Organizes against the "Academic Intifada,"
Hirsh, David
AN INTERNATIONAL campaign for a boycott of Israeli artists, musicians, teachers, thinkers, writers, and researchers calls itself the "Academic Intifada." Two years ago, it proposed that the...
...But we wanted to be members of a union, and the AUT is the only one there is...
...A group that had been doggedly fighting the boycott campaign for years declared that this was the final straw...
...Most of them refused, and many left the country...
...The weekend before the Special Council, there was a very small demonstration in London for Palestinian freedom...
...Two years ago, it proposed that the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) should require its members to blacklist colleagues who worked for Israeli universities...
...This political test would require that Israeli academics apply for exemption on the basis of their political cleanliness...
...The argument put to academic trade unionists this April was straightforward: Israel is an apartheid state, so boycott it...
...Ariel Sharon claims that all criticism of Israel is a manifestation of anti-Semitism...
...This problem is exacerbated by confused thinking about the distinction between jihadi-fascist movements, which incorporate hostility to Jews at the heart of their ideology, and Islam in general...
...A wish to oppose anti-Islamic racism sometimes slips into an implicit or overt alliance with Islam's self-appointed but in fact unrepresentative spokespeople...
...The universities are spaces where Jews and Arabs work, teach, learn, and think side by side...
...Most people do not want to be involved with such a movement...
...Since the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, left anti-Semitism has disguised itself in the clothes of anti-Zionism...
...A number of people were coming alive again politically...
...Jon Pike read the AUT rule book...
...In the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union sent Jews who wanted to live in Israel to the Gulag...
...All this is the expression of a false and racist radicalism...
...Open and democratic meetings were held in local branches, winning nearly all of them to anti-boycott positions...
...They offered an exemption for professors who would denounce the "colonialist and racist" policies of Israel...
...Implacable hostility to Israel functions as a centerpiece to some "anti-imperialist" worldviews, not only on the left but also in right-wing isolationism...
...One academic at an AUT branch meeting said that the role of Jews throughout history has been destructive to all around them...
...The boycotters argued that theirs was the only way to support Palestinians...
...At the same time, it damages the most open and anti-racist institutions in Israel and pushes the already demoralized Israeli left toward the right...
...At the same time, it was almost unanimous in its conviction that Palestinians suffer unjustly under Israeli occupation...
...The Holocaust myth...
...Palestinians have come to symbolize the global struggle against imperialism while Jews have come to symbolize the veiled imperialist forces behind the fiction of "democratic val24 DISSENT / Fall 2005 POLITICS ABROAD ues...
...DISSENT / Fall 2005 23 POLITICS ABROAD The boycott campaign tolerated incidents of open anti-Semitism in its midst...
...What about the Holocaust industry...
...THOSE WHO AGREE that Israel should be singled out fail to agree on why...
...Rather it was a fight between two souls of the left...
...Some say that the Jews should know better, that Israel claims to be a democracy and so should be held to a higher standard than states that do not...
...Many in the Palestine Solidarity Movement have long claimed that "Zionism Equals Racism," that Israel is the only "illegitimate" state in the world, and that Jewish nationalism is irremediably worse than any other...
...Something about the boycott effort brought a new group of people into open opposition...
...We judged that it was better to take the fight into the union than to step outside, leaving it permanently in the hands of an unrepresentative minority...
...I was in touch with a few old political colleagues, people with whom I had fought against the banning of Jewish societies in the student movement in the 1980s...
...Member of Parliament George Galloway claims that Jerusalem is in the hands of "foreigners," meaning Israeli Jews, who are perpetrating a rape of that city...
...The boycotters learned nothing from their defeat...
...the big anti-war demonstrations had linked opposition to the invasion of Iraq with demonization of Israel...
...some are being bypassed with rhetoric referring to Zionists rather than Jews...
...We wrote a letter to the Guardian, articulating our case against the boycott and, at the same time, our opposition to the Occupation...
...But if you build a movement that is effectively if unconsciously anti-Semitic, then you cannot be surprised when it breeds and licenses hostility to Jews...
...Most critics of the boycott in the AUT are also critical of Israeli policy...
...we were jolted out of our complacency by the boycotters...
...So Jon worked within the union structures while I developed a Web site that would arm people with arguments for the coming debate...
...Its unremitting hatred of Israel, its calls for divisive boycotts, its libeling of Jews as racists, and the crassness and one-sidedness of the stories it tells—none of this serves its ostensible cause...
...These manifestations can't be unexpected...
...Before the Second World War, Oswald Moseley came out of the Labour Party to campaign on an anti-Semitic platform in the East End of London...
...The April decision plunged the AUT into crisis...
...com) to coordinate the campaign...
...British academics decided instead to make positive links with Israeli and Palestinian universities, engage in joint research, joint teaching, and exchanges of students and ideas...
...Haifa University and the Hebrew University have about 20 percent Palestinian students...
...Criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic, but sometimes it is exactly that...
...some say that Israel plays a particular role at the vanguard of global imperialism...
...Some of my Masters students, for example, in a course on human rights, had created a swirl of half-baked anti-Semitic narratives in response to a lecture on the complexities of Holocaust representation...
...Jewish intellectuals were challenged to declare themselves anti-Zionist...
...This letter flew around academia and was published alongside a blander one opposing the boycott on the basis of academic freedom and another that opposed the boycott tactically but ambivalently...
...Personally, I had encountered some difficult moments while teaching...
...A fresh wind of member participation blew through the cobwebbed cliques of the AUT...
...I was already worrying about the connections between anti-imperialism, anti-Semitism, and hostility to Israel...
...The vote was taken at the end of the meeting...
...Jane Ashworth, with her huge experience of building campaigns, consolidated the network...
...where debate rather than bloodshed is the norm...
...Just as an institutionally racist police force does not necessarily contain racist officers, so parts of the left are politically hostile to Jews even if their activists do not feel anti-Semitic...
...Many of us had stopped worrying about Israel and Palestine during the peace process...
...The AUT Special Council voted against the boycott and for the authentic values of the left, academic freedom and for democratic norms...
...they have made both tacit and formal alliances with political Islamism and they have been responsible for a renewed focus on Israel and Jews as the vanguard of global imperialism...
...The most common reason is that Israel, as a Jewish state, is by definition racist...
...We decided to campaign against the boycott and set up the Web site Engage (www.liberoblog...
...there are Arab professors in all Israeli universities...
...Some of the post-Holocaust taboos are withering...
...We argued for an analogy with institutional racism...
...There is a long tradition of anti-Semitism on the left and in the labor movement—the "socialism of fools" as August Bebel called it...
...A number of high-profile Jewish academics responded immediately with calls for resignation from the union...
...This singling out of Jewish nationalism is anti-Semitic in effect, if not intention, because it licenses people to relate to Jews as though they were racists until they define themselves as "anti22 DISSENT / Fall 2005 POLITICS ABROAD Zionist...
...Under these circumstances, some honest delegates voted for what was effectively an anti-Semitic policy...
...Why is there no mass movement for this cause—in support, also, of the Israeli peace movement...
...it is not responsible for the most serious campaign of ethnic cleansing...
...Some say that Israel is particularly culpable because it occupies Muslim land...
...Anti-Zionists attacked the rights of Jewish students to organize Jewish societies in the UK in the 1980s...
...In another class a student had repeated the claim that there were no Jews in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001...
...Since the collapse of the peace process, the attacks of September 11, and the War Against Terror, left and liberal currents that consider America to be the central force for evil in the world have gotten stronger...
...Stalinists used anti-Semitic motifs in the 1930s, and the clearly anti-Semitic "Doctors' Trial" was in preparation in the early 1950s, before Stalin's death...
...But criticism that demonizes Israel and Jews lets Sharon off the hook...
...Under the cover of solidarity with Palestinians, the Polish state had purged the Jewish intelligentsia...
...An academic who comes originally from Poland wrote to me saying that the rhetoric of the boycotters reminded him of events there in 1968...
...The boycotters say that criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic...
...Some activists referred to "rich and powerful Zionists" who would stand in the way of their campaign...
...Parts of the left in the United Kingdom are now allied with overt anti-Semitism, some of it Islamist, some of it native to its own ranks...
...The boycott was anti-Semitic because it singled out Israel and Israeli academics for special treatment with no morally or politically relevant reason for doing so...
...Jews are Nazi-Zionists, Jews are rich capitalists, Jews are scheming communists, Jews are the shady neocons pulling the strings of American imperialism in the interest of Israel...
...We can call a Special Council to discuss the issue," he told me on the phone, "if we get the signatures of twenty-five council members...
...Poland lost a large number of its thinkers, teachers, writers, and researchers...
...This past year, the campaigners came back with what they thought was a more sophisticated approach...
...Many colleagues had encountered similar attitudes in the classroom, in the union, and in public life more generally...
...What drives them to such intellectual lengths...
...Both sides miss the point...
...there was no time for speeches against the boycott, and there had been little debate in the branches...
...The Union of Jewish Students reports that campaigns to boycott Israel on campuses bring with them an increase in racist incidents against Jewish students...
...The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, had hosted an Islamist cleric who had spoken in favor of suicide bombing against Israelis and had used unambiguous anti-Semitic language...
...it moves the discussion onto ground where he can respond with righteous indignation...
...The left has to reeducate itself to recognize anti-Semitism when it sees it...
...THE DEBATE at the Special Council cannot be understood as a fight between the left and the right...
...At first glance this is appealing to people disgusted by the realities of the Occupation...
...This boycott was rejected by the AUT...
...In this way, the politics of Palestine solidarity does tremendous harm to Palestinians...
...The General Union of Palestinian Students allowed a leaflet to be circulated from its stall at a student conference that peddled the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...
...Racist policy is presented as the inevitable product of a racist essence (even by people who are otherwise opposed to essentialism...
...The chief reason for this is that the existing Palestine Solidarity Campaign smells of anti-Semitism...
...DAVID HIRSH is a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, author of Law against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials (GlassHouse, 2004), and editor for Engage at www.liberoblog.com DISSENT / Fall 2005 25...
...We were surprised when the boycotters won the initial vote...
...Why does one group feel they own the Holocaust...
...Israel is not, as the boycott suggests, the worst human rights abuser or the most racist state in the world...
...It's the Zionists that insist on the ineffability of the Holocaust...
...The AUT would have endorsed the idea that "Zionists" had no place in academia, and some of its militants might have been tempted to extend the "Zionist" test to Jewish academics outside Israel...
...They argued for boycotts against particular Israeli institutions, in the hope that they would gather momentum for a total boycott in due course...
...They also responded to the objection that such boycotts would silence even Israeli academics who oppose the Occupation...
...There is so much discussion of the Holocaust because of who controls the market...
...They reacted with a new barrage of anti-Semitic rhetoric, insisting that they were defeated by a well-funded global Zionist lobby that pressured the AUT...
...Why not give it a go...
...Many people find it difficult to oppose the politics of those movements that claim to be the authentic voice of Islam...
...Today, at last, there are people organizing to resist this fake leftism, educating themselves to recognize talk of Jewish lobbies and Zionist power as a sign of a cancer within our movement...
...Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe and the United Kingdom...
...The boycott targeted the best of Israeli society...
...This is not a claim about what Israel does, but an existential claim about what Israel is...
...Each of these was signed by about a hundred academics...
Vol. 52 • September 2005 • No. 4
