self-determination is never a right to colonisation,
whoever is doing it.

Finally, to maintain that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is
to deny the historical and contemporary reality of the Palestinians’ experience,
and to dehumanise
them as a people. For the Palestinians, Zionism has meant violent displacement,
colonisation, and discrimination – are they ‘antisemitic’ for refusing to cheer
their own dispossession? By extension, as orthodox Jewish studies and
philosophy professor Charles
H. Manekin put it recently, labelling Palestine solidarity activists as
antisemitic is to imply that “the Palestinians have little justified claim to
sympathy.”

The Israeli
government’s war on Palestine solidarity

The conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and the
appropriation of the fight against antisemitism as a means of combating
Palestine solidarity, is perhaps best embodied by a periodic conference
organised by the Israeli government. Convened by the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs (MFA), the Global Forum for Combatting Antisemitism has become a
talking shop and strategizing opportunity, in particular, for how to best
thwart the growing BDS campaign.

In 2007, delegates discussed
topics such as “pre-emptive strategies” against “academic and economic boycotts”,
while at the 2009
Forum, a working group was tasked with proposing
“imaginative, effective and successful solutions to counter [BDS].” Four years
later, in 2013, the conference’s anti-BDS ‘task force’ produced another ‘action
plan’, while in 2015, the gathering proposed that activists “pursue
legislation at the local, state and federal level to constrain BDS.”

These are not just empty words. In February this year, an
Israeli spokesperson admitted
that the government had “stepped up our efforts directly and indirectly,
dealing with friends of Israel in a variety of countries in which we have the
BDS movement, fighting it with legal instruments.” As a recent AFP report put
it, despairing of ever winning “the battle for public support” in many
countries, “Israel has instead increasingly focused
on measures limiting BDS legally.”

This year, the Israeli government budgeted
NIS 100 million to fighting the boycott movement, and has boasted of its plans
to use cyber-tech
in its efforts to undermine Palestine solidarity activism and BDS. This comes
five years after Israel passed a domestic anti-boycott law, described as “the
silencing and the restriction of legitimate protest to criticise and act to
change Israeli policy.”

Israel’s allies have picked up the baton, including in
the UK, where support for BDS and Palestinian rights has grown considerably
amongst political parties, trade unions, faith communities, human rights
groups, and on campuses. In the Israeli embassy in London, a ‘battle’ map hangs on
the wall showing “the deployment of pro-Israel activists and the location of
the ‘enemy forces’.”

Willing UK
accomplices

The Israeli government’s counter-offensive has found willing
accomplices in the Conservative government, with ministers seeking to deter
local councils from taking ethical investment and procurement decisions that
they are in fact entitled to make. These efforts are the ‘soft end’ of a wave
of repression that, as documented by Amnesty International, has seen
Palestinian human rights defenders, including BDS activists, threatened
and intimidated by Israeli authorities.

In Britain, the target of the current crackdown is
broader than just BDS: the very legitimacy of Palestine solidarity activism is
at stake. On March 22, the Board of Deputies of British Jews president Jonathan
Arkush told
the Daily Mail that “this is not
about criticism of Israel – every country can be subject to criticism.” This
has become a clichéd talking-point by proponents of the ‘new antisemitism’;
that mere criticism of Israel does
not constitute antisemitism.

Yet a few weeks earlier, Arkush had admonished
David Cameron for having issued a very mild rebuke to Israeli settlements,
claiming that it had made “many” in Britain’s Jewish community “concerned and
uncomfortable.” Last year, as then-vice-president, Arkush had urged
another Board official not to even “criticise the government of Israel.”

In other words, this is a much broader assault on
political freedoms and the right of Palestinians and their allies to campaign
against Israeli violations of international law. ‘Of course, mere criticism of
Israeli policies isn’t antisemitic’, say those who never actually criticise
Israel, ‘but – why are you singling
out Israel?’

Lerman is worried about the impact of this strategy by
the Israeli government and its allies. “Given the misery and murder that
antisemitism has caused over the centuries,” he notes, “one might expect
pro-Israel groups to be more circumspect before using it indiscriminately as a
political tool.” According to Lerman, “not everything that offends Jewish
sensibilities is antisemitism”, and by labelling BDS as antisemitic, Israel
advocates “are draining the word of any meaning.”

Targeting Corbyn’s
Labour Party: a convergence of interests

On February 15, the co-chair of the Oxford University
Labour Club (OULC) resigned
his position, in response to OULC deciding to endorse Israeli Apartheid Week (a
telling trigger). Shortly afterwards, and for a period of roughly a month, the
media reported a number of cases where Labour members were alleged to have been
guilty of antisemitic remarks, predominantly on social media.

Corbyn’s political opponents and their friends in the
media, saw an opportunity: the Daily Mail
declared Corbyn to be “a long-standing supporter of the
terrorist organisation Hamas”, while Boris Johnson urged Londoners to vote Tory
in the mayoral contest, citing Labour’s antisemitism “cancer.”
In mid-March, The Jewish Chronicle declared
that Labour “attracts antisemites like flies to a cesspit.”

The Labour Party has more than 400 MPs and peers at
Westminster, in addition to almost 7,000 local government officials and some
390,000 members. The antisemitism ‘crisis’ has involved half a dozen individuals,
most of whom have either never held, or no longer hold elected office. Corbyn
himself has repeatedly condemned antisemitism since becoming leader, while
according to Party General Secretary Iain McNicol, everyone
reported for antisemitism has been suspended or excluded.

Getting a problem in perspective is not the same as
denying that any problem exists (by
definition). As Richard Kuper, spokesperson of Jews for Justice for
Palestinians tells me, “there is some antisemitism in and around the Labour
party – as there is in the wider society in Britain”, a problem made worse by
“increased use of social media.”

However, Kuper said, “there is clearly also a
coordinated, willed and malign campaign to exaggerate the nature and extent of
antisemitism as a stick to beat the Labour party” under Corbyn. Ian Saville, a
founder of the ‘Jews for Jeremy’ Facebook page, agrees, saying he is
“disturbed” by the way antisemitism has “been taken up as a proxy with which to
attack the left in the Labour Party.” 

Conclusion

As Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, member of Jews for
Boycotting Israeli Goods (JBIG), tells me: “This is not about whether we should
be dealing firmly with antisemitism – of course we should – but how
antisemitism is defined.” This politicised redefining of
antisemitism should worry us all: it dehumanises Palestinians and
delegitimises solidarity, imperils the fight against real antisemitism, and
constitutes a much broader
attack on our democracy and political freedoms.