This work is significantly informed by participant observation. I am not a disinterested observer. I am involved in the events and the controversies analyzed in this book. This book is part of them; and it is a compilation of them.
I am resistant to discussing my own biography; in these debates, those who parade their Jewish identity tend to do so with the aim of adding weight to the evidence they give against the Jews. Our response has always been to make our arguments and to present the evidence; we have claimed no special authority which flows from our standpoint. Yet I think it would be a little hollow for a sociologist to claim that his social and political identity is entirely unrelated to his work.
My dad, Julian, was born into the Jewish community of the East End of London. His parents, as children, had been part of the wave of Jewish migration to the west at the time of the Kishniev Pogrom of 1903: his mother from Russia, his father from Poland. At 13, my dad won a scholarship to a public school where he was taught by the bullies how to present as a true Englishman. He became a physician, and, a twentieth-century man, he pioneered the science and the practice of geriatric medicine. He helped to develop the care of the elderly in the National Health Service, starting in wards which had once been Work Houses.
My mum was a 3-year-old child living in Germany when Hitler came to power, and she was 8 when she fled to London with her parents and her sister. Her father re-started his business, trading wholesale in fabrics, and he made some money. She never identified as a ‘survivor’, quite the opposite. She always says that she was immensely lucky not to have been caught up in the Holocaust.
Out of her whole extended family, three cousins from Łódz´ in Poland survived the concentration camp system: Fela, Fishel and Rushka. On the liberation of Auschwitz, Fishel was alone in the world. Eventually, he received a letter via the Red Cross from my grandfather telling him that two of his sisters were still alive. The letter said: ‘Don’t worry any more now, I will look after you.’ Fela came to London and was desperate to go to Palestine; she found it intolerable to be reliant on non-Jewish authority for her security. My grandmother would not let her go until 1949, saying that she had been through enough war. After Fela arrived in Tel Aviv, she never left; she has not left Israeli sovereignty since, not even for a day. It was not exactly safety that she craved; it was the knowledge that if her safety was ever again threatened, she would be defending herself as a Jew. Fishel made his family in Haifa; Rushka made hers in Netanya.
I am a middle-class Jewish boy. I was brought up in a nice big comfortable house in North London, and I was sent to an expensive public school. I was never religious, and although I had a Bar Mitzvah at a Reform synagogue, and although I always identified without any ambiguity as Jewish, I was never particularly at home in what is known as the Jewish community.
In my teens I identified with the left, and at university I committed myself to the Marxist and anti-Stalinist politics of the tiny left group that was later to become the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL). Rather than a university education, I received a Trotskyist political education about which I am now ambivalent. I am indebted to the AWL tradition and to its key theorist, Sean Matgamna, for much of the shape of the critique of orthodox left politics, including left antisemitism, which informs this book. I also learned theory and ideas in an intimate relation to practical politics in ways which seem completely alien and irrelevant to many contemporary academics. I went back to university later; much of my academic engagement with sociology was also my breaking free from the Marxist religion in which I had been educated and into which I had been socialized. For many, academia and sociology constitutes a kind of grown-up sphere in which one can earn a good living and enjoy high social status by continuing to engage with the theory and the politics of the far left. In this way one can remain within this community of the good while at the same time enjoying the benefits of middle-class success.
As students in the 1980s, we had opposed the kind of antisemitism which appears as hostility to Israel and which is the focus of this book; and we had opposed it from the left. We struggled with people who said that Jewish societies in student unions ought to be banned because they were Zionist and therefore racist; twenty years later we were up against some of the same individuals who wanted to boycott Israel in the academic trade unions.
Through the 1990s, things settled down; the assumption was widely shared that after the horse-trading was finally done, the Israelis and the Palestinians would make a deal and the virulence of the demonization of Israel and Zionism would henceforth be neutralized; it would be exiled to extreme and absurd corners of public life.
In the late 1990s, I participated in a memorable master’s course on antisemitism and the Holocaust taught by Robert Fine; we studied Marx and Abram Leon, Arendt and Bauman, Adorno and Horkheimer, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. In the whole course, we did not look seriously at hostility to Israel; it did not seem threatening to any of us at that time. This changed profoundly in 2001, following 9/11, Durban and the failure of the peace process; or perhaps that was just when we really noticed its return.
I did not think of my PhD as being autobiographical, and I did not think of it as being about Jews or about antisemitism; with hindsight I can see that it was all of these things, but not in direct or obvious senses. My PhD was about the resurgence in the 1990s of legal ways of addressing and prosecuting ethnic cleansing and genocide. It took the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials as a central historical foundation for contemporary thinking and emerging practice concerning crimes against humanity, and legal responses to them. My PhD looked at antisemitism, but largely as a historical phenomenon. I was interested in what could be learned from antisemitism and the Holocaust and applied to the contemporary human-authored catastrophes in Bosnia and Rwanda. Even the chapter about David Irving’s libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt over her designation of him as a Holocaust denier was about the defeat of an attempt to make antisemitism come alive again.
By early 2005, I was intellectually comfortable in an academic job. Old comrades from the AWL brought it to my attention that my trade union was going to discuss a boycott of Israeli academic colleagues. I wrote a letter outlining the arguments against a boycott, and I sent it round to people I knew to see if they would put their name to it. Lots of people signed the letter, and we had it published in The Guardian. I was enjoying myself; the internet made political communication so much easier and more immediate than it had been; and I myself was a different person from the student activist I once was. I was confident in my ability to write, to engage and to make arguments in a way that I could only have contemplated ten years earlier as part of a group. I felt empowered by my ability to articulate what I felt needed to be articulated. I was able to have a thought in the morning and for it to be in the public domain on a blog by lunchtime. I thought that very straightforward arguments about the nature of solidarity, the principle of the university and the dangers of antisemitism would win, and win straightforwardly.
The degree of sustained hostility and ignorance that followed our opposition to the boycott – from friends, from people in my own academic discipline and from comrades in my own trade union – came as a shock, and in some ways it was a profoundly transformative experience for me.
I was a successful, confident, early career sociologist; I had written a prize-winning academic book; I had a permanent job in the coolest sociology department I knew of; I was comfortable and confident on the left; I had two decades of activism in favour of a Palestinian state and against the Israeli right under my belt. I belonged.
At a UCU event in Brighton in January 2010, I set out the story of antisemitism within the union, giving a large number of examples and quoting from many union members (Hirsh 2010b). Tom Hickey, a key leader of the boycott campaign and a member of the UCU National Executive Committee, declared, in public, in front of my union and academic colleagues, that what I had said was
a traducement of the truth and it’s a straightforward lie and the author knows it. There has been no intimidation – the union and the chief executive would not allow it.
(Symons 2010)
He was not disagreeing with my judgment, and he did not say I was mistaken; he said that I was knowingly telling lies. He transformed me from an academic and a union activist into a person who lies for hidden reasons in defence of a foreign racist movement. He ruled out antisemitism in the union as even a possibility, saying that the union officers would never allow it.
I myself, by this time, had been banned from the internal online debate amongst union activists, for whistle-blowing. I am still banned. I am not allowed to see what people say there about me or about my work, and I have no right of reply. The level of antisemitic bullying which was occurring in that forum at the time of my ban was worrying. The union refused to take sides between those fighting antisemitism and those saying antisemitic things. But the one thing the union officials policed zealously was the prohibition against making anything public. We know that a pre-requisite for institutional racism is the policing of the boundaries of an organization or a community to make sure that the internal culture cannot leak out and that the external culture cannot shine light in.
This is how Mike Cushman, one of the leaders of the boycott campaign in the union, wrote about me in 2016: ‘Colleagues have said that we should not respond to Hirsh’s calumnies, suggesting that he is such a marginal and pitiful figure that he is not worth the attention.’
And what was thrown at us in the trade unions and in the field of political activism was also mobilized with little more sophistication within the academic discipline of sociology itself. I submitted a paper on sociology and antisemitism to a major European sociology journal. The paper argued that while sociology is itself not immune from the ambivalence toward antisemitism that has haunted anti-hegemonic intellectual and political traditions, the resources of sociology can also be of great value in analyzing and understanding the ways in which antisemitism is sometimes manifested in discourses and movements against Israel and Zionism, even those which think of themselves as antiracist. The paper had already been accepted by the journal after a full peer-review process. A new editor took over at the journal, however, a senior professor of the discipline, and he wrote:
The text by Hirsh is unpublishable in a scholarly journal: it is an opinion piece, not based on any research, neither theoretical nor empirical. Even its opinions are redundant given their occurrence, in scholarly contexts, in other contributions.
The text was indeed published in a scholarly journal, but not a sociology journal: The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (Hirsh 2013c).
The Engage website, which published thousands of blog posts and journal articles on antisemitism, which acted as a bridge between the academic study of antisemitism and public discourse, which had a significant impact in shaping practical and political responses to antisemitism and which received millions of hits over a period of more than ten years, was never valued within my university, and no pride was ever taken in it by my institution. The importance of that network, and its family of networks, shines through this book; the work of colleagues, comrades and collaborators is referred to and built upon and made use of throughout this work.1 In order to get a hearing for this work, it was necessary to build our own intellectual and political infrastructure.
My own experience resonates with that of anybody who has spent time standing up against a culture of institutional racism. It bears down on you; it makes you doubt your own ability, your reasoning and your own senses; it makes you feel alone; it makes you feel that other people neither understand nor care; it makes you mistrust people; and it makes you wonder if what other people say is right: that you have brought all this down upon your own head, that you are really caught up in a defence of your particular nationalism or a defence of your own special privilege. I think some of the feelings mirror the experiences of women, LGBT people and ethnic minorities who have fought against institutional and cultural exclusion. But there is one key difference, I think: the world where antisemitism is strongest is precisely the world where one would expect it to have the least traction. Well, it is true that other groups fighting bigotry have experienced it in sociology departments, in the Labour Party and in the unions; there is nothing unusual about that. But there is a sense in which people fighting other forms of bigotry have had the feeling that history is on their side, that they will overcome in the end. I do not feel like that with antisemitism. I feel that things are moving away from us, slowly but consistently, one step at a time. Things that are possible today, one keeps feeling, would have been unthinkable only a couple of years ago. There is no catastrophe, no falling over the cliff; it is not 1939 again, but neither is there a feeling that we are heading, in the end, to a better place.
I cannot say how much of the analysis in this book is conditioned by my own involvement in the struggles about which I write. Of course, standpoint theory does not dictate that experience leads to a pure knowledge of truth in itself. But standpoint theory does require that the lived experience of actual human beings should be given a certain kind of epistemological weight. Experience relates to the material world. Knowing something from the inside is part of knowing it from the outside. Nancy Hartsock (1997: 159) classically argued:
A standpoint is not simply an interested position (interpreted as bias) but is interested in the sense of being engaged …. A standpoint … carries with it the contention that there are some perspectives on society from which, however well-intentioned one may be, the real relations of humans with each other and with the natural world are not visible.
Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot against America, was a study of an antisemitism which most people could not see. The characters who could see it clearly enough to be afraid of it were powerless and isolated. It was their position in social life, their exclusion by the antisemitism that was rife but invisible around them, which was intimately linked to their ability to understand what was going on. Of course Roth’s novel is easily seen with hindsight as prescient of the rise of President Trump and his ‘America First’ movement. But in 2004, the novel spoke, to me anyway, about the kind of left-wing antisemitism which I was seeing first hand around me. That it was imagined on the right, I thought, was a device to allow people to look at it without instantly raising their defences against it.
A 79-year-old Arthur Miller was aware of the process of hidden and paranoid antisemitism too, in 1994, when his play Broken Glass was first performed. It features a woman who watches events unfold in Nazi Germany in 1938 from the safety of New York. Both her husband and her psychiatrist downplay and ridicule the threat; they tell her that it is all going to be fine; they tell her that Hitler is a passing phenomenon, that it is not her problem and that she is worrying for nothing. Her paralysis in the face of this denied antisemitic threat is dramatized in the play by the refusal of her legs to work. In both fictional accounts, we are privileged with the certainty that the antisemitic threat we are witnessing is anything but imagined; but the characters are forced to be satisfied with a much more uncertain understanding. Contemporary antisemitism fosters feelings of paranoia; those who cannot see it and those who angrily deny it are quite sure that those who can are inventing it for their own disgraceful reasons. Their certainty, and their freedom from the weight of knowledge, only serves to weigh us down more heavily.
Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is a third fictional exploration of a Jewish American sense of dread: an effort to imagine how normal an American rejection of the Jews would look and feel. All three works are perhaps a contrast to the open and fearless Woody Allen of the 1970s, a time in which American Jews seemed able to share their own self-deprecating humour without a second thought for the hostility that it might elicit or for the unconscious memes and assumptions it might key into.
The experience of people opposing antisemitism is not decisive in understanding the phenomenon, but it would be difficult to understand antisemitism without paying close attention to the experience of those who have felt it up close. Not a single truth claim or piece of analysis in this book relies on my personal experience or identity, or on my Jewish nose for antisemitism, for its persuasiveness. Yet, I am a sociologist and I am discussing sociological method, and I am aware that identity, commitment and participation cannot be discounted as a route into understanding.
As a sociologist and as an activist, my Jewish identity has, in a sense, been thrust upon me. That is not to say that I do not have my own Jewish identity or that I was ever ambivalent about it. But it is the nature of the Livingstone Formulation that the identity of the opponent of antisemitism comes under scrutiny and assumptions are made about it. Identity is thrust upon the critic of antisemitism; it is not a self-identification. Racism constructs race. Antisemitism constructs me as a Jewish sociologist or as a Jewish activist rather than as a sociologist or as an activist. I have no wish to disavow my Jewishness or, if it is thrust upon me, my Zionism either. But it is often experienced as a hostile imposition rather than as the positive identification of a free person. If you raise the issue of antisemitism, and somebody responds that you are only doing it because you are really a Jewish supremacist trying to silence solidarity with the Palestinians, then you have been constructed from outside as a Jew, rather than as an antiracist.
Guardian columnist Nick Cohen writes that he was not brought up Jewish and he did not feel Jewish. His father was Jewish in name only, and his mother not at all. Yet when Nick Cohen wrote about issues which even tangentially touched Israel, or when he opposed antisemitism, he attracted a large volume and intensity of antisemitic response, much of it relating to his Jewish name:
I stopped [denying that I was Jewish] and accepted that racism changes your perception of the world and yourself. You become what your enemies say you are. And unless I wanted to shame myself, I had to become a Jew. A rather odd Jew, no doubt: a militant atheist who had to phone a friend to ask what on earth ‘mazel tov’ meant. But a Jew nonetheless.
(Cohen, N. 2016)
I have spent a lot of time in the last ten years online. I edited and wrote for the Engage website; I wrote thirty-four pieces on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free; I have had scholarly, political and journalistic pieces published online. At first arguments raged ‘below the line’, in the comments sections of the blogs; later these discussions largely migrated to Facebook. I am a latecomer to Twitter. Of course, it is easy to feel ashamed of being glued to your computer, as if it was some sordid addiction; and perhaps it is a bit; ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ do provide little instant injections of endorphins, of acceptance, of validation. And there is the feeling that time spent doing what sometimes degenerates into online political street brawling is not befitting of one with ambitions to intellectual gravitas. But on reflection I have come out against Facebook-shaming. I mention this in the methodology section of this book because it seems to me that social media has operated for me in some ways as a research methodology. Firstly, blogs and social media are for me something akin to a research notebook; they are where I keep a record of material that concerns my subject matter and thoughts or fragments that I want to remember. But it is public, and it is open to scrutiny. This world is one where we can try out arguments, where we can get feedback, where we can sharpen thoughts, focus on ones that resonate, re-think ones that do not. My online communities are mixed; there are colleagues and scholars and intellectuals from all over the world; no longer are we forced into community with people who happen to have offices on the same corridor; and they are plural spaces, not limited to people who satisfy entry requirements. And ideas and discussions and feedback bounce around quickly and unexpectedly; and if you get things wrong, somebody will tell you; and if others have written things which relate to what you are thinking, you will find out.
* * *
The research materials for this book have been gathered between 2004 and 2016, mainly in the UK, on the basis that they may be relevant to the relationship between hostility to Israel and antisemitism. These materials are produced by individuals, groups and institutions, including political and social movements, trades unions and churches. They appear in many different forms: books, pamphlets, newspaper articles, journal articles, websites, web pages, blogs, speeches, video, music and social media. There is a focus on material which is self-defined as being antiracist and therefore also anti-antisemitic because this material has the greatest potential to resonate in democratic spaces.
There is a tendency in research in this area for the distinction between primary and secondary research material to become blurred. An academic text can also function as, or be read as, a political intervention. It may itself be understood as an example of discursive antisemitism or an example of a spurious charge of antisemitism.
Materials produced within official institutional frameworks also constitute part of the terrain on which political struggles are conducted by, amongst others, academics. For example, the Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism (2006), the Chakrabarti report (2016) and the Select Committee report (2016) were not simply neutral sets of findings but also attempts, in which academic scholars were participants, to institutionalize as official particular approaches to the understanding of antisemitism. The legitimacy of these official frameworks was rejected by scholars holding opposing views. The European Union Monitoring Centre Working Definition of Antisemitism2 is similarly contested by some scholars, while others were actively involved in the work of drafting up the definition. The boundaries of primary materials are porous and include scholarly, political, institutional and more popular texts.
The material is qualitative, not quantitative. It never ‘speaks for itself’, but it always requires analysis and judgment; and it is open to different interpretations. Much of the material is gleaned from participant observation and action research. It is the fruit not of dispassionate and neutral observation but of public and contested debate and struggle.
Hostility to Israel comes from different sources and takes different forms. Tropes, elements of rhetoric and common-sense notions migrate between antiracist and democratic spaces, nationalist and Islamist spaces, fringe and mainstream spaces, different kinds of media, and the right, the left and the political centre. It is within this complex and dynamic reality that this book finds its material and moves towards specific analytical claims.
A key insight of sociological method is that racism, and other bigotries and exclusions, are more than a subjective feelings of hatred or fear. They are also about structures of power and ways of thinking; they are also about institutional norms and practices; they are also about cultures constituted by shared racist symbols and meanings.
In contemporary democratic societies, openly racist thought and sentiment is increasingly recognized as falling outside of the boundaries of legitimate public discourse. Racism is squeezed by legislation, legal precedent, public disapproval and institutional policy. Antiracism is, at least formally, wholly incorporated into what used to be called the ‘dominant ideology’. Nevertheless, racism stubbornly persists. That which persists tends not to be conscious hatred, openly expressed, but rather unconscious institutional or discursive manifestations of racism. Racist discourse has generally shifted away from zoologically based hostilities and towards prejudicial ways of thinking more likely to be articulated in the language of culture (Barker 1981). There is also increased awareness of the complexities of racisms, and there is more unease with a simple black/white binary framework. In Britain, for example, there is a rise in bigotry and xenophobia, similar to racism in its structure, against people from Eastern Europe who would be designated as ‘white’ by standard critical race theory or multiculturalist assumptions (Dawney 2008).
This is still true after the Brexit summer, although maybe it is a little frayed at the edges. But even those who blame Britain’s problems on foreigners, in Brussels telling us what to do, or here in Britain taking our jobs, angrily reject the charge of xenophobia or racism. Racism has not quite gone mainstream; it is more accurate to say that the Livingstone Formulation has been appropriated from the left and developed by the right and by the nationalists. It is almost as if the way that left antisemites angrily deflected and denied was coveted by the populist right. Anyone who raises a public concern about xenophobia in the Brexit debate is likely to be confronted with a counter-allegation of bad faith – that accusations of racism are raised in order to de-legitimize arguments for ‘sovereignty’, for ‘taking our country back’ or for ‘controlling immigration’. The raising of the issue of racism in this context is portrayed as a tactic for closing down free speech. Just as some patronizingly understand Palestinian antisemitism as the cry of the oppressed, so others now interpret the xenophobia of the so-called ‘white working class’ in the same way. The charge is that the ‘Zionists’ or the ‘Cosmopolitan elite’ mobilize the rhetoric of antiracism as a weapon against the oppressed. Both cases, of course, lend themselves to antisemitic discourse. All of which is evidence that explicit racism remains taboo even while it endures as a significant and objectively identifiable social phenomenon. Just as antizionism and the politics of boycott was pioneered in the UK before emerging in the United States, so we saw the populist politics of xenophobic resentment being exploited with great efficiency by the Donald Trump presidential campaign.
In the 1970s, it was common for black professional footballers in England to be subjected to open, sustained and unchallenged racist abuse by crowds and opponents. But more recently, Luis Suarez, Nicolas Anelka and John Terry were quickly sanctioned by the football authorities for expressions of open racism. The tribunal which punished Suarez was careful to make a distinction between the charge that he ‘was a racist’ on the one hand and that he had ‘done a racist thing’ on the other. It de-coupled the racist act from an association with the quality of ‘racist’ which may be applied to the person (Reasons of the Regulatory Commission 2011). The same distinction was made in both the Anelka quenelle case and the John Terry racism case.
The public inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s mishandling of the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence made use of the concept of ‘institutional racism’ in order to make a similar distinction between racist norms and cultures within an institution, on the one hand, and declaring police officers to be racists, on the other (Report of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry 1999).
A clear practical benefit flows from making distinctions between racist acts and the designation of individuals as racist. It is easier in terms of natural justice for authorities to prohibit racist speech than it is to move against individuals who ‘are’ racist; it is easier for them to address racist norms and practices than to look into the essence of individuals. Rules can prohibit certain kinds of acts but not certain kinds of persons.
Aside from the practical issues, the question remains how scholars should analyze the relationships between racist acts, racist institutions, racist discourses, and social actors who construct, and who are constructed by, these social phenomena.
The driving of racism underground is a victory, but that which has been driven underground is not necessarily eradicated, and it may re-erupt in new and virulent forms.
Does antisemitism fit into the pattern? Following the Holocaust and the rise of the post-war antiracist movements, there was diminishing space left in public discourse for open antisemitism. Post-war Europe re-invented itself according to the narrative of the defeat of Nazism, the coming to terms with the fact of the Holocaust and the creation of a new peaceful, rights-based settlement. Overt hatred of Jews violates the norms of respectable public discourse. This book has demonstrated that antisemitism endures in more subtle ways, manifesting itself in the quality and the intensity of hostility to Israel. If contemporary antisemitism is difficult to recognize because it is intertwined with a complexity of discourses, ideas, criticisms, activisms, common-sense notions and unexamined assumptions, it is not unusual amongst contemporary structures of power (Faludi 2006). Bigoted ways of thinking may have more purchase if they can be held by people who believe they oppose bigotry. This phenomenon is not as simple as people dishonestly hiding their bigotry within an ostensibly universalistic rhetoric; rather, people are unconscious of the racist memes, assumptions and outcomes which are manifested in their own thought, speech and action. It is neither pretence nor camouflage, and racism is angrily, and honestly, denied.
Emile Durkheim (1952[1897]: 43) writes the following on the notion of intent, in his landmark work on Suicide:
Intent is too intimate a thing to be more than approximately interpreted by another. It even escapes self-observation. How often we mistake the true reasons for our acts! We constantly explain acts due to petty feelings or blind routine by generous passions or lofty considerations.
Besides, in general, an act cannot be defined by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too many different ends without altering its nature.
How is such unconscious racism to be recognized? One leading Israel boycotter drew attention to a case where the Commission for Racial Equality (now the Equality and Human Rights Commission) ruled that redundancies in one department of her university were racist in outcome (although not in intent) because five of the seven members made redundant in that department were from ethnic minorities. She did not follow the same logic with her proposed boycott. If a routine impact assessment study was carried out with respect to the proposal to boycott Israel, in terms of its effect against Jews, irrespective of its intent, the results would predictably show the outcome would impact disproportionately against Jews.
Antisemitism may be recognized by the replication of racist tropes and stereotypes in ostensibly non-racist discourse. For example, opponents of Israeli human rights abuses may find themselves embracing ideas reminiscent of classic antisemitic blood libels3 or conspiracy theory.4
Unconscious antisemitism may manifest itself through slips or mistakes, which are otherwise difficult to explain. For example, one activist explained in a petition that the Holocaust was an event in which ‘thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered’, forgetting to mention Jews (Bates 2008). A union official thoughtlessly made a connection between anti-boycott lawyers in Britain and ‘bank balances from Lehman Brothers that can’t be tracked down’ (Kovler 2009).
There is anger in Britain with Israel, with its inability to make peace with its neighbours, with its continuing occupation of Palestinian territory and with its record of human rights abuses. Given the long histories of antisemitism in Europe, it would be unexpected indeed if none of this anger with Israel was ever manifested in the language, tropes or themes of antisemitism. Given the long history of antisemitism within left and radical politics, it would be surprising if antisemitic discourse did not sometimes infect or fortify left-wing and radical criticism of Israel.
Sociology begins as an empirical enterprise, starting with an analysis of what is. Our ideas about the world as it could be are constrained but also inspired by their relationship to the world as it is. Sociology’s foundation in the social world is its materialism. Its cosmopolitanism lies in its assumption that all human beings are in some profound sense of equal worth, irrespective of those factors which divide them, such as ethnicity, gender, class and nation. Sociology’s materialism keeps its cosmopolitanism from the temptation to raise universal principles to an absolute. Its cosmopolitanism keeps its materialism from the temptation to limit itself to descriptive empirical observation of what exists, to an unambitious empiricism.
For the sociological study of antisemitism and its relation to rhetoric about Israel, the objects of study are movements critical of Israel, including Palestine solidarity movements and antizionist movements. Criticism of Israeli policies and hostility to Israel come from distinct and different political traditions: liberal, democratic, post-colonial, Stalinist, socialist, nationalist, conservative, fascist, Islamist. They also come from different parts of the world, and different cultural and language traditions. These traditions are variegated and distinct, but they are also intertwined. Elements of rhetoric and common-sense notions circulate among these living spaces, evolving and moving easily from one to another, not least through the new media and social network platforms.
An understanding of contemporary antisemitism requires a methodological toolbox which draws upon a number of resources developed within sociology. For example, we need to root our understanding of Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms within the frameworks developed for the analysis of nationalism in general (for example, Anderson 1995; Hobsbawm 1995). This is a critical tradition, which has come to understand the mechanisms by which nationalist movements reproduce themselves through narratives which aspire to achieve a status which is analogous to the sacred. Through these processes events are moulded into music and movies and objects, texts which make us feel ourselves to be part of the narratives or ones which make us feel excluded. The sociological understanding of nationalism provides a framework which probes the claims of nationalists but which also understands that nationalism is fundamentally dialectical. It has the potential to construct both community and exclusion, responses to oppression but also oppressive structures. Sociological work on nationalism tends to be comparative and resistant to the representation of any particular nationalism as if it were unique, in isolation from all others. It understands nationalism as being produced and reproduced through interactions between economic, political and cultural processes. It regards nationalisms critically but looks at what is, before it moves on to consider what might be.
Sociology is full of contested terms like Zionism and antizionism, apartheid, human rights, the state, democracy, law, totalitarianism, imperialism, whiteness, genocide, ethnic cleansing. Such concepts, and the frameworks built around them, are sometimes indispensable for analysis but are also central to that which is being analyzed. Sociology understands concepts in relation to their actualization in the material world. Thus, discourse analysis addresses ways in which contested meanings are interpreted and played out, and how they solidify into distinct or opposed discursive formations. Widely different forms of hostility to Israel, embedded in distinct social movements, may host common elements of rhetoric and shared understanding, and give rise to unexpected political alliances.
Sometimes, thinking on Israel and Palestine fails to go beyond a conceptual discussion of logical principles. Some people content themselves with a demonstration that there is a contradiction between the requirements for Israel to be a democratic state for all its citizens and for Israel also to be a Jewish state. They find that contradiction to be sufficient to pronounce that Zionism is essentially a form of racism, and they understand all racism in Israel to be a manifestation of the racist essence of Zionism. Others content themselves with a demonstration that because antizionism finds Jewish self-determination to be the only illegitimate nation in the world, then antizionism is by definition antisemitic. These are conceptual frameworks which give huge explanatory weight to ideas, partially and simplistically presented.
Sociology can offer a more sophisticated framework of understanding than that which is content to show that a Jewish and democratic state is contradictory. Sociology can also offer ways of analyzing the dynamics of the contradiction and how it interacts with other contradictions. It suggests ways of exploring how the contradiction arose, how it has managed to find a material existence in a complex world, how successfully it has been able to fulfil contradictory requirements, and in which ways things might develop. Similarly, Sociology is not content to ‘prove’ that antizionism is antisemitic; rather, it could help us study distinct forms of antizionism and their different traditions and assumptions. Sociology offers us ways of looking at how antizionism can actualize itself in concrete political exclusions. It could explore the contradictions between the meanings social actors wish to communicate and the meanings with which their communications are heard, read and interpreted in distinct contexts.
Take for example the proposal for an academic boycott of Israel. A sociological analysis of the relationship between the proposal for an academic boycott and antisemitism can offer more depth than definitional and ideational claims. It can look at the ways in which the concept of an academic boycott is actually realized in a campaign. It can look at the ways in which the campaign plays itself out, say, in an academic trade union or a university. Jewish communal leaders in the UK accused the University and College Union, which represents university and college workers including academics, of being institutionally antisemitic (Davis et al 2011). A sociological approach to investigating this claim would be able to examine the relationship between the empirical and the conceptual. It would be able to observe union congresses and meetings employing methodological rigour from the traditions of ethnomethodology and discourse analysis. It would be able to analyze the culture, norms and practices of the union closely. It would be able to study the ways in which opponents of the campaign to boycott Israel have been isolated within the union and to look at the ways that the union leadership and structures had responded. An empirical approach would have to find ways to think about the cumulative effects which may arise from criticism of scholars who were constructed as ‘Zionist’ being characterized as pro-apartheid, like the Nazis, as people who are indifferent to Palestinian suffering and as people who cry wolf. It is necessary to see how concepts circulate in social situations and how concrete exclusions emerge, whether intentional or not.
Sociology understands antisemitism as an objective social phenomenon which cannot be defined simply by reference to the subjective feelings of individuals concerned. Sociology attends to discursive and institutional forms of antisemitism and antisemitic ways of thinking, not only to conscious hostility to Jews.
Judith Butler responded to this claim made by the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers:
Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in their effect if not their intent.
(cited in Butler 2003)
Butler’s (2003) response:
When the president of Harvard University declared that to criticise Israel … and to call on universities to divest from Israel are ‘actions that are anti-semitic in their effect, if not their intent’, he introduced a distinction between effective and intentional anti-semitism that is controversial at best. The counter-charge has been that in making his statement, Summers has struck a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not in intent. Although he insisted that he meant nothing censorious by his remarks, and that he is in favour of Israeli policy being ‘debated freely and civilly’, his words have had a chilling effect on political discourse. Among those actions which he called ‘effectively anti-semitic’ were European boycotts of Israel.
Butler takes up this same ‘in effect but not intent’ position in relation to freedom of speech. Although Summers insisted that he is for freedom of speech, and makes a distinction between speech and boycott (which he thinks is antisemitic), she says that his analysis is objectively anti-freedom in spite of his lack of intent and in spite of the explicit warning that he should not be understood in this way.
Butler is known for her pioneering work on the complex ways in which social and linguistic structures set up gendered and homophobic exclusions and how conceptual and discursive factors coalesce into systems of discrimination. According to her own theory, we are all caught up in the complexity of power relations in which our own self-consciousness is only a part of the story. But when the issue is one of antisemitism, she puts down her sophisticated social and discursive tools and argues instead that people can only be implicated in antisemitism if they are self-conscious Jew-haters. She resists the idea that the boycott campaign could have antisemitic effects even if nobody intends them. Yet when responding to Summers, she reverts to her more familiar way of thinking, emphasizing that Summers is reinforcing a power structure which chills academic freedom in spite of his declarations that he wants to find the boundary between free speech and racist discourse.
A second illustration of the complex interplay between antisemitism conceived of as a self-consciousness on the one hand or as a social structure on the other is the story of Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children – a Play for Gaza. This play offers an account from her imagination of the psychological dynamics within an archetypal Jewish family which have led to the situation where today’s Jews are able to contemplate the suffering of the Palestinians without pity or remorse (Churchill 2009a). The author Howard Jacobson (2009) argued that Churchill’s play was antisemitic, not least because it made use, in his interpretation, of themes of blood libel and, he argued, because it accused Jews of being pathologically pre-disposed to genocide.
Churchill (2009b) responded with the Livingstone Formulation:
Howard Jacobson writes as if there’s something new about describing critics of Israel as anti-Semitic. But it’s the usual tactic.
Her letter goes on:
When people attack English Jews in the street saying, ‘This is for Gaza’, they are making a terrible mistake, confusing the people who bombed Gaza with Jews in general. When Howard Jacobson confuses those who criticize Israel with anti-Semites, he is making the same mistake.
(Churchill 2009b)
Her position is that the element of intentionality is analogous between the violent street thug and Jacobson. Jacobson’s critique focuses on the distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, but she accuses him simply of conflating one with the other. But then she arrives at the punchline of her letter: Jacobson is making the same mistake as the street thug, ‘unless he’s doing it on purpose’, she adds. She ascribes malicious intent not to the violent antisemite but to the person who opposes antisemitism.
Antiracists who are accused of antisemitism in connection with their statements about Israel find themselves in an unusual position. While it is difficult to look into the heart of a person in order to discover whether they are racist, it feels easy when the person is yourself. Often, antiracists accused of antisemitism forget the importance of understanding racism objectively as something which exists outside of the individual racist. They find it easier to look within themselves and to find themselves not guilty. Intimate access to the object of inquiry yields an apparently clear result and seems to make it unnecessary to look any further at how contemporary antisemitism functions independently of the will of the social agent.
Hannah Arendt must be right, that antisemitism in profoundly different times and places is bound to be significantly distinct. Antisemitism is not a timeless fact of human civilization. It exists within, not outside of, history and society. It is not a single monster across time and across the globe. Nor are manifestations of hostility to Jews isolated from other forms of racism and exclusion. The struggles against Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Arab racism; the struggle against the occupation of the West Bank; and the struggle against the project to smash the state of Israel – these are all potentially democratic struggles, and, although they are distinct, they can be understood in a cosmopolitan way as belonging to the same family.
But neither is it surprising if Jews tend to experience each new hostility, which draws upon older ones for images and mythology, as just another manifestation of what Robert Wistrich called ‘the longest hatred’ (1994). Each antisemitism creates something enduring, which remains in the cultural reservoir ready to be drawn upon and reinvigorated. Within this cultural reservoir, two recurring motifs stand out: blood libel, which charges Jews with ethnically motivated crimes of cruelty, often against children, often involving the consumption or use of blood or body parts; and conspiracy theory, which constructs Jews, who are very small in number, as being hugely, selfishly and secretly influential on a global scale (Julius 2010).
Criticism of Israel takes many forms. One might say that the occupation of Palestinian territory is oppressive and requires a regime of racist violence and humiliation to sustain it. One might say that Israel uses targeted assassinations against its enemies and practices imprisonment of Palestinians without trial which are contrary to international human rights norms. One might say that it is an ethnically based state and not a state for all its citizens. Or it may be said that Israel was founded through a campaign of ethnic cleansing and only endures due to an ongoing campaign of ethnic exclusion. There are criticisms which have been made against Israeli policy or Israel’s existence in an entirely rational way. Some of the criticisms, one may judge, are justified; others, one may judge, are not. On this level, dialogue, debate, criticism and campaigning continue.
Campaigning against Israeli human rights abuses occurs at an emotional level as well as a rational one, and it seeks to engender feelings of compassion for Palestinians and feelings of anger towards Israel and Israelis. Sometimes, antisemitic themes and images are put to work to help this process. Some antizionist movements employ antisemitic tropes to explain the behaviour of Israel, to exaggerate it, and to bind people into an emotional commitment against it. Sometimes, images and tropes which resemble those of antisemitism also appear in the anti-Israel agitation of antiracists, of people who strongly oppose antisemitism. Here, there must be an unconscious drawing upon the antisemitic motifs which reside in the collective cultural reservoir. What makes this latter hypothesis of unconscious antisemitism more puzzling still, however, is the vehemence with which antiracists who employ antisemitic tropes tend to deny that they are doing so even when it is pointed out to them – and the vehemence with which they downplay the significance of openly antisemitic agitation on the part of others, which is visible around them, against Israel.
The rational type of criticism of Israel outlined above is joined in public discourse by a swirling mass of claims which are of a different kind. Israel has a policy of killing children; Israeli lobbying is hugely powerful; Israel is responsible for the Iraq War; Israel is responsible for ISIS; Israel is responsible for instability throughout the Middle East; Israel destroys the reputation of anybody in public life who criticizes it; Israel has huge influence over the media; Israel exaggerates the Holocaust and manipulates its memory for its own instrumental purposes; Israel steals the body parts of its enemies; Israel poisons Palestinian water supplies; Israel is genocidal; Israel is apartheid; Israel is essentially racist; Israel is colonialist; Israel is the testing ground and the prototype for ‘western’ techniques of power and surveillance.
The border between rational criticism and irrational claim is contested and difficult to define; sometimes, the same claim may be either a rational criticism or a blunt weapon, depending on how it is mobilized and in what combination; sometimes, rational criticisms and irrational libels combine in toxic, angry swirls which are difficult to de-couple and which have emergent properties which were not present before their release and combination.
A common feature of diverse antisemitisms has been that they construct ‘the Jews’ as centrally important to everything that is wrong with the world. Jews have usually been portrayed by antisemites as having a universal importance for humankind. Christian antisemitism pioneered this view. It said that that the Jews murdered God. They watched him suffer on the cross, suffer for the universal benefit of all mankind, yet they still refused his love. In so doing, they not only condemned themselves to damnation; they also stood between humanity as a whole and blissful redemption. Bauman wrote that the Jews became ‘a ubiquitous and constant concomitant of Christianity’, whose overcoming is necessary for the accomplishment of the Christian mission (1993: 37). Left antisemitism, which Bebel called ‘the socialism of fools’, said that Jewish bankers, capitalists and the cosmopolitan elite in general sucked the productive capital from the capitalist system for their own benefit. Modernist antisemitism held Jews responsible for resisting modernity; anti-modernist antisemitism said that Jews were responsible for modernity’s assault on traditional values and institutions. Nazi antisemitism said that Jews were like an infection which made the whole of society sick. In all cases ‘the Jews’, who are very small in number, are afforded universal significance.
It is often the case that Israel or Zionism is constructed by critics of Israel or by antizionists as being globally important: Israel is the keystone of the whole edifice of imperialism; Israel prevents peace and democracy across the Middle East; the Israel Lobby is responsible for war; Israel shows us all our future because ‘American power’ may be undergoing a process of ‘Israelization’; Zionism is responsible for re-importing Islamophobia into Europe.
There is a tendency for the Israel/Palestine conflict to attain a place of great symbolic importance. In this way the Palestinians come to symbolize victims everywhere, and then it follows that Israelis tend to become symbolic representatives of all oppressors. In this context, discussion about Israel and Palestine sometimes functions less as a way of understanding a small if intractable conflict on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and more as a symbolic narrative with global resonance. The conflict becomes an empty vessel into which we can pour our own concerns: British concerns over the colonial legacy; European concerns about the Holocaust; American concerns about the frontier; Irish concerns about Unionism and Republicanism; South African concerns about overcoming apartheid. Apart from putting Jews back at the centre of the world, this tendency is also disrespectful to the suffering of the Palestinians. By constructing Palestinians as universally symbolic, their existence as actual people goes largely un-considered. Rather than human beings finding a multiplicity of ways to live and to struggle in difficult circumstances, the Palestinians find themselves portrayed as one single heroic victim of the ubiquitous Zionist evil.
In these ways of thinking, the usual sociological approaches to nationalism are reversed, when looking at the Israel/Palestine conflict and at its related antisemitism. Nationalisms are usually looked at in sociology critically and comparatively, but Israeli nationalism is often singled out as unique and essentially racist. Narratives of nationhood are usually not examined only for their truth or falsity but understood also as social phenomena with particular trajectories and functions, while Israeli nationalism is often denounced in simplistic binary terms as artificial, as though all the other nations were in some sense authentic. Palestinians are constructed as indigenous and Israelis as settlers, while notions of authentic ties to pieces of land are normally challenged by a sociological approach. Contradictions are usually examined and their consequences traced, but regarding Israel they are often employed to construct essentialist patterns of thinking to denounce the idea and reality of a Jewish state. Sociology itself is not immune to forms of antisemitism that claim to speak for the oppressed and to confront the powerful (Postone 2006). Antisemitism, after all, can be attractive to radical people who look at the world that exists and find everything wrong with it. However, Sociology also holds an important key to understanding antisemitism and the world that produces it.
1Paul Berman (2006): ‘If I had a million dollars, which I don’t, I would give it to a little cluster of political and intellectual projects in Britain whose purpose is to renovate the liberal left with new ideas. The people working on these projects are best known for having produced a document called the Euston Manifesto, which was composed in a bar near the Euston station of the London metro. (If these people had a million dollars, they wouldn’t have to compose their manifestos in bars – they would be able to rent a proper office for themselves.) Their online journal, Democratiya, has become, by my lights, the liveliest and most stimulating new intellectual journal on political themes in the English-speaking world – certainly the liveliest new thing to appear on the English-speaking left in a good long time. Their project Engage has rather bravely taken up the challenge of arguing against the slightly demented anti-Zionism that appears to have apparently overrun whole regions of British intellectual life. And people from the same group put out a couple of vigorous blogs as well: Harry’s Place and Normblog.’
2European Union EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism. Available: http://fra.europa.eu/fra/material/pub/AS/AS-WorkingDefinition-draft.pdf (accessed 8 November 2007).
3From the Daily Mirror: ‘We looked away as Israel bombed the crap out of Gaza. When the 1,314 dead Palestinians temporarily sated Tel Aviv’s bloodlust’ (Reade 2009).
4John Mearsheimer: ‘The Israel lobby was one of the principal driving forces behind the Iraq War, and in its absence we probably would not have had a war’ (Stoll 2006).