Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism Cosmopolitan Reflections
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism Cosmopolitan Reflections David Hirsh Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK The Working Papers Series is intended to initiate discussion, debate and discourse on a wide variety of issues as it pertains to the analysis of antisemitism, and to further the study of this subject matter. Please feel free to submit papers to the ISGAP working paper series. Contact the ISGAP Coordinator or the Editor of the Working Paper Series, Charles Asher Small. Working Paper Hirsh 2007 ISSN: 1940-610X © Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy ISGAP 165 East 56th Street, Second floor New York, NY 10022 United States Office Telephone: 212-230-1840 www.isgap.org ABSTRACT This paper aims to disentangle the difficult relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. On one side, antisemitism appears as a pressing contemporary problem, intimately connected to an intensification of hostility to Israel. Opposing accounts downplay the fact of antisemitism and tend to treat the charge as an instrumental attempt to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. I address the central relationship both conceptually and through a number of empirical case studies which lie in the disputed territory between criticism and demonization. The paper focuses on current debates in the British public sphere and in particular on the campaign to boycott Israeli academia. Sociologically the paper seeks to develop a cosmopolitan framework to confront the methodological nationalism of both Zionism and anti-Zionism. It does not assume that exaggerated hostility to Israel is caused by underlying antisemitism but it explores the possibility that antisemitism may be an effect even of some antiracist forms of anti- Zionism. CONTENTS Acknowledgments 4 Introduction 5 Part I Antisemitism and criticism of Israel: conceptual 14 considerations i The many headed hydra: an ahistorical model 14 ii The tropes of anti-Zionism 16 iii A simple picture of oppressed and oppressors 32 Part II Antisemitism and criticism of Israel: discourse 34 i Denying antisemitism: ‘Intensified criticism’ of Israel and 34 the Zionist manufacture of the antisemitism charge ii Antisemitic themes mirrored in anti-Zionist text 47 iii The diminishing caution over the expression of antisemitism 59 Part III Concept and discourse become concrete exclusion: Boycott 68 i A chronology of the trade union campaign for a boycott of Israel 68 ii A critical examination of the debate over an academic boycott of Israel 73 iii Sporting and Cultural Boycott 88 Conclusion 91 Bibliography 98 Websites 109 Numbered Images 109 Reports 110 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to Alexandra, Eddie and Dora, who I love. Huge gratitude to Robert Fine, who has had a profound influence on me and who always has time for me. The conceptual frame of this work, as well as many of the more detailed analyses, ideas and formulations, have emerged from countless conversations with Robert. There is nothing good in this work which is not in some sense the product of our collaboration. Particular thanks go also to Jane Ashworth and to Jon Pike, without whose clarity of thought and political talents there might now have been in place an exclusion of Israeli scholars from UK campuses. I have relied on them and they have always delivered. Thank you to everybody else who has been supportive, inspiring and helpful; some profoundly, some hugely, some daily and some in passing. All are appreciated Introduction The research question1 Most accounts which understand antisemitism to be a pressing or increasing phenomenon in contemporary Europe rely on the premise that this is connected to a rise in anti-Zionism. Theorists of a ‘new antisemitism’ often understand anti-Zionism to be a new form of appearance of an underlying antisemitism. On the other side, skeptics understand antiracist anti-Zionism to be entirely distinct from antisemitism and they often understand efforts to bring the two phenomena together as a political discourse intended to de-legitimize criticism of Israeli policy. The project of this work is to investigate the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, since understanding this central relationship is an important part of understanding contemporary antisemitism. The hypothesis that this work takes seriously is the suggestion that, if an anti-Zionist worldview becomes widespread, then one likely outcome is the emergence of openly antisemitic movements. The proposition is not that anti-Zionism is motivated by antisemitism; rather that anti-Zionism, which does not start as antisemitism, normalizes hostility to Israel and then to Jews. It is this hostility to Israel and then to Jews, a hostility which gains some of its strength from justified anger with Israeli human rights abuses, that is on the verge of becoming something which many people now find understandable, even respectable. It is moving into the mainstream. An understanding of the rhetoric and practice of antiracist anti-Zionism as a form of appearance of a timeless antisemitism tends to focus attention on motivation. Frank Furedi makes the same observation: Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal is one of those who argue that many critics of Israel are motivated by an anti-Semitic impulse. However, he acknowledges that it is difficult to demonstrate, convincingly, that someone is anti-Semitic. ‘[There] aren’t many anti-Semites today who will actually come out with it and say “I hate Jews”’, he notes. Therefore, ‘spotting an anti-Semite requires forensic skills, interpretive wits, and moral judgement’ (Furedi 2007) But even with such skills, wits and judgment, we cannot know what goes on inside the minds of social actors – neither the conscious mind nor the unconscious. All we can do is relate seriously to what people say, not to what we think they might mean or to what we think may be their true underlying motivation. This approach does not seek to denounce anti-Zionists as antisemitic but it does sound a warning. If some people are treating Israel as though it were demonic, if they are singling out the Jewish state for unique hostility and if they are denouncing ‘Zionists’ as Nazis or racists or identifying them with apartheid, then in doing so, they may be playing with the fire of antisemitism. The danger is that antiracist anti-Zionism is creating commonsense discourses which construct antisemitism as thinkable and possible. There are some people who are prepared to experiment openly with antisemitic ways of expressing themselves and are nonetheless accepted as legitimate by some antiracist organizations and individuals (Hirsh 2006j; Hirsh 2007).2 At the moment this form of antisemitism is generally played out at the level of discourse and politics, not on the streets. And those who wish for antisemitism to remain unthinkable are often faced with a charge of interfering with freedom of thought. What is more to the point, however, is the struggle 1 David Hirsh is a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been centrally involved in the anti-boycott campaign within the British academic trade unions and he is the founding editor of the Engage website (www.EngageOnline.org.uk), an anti-boycott campaign and an antiracist campaign against antisemitism. This positioning facilitates participant observation and action research by a key actor in these debates. 2 I will argue, for example, that the Jazz musician and activist, Gilad Atzmon, is a case in point. 6 over which notions become hegemonic or commonsense and which remain marginal. Because there is a relationship between discourse and violence, there remains a possibility that discursive antisemitism may manifest itself in more concrete political movements and that these may constitute an increased physical threat to ‘Zionists’, especially Jews and Jewish communities, around the world. Some who theorize the connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism (e.g. Matas 2005, Foxman 2004), argue that anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic on the basis that it denies national self-determination to Jews whilst recognizing a right of national self- determination for all other nations. Most writers who investigate the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, however, understand the relationship in more fluid and complex ways. Some argue there is often a level of ‘enthusiasm’ present in criticism of Israel which is not apparent in criticism of other similarly serious human rights abusing states and that this can only be explained by factors external to the critique. For instance, Abram de Swaan (2004:1), maintains that this over-enthusiasm functions as …a vent for righteous indignation that brings some relief from the still-burning shame of the memory of the Shoah, it employs facile equations reducing the Jewish State to the last bastion of colonialism and thereby conceals the true issues underlying this conflict. Moishe Postone (2006) understands this ‘singling out’ of Israel to be a result of a particular kind of rupture in anti-hegemonic social movements, a shift from a positive politics of social transformation to a negative politics of resistance. Antisemitism… can appear to be antihegemonic. This is the reason why a century ago August Bebel, the German Social Democratic leader, characterized it as the socialism of fools. Given its subsequent development, it could also have been called the anti- imperialism of fools. As a fetishized form of oppositional consciousness, it is particularly dangerous because it appears to be antihegemonic, the expression of a movement of the little people against an intangible, global form of domination. It is as a fetishized, profoundly reactionary form of anti-capitalism that I would like to begin discussing the recent surge of modern antisemitism in the Arab World. It is a serious mistake to view this surge of antisemitism only as a response to the United States and Israel. This empiricistic reduction would be akin to explaining Nazi antisemitism simply as a reaction to the Treaty of Versailles.