Greens Engage

One interest Palestinians, Israelis and Jews share (whether or not they realise it) is to ensure that the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign remain marginal in the movement to end the occupation of Palestinian lands.

This is the kind of support it attracts:

“anyone who is not boycotting Israel (both economically and culturally) is supporting Ethnic Cleansing!”

After that comes a call for American tourists to boycott Scotland, pledges to boycott the United States on grounds of its support of Israel, and the wild opinion “I would NOT describe the U.S.A as a democracy”.

The claim that Israel is conducting ethnic cleansing is false, and it’s also false and vindictive to assert that opposition to the total isolation of Israel is tantamount to support of ethnic cleansing. This person is clearly disaffected to the extreme. From what I know of the SPSC, he or she fits in well there.

More SPSC:

• Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign remembers the Holocaust by blaming Zionists
• The SPSC and the Holocaust
• What is going on in the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign?
• What is it with the Scottish PSC?
• Scottish PSC and the Jerusalem Quartet
• Scottish PSC crows as Israelis are not boycotted but chased from Turkish basketball court
• What doesn’t motivate the SPSC
• Open antisemitism is challenging ‘antiracist’ anti-Zionism in the Palestine solidarity movement
• SPSC host Gilad Atzmon

Cross-posted on Engage.

After reading Gene’s reminder “Equally, boycott opponents have a right, and a duty, to express themselves as well”, I just sent this (which I’ve tweaked a bit since sending) to BBC and Cadogan Hall addresses listed on PACBI’s ‘call to action against the Jerusalem Quartet’s Proms Appearance’. I hope the links make it through their spam filter.

***

info at cadoganhall dot com
proms at bbc dot co dot uk
and the Quartet.

Hello,

I understand you are coming under pressure from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel to cancel the performance of the Jerusalem Quartet on August 29th.

Hopefully cancellation is out of the question, but given the intensity of PACBI’s campaign, I thought I should contact you with some reasons to go ahead.

If you look at the boycott, divestment and sanction calls PACBI references, it is clear that PACBI and other boycott campaigners such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign are not interested in establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Rather, they are interested in eliminating Israel. This was made clear when PACBI successfully cancelled joint simultaneous peace concerts in Israel and the West Bank. PACBI and the PSC cannot tolerate peace work and move to sabotage it.

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1479
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1547

Some Israeli political groups and human rights and peace-making NGOs draw a distinction between boycotting the occupation on the one hand, which they view as appropriate, and boycotting Israel in its entirety on the other hand, which they recognise as eliminationist. PACBI and other groups pursue the latter – the entire social, cultural and economic exclusion of Israel. PACBI seeks, indiscriminately, to break links between medical institutions and cultural ones alike. Nothing less than the total pariahdom of Israel will suffice. PACBI is attempting to end Israel’s existence.

Unlike the boycott of South Africa, to which the boycott of Israel is frequently compared, hardly any Israelis call for a boycott. Those who oppose boycott include the Israeli socialist party Hadash and peace-making NGOs such as Gisha (legal centre for freedom of movement), the Abraham Fund for coexistence, and Peace Now (for an end to the occupation). The boycott is widely seen by peace-makers on the ground as counterproductive to peace. It is inarticulate, it causes more of the difference and division which are exascerbating the conflict, and it abandons Israeli peace activists.

http://links.org.au/node/968
http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/en/peace.asp?pi=69&docid=3303&pos=0
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1715
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/a-cringe-making-boycott-letter/

Israeli authorities have attempted to disrupt Palestinian cultural and academic affairs; I and other anti-boycotters have spoken out against these politically-motivated acts, as I do here.

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/protesting-the-israeli-security-forces-disruption-of-palfest/
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1940
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1029
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/student-protester-arrested-on-israeli-campus/

Meanwhile even joint anti-war Jewish and Palestinian Israeli productions such as Plonter are prevented from staging performances in Israel’s neighbouring states; performances are held to ransom as if they could lever peace. And even joint Israeli and Palestinian Israeli relationships are the focus of PACBI’s ongoing attempts to drive a wedge into co-existence between Israel’s Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. Wafa Younis’s life was in danger after she took her youth orchestra, Strings of Freedom, to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/pacbi-drives-a-wedge-into-coexistence-inside-israel/
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/good-things/

This is the nature of the cultural boycott.

Israel is unlike South Africa in a crucial way: its neighbours have only recently formally accepted its existence, this acceptance cannot be taken for granted, and there are enduring armed movements which hope to eliminate Israel. In South Africa anti-apartheid activists sought majority rule. In Israel there is majority rule. Israel is the world’s sole Jewish state, which came into existence after the attempted genocide of the world’s Jews. Hamas, Hesbollah and other factions continually preach hatred of Jews, and call this resistance to Israel. Beyond Israel antisemitism is a regional norm.

A total boycott of Israel – the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions of which PACBI’s cultural boycott is part – assists Hamas and other eliminationists by posing an obstacle to peace-making. In short, Israel is not and never has been the sole aggressor in this conflict, nor does it act capriciously or sadistically, as you might think if you were to read only PACBI’s, or only the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s, narrative of the conflict. The settlers must leave the occupied land, reparations must be made to refugees, occupation must end, resources must be equitably distributed, infrastructure must not be used to control and subdue, and Israel’s neighbours must permit Israel to live in peace. In Israel and the occupied territories violence feeds on violence, extremism on extremism. The reason the conflict is intractable is because the causes endure, not because Israel is a brutal state.

Anti-Israel politics are frequently expressed as hostility to Jews. PACBI has been complicit in this, and seeks to diminish concerns about this.

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/hamas-threatens-to-kill-jewish-children-anywhere-in-the-world/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/04/gaza-jewish-community

Boycotters will insist otherwise, but hosting an Israeli orchestra does not amount to acceptance of the decisions and actions of the Israeli government. Nor does it amount to a solution to the conflict.

But societies in conflict are vulnerable to the prejudice, demonisation, dehumanisation and despair which haunts conflicts, and without cultural and social exchange there can be no coexistence. And yet cultural exchanges are under attack not from peace-makers but from those who wish to prolong division.

The last time the Jerusalem Quartet was targeted in the name of Palestine solidarity, the protesters were charged with a racially aggravated offence. Separately, protest leader Mick Napier of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign uses far right antisemitic materials in his arguments on behalf of Palestinians. He is part of a current of thinking that perceives anti-Jewish words and acts as a legitimate part of Palestine solidarity.

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1752

The attempt he led to disrupt the concert was met with boos from the large audience at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh.

http://www.edinburghguide.com/festival/2008/edinburghinternationalfestival/jerusalemquartet

I could think of many more reasons not to cancel the Jerusalem Quartet. Some of them would be to do with cultural exchange and some of them would be to do with art. None of them would be to do with discrediting solidarity with Palestinians under occupation. Israel is engaged in a violent occupation and ongoing settlement of Palestinian lands beyond its own borders. Israel has demonstrated it is willing to turn large parts of Gaza to rubble and make security for ordinary Gazans meaningless in the name of protecting its own security. But the cultural boycott of Israel will not help end the occupation nor the violence – if anything it will exacerbate the division. Additionally I think (unlike boycotters) that the best way for international community to end the occupation is to learn about the conflict, represent it accurately, and demand and take action which addresses the causes of the conflict. The best way for artistic bodies in Britain to reach out to Palestinians living under occupation is to invite Palestinian artists and performers to this country and pursue their travel permits with the Israeli authorities. I would be more than happy to play a part here, should such an initiative arise.

Thanks for reading and best wishes,

Mira

PS.
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/tali-shalom-ezer-won’t-do-ken-loach’s-work-for-him/
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/msu-jewish-studies-welcomes-honour-to-tutu-but-calls-on-him-to-renounce-israel-boycott/
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/boycotters-target-leonard-cohen-as-a-bhuddist-jonathan-freedland/

Riazat Butt on Comment is Free:

“Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Sudais can normally be seen leading prayers at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, but this week he’s been charming the crowds of Banbury, Blackburn and Birmingham, where he attended a conference organised by the Ahlul Hadeeth Society called Unity of God: A Message Of Peace And Security. This evening, he will speak at the East London Mosque.

Rewind some years and he was describing Jews as “monkeys and pigs and worshippers of false gods”, Christians as “cross-worshippers” and Hindus as “idol worshippers”. His views were highlighted in a BBC Panorama programme on the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). Following the broadcast, the MCB sent letters of complaint to the corporation about the accuracy and editing of the show, queries that were dealt with at length by Panorama editor Mike Robinson.

Between the earlier media reports and the programme featuring the sheikh’s comments, al-Sudais led a sermon at the East London Mosque that was attended by the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks and the Racial Equality Minister Fiona McTaggart. One would have thought that these two guests, given their respective roles, would have been aware of who the sheikh was and what his opinions were: but still they went.

Peter Tatchell has asked why the Home Secretary is allowing al-Sudais into Britain. “Is it because of the close business links between the British and Saudi establishments? Al-Sudais was appointed imam of the Grand Mosque by the royal leaders of the pro-western Saudi dictatorship. His continuing tenure as chief imam is a damning indictment of the Saudi regime’s toleration of antisemitism,” he writes.”

Read the rest.

And on Peter Tatchell’s blog:

“The chairman of the East London mosque is Muhammad Abdul Bari. He is also the leader of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).

Although the MCB has condemned anti-Semitism, it has previously declined to criticise the anti-Semitism of al-Sudais and has continued to support him despite his anti-Jewish tirade.

“Al-Sudais has stoked religious sectarianism and anti-Jewish racism. He has never expressed any regret,” said human rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, who is urging the East London mosque and the MCB to publicly condemn al-Sudais’s “shameful prejudice.”

“As a condition for him being allowed to preach, the East London mosque and MCB should insist that al-Sudais apologise for his anti-Semitism and publicly state his opposition to hatred, discrimination and violence against Jewish people.

“The East London mosque received $US1m from the Saudis towards its new London Muslim Centre. The mosque’s links to Saudi Arabia go back many years, according to the BBC.

“I don’t understand why the Home Secretary is allowing al-Sudais into Britain, given that similar hate preachers have been banned. Is it because of the close business links between the British and Saudi establishments? ” queried Mr Tatchell.

“Al-Sudais was appointed imam of the Grand Mosque by the royal leaders of the pro-western Saudi dictatorship. His continuing tenure as chief imam is a damning indictment of the Saudi regime’s toleration of anti-Semitism.

“I am surprised that the Jewish community in Britain has not kicked up a big fuss about him coming to Britain,” said Mr Tatchell.”

Coming from somebody outside the community, that must be good to hear. Read the rest.

And Habibi.

It is a mystery that this hate preacher wasn’t headed off at the border. And if public funding for religious institutions should be contingent on anything, it should be on their not hosting haters.

Sunday 5th July, 11am-1pm in the Lord Mayor’s Parlour at Manchester Town Hall followed at 2pm by Immigration Law Practitioners Association meeting. Speakers covering aspects of Steve’s political life.

Anti-capitalist discourse has become personal. Moishe Postone, Professor in the University of Chicago’s History Department, is an intellectual historian who explains this well. Unless I’m mistaken, he also edited His work is also published in what for me is one of the most important texts to come out of the small section of the radical left which fights antisemitism – the reader Why Your Revolution Is No Liberation (all links point here, but it’s gone – I’ll see if I have a copy on file to upload).

His presentation at SOAS on June 15th outlined with great clarity the origins of the weaknesses of thought on the radical left which are preventing it from reckoning with antisemitism. He explains difficulties both universalist and particularist ways of looking at the world have had accommodating Jews since the rise of Fascism in the ’30s. This is not an optimistic presentation, but it does set out and clarify our problem: radical anti-capitalist critique has taken up antisemitic ways of thinking.

My jots:

~~~~

Buchenwald and Hiroshima was dealt with by Left; but the left has not managed to deal with Auschwitz.

The Age of Catastrophe in the 30s and 40s gave way to High Fordism’s state centred synthesis and its welfare states; in turn this yielded to Post-Fordism with its social differentiation and unemployment, downturns in some parts, undermined welfare state.

USSR as development of capitalist social formation, no matter how antithetical. It was a response to capitalism, not an independent movement.

Antisemitism understood widely as variant of racism. But modern antisemitism treats Jews not as a racially inferior group to be kept in place but as dangerous, destructive and powerful in an intangible, global, abstract way. Jews as vast modern conspiracy.

Antisemitism is populist, counterhegemonic, claims explanatory power. Modern a/s purports to explain the modern capitalist world. Misrecognises the global domination of capital. Freeing the world involves freeing it from the Jews. Emancipatory. Blurs differences between reactionary and progressive/emancipatory. Bebel. Antisemitism today understands capitalism as a Jewish conspiracy.

Is the reactionary critique a first step to a progressive critique? No, not historically.

Left responses to the Holocaust.

As fetishised form of anticapitalism.

Nazis were recognised first as anti-modern, then fundamentally modern. A problematic reversal. Anti-capitalism was an effort to overcome a huge historical change which seems to be beyond people, impersonal. Reimagine the struggle against capitalism as a struggle of wills. But that world view faded for decades after the Holocaust. History faded as an issue for a while. Beginning in the mid 50s, rapid economic growth enveloped Stalinist East and Keynsian West and seemed to be an age of universal progress. History seemed tame. Nazism seemed like an aberration, an incongruity – anti-modern at a time when affirmations of modernity were hegemonic.

Shift to particularism saw Nazism as extreme eg of rationalised bureaucratised modernity. But still counter-hegemonic.

The Holocaust was marginalised between ‘45 and ’60s, after which it became centralised in discourse. But the centrality of antisemitism to Nazism was completely bracketed. Fascism was understood as a tool of capitalism used against working classes; antisemitism was seen as a variation. USSR monuments to the Holocaust didn’t mention the Jews, or else they listed them as one of many nationalities victimised by Nazis. Ruling elites were prepared to curry favour with groups who remained antisemitic. Neither Churchill nor De Gaulle avoided this. So Jewish children sent to Auschwitz were officially described as ‘political deportees’ – the different reasons for being sent to Auschwitz were conflated. This constituted a submergence of specificity of the Holocaust. It was a form of universalist colour blindness which viewed any mention of Jews-as-Jews as unacceptably particularistic. After ‘45 each country formerly occupied by Nazis presented itself as a briefly-occupied nation of resisters; this nationalist self-regard suited the emerging Fordist-Keynsian capitalist configuration.

In the USSR there were show trials; the Jewish Doctors’ Plot; in the US, McCarthyism. Each configuration viewed its foe as abstract and intangible. In each, Jewish identity was not treated as contingent, but central. Soviet show trials described Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and ‘Zionists’. The Doctors’ Plot led to preparations in ‘53 to round up Soviet Jews, abandoned on Stalin’s death that year. The turn against ‘cosmopolitanism’ was also seen in McCarthyism, a move against “international communism”. After 53, Cold War ‘regularised’, with blocs presenting fetishised values of alternatively liberty or equality, actualised according to universalised principles.

New movements – for the liberation and emancipation of women and other minorities – criticised abstract universalism and there was a shift towards a politics of recognition and of particularistic specificity. But anti-imperialism has reproduced old dichotomies by taking one particularist side against another.

A new conceptualisation of the world became diverted into an attack on the concrete – a turn from terra incognita and towards the conceptually familiar. Concrete forms of anti-imperialism occlude the nature of abstract domination of capitalism.

Much of the New Left became involved in an anti-colonialism which was a failing as well as an expression of solidarity. Anti-colonialism was also a displaced way of expressing a radical critique of Western society, translated into other terms which fail to mount opposition to capitalism.

Anti-Iraq war demonstrations were not, after all, supporting a progressive force in Iraq, but the Baathist regime. Resistance to the US in and of itself is now viewed as counter-hegemonic. This is a reactionary, rather than progressive, form of anti-imperialism.

The conflation of Israel and US re-articulates old discourse of European political right about Britain and the Jews. The constitution of anti-hegemonic politics and movements was afflicted by this way of thinking in the 20th century, with the eventuality of the Holocaust.

Left cannot formulate an adequate radical critique of capitalism today. This absence of radical critique breeds fetishised forms of anti-capitalism which are essentially antisemitic.

Questions

Qu

Why do you want to avoid conflating mass extermination with mass murder?

Nazis wanted to kill many Poles and Russians and enslave the rest. But there was a will to kill all Jews, old and young. The killing of children demonstrated the hugeness of the threat that the Nazis assumed the Jews to be. Mass murder does not imply the destruction of evil; extermination does.

Book 2003 Jonathan Brent. ‘The plot against the Jewish doctors’

Qu

Equation of Israel with Nazism is a product of Soviet propaganda post-67 when Zionism became once again an international conspiracy, particularly in Pan-Arab discourse.

The focus of attention on Israel could make more immediate problems recede. Anyway, until that time, Nazism wasn’t such a bad word. It was simply expedient to use it as a gold standard of evil at the time.

Qu
Under Tsarism?

Soviet messages from 60s include cartoons which cast Jews as complicit in Jewish crimes. Perdition – according to somebody who read a draft, Perdition lost incendiary lines in the editing process, about Jews, as culprits for the death of Jesus, nailing the Christ to the cross and similar or worse.

Qu

What resources has the left lacked to allow it to get into this state. Moral perspective lacking? Match-up between straightforward utilitarian consequentialists who are at the same time advancing antisemitism eg Ted Honderichs, and, on the other hand universalists. Critique of anti-capitalism which comes from a milieu without the moral resources to develop the politics of recognition into a truer critique.

Calling into question of a form of universalism which rejects difference – but incoherent because some diffs were liked and some not. A form of universalism which encompasses difference is required. In the US on the academic left there is a reification of difference which either negates or affirms eg Islam as a unitary other, a form of orientalism.

Qu
Why are we surprised by discoveries of antisemitism in one or other section of thought?

Left doesn’t understand a/s. Understands it as being anti-Left, anti-gay, anti-black. But a/s is a particular challenge for the left, at the time when the left is largely unmoored.

Qu
Why do we persist with umbrella term of antisemitism? Why not say anti-Jewishness?

Antisemitism, the term coined by antisemites, has never referred to semites – it has referred to a world conspiracy.

Qu
Herzl was the first to brag about the international Jew. He sold out on the Armenian revolution. What is the Jewish contribution to antisemitism? [this man blames the victims. The “Jewish contribution to antisemitism” is to be the target of it].

There was no answer; a polite deferral.

Qu
Anti-imperialism grew out of attempt to explain why Marxist predictions didn’t come to pass. The concept of imperialism exists for the marxist left to explain the failings of marxism.

As long as there is capitalism there is the necessity of understanding it. Communist revolutions were about taking ‘imperialised’ countries and have them develop national capital along statist lines. At the same time the Arab Middle East and Sub Saharan Africa have declined drastically, with people looking for responsibility – and hitting on the US and Israel as the culprits.

Qu
State capitalist antisemitism desecrating cemetery with bulldozers in (I think) Eastern Europe. Hamas was being socialist in Gaza even as Muslim nationalists, while the PLO were doing nothing. Maybe a left view of universalism which could address US’s allies Saudi while being pro-public…?

That space is occupied by Islamic fundamentalists. Not optimistic Not seeing possibilities. One of the best things that could happen would be an even shaky resolution between Israel and Palestine, removing one excuse for antisemitism.

~~~~

You can read an article of his, History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism, and encounter some of these thoughts as the author intended.

Update: Here’s a copy of Why Your Revolution Is No Liberation [PDF]

Only a few countries’ affairs were addressed in the international business of the University and College Union conference, and all of the motions not to do with Israel were submitted as late motions and breezed through in ten minutes. The Israel business took well over an hour.

Why is this? Standing up to ‘Zionists’, ‘the law’, ‘Zionist law’, ‘Zionist power’, pusillanimous leaders and trustees – the only thing constant is the sense of standing up to something in a heroic “truth against power” kind of way – strongly motivates these Conference delegates, who are often marginalised in their institutions. So, members who actively oppose the boycott – it is no coincidence that most are Jews – are identified as Zionist, and inexorably, connections are made in many minds, such as Sean Wallis’, linked below.  And yet allegations of antisemitism within the union are now viewed as vexatious, because they often emanate from members who oppose the boycott and among these members was a group who decided to pursue litigation. This view that claims of antisemitism are vexatious is a good way to grow antisemitism. It’s not dissimilar from our own situation in the Greens.

Conference delegates are rarely chosen by their members, and the important thing to keep in mind is that the boycott has been extensively discussed for many years in branches, and no boycotter has ever managed to get a motion on boycott passed in their branch. Branches don’t want to boycott Israel, althoug Conference delegates do.

Engage has written on Conference:

• Why the lecturers’ union must oppose a boycott of Israeli universities – Jon Pike’s piece in the Education Guardian
• SWP backs down, and then indulges in disgusting anti-democratic display – Jon Pike
• The UCU boycott campaign is about fuelling hatred against Israel – John Strawson
• David Hirsh’s live blog of the international business of UCU Congress – notes of the debate
• UCU Conference votes down amendment to investigate antisemitism-related resignations
• UCU Congress has ruled out debating a ballot
• UCL UCU branch secretary Sean Wallis lines up with antisemitic Lehman Brothers conspiracy theorists

Here’s something still relevant by Mark Osborne, about the pro-boycott resolution 2 years ago.

“Somehow I can not imagine Sally Hunt fighting the battle of ideas against the SWP, slugging it out, campus by campus. I can, however, imagine her attempting to use some bureaucratic trick to cheat a pro-boycott UCU conference majority in a year’s time (after having done nothing much to tackle the politics of the matter over the next year).”

This is, in fact, what seems to have happened. In this year’s conference, boycott motions appeared in the agenda with a disclaimer that they would be voided if passed, and a strange pantomime of defiance predictably ensued.

This is likely to lead – and it will be stealthy and confusing for the target, because this kind of discrimination is against the law – to some Israeli exclusions, but given the clear views of the grass-roots, it is unlikely to be many.

This gesture by UCU once again subordinates academic freedom to its own self-indulgent gesture of defiance – for a clear view of what academic freedom actually means, read Jon Pike’s Education Guardian piece, linked above. It was also devoid of any conflict-resolving content. The word ‘peace’ was mentioned only once in the agenda, as part of the comically-worded Motion 27:

“Congress demands

…

• Lasting peace in Palestine.”

But this gesture has side effects on us with respect to UCU’s Jewish membership, the deficit at which Jewish members who want to participate find themselves, and the diversity of views, including Jewish views, which are heard. To make this point is not to campaign for Zionism – rather it resists a campaign to force notional ‘Zionists’ out of the union; a campaign which ends up forcing out Jews because, along with the needs they share with other members, many Jewish members also have a strong concern about how the union should comport itself with respect to a boycott campaign against Israel, a concern which is very widespread among Jews in general, but this particularly Jewish aspect of their membership is unwanted, and to express it, deeply antipathetic to the views of those who claim the right to be their branch representatives at Conference, the supreme policy-making body of the union. David Hirsh worries about the absence of Jewish voices speaking against the boycott at Conference, and he is right to worry.

This is institutional racism – institutional antisemitism.

Perhaps the most visible faces of the Jewish Left are the Jewish anti-Zionists who flirt with antisemitism. I think you could say that among the wider left, these few people have come to define the Jewish left.

For other voices – on Israel, on community, on Zionism, on activism – watch the trailers for Young, Jewish and Left, a documentary from the U.S..  They have a YouTube Channel (currently headed by a video on global warming).

Via Contested Terrain who comments:

“The story demonstrates more than a sensitivity deficit on the part of Jna’s comrades. It illuminates a conflict in the Left’s relationship to the Shoah, and the inability to fit it into a historical narrative that relates intelligibly to the present. The issue is not about a trauma that is carried forward from one generation to the next, but about how this historical event has shaped the twentieth century as well as the current one. The “I am Jewish and I hate Israel” identity, which is the only acceptable form of American Jewish Left identity, reveals precisely that, that within the Left, the Shoah can only be understood if it is restricted to the World War II period and the European terrain. If it is allowed to defy these space and time dimensions, it threatens to break down the whole framework of the Left orientation. For Jna and many others, the two orientations represent an unbridgeable chasm.”

Scroll down to the bottom of its Wikipedia entry for some links to interviews and reviews.

In case you hadn’t guessed already, this one won’t be coming to a cinema near you, but you can find out how to see it on the Young, Jewish and Left site.

I hope this wouldn’t embarrass him, but I have generally found myself in agreement with S.O. Muffin, reader and occasional contributor to Harry’s Place. I think he’s an academic with a foot in both Israel and the UK but don’t ask me where I got that impression.

Here he is congratulating the mass media on the quality (if not volume) of its coverage of the conflict in Sri Lanka.

Bonus links:

On Operation Cast Lead.

On Palestinian children and Jewish children.

On how the UCU reminded him that he is a Zionist.

“Had anybody asked me the same question a decade ago, I would have probably answered back (a bad Jewish trait) “and what exactly do you mean by `Zionist’?”.

If you ask me today, however, the answer will be an emphatic “Yes”. And for this I have to thank assorted members of the UCU executive, SWP, Respect and several posters on this blog. Jean Paul Sartre once said that Jews are defined by anti-Semites and by their persecution. Although I never liked this definition, I must confess that, at least in my case, Zionists are defined by the hatred of the anti-Zionists. (Not all anti-Zionists – I don’t believe that being an anti-Zionist makes you automatically into an anti-Semite. But by those vocal anti-Zionists that we hear these days in UK.)”

Shalom Lappin writes on Normblog about the phenomenon of psychologising about a country or an entire ethnic group in terms of trauma, illustrated with examples from Jacqueline Rose, academic critic, Anthony Lerman, former Jewish think-tank leader, Caryl Churchill, Palestine Solidarity Campaign patron. He draws parallels with and distinctions from an earlier therapist to ‘the Jews’, Otto Weininger, an Austrian pseudo-scientist whose negative views of Jews compared to the Aryan qualities he admired resonated strongly with Austrian literary society.

From the piece:

“There are at least five features of the psychologizing discourse worth noting. First, it provides an ostensibly scientific basis for attributing negative properties to an ethnic group. Inter alia, most (but not all) Israelis, and many of their Diaspora Jewish supporters suffer from a blood lust. They are insensitive to the suffering of innocent Palestinians. They are exclusively concerned with the welfare of their own people. They engage in illicit lobbying and hysterical political campaigning to promote a narrow and destructive group agenda. They refuse to acknowledge the normal constraints of universal human rights and morality. These are, of course, versions of longstanding anti-Jewish bigotries that infect European and Middle Eastern history. They are, however, rendered opaque and acceptable through translation into the psychological symptoms of a disturbed group. The painstaking clinical studies required to support serious psychological diagnoses are singularly absent from the psychologizing discourse. It is, in fact, a vintage case of pseudo-science in the service of prejudice. It does, however, serve an important political and cultural role. It renders acceptable attitudes and assumptions that would be inadmissible if expressed in traditional terms.”

Read it all.

On Normblog, Eve Garrard writes with her usual lucidity. From the piece:

“The resurgence of anti-Semitism is most noticeable in (though it’s by no means confined to) parts of the liberal-left; that is, among people who would otherwise be expected to be very alert, and very hostile, to any form of racism. And it’s hard to know how to combat this, since a largely successful campaign has been mounted to defuse the charge of anti-Semitism by way of the Livingstone Formulation – the all-purpose response which claims that charges of anti-Semitism are all really attempts to distract people from the crimes of Israel (or possibly the insidious influence of the Jewish Lobby). This, too, is a traditional anti-Semitic trope – Jews, it is said, whine about their ill-treatment in order to escape censure for their misdeeds. Furthermore, there are also people on the left who refrain from deploying the worst anti-Semitic tropes themselves, but who nonetheless belittle, and deride as exaggerated, Jewish concern about anti-Semitism, thereby strengthening the position of those whose hostility is more overt. It is not surprising that some people who have spent a great deal of energy trying to fight anti-Semitism from the left over the last few years begin to feel that their efforts have been largely pointless, since their adversaries don’t actually care about the arguments, or even about the facts: the gratifications of believing in (supposed) Jewish conspiracies and bloodthirstiness and duplicity are too great to yield to reasoned argument or empirical evidence.If anti-Semitism is really on the march again, then this is a seriously worrying development. Already Jews are beginning to feel that the environment in which they live has become more hostile and alien (and hence of course more alienating). Many of us used to think that the terrible precedent of the Nazi genocide would itself prevent any recurrence of Jew-hatred, since the contemplation of what anti-Semitism had led to was and is so appalling. But if in spite of that history Jew-hatred is once more on the rise, then we simply can’t tell whether people will continue to see, or even care about, where it might lead. There are parts of the left which do not have a good track record of seeing, or caring about, crimes against humanity when it’s politically inconvenient to do so. (It goes without saying that there are also parts of the right which suffer from a similar selective blindness.)”

I agree with her that the behaviour of the onlookers is profoundly worrying.

After describing current circumstances, Eve proceeds to consider a number of possible responses for those concerned about these developments.

“There is, however, one further strategy which can be canvassed. We should bear in mind that Jews are not friendless, even on the left, and we should try to build on that. There is a distinct section of the liberal-left which sees what is happening, and doesn’t like it – within the blogosphere, and beyond that domain as well. Some of these people are heroes, who have themselves been the object of hostility and condemnation for the stance which they’ve adopted. They don’t think that Jews should be singled out for special obloquy for supporting the Jewish state, nor do they see Jews as exercising sinister powers in expressing that support. The anti-racism of these people doesn’t make an exception for anti-Semitism; they and their views form the basis for a genuinely universal struggle against discrimination uninfected by the traditional prejudices which are once again crawling out of the shadows. One strategy for Jews is to work with these figures and others like them to revive a universal anti-racism, alongside support for other universal rights and values, as well as more particular ones appropriate for individual situations and commitments.”

Read it all.