Antisemitism: An Essentially Contested Concept?
Anti-Semitism is objective, and is external to the subjective feelings of individuals. This means that in order to clarify the issues involved in debates around the definition of the concept, it is essential to examine how the concept is actualised in the social world in addition to the ways in which the processes of definition are played out there. What counts as a case of racism is a matter of dispute. It is the nature of these debates with all the visceral emotions they engender and the political implications and consequences that flow from them that makes clarity over the definitions of what we disagree essential (Hirsh: pp.137-38).
Antisemitism has a shape shifting, amoebic quality. Deborah Lipstadt cites the definition of anti-Semitism by the historical sociologist Helen Fine as constituting:
A persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collectivity manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore and imagery, and in actions – social or legal discrimination, political mobilisation against Jews, and collective or state violence – which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace or destroy Jews as Jews. (Lipstadt: p.17)
This “structure” suggests an internal coherence to anti-Semitism; a coherence which did not exist for John-Paul Sartre who saw anti-Semitism as a “passion” which because it made no intellectual sense should not be dignified by the appellation of an “idea”. Likewise, Anthony Julius who, while fully recognising the historical lineage of Jew hatred, contends that antisemitism must ultimately be seen as a "discontinuous, contingent aspect of a number of distinct mentalities and milieus.” He goes on to say that antisemitism “is a heterogenous phenomenon, the site of collective hatreds, and of cultural anxieties and resentments." (Lipstadt: p.20).
It is fair to say though that most scholars, writers and activists in the sphere do recognise some degree of consistency and unity in the variegated forms of anti-Semitism that have persisted down the last two millennia. The conundrum is to find a definition that has dear as possible universal acceptance and applicability. A quest for such an automatic and uncontested formula which can instantly tell us what is and what isn’t anti-Semitic is, in the words of Hirsh ‘not going to be successful’ (Hirsh, p.139).
However, the possibility of ultimate futility of trying to find a Grand Theory of Everything type explanation of anti-Semitism does not nullify the importance of identifying, at any rate, institutional forms of anti-Semitism. Understanding whether a comment or institution is racist/sexist/disabilist or embodies any other prejudice requires a close study of and an understanding of context, of tropes and of the histories of the form of bigotry or prejudice in question. It requires consideration of intentions and discursive practices, of norms and methods of exclusion, of modes of denial. The recognition of anti-Semitism requires similar epistemological and archaeological effort (Hirsh: p.139).
Zionism and Antizionism
Here I discuss how antizionism, although conceptually different from intrinsic hostility towards Jews as a people and Judaism, has segued into a modern form of antisemitism.
The most essential elements of left anti-Semitism concern its interrelationship with anti-Zionism and is germane to the Labour Party’s institutional crisis. Zionism or specifically political Zionism was, in the view of its advocates historically’ the belief in establishing a Jewish state in the historic homeland known as Israel’ [1]. Its founding father was Theodore Herzl who formulated the doctrine in 1897 as a reaction to a period of intense anti-Semitism in Europe characterised by pograms in Russia and Eastern Europe and symbolised by the notorious trial in France of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew and army captain who was accused of selling secrets to the German Empire and which led to anti-Semitism becoming rife throughout France. Herzl laid out his idea for a Jewish homeland which he saw as the only means of guaranteeing the safety of the Jewish people in the pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. In it, he proclaimed that in a Jewish state “We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our homes peacefully die”. In light of modern academic and political controversies over the intended scope of Zionist expansionism, Zionism crucially never specified how much of the historic land of Palestine/Israel was to become the Jewish state, just that a Jewish state should be re-established in the Middle East.[2]
It is axiomatic to Zionist supporters therefore that anti-Zionism equates to anti-Semitism. With the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, anti-Zionism changed from abstract opposition to the idea of a non-existent Jewish state into opposing ‘the existence of a country with actually existing, living, breathing inhabitants’.[3] In this account anti-Zionism in a mutation of anti-Semitism which updates traditional anti-Semitic tropes first propagated and them spread aggressively later by the Soviet Union[4]. It singles out Jewish people as some kind of anomalous group to be deprived of rights to national or regional autonomy that groups all round the world possess or aspire to possess. It also seeks to deprive Jews of their cultural and ethnic history, as it rejects their claim to be a people indigenous to the land of Israel/Palestine. Anti-Zionists describe Israel as a White European colonialist venture and frame it in the wider context of imperialism. Zionists retort by asking how can an ethnic group colonise its own historic land that it was exiled from through ethnic cleansing and genocide?[5].
Others such as Peter Beinart caution against the conflation of anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred.[6] He tries to deconstruct the three pillars on which this equation is founded as follows.
The first is the national self-determination argument; that opposing Zionism is anti-Semitic because it denies to Jews what every other people enjoy: a state of its own. Beinart points to the “dozens” of other stateless nationalities such as Kurds, Basques, Tibetans, Scots and Quebecois and asserts that:
barely anyone opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot in order to bolster his argument that it is better to foster civic nationalism, a nationalism built around borders rather than ethnic nationalism built around heritage.[7]
Many would argue that this statement betrays an astonishing ignorance of the experiences of the oppression of national minorities by centralising states such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Turkey, China, Franco’s Spain, Modi’s India and the Iran of the mullahs in which particular ethnic and tribal groups historically held sway.
Beinart also uses arguments for civic as opposed to ethnic nationalism to critique the second pillar of the anti-Zionism=anti-Semitism synonym: that in the words of the New York Times columnist Brett Stephens that “… Antizionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it”. While abjuring descriptions of Israel as “an apartheid state”, Beinart argues that for most of Israel’s Arab citizens (as well as for the larger Palestinian Arab diaspora) Zionism represents a form of political dispossession in that the State of Israel privileges Jewish immigration but denies the Right to Return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants[8] in order to preserve Israel as a Jewish-majority entity and that the steadily rightward direction of travel taken by the Netanyahu government as symbolised by the Nation-State Law indicates an increasingly cold house for Israel’s Arab population (to say nothing of the situation of the Palestinian Arab residents on the West Bank). But it is also important to point out that many Zionists advocate a two-state solution; that to ensure peace in the region ‘a strong and secure Palestinian state’ must ‘exist alongside a peaceful and secure Israeli state.[9] Beinart also advocates that the West Bank and Gaza become a Palestinian state alongside a ‘more inclusive’ Israel which should ‘remain a state with a special obligation to protect Jews’.[10]
The third element of the equation between antizionism and antisemitism which Beinart seeks to disprove is the practical argument that the two animosities simply go together. He points to the affinity between Netanyahu and far right European leaders such as Victor Orban, Heinz-Christian Strache of the Austrian Freedom Party and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany who traffic blatantly in anti-Semitism while publicly championing Zionism too as well as the Christian anti-Semitic Zionism of US evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.[11] However anti-Zionism is still a staple of anti-Semitic racists such as David Duke, Nick Griffin and Louis Farrakhan which underlines the contention that anti-Zionism is a modern variant of anti-Semitism.
Anti-Zionist Discourse
Hirsh frames the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as follows. He uses the term ‘anti-Zionism’ as a descriptor for the multiplicity of ‘movements which coalesce’ not around opposition to Israeli policy or racist movements within Israel ‘but rather around a common orientation to the existence or legitimacy of the State of Israel itself' (Hirsh: p.184) He hypothesises that anti-Semitism is the consequence, intentional or otherwise, of anti-Zionism. For ‘although hostility to the idea, existence and policies of Israel comes from a variety of sources, and is not the same as hostility to Jews’; certain ‘manifestations of this hostility can nevertheless’ produce ‘a politics’ and aggregate ‘of practices which create a common-sense of Israel as a unique evil in the world’. They therefore can set the scene for confrontation with Jews – ‘those Jews, anyway, who prefer not to disavow Israel by defining themselves as anti-Zionist (Hirsh: p.185).
As stated above post-1948 antizionism is not a single, unitary movement but an assortment of differing strands. In the Middle East, both secular and Islamist anti-Zionist traditions have always been hostile to Jewish immigration into Palestine and the continued existence of the State of Israel; in the former Soviet bloc there was a Stalinist anti-Zionism (of which more later); right-wing and neo-Nazi anti-Semitism increasingly articulates hostility to Jews in anti-Zionist rhetoric (e.g. David Duke, David Irving and Nick Griffin) and there is also a contemporary current of anti-Zionism which openly toys with anti-Semitic rhetoric and which does not easily fall on a left-right polarity as exemplified by artists such as the jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and the comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala. (Hirsh: pp.186-87).
The ‘Zionism’ of the anti-Zionists is a totalitarian movement which is equivalent to racism, Nazism or apartheid. The ‘Zionism’ of the discourses of anti-Zionism is more a signifier of evil rather than a word which signifies an actual set of changing and plural philosophies and practices. Anti-Zionism portrays itself as part of an emancipatory worldview but its demonization of Zionism often assumes darker and more totalitarian hues and is attracted to conspiratorial thinking. It does not seek peace and reconciliation in the Middle East but rather to the elimination of the evil wherever it is to be found[12] (Hirsh: p.189).
Hirsh analyses the writings of one critic of Zionism, Joseph Massad, to illustrate how anti-Zionism collapses differing ideological and historical strands to form a Zionist monolith. Massad takes as his starting point the assertion that Zionism is a colonial movement that is constituted in ideology and practice by a religio-racial epistemology. Zionism, in his view, is defined by its commitment to building a demographically exclusive Jewish state which he incorporates into the European colonial ideology of white supremacy over colonised peoples. From its inception in the 1880s to the present day therefore, Zionism constitutes a homogenous, Jewish supremacist movement. The distinctions between left and right Zionism, between secular and religious Zionists, between Labour Zionism and the Zionism of the fundamentalist settlers are thus completely nullified in order to construct a monochromic, single edifice of Jewish supremacist nationalism (Hirsh: p.190).
Massad proceeds to extrapolate from quotes and anecdotes from Herzl, Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky, the actualisation of this racist idea in the Naqba in 1948 right down to the lurid call by a far-right Jewish settler and Tourist Minister Benny Elon for the expulsion of the entire Arab population from Israel in February 2002 and from an article in Israel’s leading Russian language daily the previous month suggesting that the Israeli government should use the threat of castration to force Arabs to leave Israel the assertion that Zionism is a coherent body of thought; ipso facto Jewish supremacist movement. (Hirsh: pp.190-91).
He then cites Zionism as part of the European colonial project; of a white imperialist set of crimes such as the Crusades, British rule in India, the Scramble for Africa, the colonisation of the Americas, the British Mandate in Palestine; US policy in Latin America and South East Asia during the Cold War; indeed any Western colonial atrocity over the centuries one can think off (Hirsh: P.191)
This ‘whitening’ of Jews is key to the understanding of contemporary antisemitism and interrelated developments on the contemporary left. The major development is the tendency for part of the left to identify the ‘oppressed’ more in terms of nations and national movements in their ‘liberation struggles’ against the rich, powerful ‘imperialist’ and white states of the ‘North’ or ‘West’ rather than the self-liberation of the working classes, women or other minorities within the former. (Hirsh: p.145) This has led to the grotesque spectacles of some left thinkers and activists supporting movements such as Hamas, Hezbollah and regimes such as those of Bashar Al-Assad, Kim Jong-Un, the Taleban, Slobodan Milosevic and Vladimir Putin on (bogus) ‘anti-imperialist criteria.
Within this white/black binary, Jews occupy an ambivalent status. On the one hand anti-Semitism is the exemplar supreme of European racism with Auschwitz as its eternal memoriam. On the other hand, anti-Semitism has functioned as a ‘fetishized form of oppositional consciousness’ through which Jews are thought of as conspiratorially powerful and lurking behind the oppression of others. (Hirsh: p.145).
Hirsh draws upon the narrative of Karen Brodkin’s book[13] of the ‘whitening’ of American Jews to show how it fed into a new picture of Jews as part of a Judeo-Christian white elite. This narrative provides a framework for understanding the ideological transformation from Israel as a life-raft for oppressed and stateless victims of racism and pioneer of socialist practices such as the kibbutz into a pillar of the global system of white oppression of black people. The UN General Assembly 1975 resolution condemning Zionism as racism and the Durban Anti-Racist Conference of 2001 mark two milestones in this journey from the idealisation and romanticising of Israel to its demonization and delegitimisation by many on the left. As an illustration of this shift, consider this response by Seumas Milne, now Jeremy Corbyn’s Communications Chief, in his Guardian column to an anti-Semitic speech by President Ahmadinejad of Iran to the UN in 2009. He opined ‘what credibility is there in Geneva’s all-white boycott.
The ‘whitening’ of Jews and especially Israeli Jews can be seen in the narrative of ‘intersectionality’ in relation to the Palestinian struggle by US antizionists such as the Women’s March activist Tamika Mallory, Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill and the Michigan Democrat Rep Rashida Tlaib. Their tendency to define Israelis as Ashkenazi Jews or the descendants of European Jews only discounts certain demographic realities of modern Israel which are that only about 30% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi while the majority are Mizrahi who are of Middle East and North African descent. For centuries the Mizrahim lived without sovereignty and equality in the Muslim world; treated as “dhimmis”, an Arabic term for a protected minority whose members pay for that protection, which can be withdrawn at any time. In the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war 850,000 Mizrahi Jews were expelled from Arab lands and took refuge in Israel[14]; an episode that conveniently escapes the notice of many anti-Zionists.
Also escaping their notice are certain salient facts about the inception of the State of Israel and its position in global politics for the early years of its existence. Israel would not have come into existence when it did had not the Soviet bloc voted for the UN Partition Resolution on 29th November 1947 and it would have been wiped out at birth had it not been armed by Stalin’s Soviet Union against a British and American arms embargo (at a time when Stalin was actively persecuting Jews at home). It was only in the early 1960s that a US-Israeli alliance began to develop and was cemented after the Six Day War in response to the Soviet shift in the 1950s towards alignment with Arab nationalist regimes. These wider geo-political factors undermine the Western colonial implant and the Israel-as-America’s-regional-police-force stories as faithfully told by left anti-Zionists. As does the fact that when America does intervene in the Middle East it relies on regional Arab or Muslim allies such as Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for support rather than Israel (Hirsh: pp.198-99).
How to interpret the transformative effect on the Shoah/Holocaust poses the greatest intellectual and practical conundrum for anti-Zionists. The prominent anti-Zionist Norman Finkelstein attributes ‘the Zionist denial of Palestinians’ rights, culminating in their expulsion’ not to ‘an unavoidable accident’ but to ‘the systematic and conscientious implementation, over many decades … of a political ideology the goal of which was to create a demographically Jewish state in Palestine’. (Hirsh: p.200) He takes issue with the former anti-Zionist Isaac Deutscher who spent his early political life in the Yiddish-speaking environment of the Jewish Left in Europe before the Holocaust and who, while never identifying as a Zionist, came round to the view that the Shoah/Holocaust had made the creation of the State of Israel a ‘historic necessity’ but that Zionist leaders had acted irrationally in refusing to ‘remove or assuage the grievance’ of Palestinian Arabs. For Finkelstein the ‘historic necessity’ argument flies in the face of ‘the Zionist movement’s massive and, in many respects, impressive exertion of will’ (Hirsh: p.200) in achieving its goal of achieving a demographically pure Jewish nation-state. He says that the Palestinians’ chief grievance was the denial of their homeland and that ‘Zionists’ could only remove this grievance by negating the ‘raison d ‘etre’, the fundamental essence of ‘Zionism’. (Hirsh: p.201).
In trying to justify his case that Israel is definitionally racist, Finkelstein refuses, like many anti-Zionists, to engage with or attribute to in any way to the materiality, the real-life transformative circumstances of the Shoah/Holocaust in the creation of the State of Israel. For the narrative of the survivors of the Final Solution being denied entry to Palestine by the then British Mandate authorities and held in ships off Cyprus in 1945-46 drives a coach-and-horses through the binary categories that constitutes anti-Zionism: white/non-white; oppressor/oppressed; good nationalism/bad nationalism; coloniser/colonised (Hirsh: p.201).
While Deutscher argues that the foundation of Israel can only be understood by the events that preceded it; Finkelstein sees Deutscher as using the Shoah/Holocaust in order to justify Israeli human rights abuses; a view which he fully expounds on in his polemic The Holocaust Industry. For Finkelstein ‘the Zionists’ were totally responsible for Palestinian sufferings or were innocent refugees in which case they should have behaved in the manner expected of innocent refugees (according to the romantic left). Deutscher, by contrast, tries to rationalise the feelings of Jewish refugees taught to be fearful, angry and distrustful through their experiences in Europe and the Middle East.
Anti-Zionist narratives, as well as some pro-Israeli ones, flatten the experiences of the Palestinians into a single perspective (and conversely those of the Israelis). No account is taken of the complexities of the relationships between the Palestinian leadership and their peoples nor between Palestinians and Arab states many of whom have refused to integrate Palestinian refugees into their societies and whose instrumentalised hostility to Zionism to deflect from their own failings. Similarly, there is near silence on the virulence of anti-Semitism in the Arab world (and parts of the wider Islamic world) and terrorist and anti-Semitic attacks on Jews are interpreted by anti-Zionism as fundamentally defensive responses to Zionism. Cosmopolitan approaches to Israel/Palestine which search for the bases for a genuine peace and which do not infantilise or deny agency to Palestinians by considering the differences in opinion, politics and choices within their society (nor which conversely demonise Israel and Israelis) threaten the purity and simplistic anti-imperialist/imperialist dualism of anti-Zionism (Hirsh: pp.202-06 (and of the post 9/11 occidental left).
How Anti-Zionism Discourse Articulates Anti-Semitism
At key moments anti-Zionist discourse, unconsciously or consciously, reproduces two classic anti-Jewish tropes, the ‘blood libel’/Jews as Christian child killers and the global Jewish conspiracy and marries the two in the following ways.
The theme of Israel as a child-killing state is increasingly common. Any incident of an under-age Palestinian killed during the conflict is liable to be interpreted and portrayed as a feature of Israel’s essentially child-killing nature (Hirsh: p.208).
The child-killing theme is articulated viscerally in visual depictions of the Israel-Palestine conflict. For example, a poster for the BDS campaign shows a wholesome Jaffa orange cut in half, out of which blood drips. The slogan reads: ‘Boycott Israeli Goods: Don’t squeeze a Jaffa, crush the occupation.’ This comingling of Jews (or Jews as Israelis), food and non-Jewish blood sends the powerful and emotive message that if you eat the Jaffa oranges that the Zionists are trying to sell you, you will be metaphorically be drinking the blood of their victims (Hirsh: pp.206-07).
In another incendiary illustration of the would-be ‘blood libel’, the self-professed antiracist Norman Finkelstein hosted an extensive gallery on his website by the Brazilian artist ‘Latuff’ who had won second prize in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s notorious competition for cartoons illustrating Holocaust denial. One image shows a swimming pool, in the shape of the Gaza strip, filled with blood. The image shows Uncle Sam luxuriating in the blood; the then Israeli premier Ehud Olmert covered in the blood and using the Israeli flag as a towel; and a UN waiter bringing a drink of blood to the swimmers while the rest of the world is depicted standing aside uninterested. Another image shows an innocent child who is either Lebanese or is representing Lebanon itself, being doused in Israeli petrol. (Hirsh: pp.207-08)
The most persuasive explanation for such visual imagery lies not in pure coincidence or conscious hostility to Jews as a people but in the realm of the cultural unconscious whereby anti-Zionists draw unconsciously upon ancient anti-Semitic themes when devising and using emotive visual symbols to highlight alleged Israeli wrong-doing but are reluctant to reflect on the genealogy of prejudice that reside beneath these images (Hirsh: p.208) The whole domain of the cultural unconscious requires greater scholastic enquiry but it is fair to state that historical or popularly received stereotypes are drawn upon in other semi-conscious articulations of racism such as black criminality in the notorious Willie Horton video ad by the Republicans used in the 1988 US Presidential election and Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’ in 1990.
Critiques of the emotive imagery used thus by anti-Zionists should never be used to exculpate proven Israeli wrong-doing (nor should the Shoah/Holocaust be used to prevent criticism of such either). But I (and it is only my personal opinion) think it worthwhile to point out that ‘child’-killing ‘ and ‘blood drinking’ cries are never used to the same degree of resonance in relation to child victims of wars in which the USA, UK and Russia are involved nor in the case of the killing of children by plastic or live bullets or other actions by state security forces in Northern Ireland.
Blood libel always accompanies anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In the words of Anthony Julius referenced by Hirsh, if the ‘Jews’ kill children then they certainly then conspire to hide the crime. If Israel is based on child-killing or genocide then there must be a Zionist conspiracy of Israel lobby which has the power to shield the truth from the global media (Hirsh: p.208).
The most explicit and comprehensive from of global anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is the Protocol of the Learned Elders of Zion, a late 19th Tsarist Russian forgery which purported to comprise a report of the meeting of the Jewish conspiracy in Prague. The Hamas Covenant (1988) explicitly reprints and endorses this forgery as well as holding the Jewish (not merely the Zionist) ‘enemy’ for all the revolutions, wars and imperialist ventures of modern times (Hirsh: pp.208-09)
Contemporary echoes of the hoary old Jewish conspiracy theme are found in the argument that there is a Zionist lobby that possesses such huge power and influence that it is able to send the USA to war in its interests and to taint any narrative of Israel and Palestine as contrary to its own as automatically antisemitic.
Thus, the US academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2006 writings on the “Israel Lobby” found it to be responsible for the decision of the USA to go to war with the Iraq of Saddam Hussein without offering any substantial evidence (dodgy dossier, anyone!) for this claim. This claim resonates with claims made throughout history that Jews start wars such as that the Boer war was caused by a Jewish diamond lobby manipulating the British Empire; America First’s key propagandist Charles Lindberg’ s claim that the leaders of ‘both the Jewish and British people … for reasons which are not American wish to involve us in the [Second World] war; Hitler’s Reichstag speech in which he threatened that if ‘Jewish financiers .. succeed once more in hurling the peoples into a world war … the result will be… the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe right down to the conspiracy theory that Zionists were behind 9/11 (and ISIS) with reports (printed in the Lebanese Hezbollah newspaper Al-Manah) that 4,000 Jews were told not to go to work to the World Trade Centre on the day of the attacks and of Israeli agents (of ‘Dancing Israelis’ fake notoriety) seen celebrating in New Jersey as the Twin Towers collapsed (Hirsh: pp.210-11).
So also, Robert Fisk wrote a four-page piece in the Independent newspaper on 27th April 2006 headlining ‘United States of Israel?’ that was illustrated by a full-page, colour image of the Stars and Stripes with Stars of David replacing the usual stars. The piece profiles Stephen Walt a hero, speaking truth to power, who took on the ‘Lobby’ and its egregious accusations of anti-Semitism. Fisk offers no evidence that the ‘Zionists’ forced the US into starting a war not in its own interests; nor any examples of anti-Semitism accusations directed at Mearsheimer and Walt; nor any evidence for his claims that the ‘Lobby’ stopped Noam Chomsky for having a column in an American newspapers or that it prevented the showing of the play I am Rachel Corrie in New York (Hirsh: pp.214-15).
In this process of ‘slippage’, the empirical focus on the differing organisations and interests within the broad sweep of the pro-Israel lobby within Mearsheimer and Walt’s and Fisk’s works segues or ‘slips’ into the construction of a single, unvariegated, monolith motivated by bad faith and a desire to manipulate the highest reaches of American decision-making. In the course of this slippage, Jewish symbols (Stars of David) not Israeli ones are used to convey the impression that Jews, because of their loyalty to other Jews round the world, are not patriotic Americans. The device of merging Jewish stars with the American flag has long been a weapon of choice for neo-Nazis, radical Islamist and conspiracy theorists (Hirsh: p.214).
Indeed, anti-Zionists can be quite candid in the ideological and political company they keep in the cause of assailing the all-powerful “Zionist” lobby. At a conference at the University of Chicago in October 2007 on ‘academic freedom’ and to defend Norman Finkelstein who had failed to win academic tenure at De Paul University, Chicago due to the supposed influence of the Israel Lobby, the late distinguished historian and professed antiracist Tony Judt made the following statement:
If you stand up and say [as he did] … that there is an Israel lobby … that there are a set of Jewish organisations, who do work, both in front of the scenes and behind the scenes, to prevent certain kinds of conversations, certain kinds of criticisms and so on, you come very close to saying that there is a de facto conspiracy or if you like plot or collaboration to prevent certain policy from moving a particular way… – and that sounds a lot like, you know, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the conspiratorial theory of the Zionist Occupied Government and so on – well if it sounds like it’s unfortunate, but that’s just how it is. We cannot calibrate the truths that we’re willing to speak, if we think they are true, according to the idiocies of people [like David Duke who confirmed in an email to Judt that he was on the same page as him, Mearsheimer and Walt on the issue of the Israel lobby] who happen to agree with us for their own reasons. (Hirsh: p.215)
Judt proceeds to try to give himself ideological and ethical cover by reminding his audience of:
… what Arthur Koestler said in Carnegie Hall in 1948 when he was asked ‘Why do you criticise Stalin – don’t you know that there are people in this country, Nixon an and who were not yet known as McCarthyites, who are also anti-Communists and will use your anti-Communism to their advantage. And Koestler’s response was that … you cannot help it if idiots once every 24 hours with their stopped political clock are on the same side as you… (Hirsh: p.216)
However, the gulag did exist. The Jewish (or Zionist) conspiracy of the all-encompassing scale that anti-Zionists imagine does not. The McCarthyites were conspiracy theorists who say ‘reds under every bed’ in the form of every liberal schoolteacher, Hollywood actor and performing artist. Koestler and other anti-Stalinist leftists like Orwell, Trotsky, Arendt spoke out against the prevailing left orthodoxy of their time; that Stalin should not be criticised. Some contemporary leftists like Judt fail to speak out against a current left orthodoxy; that Israel and its Jewish supporters are uniquely evil and powerful. They are also blissfully ignorant or wilfully blind or perhaps do not care about the far-right elements that they attract to their antizionist orbit. The same can be said of the devotees of Jeremy Corbyn who bask in the Labour leader’s so frequently trumpeted antiracism and wallow in Israeli Embassy conspiracy theories or ‘bad faith’ refutations of anyone who raises the issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour movement. In spite of, or maybe because, of their self-referenced, pure ideological leftism that they fail to understand how Zionist conspiracy theories and their obsession with the perceived evils that Israel is said to embody can act as a progenitor of an unadorned anti-Semitic movement.
Bibliography
(1) David Hirsh (2018) Contemporary Left Antisemitism London: Routledge
(2) Deborah Lipstadt (2019) Antisemitism Here and Now London: Scribe
[1]Uncategorised http://hurryupharry.org/2019/01/31/anti-zionjsim-is-antisemitism/ p.2
[2]Ibid. p.2
[3] Ibid, p.3
[4] Ibid, p.3
[5] Ibid, p.5
[6] Peter Beinart Debunking the myth that antizionism is antisemitic https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/mar/07/debunking-myth-that-anti-zionism-is-antismemitic
[7] Ibid: p.2
[8] Ibid: p.21
[9] Antizionism is antisemitism p.6
[10] Beinart: p.3
[11] Beinart: p.4
[12] Including the British Labour Party perhaps
[13] Karen Brodkin (1999) ‘How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America
[14] Hen Mazzig No, Israel isn’t a country of privileged and powerful white Europeans. Los Angeles Times 20 May 2019 https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0mazzig-mizrahi-jeaws-israel-20190520-story.html
⏩ Barry Gilheany has joined the Jewish Labour Movement as an affiliate member and encourages fellow labour movement colleagues concerned about Labour’s anti-Semitism problem to do the same.
Barry - as always thanks for the piece even though I am not remotely persuaded by it. The overall tenor seems to be one of protecting a brutal regime from serious ethical questioning and investigation. Nevertheless, there has to a more panoramic view of the terrain within any perspective and you add to the widening of the view.
ReplyDeleteNetanyahu, urges a:
a strong Zionist government and prevent a dangerous anti-Zionist government … There won’t be, there can’t be a government that relies on the anti-Zionist Arab parties, parties that deny Israel’s very existence as a Jewish and democratic state
The question it begs really is if the allegation being made by him is that because Gantz and co might be head a government that relies on Arabs and is an "anti-Zionist" government, are they too anti-Semitic.
There is an overlap between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism but there is an overlap between many things. An overlap, as in a Venn Diagram, is not the same as one being identical with the other. Anti- Zionism is a most progressive position whereas anti-Semitism is regressive and fuelled by hatred.
Anthony
ReplyDeleteBelieve me, I do not believe that Netanyahu and populist, nationalist Alt-Right governments like his or ideologies like it should be protected from questioning and I have no intention of doing so.
So it is preposterous to suggest that a government depending on Arab support would be antisemitic
For a start Netanyahu is factually incorrect when he says that Arab parties (or Fifth Columnists) deny the existence of Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state.
As we have seen in the comment threads relating to Laura, the demarcation lines bdetween antizionism and antisemitism does become blurred. Progressive is the very last description I would use in relation to one particular antizionist on this site.
Was the antizionism spread by the former Soviet Union that I wrote about in a previous article progressive? When regimes such as Iran's homicidal theocracy and Saddam Hussein's Baa'thist terror state (and that of Assad) condemn the "Zionist entity"; are they coming from a "progessive" position?
Thanks again for publishing my writings.
Barry,
ReplyDeleteOne of the very few things Laura Weinstein got correct in her piece (actually a reply) was this....
In addition, he seems not to understand the linguistic meaning of "Semite," a family of languages that also includes Arabic (in addition to Hebrew)
I have said the same thing over and over...And we both know what the word anti means...So do the world a favour and tell everyone why you think it means anti-Jew? The thing is in her original piece Laura makes the same mistake as you in trying to make anti-Semite out to be anti-Jew. Another thing both of you need to get your heads around is Zionism & Wahhabism at their root have exactly the origin. In fact there isn't much if anything to separate them.
It is people like you Barry (and Laura) who talk about subjects they haven;t much of a clue about and the minute anyone goes out of their way to explain why you both are wrong, they get shouted down with words like “Racist, Nazi supporter or other”.
Truth is Barry, the reason why so many people on this rock are biased towards Jews is because of the propaganda you and others write. One day I hope you see the error of your ways and understand Jews, like Arabs are good people who eat, sleep and shit in the same position (like you, me and a boy named Sue do)...Zionism in all it's forms is evil. Evil beyond belief.
If "Zionism in all it's forms is evil. Evil beyond belief" then the same descriptor applies to ALL nationalisms..
ReplyDeleteBarry - yes, it was moving. The political careerists did well out of it all. There was nothing shallow about Tommy.
DeleteBarry - there are indeed some people who play the anti-Zionist card from a regressive perspective. Yet there remain crucial distinctions between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I agree with Frankie about the evil of Zionism - the lebensraum at its core reminds me so much of the Nazis. And that urge to steal other people's land and the crimes against humanity it gives rise to is irredeemably evil. Semitism isn't evil. Nor is all nationalism evil. As an ideology it has always been Janus faced. The nationalism of expansionism is evil.
ReplyDeleteAnthony
DeleteTo mention something totally unrelated; I was deeply afected by Tommy Gorman's tears on Part 2 of Spotlight's series on the Troubles on Tuesday evening. The utter futility of the needless sacrifices he made and the traumas he endured were imprinted on his face. Never again.
Was China's conquest of Tibet "irredeemably evil"? Was the genocide of national minority groups like the Kurds by Arab national-socialist dictatorships "irredeeemably evil"? Was Iran's persecution of the Bahias for their faith "irrededemably evil"?
ReplyDeleteBarry - without exception. And not just there. Expansionist nationalism and its concomitant crimes against humanity is always irredeemably evil. How can it be anything else?
DeleteThis is a letter from Jeremy Corbyn to labour party members. What part of this falls short of dealing with this issue?
ReplyDelete'The struggle for liberation of all people is never complete and must always be renewed. As a movement, we educate ourselves and each other to better stand in solidarity with and unite all those facing oppression and discrimination.
That's why we are launching education materials for our members and supporters to help them confront bigotry, wherever it arises. Over the coming months, the party will produce educational materials on a number of specific forms of racism and bigotry. Our first materials are on antisemitism, recognising that anti-Jewish bigotry has reared its head in our movement.
Browse our new antisemitism minisite
Read our new leaflet on antisemitism
Hatred towards Jewish people is rising in many parts of the world. Our party is not immune from that poison – and we must drive it out from our movement.
While other political parties and some of the media exaggerate and distort the scale of the problem in our party, we must face up to the unsettling truth that a small number of Labour members hold antisemitic views and a larger number don't recognise antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories.
The evidence is clear enough. The worst cases of antisemitism in our party have included Holocaust denial, crude Jewish-banker stereotypes, conspiracy theories blaming Israel for 9/11 or every war on the Rothschild family, and even one member who appeared to believe that Hitler had been misunderstood.
So please engage with the materials we are producing, which will be placed on a page on our website, along with other resources, so our movement can be the strongest anti-racist force in our country.
I have learned so much, I hope you will too, so that together we can fight these evils.
In solidarity,
Signed, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Leader of the Labour Party
Jeremy Corbyn
Leader of the Labour Party'
Mike,
ReplyDeleteI don't see what the JLM or anyone has a problem with Corbyn's letter except...
The evidence is clear enough. The worst cases of antisemitism in our party have included Holocaust denial, crude Jewish-banker stereotypes, conspiracy theories blaming Israel for 9/11 or every war on the Rothschild family, and even one member who appeared to believe that Hitler had been misunderstood.
Why is is wrong to ask how many people died during the holocaust? I have read figures from several hundred thousand to over 9 million people who died during the Jewish holocaust. There are two photographs taken at Auschwitz one says 4 million people suffered and died while another after a revision says about 1 ½ million died. Why not talk about other holocausts that America, Britain and Russia allowed to happen in WW2. Why wont the IHRA be all inclusive and remember the forgotten holocausts of WW2?
What is the difference with a 17 yr old Jew being tortured and starved to death by Nazi's to a 17yr old probably drafted German kid being starved and tortured to death in Eisenhower's death camps? When the Allied forces and the Russians rounded up whoever they wanted at the end of WW2 and herded them to Eisenhower death camps or Russian gulags to die in almost the same conditions and numbers who died in Nazi death camps;Were they any better than the Nazi's? Hitler wasn't misunderstood he simply misunderstood the power of the banking cartels. The banks wanted their money back. If Hitler had played ball and paid the banks, Europe wouldn't be in the mess it is today.
The sterotype Jewish-banker isn't that far from the the truth. Lucky Luciano banked with Meyer Lanksey for a simple reason throughout history Jews have been noted for being good with money. The fact some of the banking cartels are Jewish is a smoke screen. What all western banking cartel families have in common is they are all Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jewish. There are American Christian and European Royalty Zionists. They also walk the corridors of power in Westminster, Washington, Brussels, Tele Avi and the house of Saud. And today they are all trying to consolidate their control over the western world.
Not only did Israel have prior knowledge of 9/11 so did the American, British and Saudi governments. Who exactly were the dancing Israelis and why did Oded Ellener say on Israeli television...
“And at that point we were taken for another round of questioning. This time related to us allegedly being members of Mossad. The fact of the matter is, we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.”
What event Mike? Why were the Bin Laden family evacuated as CBS reported....
Most of bin Laden's relatives were attending high school and college. The young members of the bin Laden family were driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret place in Texas and then to Washington, The Times reported Sunday. Throw into the mix the British Governments propaganda media machine the BBC who claimed Salomon Brothers had collapsed 20mins before it was pulled (glitch in the matrix?)
To quote Corbyn...I have learned so much, I hope you will too, so that together we can fight these evils, In solidarity,
The difference is that it was Nazi policy to exterminate every single Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe as in the Final Solution at the Wansee Conference in January 1942.
DeleteAt the very least Frankie is a Holocaust relativiser at worst a possible denier. But there again he is a fan of Marine Le Pen; anti-abortion rights, anti-feminist, climate change denier and a 9/11 truther. Beneath contempt.
Mike
ReplyDeleteThe promises are good. Let us hope for some outcomes
Frankie might have ideas which we think off the wall but he is very valuable contributor here, is his own man and you only speak for yourself Barry when you say he is beneath contempt. He asks more questions than asserts positions.
DeleteThe Russians suffered much worse than the Jews - the Holocaust against Soviet POWs - 3.5 million estimated to have perished as a result of mass murder, starvation, exposure: 30 million of a population killed during the War in the East - yet Soviet expansionism cannot be excused on those grounds. The Soviets had more grounds to steal land than the Zionists given they sustained a bigger loss.
Anthony,
ReplyDeleteWell said!
“Expansionist nationalism and its concomitant crimes against humanity is always irredeemably evil.”
True when Belgium invaded the Congo.
True when England invaded Ireland, etc.
True when Germany invaded Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.
True when USA invaded Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc.
And true when Israel invades and steals land from Palestine & Syria.
Only ass kissing fools or worse would hold Israel to another standard.
As such I tire of the usual analysis that conflates Anti-Semitism with Anti-Zionism, as if Jewish people have a monopoly on suffering.
Sure, as you said there may be overlap as in a Venn Diagram.
But as you say one doesn’t necessarily equal the other.
Too often then this is just a slanderous PR game...
Pushed by racist right-wing Israelis and their amen corners.
Dr.Yeshayahu Liebowitz had a name for these people: “Judeo Nazis.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshayahu_Leibowitz
Because rightwing is rightwing is rightwing.
Now who would call Dr. Liebowitz a Jew-hating-Jew?
It's always instructive to see.
And I bet it won't be Frankie!
Eoghan - my view of it is that the IRHA PR scam should have no standing when it cones to these matters. It is entitled to remember the victims of the Holocaust but it has no right to use that remembrance as cover for a brutal regime fuelled by the same expansionism that drove the people behind the Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteBarry,
ReplyDeleteAt the very least Frankie is a Holocaust relativiser at worst a possible denier. But there again he is a fan of Marine Le Pen; anti-abortion rights, anti-feminist, climate change denier and a 9/11 truther. Beneath contempt.
Again Barry, I am nothing more or less than a Rockabilly from Ardoyne who opted out of society in 1993. I didn't put the plaques up that says 4 million people suffered and died while another after a revision says about 1 ½ million died. Doesn't that make whoever revised the deaths down at Auschwitz a reviser too? Or are they possible deniers? All I asked about the death camps was, once you take party politics and ideologies out of it, to me they read exactly the same, man's in humanity to man. You can play a numbers game but I think Anthony answered that Q...
A few weeks back Barry when you again brought up about me giving Marine le Pen my vote, I asked my oldest daughter (who is Jewish) does she think Macron will get a 2nd term. She said no, she believes Marine will get in. If she had been elected, the Zionist plan of having a United State of Europe would be a dead horse. I hope she gets in, she will let France decide to Frexit or not. Macron is stool pigeon like George Bush jr was, Blair is and our very own, he is just taking orders..
I am not anti-abortion. I just refuse to accept all the pro life-it is a woman's body etc arguments. Some make no sense and even less provision for what men think. I will ask you again Barry, when you researched your paper on the 8th, how many men did you talk to about abortion? I said before, I asked one woman to have an abortion, which I regret asking her. Everytime I think about that conversation the only answer I can give myself is “Frankie, that was a very bad call.” The other woman I talked her out of not aborting, today my mutt is 18. It is not always about what women think.
The fact you hold women like Jess Phillips in high esteem is not my problem. The woman is a muppet a complete fool who has little respect for men's issues (we both know the famous clip of her joking about men's prostate cancer, men's suicide rates etc). Dr Joanna Williams and Dr Anne McCloskey to name but two women get my vote. Fearless Jess will never have it.
I don't deny the climate changes Barry. It has been changing since day 1 and will continue to change. It changes mostly to the activity of the sun and the odd slam dunk by a meteorite. If you or anyone want me to buy into the latest nonsense that the current bunch of eco warriors have who are trying to brow beat me into buying their arguments. It is not happening. The people who fund the IPCC and pay non scientist's to write their propaganda reports are the same energy companies who suck the oil and gas from this rock and turn some of it into plastic!!!!!
9/11..The truth is out there. What is not happening is it being discussed on MSN. Am I to discount the FDNY, people who escaped WTC before they came down, the first news reports of eye witnesses? The put options on American days before, Larry Silverstein changing the insurance policy shortly before to include getting hit by hijacked planes or the PNAC document, why certain people were told not to come in/fly that day, why some of the hijackers named are still alive, how a passport was found intact while everything else around it was pulverised? The list is endless. The official narrative of 9/11 is like the Warren Commission, Widgery, Hillsbrough simply wank ...to me 9/11 is almost a carbon copy of Operation Northwood.
Heads up Barry, if after reading what I wrote you feel the urge to reply with “More Gobbles whatever and a women hater” and all the rest. Don't.. Save your energy and you will reduce your carbon foot print by not increasing your digital one. All I am doing is what you told me you endorse...
Freedom of artistic expression and intellectual inquiry is a universal right to be defended as such.
Frankie
DeleteGood to hear your analysis on France and Le Pen. Here are your neighbours - Is this Diversity? Is this Multi-culturalism?
https://twitter.com/AnnaKnig16/status/1175099895692320769
This is Germany. Parts of France are like this too. It wil be Ireland very soon. And many other countries in Europe. The fake left are proxy warriors for the oligarchs. They fail to see (the innocent ones at least) that they are being used and what the real agenda is.
Go try and have a Christian celebration where these gentlemen hail frrom. You'll see how far 'diversity' will get you then. Multi-culturalism is nothing but the destruction of europe. The sooner Le Pen gets in the better. The sooner Brexit, Itexit Grexit amd Frexit happens the better. The sooner the psychopaths who rule from Brussels get the chop the better. Embarassingly, I think the Irish will be the only country crying over the EU's demise. We'd rather be slaves and a minority in our own country than have to make our own way in the world and stick up for our homeland and children.
What do you think the German woman in the above clip makes of diversity, multi-culturalism and equality? Do you think she feels safe? How is her 'bodily autonomy'? Do you think the 'bodily autonomy' of European women is under threat in places like Sweden and where this lady is from? Do you think the girls feel safe walking the streets now? Any chance of a debate on this or is it just going to be the usual you're a fascist/Nazi/ far-right bigot nonsense.
My thesis and articles on Irish abortion politics were academic analyses of the abortion debate; its history; its actors and comparative perspecti ves. It drew on feminist, social movements, philosophical and legal theories. I wrote in in a political science department and so it was by its nature written from theoretical perspectives. Had the project entailed research into men's (and women's) experiences; it would probably have had to be catrried under the auspices of a Health Studies institute.
ReplyDeleteI am pro-choice because I believe in its foundational principle of "property in one's person" which means the state has no business interfering in the biology and reproductive funnctions of women; likewise this principle forbids the enslavement, torture or any other forms of premeditated physical punishment.
Of course men should always be involved in their partner's journmey through pregnancy and childbirth but the woman has the ultimate right to autonomy throughout it.
There was no evidence of Jess Phillips MP laughing at or otherwise deriding men's experiences of mental ill-health and prostrate cancer on those video clips sourced, I note from right-wing English nationalists, namely UKIP and Philip Davies MP whose hostility to feminmism is well known.
I see no reason for the bodily autonomy of the woman to be compromised by the man. Much like assisted dying - partners can have a view and an input but no control
DeleteBarry,
ReplyDeleteAnswer the questions and no spin...(play the ball, I answer your questions)
Do you consider whoever changed the figures at Auschwitz 'revisers or 'deniers?''
Do you agree with me that American Gov. have not come clean about 9/11 and do you think the points I have raised are fake news?
Do you think life starts at conception?
Now let's talk about your poster girl.... A while back Spiked online carried a piece about fearless Jess called “Who’s really being silenced in the gender debate?” by Dan Bell, it is a good read, part reads like this
By Sunday, Phillips was presented across the media as the latest embattled female politician bravely fighting to be heard against a culture overwhelmingly hostile to outspoken women. Most of these reports barely even mentioned the sneering veto she’d imposed on men’s voices, which had caused the uproar in the first place
She very recently stood up in Westminster and asked MP's to think about what they are saying for fear of inciting violence. Didn't fearless say she would knife her own party leader in the front and not the back. Isn't that inciting violence? She also talks lots about democracy, respecting her constituents choices and all the rest. Fearless is the current MP for Yardley.... open this link, scroll down until you see Yardley and see for yourself the Brexit vote in her part of the world she represents...Why doesn't she respect the wishes what the people who elected her want?
In a liberal representative democracy like the UK, it is the function of MPs pace Edmund Burke to deliberate on and decide on matters of public interest and welfare and not to be a mere delegate for their constituents. Jess actually voted to trigger Article 50 thus recognising the will of the majority of her constituents; what there is not a mandate for is a no-deal Brexit and it is the fault of the executive not parliament that Brexit has not been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Hence the need to return to the electorate for a People's Vote.
ReplyDeleteYes the "stab in the front" comment was very unfortunate and she should not have used such language. But this does not detract from the reality that women MPs regulary receive rape and death threats meaning that they have to carry personal alarms.
Estimates for how many died at Auschwitz vary but there is no disagreement among historians that 6m European Jews died in the Shoah/Holocaust.
Potential human life may begin at conception but viable human life only begins with the development of a central nervous system. People are entitled to believe that life starts at conception but are not entitled that society be bound by that belief.
Barry,
ReplyDeletewhat there is not a mandate for is a no-deal Brexit and it is the fault of the executive not parliament that Brexit has not been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Hence the need to return to the electorate for a People's Vote.
Let's keep it real...if 17.4 million people after a democratic vote had decided to remain, you would the first first to champion the result. The only reasons why it (Brexit) hasn't kicked in yet is more to do with banks and large globalist corporations trying to salvage their ill gotten gains from the UK and very few gave the six counties a 2nd thought when voting for/against Brexit..in the comment section on the Thomas Crook piece Niall explained that the farmers are now shitting themselves because they will miss out on the EU handouts, here in 2016 Paddy Mooney and Larry Hughes made the same points..And I said the same thing in 2017 that the farmers who fund the big two parties in the six counties will wake up an watch their neighbours across the British border getting the handouts while they wont..
What it will mean in the short/medium term is a border poll and everyone will vote for their pockets...(unless they fudge the border)..
Estimates for how many died at Auschwitz vary but there is no disagreement among historians that 6m European Jews died in the Shoah/Holocaust.
I asked you not to spin..Again are the people who changed the figures at Auschwitz revisionists or deniers..You made the claim I am both...
The nervous system is complete in a human embryo after 2weeks..Which is why several weeks ago the scientists in China who were fooling around with making a human-monkey chimera had to destroy the embryo...