Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

Anti‐Zionism and Antisemitism: Cosmopolitan Reflections David Hirsh* INTRODUCTION 1. The research question Most accounts that understand antisemitism to be a pressing or increasing phenom‐ enon 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, sceptics understand antiracist anti‐Zionism to be entirely distinct from antisemitism and they often understand efforts to bring the two phenomena together as a political dis‐ course intended to delegitimize criticism of Israeli policy. The project of this work is to investigate the relationship between antisemitism and anti‐Zionism, since under‐ standing 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 world view 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 anti‐ semitism, 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 that many people now find understandable, even respectable. It is moving into the main‐ stream. 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 motiva‐ tion. 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 antisemitic impulse. However, he acknowl‐ edges that it is difficult to demonstrate, convincingly, that someone is antisemitic. * 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 is the founding editor of the Engage website (http://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. 57 58 DAVID HIRSH ‘[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 that 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 2006i; Hirsh 2007).1 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 unthink‐ able are often faced with a charge of interfering with freedom of thought. What is more to the point, however, is the struggle 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 while 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. 1 I will argue, for example, that the jazz musician and activist Gilad Atzmon is a case in point. REFLECTIONS ON ANTI‐ZIONISM AND ANTISEMITISM 59 Antisemitism can appear to be anti‐hegemonic. This is the reason why a century ago August Bebel, the German Social Democratic leader, characterized it as the socialism of ools. Given its subsequent development, it could also have been called the anti‐imperialism of fools. As a fetishized form of oppositional con‐ sciousness, it is particularly dangerous because it appears to be anti‐hegemonic, 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 anti‐ semitism only as a response to the United States and Israel. This empiricist reduc‐ tion would be akin to explaining Nazi antisemitism simply as a reaction to the Treaty of Versailles. While American and Israeli policies have doubtlessly con‐ tributed to the rise of this new wave of antisemitism, the United States and Israel occupy subject positions in the ideology that go far beyond their actual empirical roles. Those positions, I would argue, must also be understood with reference to the massive historical transformations since the early 1970s, to the transition from Fordism to post‐Fordism. The central relationship between anti‐Zionism and antisemitism may be thought of either as one of cause (underlying antisemitism motivates a disproportionate response to Israel) or as one of effect (a disproportionate response to Israel leads to antisemitic ways of thinking or to antisemitic exclusions of ‘Zionists’). Postone points to the willingness of antiracist anti‐Zionists to pursue political alliances with antisemitic movements and to turn a blind eye to the more open antisemitism of some main‐ stream Arab and Islamic forms of anti‐Zionism. 2. The outline of the paper 2 In this working paper. of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), I am interested in pursuing this more fluid line of thought. What follows will be a qualitative analysis of anti‐Zionist discourse that suggests ways we might think through the relationship between hostility to Israel and anti‐ semitism and thus help untangle this particular knot. Discourses of anti‐Zionism appear in a number of different forms: academic writing, political speeches and essays, campaigning literature, public debates, newspaper columns and reports, letters pages, blogs and websites. It is a disparate and fragmented discourse. Some of the important actors straddle the political and academic spheres, and academic study tends also to constitute political intervention. This throws up complex methodological issues. The scholarly study of contemporary antisemitism is a particularly contested field. First, there is a tendency for the distinction between primary and secondary research material to be blurred. An academic treatise is also, in Foucauldian terms, a ‘monument’ to an episteme and can function as a political intervention (Foucault 1982). It may itself be understood as an example of discursive antisemitism or an 2 This is a working paper rather than a book or a journal article. It is intended to outline my arguments and to provide an extended and detailed analysis of a large amount of significant and relevant material analysis in the public domain. This will facilitate theoretical discussion and will also allow researchers access to a large amount of relevant material. 60 DAVID HIRSH example of a spurious charge of antisemitism made to delegitimize criticism of Israel. Second, the official institutional framework also constitutes 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) was not only a report but also an attempt, in which academic scholars were partici‐ pants, to institutionalize as official a particular view of antisemitism. The legitimacy of this official framework was angrily rejected by scholars holding opposing views. 3 The European Union Working Definition of Antisemitism. is similarly contested by scholars in the field, some of whom have been actively involved in the work of drafting the definition.

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