Let’s be honest about Britain’s obsession with “anti-Semitism”

Tony Greenstein The Electronic Intifada 26 June 2019

Britain’s Labour Party lost support among Jewish voters before Jeremy Corbyn became its leader. (Ben Cawthra/Sipa USA/Newscom) 

Cries of “anti-Semitism” are the charges every supporter of the Palestinians has to face. I doubt that there is a single Palestine solidarity activist who hasn’t been accused of anti-Semitism.

The rationale for these accusations include the suggestion that we are operating “double standards” in singling out Israel for criticism. We are alleged to criticize Israel because it is a “Jewish” state. Israel is the “targeted collective Jew among the nations,” Irwin Cotler, a former government minister in Canada, has written.

Today, a different, more subtle argument is developing: Israel and Zionism are an integral part of Jewish identity. That is why opposition to Zionism and Israel is automatically anti-Semitic.

This argument was tested earlier this decade in an employment tribunal which assessed allegations that Britain’s University and College Union was anti-Semitic because it supports BDS – the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Ronnie Fraser, the pro-Israel campaigner who had taken legal action against the union, argued that Zionism was an integral part of Jewish identity.

That argument was rejected by the tribunal’s judges in 2013. The tribunal concluded that “a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel” was “not intrinsically a part of Jewishness.”

Another variant of this argument is to suggest that as Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, opposition to it must be anti-Semitic. Since there are Islamic and Christian states, opposition to Israel cannot be other than anti-Semitic. However this is to obscure the fact that Israel is unique because it is the only ethno-religious state in the world.

Inherently racist

Defining ethnicity and nationality in terms of religion means a state will be inherently racist.

Being Jewish in Israel is not a religious but a racial identity. Jews have privileges that are not accorded to non-Jews.

As a Jew in Israel, you have access to 93 percent of “national” land controlled or owned by the Jewish National Fund. Imagine that in Britain, which is nominally a Christian state, I was unable to rent a flat because it was Christian national land.

How would that not be anti-Semitic?

The Islamic states of the Middle East are certainly backward and regressive political formations. However they do not systematically grant Muslims special privileges.

On the contrary, the Islamic nature of the Iranian or Saudi states operates to legitimize the oppression and persecution of Muslims. Arguably Jews in Iran are better off than Muslims.

The French Revolution, which ushered in the emancipation of the Jews, also introduced the separation of religion from the state. This is why Zionism was based on a rejection of emancipation which it saw as leading to the “assimilation” of Jews to non-Jews.

When France’s Constituent Assembly convened in September 1789 to discuss the Jewish question, the civil liberties advocate Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre declared that “Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.”

Anti-Semitism was widespread in the ethno-religious and nationalist Christian states of Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. These states proved receptive to the Nazis.

The savagery of the Holocaust in Romania was too much even for Hans Frank, a leading Nazi lawyer. He contended that some of the massacres committed in Romania were much worse than Nazi violence in Germany, where “we use the art of surgery, not of butchery.”

In Romania, the fascist Iron Guard was also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Christianity was an essential part of Hungary’s fascist Iron Cross. And Slovakia’s Hlinka Guard – which deported Jews to Auschwitz – was led by a Catholic priest, Jozef Tiso.

Moral panic

The British political establishment, including much of the leadership of the Labour Party, has been in the grip of a form of mass hysteria, a moral panic about anti-Semitism. The mere denial of the existence of anti-Semitism is proof that you are an anti-Semite.

The situation resembles that other example of mass hysteria, the Salem witch trials. The historian Elizabeth Reis writes about the dilemmas that faced the women in these trials: “During examinations, accused women were damned if they did and damned if they did not. If they confessed to witchcraft charges, their admissions would prove the cases against them; if they denied the charges, their very intractability, construed as the refusal to admit to sin more generally, might mark them as sinners and hence allies of the devil.”

What is this “anti-Semitism” that is so all-pervasive? In many respects, it resembles the allegations of being sympathetic toward communism made in the West during the Cold War.

Among the theoreticians of this “new anti-communism” is Jonathan Freedland, a columnist with The Guardian. In 2016, he argued that “93 percent [of British Jews] who told a 2015 survey that Israel forms some part of their identity as Jews can take criticism of Israeli governments and of Israeli policy” but not anti-Zionism.

It should be noted that Freedland was concealing the full picture. The same survey asked British Jews whether they identified as Zionists – 59 percent said “yes” and 31 percent said “no.” The proportion identifying themselves as Zionist dropped by 13 percent since a previous survey was conducted in 2010.

Unsustainable

A similar claim was made earlier this year by Mike Katz, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement – a pro-Israel lobby group. Katz was referring to a comment by the Labour lawmaker Richard Burgon who described Zionism as “the enemy of peace.”

The comment had been made at a 2014 meeting but a video of Burgon’s speech was only published this April. When the video was circulated online, Katz stated that Zionism is “a core part of their [British Jews’] identity.”

In other words, criticism of Zionism, the ideology and the movement, as opposed to the government of Israel, is intrinsically anti-Semitic because you are attacking the identity of most Jews. This argument is unsustainable on a number of levels.

First, the identity of Jews has changed repeatedly.

Before World War II, most Jews were anti-Zionist. To say that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism is to say that Polish Jews, 90 percent of whom died in the war, were anti-Semitic on the basis that – in Warsaw – they voted overwhelmingly during 1938 elections for the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund.

Secondly, the reasons for the change in Jewish attitudes to Zionism is primarily a product of socio-economic changes which has driven them to the right.

And thirdly, the argument that it is racist to criticize or oppose a group’s identity is flawed and illogical. It has extremely reactionary implications.

When I was a child I used to visit relatives in London’s East End. We would go to eat in Bloom’s, the Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel. We would have to queue to get a place at lunchtime.

In 1996 Bloom’s closed, the reason being that the Jews had moved out of the East End to be replaced by Bengalis and other immigrant communities.

The Jews of the East End have migrated to the London suburb of Golders Green and elsewhere.

During the first half of the 20th century, Britain’s Jews were predominantly working class and prominent in the trade unions. When Phil Piratin, England’s only Communist Party member of parliament, won the constituency of Mile End in East London during a 1945 election, it is estimated that half of his vote came from Jews.

Jews formed an identifiable part of Britain’s working class and its most politically conscious part. Jews led the anti-fascist movement. At one time there were more than 30 Jewish trade unions.

Moving rightwards

Today, there is no Jewish working class. Jews have climbed the socio-economic ladder and – in many cases – moved rightwards politically. When it is argued that “anti-Semitism” under current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has led to the loss of Jewish support for the party, that is simply untrue.

According to a poll in April 2015, 69 percent of Jews were planning to vote Conservative in the following month’s general election and only 22 percent for Labour. That was despite the fact that Labour was then led by Ed Miliband, its first Jewish leader.

William Rubinstein, a historian, wrote in the 1980s about “the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status.” That rise “has led to the near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.”

As the Jews changed, so too did anti-Semitism. State-sponsored anti-Semitism disappeared in Britain to be replaced by racism against Black and Asian people.

Rubinstein’s conclusion was that the change in Jews’ socio-economic position “has rendered obsolete (and rarely heard) the type of anti-Semitism which has its basis in fears of the swamping of the native population.” It has made “Marxism, and other radical doctrines, irrelevant to the socio-economic bases of Western Jewry, and increasingly unattractive to most Jews.”

Geoffrey Alderman, a Jewish Chronicle columnist and right-wing Zionist, wrote in a 1983 book that by 1961, “over 40 percent of Anglo-Jewry was located in the upper two social classes, whereas these categories accounted for less than 20 percent of the general population.”

Alderman shows that British Jews frequently became much more conservative than the rest of the British population.

That is illustrated by the March 1978 by-election which took place in the Ilford North area of Greater London. Labour had previously held this seat by just 778 votes. By-elections are held in Britain when a parliamentary seat becomes vacant, usually due to a death or resignation.

During the 1978 by-election Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s svengali, came to the constituency to make a blatantly racist anti-immigration speech.

One might expect that Jewish voters of all people would react against this. Not a bit of it. The Conservatives gained the seat on a swing of 6.9 percent but among Jewish voters there was a swing of 11.2 percent.

As Jews move to the right, they become more sympathetic to Zionism, British foreign policy and US imperialism. That has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

Blackmail

The argument that opposition to a group’s identity is racist is part of the poisonous legacy of identity politics which eliminates the distinction between oppressed and oppressor. That legacy would have one believe that even the powerful and privileged have an identity and their claims have equal validity to those they exploit.

In the absence of class and race, identity politics become a justification for the status quo.

Of course, it is true that racists will disguise an attack on a particular ethnic or racial group by attacking its religion.

When right-wing firebrand Robert Spencer attacks Islam as “warfare against unbelievers” or his colleague Pamela Geller writes that “the Quran is war propaganda,” then that is racism, not a critique of religion. But when someone defends Salman Rushdie because he published The Satanic Verses, that is a defense of reason against religious bigotry.

The same applies to Zionism. If someone attacks Israel because it is a Jewish state, then that is anti-Semitic. But 99 percent of cases criticism of Israel have nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

On the contrary, it is anti-Semites – from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Steve Bannon in the US – who use support for Israel to disguise their anti-Semitism.

Opposition to a particular identity is not racist.

In Afghanistan many, if not most, people consider the burka an integral part of Islam. Is it seriously suggested that it is intrinsically racist and anti-Muslim to oppose the burka, even when such opposition comes from Muslim women?

In many countries in Africa female genital mutilation is part of the identity of those living there. Is opposition to FGM racist?

There are many religious practices that are reactionary, medieval and barbaric. Opposition to them is not racist.

The same is true with the Jewish community. Although there is no doubt that most Jews in Britain are more liberal than the Jewish leaders and the Board of Deputies, there is no doubt that the majority are supporters of Zionism. It is also arguable that a majority of Jews do not realize the extent of Israeli racism and how Zionism mandates a form of apartheid.

However it is a fact that a Jewish ethno-nationalist state in Israel cannot be other than a racist apartheid state. The argument that it is anti-Semitic to oppose an identity that is itself based on support for racism is untenable.

If indeed the majority of Jews do support a Zionism that mandates the demolition of Palestinian villages such as Umm al-Hiran in order to build Jewish towns in their place, then that is clearly a racist identity. If the majority of British Jews support a state where the chief rabbi of Safed issues an edict that non-Jews cannot rent property from Jews, then how is that not racist?

The idea that opposition to religious identity is, in itself, a form of racism is a type of blackmail.

Both apartheid in South Africa and slavery in the US were justified by particular interpretations of the Bible. Was opposition to the identity of white planters or West Indian slave owners racist?

Tony Greenstein is a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the author of The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast.

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Comments

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Frank Dallas replied on

There is a simple argument which needs to be made over and over: "Christian" does not have a racial meaning; "Hindu" does not have a racial meaning; "atheist" does not have a racial meaning. Do "Jew" and "Jewish"? Racial definitions are meaningless. Genetically, they make no sense. Biology grants difference but not distinction. Some people have black skins and some white because of biology; but apartheid and the Jim Crow laws were cultural. We should refuse all racial definitions because they demean individuals. Thus, "Jew" and "Jewish" should be used to describe those who adhere to Judaism. We should reject these as racial terms because as such they are racist. If we reject these terms as racial categories there can be no rational argument that to criticise Zionism or the policies of the State of Israel is racist. Zionism is not a racial category but a cultural one. The Israeli State is a product of culture, not biology. All culture is open to criticism. It is not racist to criticise the culture a person believes in. It is racist only to attribute someone to a racial category which is then associated with negative characteristics. Judaism can be criticised just as Christianity or atheism. There is nothing racist about that. Of course, hatred of people because of their religion is vile. If anti-Semitism is hatred of people who practise Judaism, it is despicable. If it subsumes people to a racial category, as Nazism did, it is despicable. But the Zionists can't claim that "Jew" is a racial category without falling into racism themselves.

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Julian Evans replied on

Frank Dallas - a brilliant response to a brilliant article. (I hope you don't mind me copying your comment to Facebook - credited.)

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Gavin Sealey replied on

If Jewish people choose to define themselves as a racial group it has meaning for them. Since there are self-identified 'secular Jews' the term 'Jew' is not co-extensive with 'practitioner of Judaism', it denotes a heritage group whether the basis of that is genetic or cultural. Since 'race' is not a scientific definition any heritage group can be defined as a 'race'.

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Frank Dallas replied on

What is a "secular Jew"? If "Jew" has a cultural meaning, ie identifying with a set of practices and norms shared with others, that's fine. But a cultural meaning can be criticised. If I were to define myself as "bohemian" for example, no one would consider it racist to criticise bohemianism. Racism is, by definition, the attribution of individuals to a racial category. Thus when Jeremy Corbyn is accused of anti-Semitism, the accusation is that he is attributing Jews to a racial category with which he associates negative characteristics. To criticise Zionism is not to do that. It is to take issue with a political creed.

Consider this: "The Jew is a hideous distortion of the human character, something unspeakably low and repulsive...We'll breathe more easily having got rid once and for all of these people who, with furtive shame, we were obliged to treat as our fellow tribesmen..." Who wrote that? Jeremy Corbyn? Ken Livingstone? Chris Williamson? No, Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism. If you want to check the reference it's in his Zionist Writings (1973) p 167. Zionists hate all Jews who do not subscribe to Zionism. Some of the very worst examples of Jew-hating come from the Zionists. Zionists have assassinated Jews who refused to accept Zionism. Dr Ya'acov Israel de Hahn for example, who was shot and killed by Zionists as he left the synagogue in Jerusalem on June 30th 1924. Zionism is not a democratic creed. It is an ethnocratic creed founded on genetic entitlement ie "God gave Palestine to us 3,000 years ago so we can have it and no one can question us." However you look at that, it's unacceptable. It's racist and anti-democratic.

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Zinny replied on

Herzl was not the only promoter of the Zionist program for a Jewish homeland. After his death, early on during its early period of development, the effort was given to the zealot Max Nordau, the true driving spirit of modern Zionism and muscular Jewish power, such as practiced by the present colonial rulers of Palestine. Apparently, without this man's legendary speaking prowess and leading voice as a European intellectual, he helped steer Europe into racially inspired hatred, war and not least of all the horrors of eugenics. Ironically, he is regarded in Israel as a founding hero.

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invitado replied on

I was reading the article and thinking how greatly argued it was, full of sound reasonings and lots of factual information debunking the discourse of power (even if one doesn't need facts to, for instance, speak against a strong, immutable, essential concept of identity, you just need good common sense and dialectics, but the facts, by way of illustrations, are anyway welcome when they are attacking the lies of power) and then this sentence shocked me being as it is incongruent with the arguments put forward in the whole article: "If someone attacks Israel because it is a Jewish state, then that is anti-Semitic". Unless we have to forget that in the case of Israel, being Jewish is very different from, say, the UK being a Christian State (which I guess it nominally is: the Head of State is the Head of the Church). Come on, it's in the article itself (with the example of renting appartments): if the UK were a Christian State the same way Israel is a Jewish State, it would be an inherently racist, illegitimate political construction! It is precisely because Israel is (really) a Jewish State (nothing symbolic about it) that it deserves a fundamental criticism. So I don't know where that came from, to be honest (or is it my poor, non-native English skills?).

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Frank Dallas replied on

As John Kerry argued when he was US Secretary of State, Israel can't be both a "Jewish State" and democracy. A democracy has to grant all citizens equality before the law. That's why separation of powers is a good idea. The State in the USA as in France is secular. Individuals have complete freedom of belief and worship. That is how it should be. A theocracy can't be a democracy. Thus, it isn't "anti-Semitic" to criticise the Israeli State for calling itself a "Jewish State" any more than it would be Islamophobic to criticise a caliphate for not being democratic.

The fundamental question is what is meant by " Jewish". There are two possibilities: a religio-cultural grouping or a "racial" grouping. If the first definition is what the Israelis intend, then why not a "Catholic State" or an "atheist State"? Clearly, either would be discriminatory on first principles. If the second definition is what the Israelis mean, then it's racist. Zionists use the term "the Jewish people". What does that mean? Everyone who believes in Judaism? But that can be anyone in the world, unless conversion to Judaism is restricted on some spurious "ethnic" ground. People who belong to a particular culture? The the same is true: anyone in the world could become part of the culture by accepting its norms. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that there isn't a "racial" element to the term. Which is senseless. There is no "Jewish race" any more than there is a "Christian race" or an "atheist race". The Nazis believed in a "Jewish race". They were wrong. Jewish DNA is not distinct from everyone else's. Race is a social construct used to enforce domination and exploitation.

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Bernie replied on

In Israel what is meant to be Jewish is to be white & western.
Among the first victims of white settler oppression were Yemeni Jews. Put the 'Yemeni children's affair' into your search engines and you'll find that Yemeni mothers were deemed too primitive to rear their own children who were forcibly given over to white parents (even the BBC News page and Middle Easy Eye are clear on this). Yemeni Jews have also unresolved allegations of being subjected to Nazi-style human experimentation.
Then you have the experience of Black Jews. Nazis subjected so-called inferior races to sterilization to stop them reproducing. Similarly Israel subjected Black Jews to forced heavy 3-monthly doses of contraception injections. According to Forbes magazine this supressed Black Jewish reproduction by 20%. According to Israel's own media Ynet etc this could be as high as 50%.
Tony touches on the issue of neighborhoods operating white only housing policies - again explicitly applied to Black Jews. Similarly for years Israel's hospitals and Red Cross have operated a policy of dumping so-called Black blood donations at unclean.
All of this applied to Jewish people-of-colour and this is before you get to the treatment of indigenous Palestinians.
If you're in any doubt use your search engines. These facts are not in any doubt except in the pro-Zionist corporate media who bury these scandalous facts.

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Peter Hindrup replied on

' Israel can't be both a "Jewish State" and democracy. A democracy has to grant all citizens equality before the law.'

Therein lies the crux of the matter. Israel does not see all citizens as equal before the law, so Israel is not, cannot possibly be ademocracy.

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Tony Greenstein replied on

Perhaps I didn't explain myself very well when I said that '"If someone attacks Israel because it is a Jewish state, then that is anti-Semitic". What I meant was that someone doesn't criticise Israel for what it does or for the fact that it is a Jewish supremacist state, but because it is Jewish as opposed to Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or whatever. In other words it is the Jewishness of the state that attracts their ire.

There is no doubt that fascist groups like Britain's National Front didn't like Israel, not because of what it did to the Arabs, who after all are lower in the racial hierarchy then Jews, but because it was Jewish. They had no analysis of Zionism.

Yes of course in Israel being Jewish is a racial/national characteristic and not religious per se. It is a Jewish supremacist state but in its essence there is nothing particularly Jewish about Israel. I don't want to get into a question about what being Jewish actually is as this is a minefield. But let me give an example

The supporters of Apartheid characterised South Africa as a Christian State. Would we therefore attack it because of its being a Christian state? No because Christian means more than that so we should be careful to emphasise the Zionist nature of Israel whilst accept that in its own terms it is a Jewish supremacist state!

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Daniel Galil replied on

So your saying that if someone says palestinians aren't a people that isn't racist, since criticizing an Identity isn't racist?

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Frank Dallas replied on

No, if someone says the British aren't a people, that isn't racist, but it's nonsense. The British are a people because they have British citizenship. You can come from anywhere in the world or follow any religion and be British, or French,or Italian, or Swedish. Saying the Palestinians aren't a people is denying them citizenship. "Palestinian" is not a racial definition. Nor is "Arab". The former is a definition of citizenship, the latter essentially of linguistic usage. Incidentally, the term "Semitic" does not mean "Jewish". It is a linguistic term. Arabic is a Semitic language, so is Maltese.

The Zionists have long used the term "Arab" as a racial definition. Indeed, Ben-Gurion said that Palestinians are "Arabs who happen to be in Palestine." That is racist, because it subsumes all Palestinian individuals to a presumed racial category. Such a category doesn't exist. "Race" is not a biological taxonomy. Biology classifies all forms of life according to nine taxonomies, from life at the most generic to species at the most restricted. Homo sapiens is a single species. Race is not a biological category but a cultural one. It is not a difference but a distinction.

Zionism defines the Jews as a special grouping. It is hard not to see a racial overtone to this, at least. As a racial category, "Jewish" has no meaning. We must set our face against subsuming individuals to racial categories. That is what the Nazis did. That is racism.

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Daniel Galil replied on

You're absolutely right that race is a social construct. However, as a cultural idea, ethnicity is a very subjective but important part of one's identity(food, music history etc. etc.) and one group's identity is being attacked and another one is a given. What antizionists do is (rightfully) talk about attacks against palestinian identity (for instance Golda Meir saying there's no such thing as palestinians) and then take a dump on my ethnic identity. Quite frankly it's very hypocritical of them.

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Frank Dallas replied on

I agree, but the British could be classed as an ethnic group. Think of the difference between the lives of people in Bootle or Brixton or those, like our possible new PM educated at Eton and Oxbridge. There is a huge gulf, yet they could be said to belong the same ethnicity. We have to be careful not to subsume individuals to categories. People can be born into an ethnicity they reject. It was part of the ethnicity of Britain in, say, the 1950s to revile homosexuals. People changed the ethnicity. Some theorists draw too close a parallel between ethnicity and race and in common usage, people sometimes confuse the two. Race should be dropped as as serious category. There are differences between gene pools, but they are peripheral and usually of little significance. The human gene pool is what defines us. We are on species. Within that oneness we can choose the culture we favour.

As for the claim there are no Palestinians. It is the prelude to genocide. The Palestinians have been robbed of their citizenship by violence and lies. But they will retrieve it.

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Hallie Appel replied on

We are not anti-child for telling a child s/he must not hurt another child and sending them to their room. We are not anti-Semitic for objecting to what Israeli Zionists are doing to Palestine. BDS is a non-violent way of showing that.