This chapter focuses on struggles over how antisemitism is defined. These struggles over definition, over what is recognized as antisemitism, are a distillation of the wider struggles which are the subject of this book. What kinds of hostility to Israel may be understood as, or may lead to, or may be caused by, antisemitism?
In this chapter, I trace a genealogy of the EUMC (European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, now the Agency For Fundamental Rights [FRA]) Working Definition of Antisemitism. The definition, in a slightly evolved but functionally identical form, was later adopted by the US State Department, by the thirty-one-state International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and by the UK Government.
In this chapter, I show how this definition emerged originally out of a process of splitting between the global antiracist movement on the one hand and Jewish-led opposition to antisemitism on the other. At the Durban World Conference against Racism in September 2001, there was a largely successful attempt to construct Zionism as the key form of racism on the planet. This way of thinking would encourage people to relate to the overwhelming majority of Jews, who refuse to plead not guilty to the charge of Zionism, as if they were racists. Relating to Jews in that way has antisemitic consequences. In response, some Jewish NGOs found that they could get a hearing for their concerns within the structures of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Union. If Durban is thought of as a non-white global forum and if the OSCE and the European Union are thought of as networks of white states, then the antagonism between non-white antiracism and white anxiety about antisemitism becomes visible and concerning. The clash between antizionism, on the one hand, and the claim that antizionism is related to antisemitism, on the other, plays out within the realm of discourse, and then it is also mirrored institutionally in these global struggles over the definition of antisemitism.
I go on to look at the specific ways in which the boycott movement in the University and College Union (UCU), at every stage, went to great lengths explicitly to insist that what it did could not be understood as antisemitic. The disavowal of the EUMC definition during the 2011 UCU Congress can be seen as the climax of this campaign to define antisemitism in such a way as the union itself was not guilty.
I then turn to look at two of the formal processes which were asked to adjudicate whether hostility to Israel had become antisemitic: the Fraser v. UCU case at the Employment Tribunal in 2012, and the Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry into Antisemitism and Other Racisms in the Labour Party in 2016.
The EUMC definition of antisemitism offers a framework for understanding the potential of certain kinds of hostility to Israel to be antisemitic. The further argument was made within the UCU, to the Employment Tribunal, and to the Chakrabarti Inquiry, that cultures of hostility to Israel and of support for boycotts tend to bring with them, into institutions which host them, cultures of antisemitism. The structures of the union, as well as the two inquiries, wholeheartedly rejected both of the claims: first, that a politics of hostility to Israel manifests itself as antisemitism in these cases; and, second, that a cultural or institutional antisemitism, analogous to institutional racism, could be identified in the UCU or the Labour Party. Where the Chakrabarti report does recognize that antisemitism has occurred, it is treated as the product of individual failings rather than a manifestation of political, cultural or institutional phenomena.
This chapter suggests that these wholehearted rejections of claims about antisemitism are themselves implicated in the functioning of contemporary antisemitism. Denial of racism is a necessary element of those kinds of racism which do not see themselves as racist. It seems clear that hostility to the EUMC definition and to arguments about cultural and institutional antisemitism are necessary components of contemporary antizionist discourse as well as the cultures and practices which flow from them.
Defining a concept cannot be done independently of understanding that which the concept seeks to encapsulate. Defining is a process which requires us to begin by looking at the world outside of ourselves. Gold, for example, is easy to define because its properties are clearly delineated in nature. Any element with atomic number 79 is gold, and having that atomic number is enough to define it as such. That is to say that having the atomic number 79 is both necessary and sufficient for a substance to be gold. To define gold it is necessary to know something about the nature of gold.
Antisemitism, a complex and contested social phenomenon, is more difficult to define than gold, but here too the work of definition must begin with an investigation into the phenomenon itself. Antisemitism is objective, and it is external to the subjective feeling of individuals. This means that in order to shed light on debates around the definition of the concept, it is necessary to look at the actualization of the concept in the social world as well as the ways in which the processes of definition happen there.
But the procedure which is appropriate for natural concepts such as chemical elements cannot be used exactly as it stands when we want to define more complex social phenomena. One principal reason for this is that whereas a natural concept such as gold has instances which are universally agreed upon as being cases of gold, the same is not true of socially contentious phenomena such as racism, in general, and antisemitism, in particular. What counts as a case of racism is a matter of dispute; indeed, it is precisely those disputes, with all their political implications and consequences, that intensify the need for a clear definition of what it is we are disagreeing about. We need a more complex method if we are to make progress in defining the social phenomenon we are interested in. As before, we must start by looking at the world outside of us; antisemitism is not simply a matter of what is inside people’s heads, either their linguistic knowledge of how the word is used or their psychological states such as feelings of hatred or contempt for Jews. Hatred may be a sufficient condition for antisemitism, but it is not at all a necessary one: antisemitism is also, and primarily, a matter of what people do and of what consequences their actions have. These are points which are widely accepted in the more general study of racism, but what people know about racism is sometimes forgotten when they turn their attention to antisemitism. And although there may be agreement about some cases of antisemitism, such as Nazism, other cases, especially contemporary ones, are the subject of hot political dispute. So we would need to move constantly between our emerging definition of what antisemitism is and our reflective sense of which cases are properly to be seen as constituting antisemitism, using a tentative definition to correct our intuitions about cases and our increasingly reflective sense of which cases really count as antisemitism to help us to revise and refine our definition.
This chapter is more an effort to understand what is at stake in struggles over how antisemitism should be defined than it is an attempt to come to a definition. The inbuilt methodological complexity is that analyzing and understanding the struggles around definition is also a process of analyzing and understanding the phenomenon itself of antisemitism. Observing efforts to define certain kinds of attitudes and actions as not antisemitic may at the same time also be observing the very functioning of antisemitic discourse. Observing struggles over definition in this way may require us to take sides in some of those struggles. It involves a constant interplay between our emerging definition of antisemitism and our understanding of which cases can plausibly be seen as examples of it.
So methodologically, an inquiry into defining antisemitism begins with empirical observation and analysis of cases, some hotly disputed, of the social phenomenon in question, as it is manifested in living, changing social movements, as it is produced through struggle and contestation over how things are understood and described. Analysis of the case studies leads me to suggest that the quest for an automatic and uncontested formula which can tell us what is antisemitic and what is not is going to be unsuccessful. We are not going to be able to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the presence of antisemitism. It may, however, be possible to look towards the development of a set of criteria which can help us to make, and to debate, difficult judgments regarding particular cases. This is what the EUMC Working Definition attempts to do. We will remain aware that any such criteria will be angrily contested.
These methodological complexities are not unique to the study of antisemitism; they also apply to attempts to define and recognize other forms of racism and bigotry. Understanding whether a comment or an institution is sexist, for example, requires a close study and an understanding of context, of the tropes and of the histories of sexism; it requires consideration of intention and of unintended consequences and of discourse and ways of thinking; it requires a consideration of norms and practices of exclusion; it requires a consideration of modes of denial. The recognition of antisemitism, similarly, requires knowledge, experience and understanding. The added complication here is that scholarly and political discussion of sexism often proceeds in social spaces in which there is a greater degree of consensus over how sexism as a phenomenon is understood, although this was not always the case. The dividing lines over the understanding of contemporary antisemitism, in contrast, tend to bisect the community of analysis and understanding.
Struggles over defining antisemitism occur in a number of different social spaces and languages. In particular, they happen within political, scholarly, legal, law-enforcement, communal and religious discourses and practices. These terrains of struggle are linked; ideas, concepts and elements of rhetoric tend to circulate from one to the other.
The case studies in this book show why there is unlikely to be even general agreement over how to define antisemitism, even amongst antiracists who broadly agree on how to recognize other forms of racism. There is a polarization around definition because the phenomenon itself is highly polarized. Some scholars and antiracists argue that hostility to Israel is related to antisemitism; others insist that relating the two is done not in error but as a malicious attempt to silence and to de-legitimize criticism of Israel.
The EUMC Working Definition is controversial because it states that particular kinds of hostility to Israel ‘could, taking into account the overall context’ be antisemitic (EUMC Working Definition). It offers examples: ‘accusing Israel as a state of exaggerating or inventing the Holocaust’ and ‘accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their own nations’. It offers examples of the kinds of things which may be judged antisemitic, ‘taking into account the overall context’:
The definition then makes it clear that, on the other hand, ‘criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’.1
Mike Whine traces the pre-history of the Working Definition back to the immediate aftermath of the fall of Communism (2004, 2006, 2010) in Europe. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was a pre-existing international forum in which Europe (East and West), the USSR (later Russia and the secession states) and the USA could talk to each other. It was a forum which lent itself to the project of attempting to shape the new Europe, in particular by formulating states’ commitment to the principles of human rights and democracy. At the 1990 Copenhagen Conference, commitments were made to combat all forms of racial and ethnic hatred, antisemitism, xenophobia and discrimination (Whine 2010: 92). These commitments were subsequently endorsed by heads of state in the ‘Charter of Paris for a New Europe’ (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe 1990).
It was ten years later when the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians broke down decisively in September 2000 with the outbreak of the Second Intifada and after the failure of peace talks at Taba in January 2001. The coalition of the forces arguing for a two-state solution in Israel and in Palestine collapsed into opposing national consensuses, each of which portrayed the other nation as being responsible for the renewal of conflict.
In September 2001, the United Nations (UN) World Conference against Racism (WACR) was held in the newly democratic South Africa. At that conference, there was a formidable campaign to construct Zionism as the key manifestation of racism in the world. A number of factors came together that week, in the conference venues, on the city streets and on the beachfront of Durban, which created a particular anti-Israel feeling; it was remarkable both in its intensity and in its tolerance of antisemitic content. There was a UN inter-governmental forum. There was also a parallel NGO conference, a huge event in a cricket ground, bringing together tens of thousands of activists. Something of the atmosphere can be understood from this contemporaneous account written by Ronald Eissens and published by ICARE, a European antiracist NGO which participated in the conference:
Jews were actively discriminated [against], shouted down, meetings on Antisemitism were hijacked by Palestinian Caucus members and supporters, and people who protested against all this were branded ‘Zionist pigs lovers’ and ‘Jewlovers’. Some NGOs were intimidated into silence. There was fear to be branded as ‘Zionist’. There were NGOs and people who openly agreed with the antisemite slogans.
The big September 1st demonstration had a lot of slogans, covered a lot of issues, but one was most dominant: Free Palestine. In the march, slogans were carried like ‘Kill all the Jews’ and ‘the good things Hitler did’. Pamphlets were handed out with a portrait of Hitler, displaying the text:
‘What if I had won? The good things: There would be NO Israel and NO Palestinian’s blood shed – the rest is your guess. The bad things: I wouldn’t have allowed the making of the new beetle – the rest is your guess.’
This march ended at the Durban Jewish Club, which was another sign that the organizers not only see the state of Israel as the enemy but all Jewish people. The Jewish club had been evacuated a few hours earlier and the South African police had the building screened-off with riot police and armoured cars. A big demonstration during a World Conference Against Racism that ends as an Antisemitic rally …
(Eissens 2001)
There was an organized and hostile anti-Israel fervour throughout the week-long conference. Some of it was expressed in openly antisemitic forms, some was legitimate criticism of Israel expressed in antiracist forms, and some was antisemitism expressed in ostensibly democratic and antiracist language.
The Conference ended on Saturday, 8 September. Initially this meant that the Jewish organizations were unable to attend the final discussions about the text to be adopted by the conference, because it was Shabbat. But the final plenary session went on so long that they were, in the end, able to attend on Saturday evening. For some of the participants, the traumatic experience of finding that global allies in the struggle against racism were prepared to tolerate antisemitism was heightened by the attacks, three days later on 11 September, on the United States of America.
Ronald Eissens (2001) editorialized at that moment as follows:
There is a dark cloud of hate descending upon this world. If we want to keep the dark away, we need to see clear and get rid of the hate. Which means we have to be open and transparent about facts. We are an antiracism NGO, so it is our duty and our moral obligation to speak out against racism. Especially, I would say, when an antiracism conference becomes the scene of racism. The fact that racism was allowed to run rampant during the WCAR is astonishing. What is even more astonishing, shameful and harmful for the antiracism cause and for the victims of racism is that the majority of the organisers and participants let that happen, did nothing to stop it and did not speak out during or after the WCAR.
The collapse of the peace process, Durban and 9/11, as well as the reverberating symbolic representations of them can be understood as heralding what some (Chesler 2003) have called ‘the new antisemitism’.
There were, says Whine, attempts to raise the issue of antisemitism within the European Union. A series of meetings took place between the EUMC director Beate Winkler and European Jewish Congress (EJC) officials which resulted in the commissioning of a report on antisemitism in each country. The Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism (ZfA) at Berlin’s Technical University was asked to analyze the reports and publish a composite analysis. However, Whine notes, the report was badly received by the EUMC board because it apportioned much of the blame for the rise in antisemitism to Muslim communities. It was leaked to the press by the EJC in December 2003.
A second report was published side by side with the main country-by-country analysis. ‘Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the EU 2002–3’ was released on 31 March 2004, and the accompanying press release said that the far right remained the main promoter of antisemitism within Europe, contradicting the body of the first report (European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia 2004). Mike Whine (2006) writes:
In its 2004 report on antisemitism, the EUMC noted the lack of a common definition and requested one from a small group of Jewish NGOs. This [was] intended as a template for police forces and antiracist campaigners, for use on the streets. The definition was disseminated in March 2004, and although not directed at governments for incorporation into national legislation, it [was] nevertheless expected that it [would] seep into universal usage via adoption by the relevant parties.
This in fact happened. Delegates to the OSCE Cordoba Conference in May 2005 constantly referred to it, and the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism in the UK recommended its adoption,2 as did a number of similar initiatives around the world.3 In 2010 the US Department of State adopted a close variant as its own official definition of antisemitism (US Department of State 2010), the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a variant later, and, in December 2016, it was formally adopted by the UK government.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Franz Fanon (1968: 122) wrote:
At first glance it seems strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: ‘When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you.’ And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and my soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.
There is a strong tradition on the antiracist left of understanding racism and antisemitism as closely related phenomena and of opposing both equally and on a similar basis. Exemplars of this tradition include Karl Marx’s critiques of antisemitism within the movement of his day (Fine and Spencer 2017), Bebel’s characterization of antisemitism as the ‘socialism of fools’, the anti-Fascist tradition and the black/Jewish alliance during the civil rights movement in the USA. At Durban in 2001, however, racism had been defined such that ‘Zionism’ was its archetypal and most threatening form, and antisemitism was not only denied but also practiced with impunity. A significant number of antiracist activists and thinkers were subsequently willing to lend implicit or overt support to organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas, either judging the antisemitism of those groups to be exaggerated or at least downplaying their political significance (for example: Judith Butler [Zimmer, Heidingsfelder and Adler 2010] and [Jeremy Corbyn 2015a]). Durban illustrated the possibility of the re-emergence of a schism between the worldviews of antiracism and anti-antisemitism.
The issue of ‘whiteness’ is key to the understanding of contemporary antisemitism, and it is linked to a number of developments in the twentieth-century left. The first development is a tendency for parts of the left to understand ‘the oppressed’, with whom it sides, more and more in terms of nations and national movements, which are fighting for liberation against the ‘imperialist states’ or the ‘rich states’, ‘the West’, ‘the North’ or the ‘white’ states. This is a different framework from the one in which the left thought of itself as supporting the self-liberation of the working class, of women, and of other subordinated groups within each nation and state.
Some found that the logic of their new position was to understand whites as the oppressors and non-whites as the oppressed, and to subordinate other forms of stratification to this central one. Jews occupy an ambivalent position with respect to the black/white binary. On the one hand, antisemitism is a racism, arguably the prototype of European racism, and it provides perhaps the clearest lesson about where racism can lead. On the other hand, antisemitism has often functioned, in the words of Moishe Postone, as a ‘fetishized form of oppositional consciousness’ through which Jews are thought of as conspiratorially powerful and lurking behind the oppression of others (2006: 99).
In the USA, Karen Brodkin’s (1999) book How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America presented a narrative of the ‘whitening’ of American Jews, and it fed into a new picture of Jews as part of a Judeo-Christian white elite. Israel – which in its early days was understood by some to be a life-raft for oppressed and stateless victims of racism (Deutscher 1981), a national liberation movement against European colonialism and a pioneer of socialist forms like the kibbutz – later came to be conceived of as a keystone of the global system of white imperialist oppression of black people. In April 2009, when President Ahmadinejad of Iran made an antisemitic speech at the UN, Seumas Milne (2009), later to become Jeremy Corbyn’s Communications Chief, asked in his Guardian column, ‘what credibility is there in Geneva’s all-white boycott?’
A number of Jewish communal NGOs responded to the defeat and the trauma experienced at Durban by withdrawing into the OSCE and the European Union, where they had some success in getting a positive hearing for their concerns. In this way the ideational polarization between black and white came to be mirrored institutionally. Durban, dominated by states which thought of themselves as non-white, represented one way of defining antisemitism; the Jewish organizations retreated into the OSCE, which could be portrayed as the international coalition of white states, and won it over to quite a different way of defining antisemitism.
Opponents of the EUMC Working Definition have pointed to the fact that the definition was the result of purposive political action by international Jewish groups; and so it was. But this genealogy can only cast shadows over the definition if there is thought to be something inappropriate about their input. Normally, it would be unremarkable for communal groups to be involved in defining a racism of which they are the object. But in this case the Jewish groups are accused by antizionists of acting in bad faith. The accusation implicit in this understanding is that the Jewish groups are not really working in the interests of the struggle against antisemitism. Rather, they are secretly prepared to sacrifice the struggle against ‘real’ antisemitism by co-opting its political capital to a dishonest attempt to de-legitimize criticism of Israel.
The Jewish groups, and their EUMC Working Definition, are conceived of, in this antizionist narrative, as being ‘white’ and not antiracist; as part of the struggle of Israel against Palestine; and neither part of the struggle of Jews against antisemitism nor part of the global struggle against anti-black racism. The case study of the genealogy of the Working Definition illustrates the extreme polarization of efforts to define antisemitism, and it relates that polarization to problematic notions and practices of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ in contemporary antiracist thinking. It shows how the polarization in struggles over definition reflect the phenomenon itself of contemporary antisemitism.
In May 2011, the Congress of the UCU in the UK voted overwhelmingly to pass a motion which alleged that the ‘so-called’ EUMC Working Definition is ‘being used’ to ‘silence debate about Israel and Palestine on campus’ (Hirsh 2011a). Congress resolved to make no use of the definition ‘e.g. in educating members or dealing with internal complaints’ and to ‘dissociate itself from the EUMC definition in any public discussion’.
Representatives of the institutions of the Jewish community in Britain judged this disavowal to be the last straw, and they said that it was a manifestation of what they called ‘institutional antisemitism’ within the union. Jeremy Newmark, Chief Executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, said, ‘After today’s events, I believe the UCU is institutionally racist’ (Bright 2011). His view was echoed by Jon Benjamin, the Chief Executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who said that ‘the UCU has … simply redefined “antisemitism” …. The truth is apparent: whatever the motivations of its members, we believe the UCU is an institutionally racist organisation’ (Paul 2011).
As we have seen, since 2003, there had been an influential campaign within the UCU to boycott Israeli universities as a protest against Israeli human rights abuses, while there had been no such campaign against the universities of any other state. Some opponents of the boycott campaign argued that this singling out of Israel was antisemitic in effect and that it brought with it into the union antisemitic ways of thinking and antisemitic exclusions (Gidley 2011). Supporters of the campaign, as well as some opponents, objected strongly to the raising of the issue of antisemitism, arguing that it constituted an ad hominem attack against ‘critics of Israel’ (see Hirsh 2010b for discussion).
From the beginning, the boycott campaign sought to protect itself against a charge of antisemitism by including clauses in its boycott motions which defined antisemitism in such a way as to make its supporters not guilty. At the Association of University Teachers (AUT) Council in 2003, Motion 54 was passed:
Council deplores the witch-hunting of colleagues, including AUT members, who are participating in the academic boycott of Israel. Council recognises that anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism, and resolves to give all possible support to members of AUT who are unjustly accused of anti-semitism because of their political opposition to Israeli government policy.
(UCU 2003)
A witch-hunt involves accusing individuals of witchcraft, something that could not possibly be true. To characterize an accusation of antisemitism as a witch-hunt implies that it, similarly, could not possibly be true. The statement that ‘anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism’ is formally true, and nobody could argue against the resolution to support members who are unjustly accused of antisemitism. However, it is clear that the formulation, taken as a whole, functions as a way of insisting that all accusations of antisemitism which relate to Israel are unjust.
At the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) conference in June 2005, a motion was passed which included this text: ‘To criticise Israeli policy or institutions is not anti-semitic’ (see Osborn 2005). The first Congress of the newly merged UCU passed a motion which stated that ‘criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic’. While the motion supported a boycott without resolving actually to implement one, the antisemitism clause referred only to ‘criticism of Israel’. The implication here is that boycott falls within the protection afforded to ‘criticism’. The ‘cannot be construed as’ element implies that there is somebody who is trying to ‘construe’ criticism as antisemitic. It is an implicit allegation of the collective bad faith of those who raise the issue of antisemitism.
The ambiguity of the motion was not accidental, since Congress explicitly rejected an amendment to clarify the wording so that it would have read as follows: ‘While much criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, criticism of Israeli state policy cannot necessarily be construed as anti-semitic’ (see Cooke 2007 for discussion).
UCU Congress in 2008 passed a similar motion which was supportive of a boycott but which stopped short of implementing one. This time the wording on antisemitism was as follows: ‘criticism of Israel or Israeli policy are [sic] not, as such, anti-semitic’ (for discussion see Geras 2008). This form of words raised a straw man by subsuming anything which may be thought to be antisemitic into the category of ‘criticism’ and then legislating that, in virtue of its being ‘criticism’, it could not be antisemitic.
This long pre-history to the disavowal of the EUMC definition is consistent. Each new form of words refuses the straightforward, common-sense position that some kinds of hostility to Israel are antisemitic while other kinds are not. Instead, each specifies that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, and it implicitly subsumes all kinds of hostility and exclusions under the category of ‘criticism’ (Hirsh 2016a). Practically, the result has been to open up a loophole in the union’s guarantees against racism and bigotry. One kind of racism is excluded from these guarantees, and that is any antisemitism which can be read as taking the form of criticism of Israel.
Instead of addressing the culture which could have been recognized by the Working Definition as antisemitic, the disavowal of the definition facilitated the union in continuing to treat ‘Zionists’ as disloyal, to single out Israel and only Israel for boycott, to hold Israeli universities and scholars responsible for their government and to allow ‘Zionist’ union members to be denounced and regarded as Nazis or supporters of apartheid.
Israel murders children? Israel controls US foreign policy? Star of David = Swastika stuck on your office door? Jews invent antisemitism to de-legitimize criticism of Israel? Host a man found guilty of hate speech by the South African Human Rights Commission? Exclude nobody but Israelis from the global academic community? All of these are considered, implicitly by UCU motions, and clearly by UCU norms, to constitute ‘criticism of Israel’ and so are in practice defined as being not antisemitic.
This narrative shows how the boycott movement sought, at each step of its campaign, to pre-empt accusations of antisemitism by constantly trying to develop and to refine its own critique of claims about what constitutes antisemitism. It felt the need to incorporate its claims over definition in its motions and its material; it fought for its own conception of antisemitism within its wider constituency, and it sought to inoculate itself in advance against being associated with antisemitism. It was important to the boycott campaign to win official recognition for its own position within the wider social space in which it hopes to operate – but in the first instance, within the union.
In the judgment of the case Ronnie Fraser took against the UCU, which we will come to more detail in Chapter 6, the tribunal wrote the following on the question of defining antisemitism:
the Claimant bases his case in part on the rejection by the Respondents’ Congress (in 2011) of the ‘Working Definition’ of anti-Semitism …. He was content with that definition. Others disagreed, regarding it as exposing critics of Israel to the unfair accusation of anti-Semitic conduct. They pointed to the fact that the definition might be read as branding attacks on Zionism as anti-Semitic and precluding criticism of Israel save where ‘similar’ to that levelled against any other country. We cannot escape the gloomy thought that a definition acceptable to all interested parties may never be achieved and count ourselves fortunate that it does not fall to us to attempt to devise one.4
The tribunal was confident in judging that nothing that happened within the UCU constituted antisemitic harassment under the meaning of the Equality Act; this seems to be in stark contrast to its professed reluctance to come to a judgment about how antisemitism ought to be defined. The tribunal attempted to position itself neutrally between the polarized positions on what defines antisemitism, yet it judged that there was no antisemitic harassment, under the meaning of the Equality Act, within the union. In this way it threw its weight behind one of the positions on what constitutes antisemitism, and it came down strongly against the other.
The report written by Shami Chakrabarti on antisemitism in the Labour Party did not attempt either a definition of antisemitism or a description of the political problem which led to the specific scandals which triggered the inquiry. Chakrabarti did not attempt to connect the politics of hostility to Israel with antisemitism.
Both the Employment Tribunal and the Chakrabarti Inquiry were asked to adjudicate the question which had been raging amongst activists and scholars about how antisemitism should be defined. Both were positioned outside of the fray; both had the opportunity to take the time coolly to examine the arguments and the evidence which were submitted to them; both were somewhat insulated from the heated atmosphere of political debate. Both came to conclusions which were similar to those which had been arrived at within the wider social movements and which were at odds with the consensus view within the Jewish community.
* * *
The genealogy of the EUMC Working Definition sheds light on contemporary struggles over the definition of antisemitism and its relationship to hostility to Israel. The possibility of a departure from a standard antiracist understanding of the relationship between opposition to racism and opposition to antisemitism may be significant indeed.
Glynis Cousin and Robert Fine identify a ‘methodological separatism’ which has challenged, and in some quarters has had some success in supplanting, the political and conceptual unity between antiracism and anti-antisemitism (Cousin and Fine 2012). They argue that ‘sociology is broken by the schism between racism and antisemitism’ (Cousin and Fine 2012: 181). First, it downplays the similarity in structure and the connectedness of the histories of anti-black racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia. And, second, it brings with it temptations of competitive identity politics which may even reproduce some of the racist ways of thinking which sociology and antiracism had formerly made every effort to deconstruct and to overcome.
The genealogy of the EUMC definition is a case study of the dangers about which Cousin and Fine worry. In the 1980s, there was an antiracism which sought to build a huge rainbow alliance of everybody who suffered racism; this alliance defined itself as ‘black’ against a category of ‘whiteness’ which was understood as an identity of privilege and power. While this kind of simplification brought with it some unity and clarity, it tended to ossify; it contained within it a danger of collapse into fixed binary categories of blackness (goodness) and whiteness (badness) which did damage to the rich complexity and diversity of social and ethnic identity and conflict across the globe. This process was exacerbated by a tendency for radical thought to conceptualize the world as being more and more split between oppressor and oppressed nations and nationalisms. These tendencies created fertile conditions for the splitting off of Israel and Jews from the community of the oppressed and for conceiving of them as white, imperialist and the enemy of the oppressed.
These ways of thinking, which are replicated and reinforced by the organizational and political schisms which we have identified, contain within themselves a tendency to repeat some of the tropes and discourses of earlier antisemitisms. Insofar as we have identified these processes of splitting first in discourse and then in institutions, and then in the practice and culture, they also reproduce themselves in the actual practices of defining and understanding antisemitism.
Antisemitism must be studied empirically before it can be defined. It is necessary to see how it operates within the complexity of human and social movements, how elements of rhetoric move from one discursive field to another, how modes of denial and reassurance operate.
The week after the Chakrabarti report was published, Jeremy Corbyn appeared in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee as a witness for its investigation into antisemitism. With Chakrabarti sitting just behind him, Corbyn defined antisemitism as follows:
Antisemitism is where you use epithets to criticize people for being Jewish, you attack Jewish people for what they are, it is completely unacceptable and I would have thought it was very obvious what antisemitism is.
(Home Affairs Committee 2016)
This ‘definition’ is reminiscent of the one proposed by antizionist and pro-boycott activist Sue Blackwell in the debate in which the UCU voted to disavow the EUMC definition: ‘I recommend Brian Klug’s “hostility towards Jews as Jews” ’ (Hirsh 2011a).
Where there is great resistance to recognizing and understanding antisemitism, it would seem that there is a preference for simplistic a priori definitions which do not reflect a deep and detailed study of the phenomenon itself, which narrow the concept down to one single aspect of the phenomenon and which focus definition only on those manifestations on which it is easy for everybody to agree.
But antiracist NGOs, scholars and activists have studied and tried to map the features of contemporary antisemitism. Many of them have themselves experienced the shock of being summarily expelled from the antiracist and scholarly community. They have tried to set up subtle and elaborate parameters and frameworks for the understanding of this rather complex and difficult-to-encapsulate phenomenon.
Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, invented a definition of antisemitism under cross-examination by the Select Committee; Sue Blackwell’s definition is five words long; Shami Chakrabarti’s account of antisemitism begins in the dictionary; the members of the Employment Tribunal say in all banality: ‘we count ourselves fortunate that it does not fall to us to attempt to devise’ a definition.5
1Note that there are a number of US spellings in the definition and this fact was later mobilized in the UCU debate to demonstrate its illegitimacy as a European and an antiracist document. See Hirsh (2011b) for discussion.
2See, for example: All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism (2006) ‘Report of the Parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism’. Available: www.antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/All-Party-Parliamentary-Inquiry-into-Antisemitism-REPORT.pdf (accessed 24 August 2016).
3See, for example: U.S. Department of State (2008) ‘Contemporary global anti-semitism: a report provided to the United States Congress’. Available: www.state.gov/documents/organization/102301.pdf (accessed 21 July 2016).
4 Judgment of the Employment Tribunal Between: Mr R Fraser v. University and College Union, Case Numbers 2203390/2011 (25 March 2013), para. 52 (hereafter: Judgment: Fraser v. UCU). Available: www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/fraser-uni-college-union/ (accessed 21 July 2016).
5 Judgment: Fraser v. UCU, para. 52.