A post of two halves – although linked by the fact both Greenstein and Jones are intervening into recent debates about the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
Tony Greenstein’s arguments against taking the concerns of Alex Chalmers seriously are very weak. His piece opens:
It is the story of how malevolent people, like Oxford University’s upper class fool, one Alex Chalmers, deliberately confuse support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism, with anti-Semitism.
It should be possible for Greenstein to acknowledge that anti-Zionism can be a vector for antisemitism, just as many campaigners against Islamism, including ex-Muslims highly critical of Islam, are rightly wary of racists or anti-Muslim bigots.
He invokes early Jewish attitudes to Zionism, while glossing over the events (not just the Holocaust, but the long-term of existence of Israel, and the emigration of so many MENA Jews to the new state) which made Zionism a far more mainstream position.
I can understand why he would want to uncouple antisemitism from anti-Zionism, and assert the validity of his position as a Jewish anti-Zionist. But this is not a good argument:
The idea that opposition to Zionism is anti-Semitism is to condemn the Jews who died in the holocaust as anti-Semites. It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews were opposed to Zionism. The majority party of the Polish Jews was the Bund. In Warsaw, in the last free elections, it took 61% of the vote and gained 17 out of the 20 Jewish Council seats, compared to one for the Zionists. It is to blame the Jews who died in the holocaust for their own deaths.
He then tries to belittle antisemitism by comparing it with anti-Muslim bigotry, which he insists is the real problem. It’s not a competition, and data may well be less complete for anti-Muslim attacks, but it would seem that, taking their respective numbers into account, Jews are more likely to be the victims of hate crimes than Muslims.
I share some of Owen Jones’ concerns about the Government’s proposed legislation on boycotts (although commenters made some strong counter-arguments in response to my recent post). But I paused when I got to the concluding section. Here’s the first of two relevant paragraphs:
Campaigners against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land are urging similar measures, but these proposals will affect those campaigns too. Leicester city council, for instance, boycotts goods made in illegal Israeli settlements but would be banned from doing so. The government argues such boycotts promote antisemitism. If that were true, we would all be gravely concerned. Antisemitism is real, it is monstrous, and it has to be rooted out and eliminated, in its overt or subtle forms, whether it emerges on right or left. The Palestinian justice movement must remorselessly drive out every last vestige of antisemitism.
Owen Jones strongly condemns antisemitism and says the Palestinian justice movement must disown it. But he avoids engaging meaningfully with the idea that the boycott movement could intersect with antisemitism through that ‘If … we would’ formula.
He goes on:
But here it is also worth listening to Barnaby Raine from Jewish Students for Justice in Palestine. “We have to be so, so clear about Israel and Jews being separate,” he says, decrying those who suggest otherwise, ranging from Islamist fundamentalists to the far right to hardline defenders of Israeli government policies.
I think one problem here is simply the use of the word Israel. There are all kinds of things, of course, to be said about the relationship between Israel and Jews. I’m sure it’s not just anti-Zionist Jews who don’t feel Netanyahu speaks for them, for example.
But Raine’s comment implies a perspective which is certainly shared by many BDS supporters – that the problem isn’t with Israel’s settlements, occupation or other specific policies but with Israel’s very existence. I infer Raine feels no connection to Israel – as with Greenstein, fair enough – but some Jews do, and their unwillingness to disown a relationship, even quite an uneasy relationship, may lead them to be targeted with racially charged forms of anti-zionist discourse, however liberal their views. Here’s an example, taken from that OULC story, of how anti-Zionist views may be expressed in an unambiguously antisemitic way:
One member stated specifically that it was ‘not anti-Semitic’ to allege the existence of a ‘New York – Tel Aviv axis’ that rigs elections, and said that ‘we should be aware of the influence wielded over elections by high net-worth Jewish individuals’.
(There are also specific antisemitic tropes which are only targeted at Jewish anti-Zionists, such as perversely casting them as secret agents for Israel, ‘Sayanim’.)
Here’s another (alleged) problem at the OULC.
One member, then on committee, stated that all Jews should be expected to publicly denounce Zionism and the state of Israel, and that we should not associate with any Jew who fails to do so.
This is like expecting Muslims to sign a pledge of good behaviour, and is yet another reminder that settlement goods are, for some, just the thin end of the wedge. Make your case for BDS – or just a boycott of settlement goods – not being antisemitic, but, at the very least, acknowledge that there is some intersection between boycotts and antisemitism.
