This book is about antisemitism in social spaces which think of themselves as antiracist and democratic. It is about antisemitism amongst people who believe that they strongly oppose antisemitism. This kind of antisemitism is usually related to hostility to Israel, but it diverges radically from rational or legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. While Israelis and Palestinians are real, localized and specific, their narratives are often appropriated, blandly simplified and woven into worldviews which serve people and purposes far away.
Ben Cohen (2014) made the distinction between bierkeller and bistro antisemitism. Bierkeller antisemitism is violent, abusive, vulgar and explicitly fuelled by hatred; it is easy to recognize, it comes with a Swastika on its arm and it is agreed by all decent people to be contemptible. This book is much more about bistro antisemitism, which is polite, civil and sophisticated; it is the antisemitism of good people. Hannah Arendt (1975) wrote about the importance of an alliance between the mob and the elite in the creation of a totalitarian movement. This book is a study of the antisemitism to be found within that part of the elite which thinks of itself as progressive. So far this elite antisemitism has failed to energize much of a mob. Antisemitism in democratic states is still largely confined to the sphere of discourse: to ways of thinking and talking. One important exception is the danger of an antisemitic terrorist attack; and it is also true that violent antisemitic incidents, while remaining at a relatively low level, are on the rise. Although one should remain sceptical about the uniqueness of one’s own time, 2016 was an extraordinary year for the success of populist political movements which mobilized mass resentments and which employed racist and xenophobic language, the like of which would, even shortly before, have seemed impossible in the political mainstream. These populist movements promise to tear everything down before it is built again. Bistro antisemitism is vile in itself, and it is an indicator of a profound problem in any social space which nurtures or tolerates it. But it also has the potential to find ways to manifest itself in the bierkellers, the streets, in mass culture and in political threat. Antisemitism is a threat to Jews. It is also a threat to democracy; to democratic institutions and to the rule of law; to the principles of equality and liberty; to democratic states; and to democratic cosmopolitan collaboration between states and between people.
This book is anchored in empirical case studies of how antisemitism emerges out of the ostensibly democratic discourse of criticism of Israel. There are lots of stories in this book: stories about things that have happened, things that people have said and done, cultures that have arisen, ways in which people have made sense of what was going on. Antisemitism is emotional, but it often dresses in the clothes of reason. Antisemitism is something which we feel we should be able to sniff out and to know, in an unmediated way; yet this is largely a book about people who are unable to do so. So as well as a book of stories and emotions, it is also a book of theory and of politics. It is an attempt to understand a complex and contradictory reality, a world in which people’s self-consciousness comes into conflict with the ways in which other people interpret them and their actions.
Methodologically, it treats discourse as being related to the social movements and cultural spaces within which it develops. This work develops a sociological understanding of antisemitism as an external and objective social phenomenon rather than simply as subjective feelings of hatred or fear within individuals. There is a focus upon the United Kingdom (UK) in the case studies, but material is also gathered from further afield because antisemitism is an increasingly global phenomenon.
This contemporary variant of antisemitism is not the first radical antisemitism to position itself as siding with the oppressed against (most of) the Jews. This positioning gives it great confidence and a natural first line of defence. Those who oppose antisemitism are widely dismissed as agents of the oppressors, and they are often accused of trying to enhance Jewish victim status, and the power which is said to come with it, in attempts to silence the oppressed.
The New Left emerged in the 1960s in revolt against Stalinism, but the traditions which it spawned have too often tended to re-configure the old politics for a new age rather than to transcend the old politics. This book emerges from, and is part of, a left-wing and democratic response to contemporary antisemitism. As such, this book itself is as much a manifestation of a democratic left tradition as it is a critique of a totalitarian left tradition.
This book is interested in the growing ossification of a tradition of left-wing thought since the Second World War into key binary oppositions: black/white; north/south; oppressed/oppressor; imperialist/ anti-imperialist; 1 per cent/99 per cent. It shows how the socialist tradition of supporting the self-liberation of the oppressed in each country is in danger of being surpassed by a new nationalist tradition of supporting whole nations which are designated as oppressed against whole nations which are designated as oppressor. It is a framework which downplays the importance of democratic values. It was within this framework that Jews, who could not have been more oppressed in 1944, can be thought of four short years later as the bearers of white European colonialism. If Jews are defined as oppressors and as white, then the assumption that antisemitism will be taken seriously in progressive movements is not necessarily correct.
This book argues that a ‘politics of position’ is emerging on the left in preference to a politics of reason or persuasion. This tends to solidify an essentialist notion of who belongs in the community of the oppressed and the community of the progressive. The boundaries of these communities are coming more and more to be policed by coercive discursive practices and less by democratic debate and persuasion. Hostility to Israel becomes a key marker of identity in this process. If Jews are reluctant to embrace this hostility to Israel identity, then they risk exile from what I am calling ‘the community of the good’.
This book looks at radical critiques of Israel and Zionism with a focus on how they tend to free themselves from empirical, rational or comparative methodological constraints. Antizionism began as a critique of the political movement for national self-determination. After the Holocaust and the war of 1948, which radically transformed the material basis of Jewish life, antizionism became something quite new, a movement to abolish an existing nation state. It then matured into a worldview which re-positions Jewish wrongdoing at the centre of all that is problematic in the world. The critique of an idea is different from the critique of an existing nation state. Particular Jewish concern with Israel, and with its failures, takes on a new significance when it is exported into the wider institutions of civil society.
One key mechanism by which antisemitic ways of thinking graduate into concrete discrimination is in campaigns for boycotts of Israel which aim to whip up emotional support for the exclusion of Israelis, and only Israelis, from the global community of humankind. The book shows how these campaigns tend also to impact on Jews who are far from Israel but are near to such campaigns, and who often feel coerced into engaging with them.
The second key mechanism by which discourse impacts against Jews is the generalization of an assumption of bad faith against those who oppose the demonization of Israel or who oppose the antisemitism associated with it.
This book is grounded in a sociological way of thinking. This helps it step back from the Israeli and Palestinian nationalist prisms, and representations of them, which emerge far from the conflict; debates concerning antisemitism are often distorted by incorporation into these narratives. Sociology is, itself, one of the anti-hegemonic discourses which is vulnerable to antisemitic ways of thinking. Yet I argue that sociology also provides resources, methods and ways of thinking which can be mobilized for understanding and then opposing contemporary antisemitism.
Antisemitism is a threat to Jews, but it is also an indicator of a more profound and general sickness within democratic movements, institutions and cultures. The study of antisemitism is not a parochial Jewish concern; it is key to understanding what threatens the health of democratic and egalitarian cultures.
The theorists of a ‘new antisemitism’ (for example, Chesler 2003) have argued that hostility to Israel may be antisemitic in its motivation; or in its form; or in its disproportionate quantity or intensity; or in its effect. Each of these suggestions requires distinct analyses, and they may inter-relate back on each other in unexpected ways. This is a study of a phenomenon whose very existence is angrily contested. The book’s discussion of the struggles over defining antisemitism, for example, is itself also a case study of the material in question.
This book is critical of those analyses which begin with conceptual blueprints, attempting to demonstrate from argument alone what is racist and what is antisemitic. Rather, it begins with empirical study of social movements, of debate, of discussion, of campaigns; it is concerned with how concepts arise, how they actualize and how they circulate between antisemitic and antiracist spaces.
The focus of this book is on that variant of antizionism which thinks of itself as antiracist, but this is only one tradition within global antizionism. From its roots in twentieth-century European Stalinism and at the heart of Jihadi Islamist and Arab Nationalist politics, antizionism has often been uninterested in distinguishing itself from antisemitism. Tropes, elements of rhetoric and common-sense notions migrate between antiracist and democratic spaces, nationalist and Islamist spaces, fringe and mainstream spaces, different kinds of media and the right, the left and the political centre. It is within this complex and dynamic reality that this book finds its material and moves towards its conclusions.
Today’s antisemitism is difficult to recognize because it does not come dressed in a Nazi uniform and it does not openly proclaim its hatred or fear of Jews. In fact it says it has learnt the lessons of Jew-hatred better than most Jews have, and it says that, unlike them, it stands in the antiracist tradition. It is an antisemitism which positions Jews themselves as ‘oppressors’, and it positions those who develop hostile narratives about Jews as ‘oppressed’.
Case studies in this book are woven together with more theoretical discussion and conceptual analysis. The first chapter looks at Ken Livingstone, one of the most popular and successful figures on the British left since the 1980s. As I write, he is suspended from Labour Party membership for comments which many have been interpreted as antisemitic. In a previous controversy over antisemitism ten years earlier, Livingstone had written: ‘For far too long the accusation of antisemitism has been used against anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government, as I have been’ (2006). At that time, this formulation struck a chord with me; I had seen it many times. Chapter 1 describes what I have named the Livingstone Formulation, which has become a standard rhetorical response to accusations of antisemitism. It is a way of refusing to answer a charge of antisemitism by responding instead with a counter-charge that those who talk about antisemitism are really engaged in bad-faith efforts to silence criticism of Israel. At the time when I named it, I was a little nervous; I thought that it was, perhaps, arbitrary to associate Livingstone’s name with this phenomenon. But more recently, Ken Livingstone has really made this formulation his own; he has repeatedly relied on it. He tries to change the subject when he is challenged on the topic of antisemitism. He says Jews cry ‘antisemitism!’ when Israel is criticized; but he cries ‘Israel!’ when antisemitism is criticized.
The second chapter looks at the unexpected and enduring rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s faction in the Labour Party during 2015. Corbyn had been clear about his political support of Hamas and Hezbollah, saying they were dedicated to peace and justice (2015a). He had jumped to the defence of Steven Sizer, a man who had later asked in public whether Israel was responsible for 9/11, saying that he was being unfairly smeared by Zionists (Frazer 2015). He had invited Raed Salah, a man who had engaged in medieval-style blood libels against Jews, to have tea with him in the House of Commons (Johnson 2015a). Corbyn had worked for Press TV, the Iranian state propaganda channel (Payne 2016). He had been a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, an organization dedicated to the campaign to boycott Israel (Palestinian Solidarity Campaign 2016). He had been the chair of Stop the War (Corbyn 2015b), an organization which campaigns for war against Israel (Author unknown 2015). Corbyn had written about a meeting he had had in 2009 with Bashar Al-Assad, the dictator of Syria; in the same article he had claimed that the Israel controls the USA, writing: ‘once again, the Israeli tail wags the US dog’ (Bright 2012). In 2012, Corbyn had called for an inquiry into the influence of what he called ‘pro-Israel lobbying groups’ on UK government policy, saying that this issue went ‘to the heart of what’s going on in the Home Office’ (Bright 2012). Chapter 2 analyzes how it is possible for a man with such a relationship to antisemitism to be elected twice to lead the Labour Party and what that tells us about recent political and cultural developments in dominant currents of the contemporary left.
Chapter 3 looks at how the issue of antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party emerged as an issue in the political mainstream of the UK in 2016. Antizionists, who had once been confined to extreme and doctrinaire corners of the left, were now taking leadership positions in the party, in the trade unions and in the student movement. A leading activist found it reasonable to claim that ‘many Jews … were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade’ and to question why Holocaust commemoration was not ‘open to all peoples who’ve experienced Holocaust’ (Gill 2016). This chapter goes on to analyze the Chakrabarti Inquiry into Antisemitism and Other Racisms, which was commissioned by Jeremy Corbyn to try to pull the sting of antisemitism as an issue which was hurting Labour.
With hindsight it is possible to see how the struggles within the academic unions over the boycott of Israel after 2003 prepared the ground for the crescendo of antisemitism into public discourse which are discussed in the first three chapters. So the fourth chapter steps back to the era which preceded the Corbyn leadership and focuses on the rise of the campaign to boycott Israel and, in particular, Israeli universities. It shows how the boycott campaign, which claims to have originated as a call for solidarity by Palestinians, was in fact conceived in London by a small group of British antizionist academics. It goes on to look at how that campaign succeeded within the academic trade unions in Britain and how it began to spread to other places, including the United States of America. It looks at the ways in which the boycott campaign tried to find ways of presenting itself as something other than a blacklist of individual Israeli scholars; in particular it experimented with the idea of allowing exemptions from boycott for those who passed a political test; and then it settled on the strategy of portraying itself as a boycott of institutions rather than individuals. This chapter goes on to look in detail at one of the key claims of the campaign for ‘Boycott Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) against Israel, which is to say that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ like the old South Africa, and to say that the strategy of boycott is therefore appropriate.
Chapter 5 is a little more conceptual. It discusses the struggles over how antisemitism is, and should be, defined. It looks at the genealogy of the European Union Monitoring Centre (EUMC) Working Definition of Antisemitism which later evolved into the International Holocaust Remembrance Association Working Definition of Antisemitism. This definition is sometimes criticized as being political; the chapter looks at what the politics of this definition were and how it arose as a response to events at the Durban World Conference against Racism of 2001. This chapter identifies a split which appears to have developed between concern for antisemitism and concern for racism as a significant cause for concern. At Durban, the dominant faction, which thought of racism as a global structure of white power, succeeded in constructing Israel as being central to that white power; in this way it tended to trivialize antisemitism as a fake cry of legitimation made on behalf of the racist oppressors. The Working Definition emerged from efforts of Jewish NGOs to get a hearing for their issues in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Union (EU). If Durban is thought of as a non-white global forum and if the OSCE and the EU are thought of as networks of white states, then the potential for antagonism between non-white antiracism and ‘white’ (Jewish) anxiety about antisemitism becomes clear. This diremption is then reflected in struggles over the definition of antisemitism.
Chapter 6 returns to the University and College Union (UCU) in the UK, in which struggles over boycotting Israel had been raging. Many Jews in the union as well as the spokespeople for the key institutions of the UK Jewish community were raising the alarm because they had come to the conclusion that the boycott campaign had imported antisemitic discourse and exclusions into the union. Many were alleging that a culture of institutional antisemitism had hardened within the UCU while the boycotters themselves continued to insist that this claim was a dishonest Zionist strategy aimed at unfairly de-legitimizing their campaign for an academic boycott of Israel. In 2011, matters came to a head with the passing of a motion at UCU Congress to disavow the EUMC Working Definition. For one activist, Ronnie Fraser, this constituted the final humiliation. He sued the union, alleging that antisemitism in the union constituted racist harassment under the meaning of the Equality Act (2010). This chapter looks at the evidence that was presented in Fraser v UCU, and it analyzes the Tribunal’s judgment.
In Chapter 7, the book takes a more theoretical turn again. It looks at the concepts and the discourses of antizionism itself, and it seeks to offer a critique. It seeks also to link that conceptual discussion to the ways in which it plays itself out in actual social movements. This chapter does not satisfy itself with a discussion of the ideas of antizionism; it argues that it is necessary to see how these ideas are actualized within real, complex, variegated and organic social movements. It traces ways in which the two key themes of antisemitism – blood libel and conspiracy theory – have replicated themselves in antizionist ideas and in the way those ideas come alive in the real world.
Chapter 8 focuses on Jewish antizionism. It looks at how Jewish movements which were critical of Zionism as a strategy for dealing with antisemitism transformed, after the Holocaust and after the foundation of the State of Israel, into Jewish movements which were concerned with de-legitimizing an existing nation state. There is a great potential for specifically Jewish hostility to Israeli human rights abuses, and then to Israel itself, to take on a different character when it is exported into non-Jewish civil society. Antizionist Jews have often rhetorically mobilized their Jewish identities in order to create an air of legitimacy to hostility to Israel. This has been an influential phenomenon in the rise of antizionism and of antisemitism. There are Jews who have made it central to their political work to try to neutralize the issue of antisemitism when it appears in relation to struggles over Israel, its alleged wrongdoing and proposals to exclude it from the global community. This chapter goes on to look at how antizionism has sometimes evolved into even more radical and explicitly anti-Jewish movements. It looks at Gilad Atzmon, who considers himself to be an ex-Jew, and who mobilizes open antisemitic rhetoric, with its sharpest focus targeted against antizionist Jews. And then it goes on to discuss Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who is a French comedian who has also delighted in pushing perhaps even further towards explicit antisemitism. Dieudonné is not Jewish; he is of black African descent; but he is relevant here because his story demonstrates the further potentiality for antizionism and its ways of thinking to push on into racist territory, even while still thinking of itself as antiracist, as a way of articulating an ever more radical hostility to bourgeois norms and hegemony.
The final chapter discusses some methodological questions. It begins by looking at the development of my own social and political identities as they have related to the material in this book. I have been a key participant in many of the debates and struggles that I have described and analyzed; indeed, this book is itself part of my effort to intervene into these struggles, as well as to offer an overview of them. This chapter goes on to think about sociology. Certainly sociology, as an anti-hegemonic and sometimes radical movement, is open to the temptations of the antisemitism which we are discussing in this book; on the other hand, sociology has in some ways been steadfastly oppositional to antisemitism and has itself offered alternative worldviews, particularly to conspiracy theory. Specifically, in this book I argue that sociology offers a framework, a method and conceptual tools, which can help us to make sense of the phenomenon of contemporary antisemitism and its relationship to hostility to Israel.
I write ‘antisemitism’, not ‘anti-Semitism’, because there is no ‘Semitism’ which antisemites oppose. Similarly, I write ‘antizionism’ not ‘anti-Zionism’ because the notion of ‘Zionism’ against which antizionists define themselves is self-invented. This notion of ‘Zionism’ is so far from actual movements and discourses which think of themselves as Zionist as to warrant the new spelling.