Many antiracist people in our time have been educated to recognize the accusation of antisemitism, rather than the antisemitism itself, as the dirty trick. They hear it as an attempt to smear and silence people who criticize Israel. Today’s antisemitism incorporates the notion that those who complain about antisemitism are the racists. It treats the opponents of antisemitism, not the antisemites, as the cynical ones; it treats opponents of antisemitism, not the antisemites, as the powerful ones. In the wake of the Brexit and Trump movements, we are seeing opponents of other kinds of racism too being designated as the powerful ones, while racism itself is interpreted as the cry of the oppressed.
In 2006, after Ken Livingstone had been accused of antisemitism, he responded with a counter-accusation that he was being accused in this way only in order to silence his criticism of Israel. This response I named the Livingstone Formulation. This chapter begins by looking at Livingstone’s own long career of hostility to Israel and at his relationship to antisemitism, and how in 2016 he found himself suspended from the Labour Party over the issue. The chapter goes on to look at the Livingstone Formulation itself and how it has become such a standard rhetorical manoeuvre. The Livingstone Formulation – the counter-allegation of Zionist conspiracy which treats discussion of antisemitism as though it were a vulgar, dishonest and tribal fraud – is a thread which runs throughout this form of contemporary antisemitism; and it re-appears relentlessly through the course of this book. Ken Livingstone is not responsible for the Livingstone Formulation, and he did not invent it; it is an honorary title rather than one which he really earned.
In May 1981, two years after Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister, Labour won the election for the Greater London Council (GLC). Ken Livingstone called a meeting of Labour members of the council the following day, and the left-wing Labour councillors defeated Labour leader Andrew McIntosh, putting Livingstone into place as leader of the GLC. The left was ascendant in local government in the cities, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was on the rise; the left in the Labour Party was strong; feminist, lesbian and gay and antiracist movements were seeking common cause in the ‘liberation movements’; the miners’ strike of 1984–85 posed a significant challenge to the government.
Ken Livingstone became a popular spokesperson for the radical socialist opposition to Margaret Thatcher. After the miners had been defeated, the Local Government Act was passed in 1985, which abolished a whole tier of institutions in which the left was strong: the metropolitan counties and the Greater London Council. Ken Livingstone headed a high-profile campaign to ‘save the GLC’; the dying GLC put on a number of popular free concerts at which Livingstone and other figures of the left made radical speeches.
After Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ took power, a London-wide election was re-instituted for the position of Mayor. Having failed to secure the Labour Party’s nomination, Ken Livingstone stood as an Independent in the 2000 election, and he won. He won again in 2004 as the official Labour candidate and was only defeated by the Tories in 2008 and again in 2012.
For four decades, Ken Livingstone was a celebrated and successful leading socialist in the UK; he was well known in the mainstream, and, on the left, he was widely admired.
In late April 2016, Naz Shah, the woman who had defeated George Galloway for the Parliamentary seat of Bradford West, was exposed in blogs and in the press for having published material on Facebook which could be interpreted as antisemitic. In particular, she shared an image which depicted an outline of the United States of America with, somewhere near Nebraska, a small shape of Israel superimposed onto it; the caption was ‘re-locate Israel into the United States’ (Author unknown 2016a).1 This material was meant to be amusing and clever, but joking about the ‘transportation’ of five million Jews out of the Middle East was thought by many to be far from funny. A significant amount of other material shared by Naz Shah on social media emerged, most of it from the time of the Gaza war of 2014. Shah had published an image on Facebook which portrayed ‘Apartheid’ Israel as being similar to ‘Hitler’ (Author unknown 2016b). She had also warned that ‘The Jews’ were ‘rallying’ against a claim that Israel was committing war crimes (Author unknown 2016c).
Naz Shah was one of the most high profile of a number of Labour figures whose antisemitic comments were coming to light at this time, and she was formally suspended from Party membership. Usually, people on the left angrily deny all charges of antisemitism, and they accuse those making the accusations of doing so in bad faith in order to harm the left or to silence criticism of Israel. But Naz Shah made an immediate and plausible apology; she promised to re-think what she had done, and she said that she wanted to understand the issues of Israel and Palestine, and antisemitism, better (Stewart, Mason and Parveen 2016). She went on to meet with a number of Jewish communal leaders and scholars of antisemitism. A few weeks later she had a meeting with Jewish congregants at her local synagogue and talked some of these issues through at length. She said there:
It is my job in the Muslim Community to highlight the issues of anti-Semitism. Going to Auschwitz is a fantastic idea but it won’t fix the problem. We need to educate the community. It’s up to me to own the narrative. To have conversations with the Muslim community [about antisemitism] and that’s my responsibility.
(Cohen, J. 2016)
Justin Cohen reported that she told the gathering of 130 community members from Leeds, Bradford and York that she wanted to make a ‘real apology’ rather than a ‘politician’s apology’, adding: ‘I looked at myself and asked whether I had prejudice against Jewish people. But I realised I was ignorant and I want to learn about the Jewish faith and culture. I do not have hatred for Jewish people’ (2016). Naz Shah has since had her membership of the party reinstated.
Ken Livingstone, by contrast, was absolutely not in a mood to apologize for antisemitism. He took to the radio stations on 27 April in a mood to counter-attack. Defending Naz Shah, even after she herself had apologized, he said on BBC Radio London that she was a victim of a ‘well-orchestrated campaign by Israel lobby’. He said:
She’s a deep critic of Israel and its policies. Her remarks were over the top but she’s not anti-Semitic. I’ve been in the Labour party for 47 years; I’ve never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the state of Israel and its abuse of Palestinians but I’ve never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic ….
It’s completely over the top but it’s not anti-Semitic. Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews. The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians.
(May 2016a)2
Livingstone presumptuously explained Naz Shah’s record by assuming that what she thinks is what he thinks; he assumed the right to explain on her behalf.
The claim from Livingstone that he had never heard anyone say anything antisemitic in his forty-seven years in the party is important. It is evidence for the view that for Livingstone there is nothing that anybody could say which – if it was said in a left-wing antiracist space, and if it related in any way to Israel – could be understood as antisemitic. In half a century of activism, he has never heard such a thing: only criticism of Israel.
And in that interview he went on to articulate a common position in one who is defending against a charge of antisemitism, which is a willingness to plead guilty to a lesser charge – to anything so long as it is not antisemitism: ‘It’s completely over the top but it’s not anti-Semitic,’ he said. For Livingstone, antisemitism on the left is close to being a contradiction in terms; he has never once seen it; it does not exist. He can plead guilty to being vulgar, stupid, rude or belligerent, but there is no guilty plea to a crime which does not, and cannot, exist.
And then Ken Livingstone turned to the claim that Naz Shah had shared on Facebook that ‘apartheid Israel’ was comparable to Hitler. One of the ways in which he defended the claim that Zionists were like Hitler was to re-state the old antizionist claim that Hitler was a supporter of Zionism, a claim which suggests to the listener that Zionism and Hitlerism are similar. Ken Livingstone has a particular attachment to comparing everything which he finds bad in political life to Hitler; in particular, he has a track record of comparing Israel and Jews to Nazis.
Most people know that Zionism was in fact a response to antisemitism; most people know that Hitler was not interested in responding to antisemitism because he was an antisemite. But for people from a certain current of left antizionism, comparing Zionism to Nazism is irresistible. First, Nazism is popularly understood as the supreme example of the horrors to which race-thinking can lead; and Zionism is said to embody, at its heart, the same kind of race-thinking. Second, Zionism is said to have in common with Nazism the assumption that Jews and non-Jews cannot live together in Europe; this is then portrayed as an ideological similarity, a shared critique of multiculturalism. Third, Zionism, as an ideology which is cast as being akin to Nazism, is said to have created a state and a society which is akin to that created by National Socialism. This analogy is potent on the level of emotion as well as on the level of reason. ‘Scientifically’ to portray Nazism and Zionism as similar is to try to make people feel towards Zionism the great loathing that good people feel towards Nazism. To say that something is like Nazism is to say that it is morally reprehensible. But to propagate the notion that Zionists – that is, the overwhelming majority of Jews – are in particular like Nazis adds a specific Jew-baiting dimension.
It is to be remembered that Ken Livingstone has been part of the hard-core antizionist movement in the UK since the days when it was a small, fringe, obsessive and eccentric clique. In 1981, when he was already leader of the GLC, Livingstone was made the figurehead editor of a left-wing newspaper called Labour Herald. It was edited by Ted Knight, a leading Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) member. The WRP was a significant Trotskyist group in Britain which eventually broke apart when plausible allegations emerged that its leadership had been guilty of the rape and sexual abuse of younger members (Matgamna 2003). Labour Herald was also financed by the WRP, which was in turn supported by Colonel Gadafi and other Arab Nationalist dictators; the WRP spied on Arab dissidents in London too, reporting back to the murderous regimes in the Middle East (Dovkants 2008). Already in the 1980s, Livingstone’s paper ran a cartoon depicting the Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, wearing a Nazi uniform, doing a straight arm salute and standing on a heap of skulls.3
In 1983, Lenni Brenner wrote ‘Zionism in the Age of Dictators’ (2014). It was an antizionist polemic and not taken seriously by mainstream scholars. Paul Bogdanor (2016) notes:
Livingstone had written in his memoirs that Brenner’s work ‘helped form my view of Zionism and its history’ (Livingstone 2011: 223). The book is a fixture of antizionist and antisemitic propaganda about the Holocaust on both the far left and on the far right, and Brenner has a cult following among those convinced that ‘Zionists’ are to blame for all evil in the world.
Jim Allen was inspired by Brenner to write Perdition, a play which was produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 1987. Perdition draws upon the story of Rudolf Kastner and the later controversies regarding later accusations that were made against him of collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust in Hungary. Allen takes this morally and historically complex and contested story, and he makes out of it a morality tale of Zionist collaboration with Hitler.
Bogdanor (2016)4 writes:
Allen characterised his play in these terms: ‘Without any undue humility I’m saying that this is the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written, because it touches the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state, Israel, a state which is itself racist’.
When Ken Livingstone was asked in 2016 why he found it so compelling, he replied:
Lenni’s book shows a shared common belief between the Nazis and the Zionists in preserving their race from interracial marriage and things like that. They wanted to preserve their ethnic purity and that’s why they had a working relationship.
(Bogdanor 2016)5
In the 1980s there was a small clique of antizionists, many of them Jewish, who created for themselves a narrative, which became for them common sense, that Zionism was like Nazism, that it collaborated with Nazism and that it created a Nazi state. There were activists and historians who stood toe to toe with these antizionists, who followed all their polemics and their intricate and obscure sources, and who critiqued their interpretations and their conclusions.6
Now in 2016, these issues were moving into the mainstream. Labour MPs and activists were being scrutinized, the leader of the Party himself was accused of being an antizionist with a long history of links with antisemitic ideas and politics, and the debates were being had in the newspapers, on radio, and on television, as well as on social media and the blogs.
Ken Livingstone, for years a great communicator of socialist ideas to a general audience, suddenly found himself saying things in public which were quite normal in his own circles but which sounded eccentric on BBC Radio London. They were now to be challenged in a much more public arena. The most prominent and immediate challenge came from John Mann.
John Mann is now the Labour MP for Bassetlaw and a central driving force behind parliamentary initiatives against contemporary antisemitism both in the UK and globally. His political career began in the 1980s when he was a leader of the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS). Part of his own formative political education, therefore, was forged in a fight with those who were pushing these demonizing narratives about Zionism; some of the same activists were, in the early 1980s, involved in campaigns to ban student Jewish societies on the basis that they were Zionist and therefore racist and so in violation of Student Union ‘no-platform’ policies (Rich 2016a).
John Mann responded to Ken Livingstone’s claim that ‘Hitler was supporting Zionism … before he went mad’. Mann confronted Livingstone as he entered a BBC radio building on 28 April 2016, the same day he made the claim about Hitler. Mann managed to accuse Livingstone, loudly and clearly, in front of a TV crew, of being a ‘disgusting racist’, of ‘re-writing history’, of ‘lying’ and of being a ‘Nazi apologist’.7 Video of the confrontation went viral on social media within an hour, and it appeared on television and radio news and in the papers the next day. In mainstream discourse, the accusation that the Jewish state had been supported by Hitler and the assertion that Hitler only ‘went mad’, read became genocidal, after 1932 looked eccentric in the extreme.
Ken Livingstone continued to double down and continued to insist that he was right about Hitler and Zionism. He was relying on, and distorting the purpose of, one moment of Nazi policy, the ‘Haavara agreement’, when there was a Nazi plan to deport Jews from Germany and make some money out of them by allowing them to move to Palestine, with German goods that they had been forced to buy. But politically, the gulf between trying to make Germany Jew-free by finding places to deport them to, on the one hand, and ‘supporting Zionism’, on the other, is unbridgeable. One analogy that was circulating at the time was that Livingstone’s position was like somebody claiming that the Atlantic Slave Trade was ‘in support of’ African immigration into America. The point of all this, it is to be remembered, is to propagate the idea in the public imagination that there is something similar between Nazism and Zionism, and that that is the explanation for the collaboration between the two.
The steady build-up of stories and examples about antisemitism in the Labour Party came to a head with Ken Livingstone when Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party (and a close ally of Livingstone), was forced into suspending Livingstone’s membership. This was when Corbyn announced the Chakrabarti Inquiry into antisemitism in the Labour Party (see subsequent chapters). This response succeeded in damping down the public scandal, which had been escalating by the day, over antisemitism in the Labour Party. John Mann was reprimanded by the Chief Whip for publicly confronting Livingstone (May 2016b). Thousands of Livingstone supporters signed a petition to have John Mann suspended from the party for ‘appallingly unprofessional and toxic’ behaviour (Bloom 2016). In response, a petition was circulated within the Jewish community calling for John Mann to be Knighted (Rashty 2016).
In spite of the fact that historians of the Holocaust like Yehuda Bauer lined up in the press to explain why Livingstone had got the history of this so wrong,8 Livingstone persisted. In June, he was called as a witness to the Home Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry into antisemitism. ‘If I had said Hitler was a Zionist, I would apologise for that because it’s rubbish,’ he told The Guardian newspaper about his testimony, as though that would have been decisively different from saying Hitler ‘was supporting’ Zionism, which he admitted. ‘If I’d said it, I would agree it was abhorrent. But I didn’t say it’ (Sherwood 2016). Notice too that Livingstone almost pleads guilty to talking ‘rubbish’ or saying something ‘abhorrent’ – but the admission that it would have been antisemitic was not forthcoming.
In 2005 I named the phenomenon of responding to an accusation of antisemitism with a counter-accusation of Zionist bad faith; I named it the Livingstone Formulation, after he had employed it following a row with a Jewish journalist who he accused of being ‘just like a German war criminal’ and after which some people accused Livingstone of antisemitism. I always worried a little that naming it after Livingstone was arbitrary and perhaps unfair, as it was a rhetorical device used by many different people. But now, in 2016, Ken Livingstone really embraced it again and made the formulation his own. Speaking after his appearance at the Select Committee, he said: ‘A handful of Labour MPs used this issue, deliberately lied about what I said, and smeared me because they wished to undermine the leader of the Labour party. It’s that simple. And they should be the ones who are suspended’ (Sherwood 2016). And he had made the same claim in his original, unwanted defence of Naz Shah, that the issue of antisemitism had been raised only to smear the left and to silence criticism of Israel.
Antisemitism has been an issue associated with Ken Livingstone throughout his career. When Livingstone was the Mayor of London, he hosted Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi at City Hall. He is pictured warmly embracing the Islamist ideologue. Livingstone insisted that Qaradawi was ‘one of the leading progressive voices in the Muslim world’ (James 2010). Qaradawi is the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian affiliate. Qaradawi speaks in favour of wife-beating, female genital mutilation and the execution of gay people (Readings 2010). He says that Hitler put the Jews in their place; he described the Holocaust both as exaggerated and as divine punishment.9
On 21 March 2012, a group of life-long Jewish Labour supporters sat down in a meeting with Livingstone to try to come to some agreement by which they could back him in the mayoral election. They reported that at ‘various points in the discussion Ken used the words Zionist, Jewish and Israeli, interchangeably, as if they meant the same, and did so in a pejorative manner’ (Gilbert et al 2012). They also raised the issue of Livingstone having taken money for fronting the antisemitic Iranian propaganda channel Press TV. Livingstone told the group that Jews are rich and so are not likely anyway to vote Labour (Gilbert et al 2012).
Ken Livingstone says antisemitic things, and he leaps to the defence of antisemites and antisemitic movements. He gave his name to a particular variant of antisemitic conspiracy theory whereby those who stand up against antisemitism are accused of doing so in bad faith. He loves getting into a fight with the Jews, those, anyway, who do not identify as antizionist. He is hungry for the spotlight in this fight.
Ken Livingstone and a significant minority of people in the UK still do not see that there is a problem of antisemitism. They see a right-wing Zionist ‘witch-hunt’ against good people who oppose austerity, imperialism, the Israeli occupation and Islamophobia. They are enraged by the injustice of the antisemitism ‘smear’. They are entrenched in their position that the influence of Israel, as well as the Jews who support it, is toxic. They are worried how this influence seems to them to seep into the dominant ideology of the ruling class and the mainstream media. Their blood boils more and more intensely about Israel, its human rights abuses (both real and imagined), its imputed vulgarity, and the racism that is to be found there; their anger is mixed with shame at what they think of as a European colonial outpost, created under British rule. They see Islamophobia, imported from Israel and America, as the poison of post-national European hope. They feel that everybody has learnt the lessons of the Holocaust except for the Zionists, who, having rejected Christian forgiveness and love, find themselves stuck, more and more isolated, in the Nazi era.
Currently, Ken Livingstone is not suspended from the Labour Party but is prohibited from running for public office as a party candidate. In a sense this is an injustice, since Livingstone thinks the same about Israel and about antisemitism as many in the very highest positions of leadership of the party. In fact Livingstone may be ending his career as rather a pathetic figure. Every time he fails to resist the temptation to talk about Hitler in public, he makes himself look more out of touch. There is a website which tells you the number of days since Livingstone mentioned Hitler.10 A satirical website jokingly quotes Livingstone as follows: ‘Quite frankly, these constant attempts by the media to smear me are leaving a Nazi taste in my mouth’ (Author unknown 2016d). On the other hand, with the Corbyn faction’s consolidation of power in the Labour Party, it is possible that Livingstone may be reinstated at some point.
Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, said at a fringe meeting of her party’s conference: ‘The pro-Israeli Lobby has got its grips on the Western World, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a certain grip on our party’ (Aaronvitch 2016). This seems to be an antisemitic claim because it articulates a mindset in which a Jewish conspiracy controls the western world through its financial muscle. It is a claim not about influence or lobbying but about singular and global financial control.
There is often disagreement about what is antisemitic and what is not. Spotting antisemitism requires knowledge, forensic skills, political and moral judgment, as well as a sensitive nose and a consideration of context. But the focus in this section of the book is not how to spot antisemitism. Rather it is about a recurrent pattern of refusal even to try. It focuses on one common response to an accusation of antisemitism. Jenny Tonge is not some kind of fascist or racist; she thinks of herself as a liberal opponent of bigotry and antisemitism. One would think that if Jewish individuals, Jewish communal bodies or scholars of antisemitism told her that some of what she had said was antisemitic, then it would worry her. You would think that she would stop, re-consider and seek advice. But that is not what she does. Instead, she responds like this: ‘I am sick of being accused of anti-Semitism when what I am doing is criticising Israel and the state of Israel’ (Innovative Minds 2007).
Tonge says that the people who claim she has said antisemitic things do not really believe she has said antisemitic things. She says that these claims are made in bad faith by people whose real concern is to silence her criticisms of Israeli human rights abuses (Hirsh 2008a). Instead of responding by discussing the content of what she has said, she responds by discussing the allegedly hidden and dishonest motivation of those who accuse her. She writes:
They take vindictive actions against people who oppose and criticise the lobby, getting them removed from positions that they hold and preventing them from speaking – even on unrelated subjects, in my case. I understand their methods. I have many examples. They make constant accusations of antisemitism, when no such sentiment exists, to silence Israel’s critics.
(Hirsh 2008a)
Tonge does not say that people who accuse her of antisemitism are mistaken. She says that they know they are wrong and they accuse her in a secretly systematic and methodical way, nevertheless. Her defence against a charge that she has employed antisemitic conspiracy theory is to rely on antisemitic conspiracy theory: the claim that there is a hugely powerful singular lobby which mobilizes Jewish victim-power ruthlessly against her and other ‘critics’ in the interests of the state of Israel.
Everybody agrees that criticism of Israel can be entirely legitimate and that it is open to debate, discussion and the examination of evidence to work out which criticisms are justified and which are not, and which kinds of criticism may be bigoted or antisemitic (Hirsh 2007). But the problem with Tonge’s response here is that she characterizes everything she does as ‘criticism’. She is in favour of a boycott of Israel, which some people say is antisemitic and is likely to bring antisemitic ways of thinking with it; she calls the boycott ‘criticism’. When she indulges in what appears to be antisemitic conspiracy theory, she calls that ‘criticism of Israel’ too.
Tonge’s response to an accusation of antisemitism is to employ the Livingstone Formulation. The key elements of the Livingstone Formulation as I characterize it are as follows:
In October 2016, Jenny Tonge responded to the Home Affairs Select Committee report on antisemitism. She wrote that it is difficult to believe that the rise in antisemitism could be explained by people hating Jews for no reason. She wrote that antisemitism is on the rise because of the ‘disgust amongst the general public’ for ‘the way the government of Israel treats Palestinians’. For her, antisemitism is not hating Jews for no reason; it is hating Jews for good reasons (Hirsh 2016a).
A week later, Tonge chaired an event in the House of Lords at which a man took the floor and explained that it was a Jewish boycott of Germany which had ‘antagonized Hitler over the edge to want to systematically kill Jews wherever he could find them’. The man was saying that Zionist Jews, and their campaign against Nazi Germany, were responsible for causing the Holocaust. Jenny Tonge sat respectfully through this speech and thanked the man warmly. Perhaps she had only heard one word that he had said: ‘boycott’. She replied by saying that the campaign for a boycott of Israel is ‘very very important’, but she said nothing about his antisemitic argument.
Finally, ten years after her ‘financial grips’ speech, this event was the last straw for the leadership of her party; they suspended her membership. She responded by resigning. She said that she had not heard the antisemitic speech. But, as though to remove all doubt anyway about the justice of her suspension, she added: ‘We need an urgent definition of anti-Semitism. At the moment anyone who criticises Israel is accused of it.’ She also criticised the Israeli Embassy: ‘They are trying to attack the Lib Dems as they do Labour. They like to be in control of things’ (Craig 2016).
In 2013, David Ward, an MP for Tonge’s former party, took the opportunity of Holocaust Memorial Day to announce that he was saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians (Quinn 2013).
Lesley Klaff characterizes this mode of comparison as ‘Holocaust Inversion’: inversion of reality (the Israelis are cast as the ‘new’ Nazis, and the Palestinians as the ‘new’ Jews) and inversion of morality (the Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of, ‘the Jews’) (2014).
David Ward responded in The Guardian to criticism of his remarks in terms strikingly similar to those of Jenny Tonge:
There is a huge operation out there, a machine almost, which is designed to protect the State of Israel from criticism. And that comes into play very, very quickly and focuses intensely on anyone who’s seen to criticise the State of Israel. And so I end up looking at what happened to me, whether I should use this word, whether I should use that word – and that is winning for them.
(Edemariam 2013)
In the 1980s a certain kind of antiracism ‘consciousness raising’ was fashionable.11 People would sit in a circle, and the group would begin, like a session of Alcoholics Anonymous, with each person admitting publicly that they were racist. There was a logic to proceeding in this way. We are human beings. We live and are formed within the existing social world; it is complex and contradictory, and so are we. It is impossible simply by an act of will to cleanse oneself completely of all the unwanted assumptions, feelings, unconscious motivations and linguistic vocabularies within which we exist. If we begin by admitting that we are not necessarily immune from racism simply because we decide to be antiracist, then it enables us to examine ourselves honestly, in a supportive group, without being afraid of denunciation. If we all contain some racist ways of thinking, then we can examine them and deal with them. It is the ones who claim to be pure who we need to worry about.
When Labour MP Paul Flynn was criticised for suggesting that it was inappropriate for a Jewish man to be the UK ambassador to Israel, part of his response was interesting: ‘I do not have an atom of racism or anti-semitism in me’ (The Board of Deputies of British Jews 2011).
Tonge says that antisemitism is a ‘sentiment’ which is entirely absent from her own inner life, and Flynn says that he doesn’t have an atom of it in him. This subjective self-consciousness of being an opponent of antisemitism, it turns out, is no guarantee against stumbling into antisemitic ways of thinking or supporting antisemitic boycotts. This certainty about one’s own political cleanliness can make one nostalgic for the 1980s consciousness raisers who remained vigilant about the possibility that racism lurked in their own inner lives, in spite of their conscious and determined wish to eradicate it.
Antisemitism is an objective social phenomenon because it resides not only inside our heads but also in the cultural spaces in between our heads and in the relationships between consciousness, culture and material reality. Antisemitism has recognizable shapes and tropes; it has been with us for a long time, and its symbols and memes are deep within us and deep within our shared cultures. So there is no contradiction when Jenny Tonge tells us that she is unaware of feeling any hostility to Jews even as she indulges in classic antisemitic conspiracy theory, or when Flynn alleges that a Jew cannot be trusted to hold a sensitive office for the British state on account of his dual loyalty, while at the same time he believes that he does not contain an atom of antisemitism.
Sometimes, it is said that hostility to Israel is a cloak which hides antisemitism. But this seems to suggest that people who are self-consciously antisemitic are adopting hostility to Israel as a way of camouflaging their real, underlying, Jew-hating motivations. Well, this may be true of David Irving, for example, whose antisemitism precedes his ‘criticism of Israel’. But it is more of a puzzle when people who are aware of no antisemitic motivations, who think of themselves as implacable opponents of antisemitism, act in antisemitic ways.
Whether the hostility to Israel comes first and the antisemitism follows, or whether the antisemitism comes first, even if it is unconscious, and is a cause of the disproportionate hostility to Israel, it is difficult to know. Perhaps it makes sense to understand it as a cycle in which both antisemitism and hostility to Israel feed on each other. But in any case, the key issue here is that the antisemitism remains steadfastly unrecognized and unacknowledged by the person who has stumbled into it. This is important if we are to understand the self-righteous anger and the certainty with which such people reject any suggestion that what they have said or done is antisemitic. The indignation is genuine.
People look within themselves and find an absence of Jew-hatred. They find it difficult to understand antisemitism as an objective social fact, preferring to see it as an individual mental sentiment. Having found themselves not guilty of antisemitism, they are tempted to move quickly on to angrily counter-attacking the motives of the people who have brought up the issue.
The 1980s consciousness raisers normalized racism, understanding it as something which is common in our world and which even happens within ourselves. This way of thinking helped them to examine racism, to understand it and to oppose it. By contrast, contemporary antisemitism is often treated in the opposite way. A colleague from the Netherlands once told me that she had been invited to participate in a panel discussion in Amsterdam about a controversial play. I asked her whether she thought that the play was antisemitic. She replied: ‘How can I accuse somebody of antisemitism in Holland, in the city of Anne Frank, which was occupied by the Nazis?’
I thought this answer revealed something important about the difficulty of discussing and understanding contemporary antisemitism. She told me that she thought the play was vulgar, was not a good play, was not nuanced, and did not portray Jews fairly or sensitively; but she was hugely reluctant, for reasons which had nothing to do with the play itself, even to consider whether it was antisemitic. For my colleague, the very concept of antisemitism had become unusable in any context other than that of the Nazi genocide or of its pre-history. In her mind, to say that this play was antisemitic was to say that the author was like Hitler; and since this playwright was not in any sense a Nazi, then it would have been insulting to call her play antisemitic. In this way, we deprive ourselves of the ability to interrogate our own speech or actions for antisemitism.
We need the concept ‘antisemitism’ to help us to understand and to oppose the phenomenon of antisemitism. But what if the term itself, and so the concept, has become unusable? What if it has become a nuclear bomb which cannot be targeted against anti-Jewish bigotry but which, instead, obliterates the whole conversation? For my Dutch colleague, it had become impossible to confront the author of the play and its audience with a reasoned and evidenced case that they had slipped into antisemitic ways of thinking. Her choice was either to dance around the issue of antisemitism using other words or to use the dreaded word, in the fear that the response of the playwright would be howling and self-righteous anger, rather than considered and sober introspection.
It suited this antizionist playwright not to have a serious discussion about her play’s antisemitism just as it suited Jenny Tonge not to have to consider the antisemitic nature of her claim that the ‘lobby’ had its financial grips on the western world. The reason for this is not that they privately admit to producing antisemitic words but that they feel themselves to be so clean that they bitterly resent even having to consider it. Portraying the charge of antisemitism as a nuclear bomb enables them to position themselves as victims of those who they think utilize such an evil and destructive weapon.
The idea that raising the issue of antisemitism is a dirtier trick than antisemitism itself is occurring to more and more people apparently independently; each seems dazzled by their own brilliance in solving the puzzle. The insight is that the debate about contemporary antisemitism itself should really be recognized as a manifestation of Zionist ruthlessness and duplicity. This notion, widely held, does serious damage to the possibility of considering antisemitism in a measured and rational way, either politically or academically.
In February 2005, Ken Livingstone, then the Mayor of London, became involved in an apparently trivial late night argument with a reporter after a party at City Hall. Oliver Finegold asked him how the party had been. Livingstone was angry because he felt Finegold was intruding, although in fact his staff had told the reporter that he would get his quote. There was a little banter to and fro, in which the reporter said that he was only trying to do his job. Livingstone fixed on that phrase and retorted by asking him whether he had previously been a ‘German war criminal’. Finegold replied that he hadn’t, and that he was Jewish, and that he was offended by the suggestion. Livingstone went on to insist that Finegold was behaving just like a ‘German war criminal’, that his newspaper (The Evening Standard) ‘was a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots’ and that it had a record of supporting fascism (Transcript 2006).
Instead of apologizing for his comments in the sober light of day, Livingstone treated the publication of this exchange as a political opportunity rather than a gaffe. He wrote an article criticizing Ariel Sharon, then the Prime Minister of Israel. In that article he responded to charges of antisemitism which had been made in relation to the Finegold affair with the following words: ‘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’ (Livingstone 2006).
This is the Livingstone Formulation. It is a response to a charge of antisemitism. It is a rhetorical device which enables the user to refuse to engage with the charge made. It is a mirror which bounces back onto an accuser of antisemitism a counter-charge of dishonest Jewish (or ‘Zionist’) conspiracy.
The Livingstone Formulation conflates everything – criticism of Israel but also other things which do not seem to be so legitimate, such as repeatedly insulting a Jewish reporter by comparing him to a Nazi – into the category of legitimate criticism of Israel. The Livingstone Formulation does not simply accuse people who raise the issue of antisemitism of being wrong; it accuses them of being wrong on purpose: ‘the accusation of antisemitism has been used against anyone who is critical’ (my italics) – not an honest mistake, but a secret, common plan to try to de-legitimize criticism by means of the instrumental use of a charge of antisemitism; crying wolf; playing the antisemitism card. This is an allegation of malicious intent made against the (unspecified) people who raise concerns about antisemitism. It is not possible to ‘use’ ‘the accusation of antisemitism’ in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israel, without dishonest intent; it is an accusation of bad faith.
An ad hominem attack is one which responds to an argument by attempting to discredit the maker of the argument. Philosopher Jon Pike (2008) argues that the Livingstone Formulation is an ad hominem attack which leaves the substance of the question at issue unaddressed:
Suppose some discussion of a ‘new antisemitism’ is used in an attempt to stifle strong criticism. Well, get over it. The genesis of the discussion and the motivation of the charge [don’t] touch the truth or falsity of the charge. Deal with the charge, rather than indulging in some genealogical inquiry.
It is always the case that there are possible reasons for making a claim which lies beyond the truth of the claim. For example a trade union representing coal miners may want to make the case against nuclear power. It is clear enough that it has an interest in winning the argument against nuclear power. But even if instrumental self-interest is one of the reasons for miners arguing against nuclear power, it is still necessary for policy makers to come to a view about the substance of the case itself. Neither does it follow that miners do not themselves believe in the case against nuclear power or that they are making the case in bad faith.
Often, critics of Israel argue that to raise the issue of antisemitism, to launch the nuclear bomb, in relation to their criticisms of Israel is itself an ad hominem attack. They do this by insisting that a necessary element of antisemitism is antisemitic intent on the part of the ‘critic’ of Israel. In other words, to be guilty of antisemitism, a person must be aware of his or her own antisemitism; to be real, antisemitism must be a conscious motivation. The accusation of antisemitism must therefore be a charge against the person, not only against the speech or the actions of the person.
But the Livingstone Formulation is itself an ad hominem response. It is an attempt to rebut this allegedly ad hominem accusation of antisemitism by reference to the malicious intent of the accuser, not by reference to the content of the accusation.
So there are charges of ad hominem usage on both sides. On neither side can the mere making of the charge settle the argument; what is needed is an investigation into whether the charges are true. Do the Jews who express worry about antisemitism actually have malicious and duplicitous motives, or are there simpler ways to account for their expressions of worry? For example, perhaps the antisemitism they worry about is real, and that would account for their worrying. Or perhaps they have misjudged something legitimate to be antisemitic, and that would account for their worrying.
Alternatively, is it true that those who denounce Zionists as Nazis or as pro-apartheid, or those who call for singular punishments for Israel, are in fact behaving in a discriminatory way? If it is, then raising the issue of antisemitism is explicable in its own terms without reference to a malicious external motive.
One of the interesting things about the Livingstone Formulation is that it is mobilized in a similar way both by self-conscious antisemites and by people who think of themselves as opponents of antisemitism.
The former President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pushed Holocaust denial and other antisemitic conspiracy theory. When he was challenged on this, he responded: ‘As soon as anyone objects to the behaviour of the Zionist regime, they’re accused of being anti-Semitic’ (Reuters 2008). David Duke (2004), former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote the following in response to an accusation of antisemitism:
It is perfectly acceptable to criticize any nation on the earth for its errors and wrongs, but lo and behold, don’t you dare criticize Israel; for if you do that, you will be accused of the most abominable sin in the modern world, the unforgivable sin of anti-Semitism!
Nick Griffin, leader of the fascistic British National Party, wrote:
Those who claim … that to criticise any Jew … is a mortal sin against a group singled out by God or Hitler for special treatment and in consequence entitled ever-after to carry a globally valid ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, are clearly in the grip either of PC self-censorship or the last misguided upholders of the late 19th century ‘Master Race’ fantasy’.
(Auster 2005)
Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator who campaigned against the USA’s entry into the Second World War under the slogan ‘America First’, said: ‘The terms “fifth columnist,” “traitor”, “Nazi”, “anti-Semitic” were thrown ceaselessly at any one who dared to suggest that it was not to the best interests of the United States to enter the war’ (1941).
These four antisemites all respond to an accusation of antisemitism in the same way. Instead of looking at what they said which is allegedly antisemitic, they launch a counter-attack against their accusers. Instead of addressing the substance of the allegation, they seek to smear the motive of the Jewish, Zionist or antiracist accuser.
Soviet antisemitism long pre-dated Israel, but the Stalinists pioneered the strategy of demonizing Israel as ‘pro-imperialist’. In 1952, Rudolph Slansky, who had himself been the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, was faced with an antisemitic purge by his ‘comrades’. Slansky was removed from power, and the following ‘confession’ was extracted under torture:
I deliberately shielded Zionism by publicly speaking out against the people who pointed to the hostile activities of Zionists and by describing these people as anti-Semites so that these people were in the end prosecuted and persecuted. I thus created an atmosphere in which people were afraid to oppose Zionism.
(Shindler 2011: 145–146)
This is identical to Livingstone’s formulation. The Jew confesses to (or is accused of) mobilizing a bad-faith accusation of antisemitism in order to silence opposition to Zionism.
The Livingstone Formulation today is commonly used by people who are avowed opponents of antisemitism when something they have said or done is challenged as antisemitic. Instead of a sober review of what was said, what was done, what the criticism was, a common response is an energetic counter-accusation of Jewish or ‘Zionist’ conspiracy.
The Reverend Steven Sizer – a leading supporter in the Church of England of the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel – wrote a letter to The Independent responding to an argument by the Chief Rabbi that the campaign for BDS was part of an emerging antisemitic culture in the UK (2007). The Synod of the Church, wrote Sizer, would not be intimidated by those who cry ‘antisemitism’ whenever Israeli human rights abuses in the occupied territories are mentioned. He went on: ‘Why has the Archbishop faced a torrent of criticism over [a vote to divest from Caterpillar]? Simple: the people in the shadows know that Caterpillar is only the first [boycott]’ (2007). Sizer responded to an argument that BDS was antisemitic by alleging that the argument was made in bad faith ‘by the people in the shadows’ (2007).
One of the people who leapt to Sizer’s defence against a charge of antisemitism was Jeremy Corbyn, later to become the leader of the Labour Party in the UK. Years before he ever imagined becoming leader, Corbyn wrote a letter to the Church of England in support of Sizer, saying that he ‘was under attack by a pro-Israeli smear campaign’ (Wallis Simons 2015). Corbyn employed the Livingstone Formulation. Sizer was later banned by the Church from further participation in social media after he shared an antisemitic article on his Facebook feed entitled ‘9/11: Israel did it’ (Bingham 2015).
Richard Ingrams, journalist and founder of Private Eye, wrote the following in defence of Ken Livingstone during the controversy about the Finegold affair: ‘The Board [of Deputies of British Jews] … thinks nothing of branding journalists as racists and anti-Semites if they write disrespectfully of Mr Sharon’ (2005).
The BBC news website greeted David Miliband’s appointment as British Foreign Secretary in 2007 with the following comment: ‘[his] Jewish background will be noted particularly in the Middle East. Israel will welcome this – but equally it allows him the freedom to criticize Israel, as he has done, without being accused of anti-Semitism’ (Reynolds 2007).
Political Scientist Norman Finkelstein compressed the Livingstone Formulation into four words with which he headed a claim on his website that the British Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism was manufactured in order to act as a smokescreen to blot out criticism of Israel’s role in the war against Hezbollah in 2006: ‘Kill Arabs, Cry Anti-Semitism’ (2006). Finkelstein has written a whole book on ‘Israel’s horrendous human rights record in the Occupied Territories and the misuse of anti-Semitism to de-legitimize criticism of it’ (2005).
Tariq Ali (2004), a well-known figure on the British anti-imperialist left since he was a leader of the protests in the UK against the Vietnam War, wrote:
The campaign against the supposed new ‘anti-semitism’ in Europe today is basically a cynical ploy on the part of the Israeli Government to seal off the Zionist state from any criticism of its regular and consistent brutality against the Palestinians.
Ali transforms everything which worries those who argue that there is a ‘new antisemitism’ in Europe into ‘criticism of [Israel’s] regular and consistent brutality’ (2004). He then states clearly that those who argue that there is a ‘new antisemitism’ are to be thought of as agents of the Israeli government who are engaged in carrying out its cynical ploy (Ali 2004). Ali goes on to state, as the conclusion of his article, ‘To be intimidated by Zionist blackmail is to become an accomplice of war-crimes’ (2004).
Sociologist Martin Shaw defended Ali’s use of the Livingstone Formulation as follows: ‘Whether this is a matter of Israeli policy, as Tariq Ali not so unreasonably suggested, I do not know: but it certainly seems to be part of Jewish-nationalist culture’ (Shaw 2008a: 102). Shaw found it ‘not unreasonable’ of Ali to have suggested that proponents of the ‘new antisemitism’ thesis were cynical agents of the Israeli government. But he offered a more apparently sociological and sophisticated variant, suggesting a different interpretation of the intent of the ‘new antisemitism’ theorists. Instead of accusing them of being agents of a foreign government, he accused them of being (perhaps unconsciously) immersed in a Jewish nationalist culture (Shaw 2008a).
Yet later on in the same debate, Shaw was drawn back to the authentic intentionalist variant of the Livingstone Formulation when he wrote, in relation to Norman Geras and David Hirsh, that ‘some Jewish socialists … use indiscriminate accusations of “anti-Semitism” to discredit the outcry against this and other policies of the Israeli state’ (Shaw 2008b).
The Livingstone Formulation variant used by Caroline Lucas, later a Green Party Member of Parliament, also posited a strong and clear claim about intent: ‘Israel has been able to act with relative immunity, hiding behind its incendiary claim that all who criticise its policies are anti Semitic’ (2008). Note also the term ‘incendiary’, which implies that the act of making the claim that something is antisemitic is hugely damaging, powerful and malicious.
In his column in The Independent, Johan Hari (2009) wrote:
For months, the opponents of Operation Cast Lead – the assault on Gaza that killed 1,434 Palestinians – have been told we are ‘dupes for Islamic fundamentalists’, or even anti-Semitic. The defenders of Israel’s war claimed you could only believe the reports that Israeli troops were deliberately firing on civilians, scrawling ‘death to Arabs’ on the walls, and trashing olive groves, or using the chemical weapon white phosphorus that burns to the bone, if you were infected with the old European virus of Jew-hatred.
A group of antizionist Jews organized a pretend carol service in a London church in December 2008 to protest against Israel. There was criticism of this carol service on the basis that the changed words of the carols mirrored the blood libel and that they made use of images related to the accusation that ‘the Jews’ were responsible for the killing of Christ. Criticism was also made on the basis that using Christian songs and spaces for an attack on the Jewish state was inappropriate, and there was further criticism of other aspects of the content of the songs. Bruce Kent, the former Catholic priest and leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, attempted to deflect criticism of the carol service simply by means of the Livingstone Formulation: ‘Anyone who speaks against Zionist policies is labelled anti-Semitic’ (Gledhill 2008).
In February 2009, Labour Peer Lord Nazir Ahmed was sentenced to prison. He had been texting while driving shortly before being involved in a car accident in which somebody died (Swaine 2009). In March 2009, the court of appeal released him and suspended his sentence, saying that keeping him in prison would hinder his work of ‘building bridges between the Muslim world and others’ (Paul 2013). In 2012, Lord Ahmed gave an interview in Urdu in Pakistan in which he claimed that a secret conspiracy of Jews in the media, the judiciary and the government had had him imprisoned, ostensibly for texting while driving, but actually because of ‘his support for Palestinians in Gaza’ (Paul 2013).
The Times published an English translation of Ahmed’s comments. Later in the day, the Labour Party suspended Lord Ahmed’s membership, saying that it ‘deplores and does not tolerate any sort of racism or anti-semitism’ (Paul 2013). Then there was a Twitter exchange between Daniel Finkelstein (Executive Editor of The Times) and Michael White (Assistant Editor of The Guardian). Finkelstein expressed surprise that the Lord Ahmed story had not been in the BBC radio news summaries (2013a). Michael White responded: ‘I agree it’s a stinker and typical of double standards. Pity about the illegal settlements though’ (2013a). To which Finkelstein replies: ‘What have the settlements got to do with it?’ and ‘Please, no. A Rotherham man is claiming the Jews helped convict him of a driving offence. What has Israel to do with it?’ (2013b). And White replies with a subtle variant of the Livingstone Formulation: ‘Danny, you’re a good chap, and I know what you’re doing. But it’s not a healthy or wise reflex, quite the reverse’ (2013b; see also Hirsh 2013a). Michael White’s claim is that Finkelstein is up to something. He is ostensibly raising an issue of antisemitism, but what he is actually doing is something else, trying to deflect attention from the real issue, the ‘illegal settlements’. White sees through this strategy, and he publically admonishes Finkelstein.
White’s implicit charge was that Finkelstein was manufacturing a charge of antisemitism against Ahmed in order to deflect attention from Israeli human rights abuses. Well, Finkelstein’s evident Jewishness was one thing; certainly, White knew that Finkelstein was also a self-confessed ‘Zionist’ and a defender of Israel; but how was this relevant here?
Adam Levick described it as ‘a Jew-baiting tweet by The Guardian’s Michael White’ on the ‘UK Media Watch’ website (2013). He said that Finkelstein is not Israeli and that to raise the issue of Israeli settlements in response to his story about Ahmed was an ad hominem attack relating to his Jewishness.
Finkelstein, interestingly, tried to damp down the controversy, saying publically that there was nothing antisemitic about White’s response. Finkelstein evidently understood what was going on, but he went out of his way to stop the nuclear bomb of an accusation of antisemitism against a fellow senior journalist being detonated. He preferred to vouch for White’s cleanliness with regard to antisemitism rather than forensically to follow through the logic of what had happened. It was as though Finkelstein understood that it would make him, not White, look bad if he was seen to go along with these accusations against White. Finkelstein had made the point clearly in his original tweet, but now he drew back from it. To make an accusation of antisemitism explicit is more vulgar than making an antisemitic connection in a tweet.
* * *
The Livingstone Formulation is a refusal to regard antisemitism as an objective social phenomenon, and it is a refusal to enter into reasoned discussion about what constitutes antisemitism. It is a counter-accusation of bad faith. While concern about racism in general is regarded with a presumption of seriousness, concern about antisemitism has to clear the hurdle of a presumption of Zionist bad faith.
The Livingstone Formulation is a discursively coercive response, which bundles the person who raises the issue of antisemitism over the boundary of legitimate discourse (Hirsh 2010a) and outside of the community of the progressive or the community of the good. It is coercive in the sense that it refuses reasoned examination, it refuses to debate the claim, it refuses to try to persuade. Instead it constructs and enforces the boundaries of the community of the good by other means: the ad hominem attack, the conflation of everything into ‘criticism’, and the refusal even to consider the possibility of antisemitism within the community of the progressive. By its accusation of silencing, it silences; by its accusation of bad faith, it refuses a hearing.
The Livingstone Formulation is in fact a specific instance of a wider phenomenon. Preferring to define opponents as not belonging rather than seeking to win them over is an increasingly mainstream characteristic of left-wing culture. Opponents are constructed as being outside of the community of the good or the progressive. This licenses their treatment as ‘other’ – impermeable to political argument, reason and evidence.
The Livingstone Formulation is a key element in the ascendency of the politics of position over the politics of reason and persuasion (Hirsh 2015a). Hostility to Israel is becoming more and more a marker of belonging on the contemporary left. The Livingstone Formulation clears the way for this kind of hostility, and it inoculates the progressive movement: not against antisemitism itself, but against having to take the issue of antisemitism seriously.
Young antiracists, both activists and scholars, are inducted into a culture where those who raise the issue of antisemitism are recognized as being reactionary, while those who are accused of being antisemitic are recognized as defenders of the oppressed and courageous opponents of imperialism.
Two things follow from this. First, in this culture, young antiracists are no longer educated to recognize or to avoid antisemitism, and they are no longer given the knowledge or the conceptual tools with which to do so. They are not taught what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are, what blood libel is or how to recognize conspiracy theory; they are no longer educated in the antisemitic history of some currents of their own movement. They are taught to understand the Holocaust as a universal lesson against racism but not as a catastrophe relating to Jewish history, to antisemitism in particular and to Zionism.
The second thing that follows is that expulsion from the community of the good is normalized as a way of dealing with dissent. Expulsion does not stop with raisers of the issue of antisemitism but also comes to seem appropriate for people who raise other kinds of disagreement too. And the story of dissenters being dealt with coercively is another part of the history of the progressive movement which is not taught as thoroughly as it might be, nowadays.
Alain Badiou is a Maoist philosopher, but he is nevertheless considered legitimate in antiracist and scholarly circles; he is a celebrated and successful intellectual. He co-authored a book in 2013 called Reflections on Antisemitism (Badiou et al 2013) which, in the words of the publisher’s web page, dissects ‘how facile accusations of “anti-Semitism” are used to stifle dissent’ (Verso 2015). Gérard Bensussan (2014) reviewed the book in Libération, arguing that, in making antisemitism respectable, the extreme-left had achieved what the far-right could only dream of. He argues that Badiou participates in a contemporary restoration of French antisemitism.
Badiou’s first response is that there ‘could be no such thing as a far-left anti-Semitism – an absurd oxymoron’ (Badiou 2014). This is a clear illustration of the eclipse of the politics of reason by the politics of position. By definition, there can be no antisemitism in this place, within the community of the progressive. The suggestion that there may be such a thing as left antisemitism is not rebutted or denied; it is met with a threatening, aggressive and emotional volley of insults which effectively puts the person who made the suggestion outside the community.
Badiou proceeds to respond with the most condescending sarcasm, implying that Bensussan and his academic institution are well below his own intellectual level. He says that the accusation of antisemitism is a matter for the courts, meaning that it is a libel, but, since he places no trust in the bourgeois courts, his remedy for the libel is as follows: ‘I’ll simply give Professor Bensussan a smack in the face if I ever come across him, which will be a richly deserved reward for his muck-spreading rhetoric.’ For more on the pleasures offered by contemporary antisemitism, see Garrard (2013).
Badiou is clear. An accusation of antisemitism, if it concerns a person on the left, if it concerns something which relates to hostility to Israel, need only be responded to by violence. Reasons, evidence or argument are appropriate for disagreements within the community of the progressive but are not appropriate for an accuser of antisemitism.
1This material previously appeared on the website of Norman G. Finkelstein. See Stern-Weiner and Finkelstein (2016).
2See Simons (2016) for discussion.
3See the image on the Workers’ Liberty website. Available: www.workersliberty.org/files/begincartoon.jpg (accessed 19 September 2016).
4Bogdanor’s reference is to David Rose, ‘Rewriting the Holocaust’, The Guardian, January 14, 1987.
5For further discussion see also: Cohen, T. (2016).
6For discussion see: Author unknown (2012) and Ezra (2007).
7A video made of the confrontation is available to view on the website of the UK newspaper The Guardian. Available: www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2016/apr/28/john-mann-calls-ken-livingstone-a-nazi-apologist-video (accessed 19 September 2016).
8See Frazer (2016).
9‘Al-Qaradawi Praising Hitler’s Antisemitism’, available: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HStliOnVl6Q (uploaded 20 February 2009) (accessed 20 September 2016).
10Available: www.aol.co.uk/news/2016/09/08/this-website-lets-you-track-how-many-days-its-been-since-ken-livingstone-mentioned-hitler/ (accessed 20 September 2016).
11This analogy was suggested to me by my friend and colleague Dr Ben Gidley.
