ENGAGE - ARCHIVE

Without Engage's efforts, AUT would still have an effectively racist policy, would be haemorrhaging members at a perhaps fatal rate and would be regarded as a racist union in the UK and worldwide by many people. So AUT activists should be pleased that Engage has rescued our union. Over the last few weeks we have been the strongest AUT loyalists around.

There are two pernicious sentiments hanging around AUT at the moment. One is that all the Jews came out of the woodwork because their 'communal' interest was threatened - they don't really care about the union or about their colleagues - only about their own interest.

The other pernicious sentiment hanging around is that we (we Jews? we Engage?) pretend to be outraged by Israel's racist treatment of the Palestinians but we really don't care; we are just some sort of 'Zionist Front' (Jewish Front? Board of Deputies Front?) organisation. We are not serious about supporting Palestinians, we have no record of supporting Palestinians and we will not support Palestinians in the future.

Firstly, neither of these sentimetns are actually based on fact. While it is true that some Jewish AUT members were motivated to join with Engage and to attend their own special branch meetings, it is also true that many more non-Jewish members were activated either because they are genuine anti-racists, or because they believe in academic freedom or because they believed that their union had been plunged into crisis. The campaign against the boycott has not been a communalist campaign, it has been an anti-racist, and pro-union campaign.

The victory at next week's Special Council will be a victory for the authentic left against the posturing left. It will be a victory for those who stand up for Palestinian rights and who stand against the Sharon regime - and it will be a victory for those who do so without allowing themselves to be polluted by the 'socialism of fools' - antisemitism.

Secondly, even if it were true that Jews had come out to defend themselves as Jews from their own union's antisemitic policy - what would be suspect or unusual about that?

If I wanted to detail the track record of support for Palestinians and for the Israeli peace movement represented by each contributor to Engage I could do. Most of us have been involved for many years in arguing and fighting against the racist policies of Israeli governments; many of us have been working in support of the refusenik movements. Many of us have proud records of supporting Palestinian rights and Palestinian national aspirations. Many of us are involved in academic projects and research that links with this record. And the boycott, after all, is a policy designed not for activists but for people who seek some kind of tokenistic way to feel that they are doing something to help.

But the point is not our record or our future plans. The point is the validity of what we argue. Opposing a racist policy in AUT does not commit those oppositionists to spending the rest of their lives doing Palestine Solidarity work in order to prove that they have the right to speak. AUT should make and facilitate links with Palestinian and Israeli academics; AUT should help and encourage Palestinians and Israelis who are fighting against the occupation, for freedom and for academic freedom. Individual Jews in the UK do not have any particular responsibility to do this – any more than anyone else does – and any more than they have a particular responsibility to oppose China’s occupation of Tibet or Russia’s occupation of Chechnya.

The central point on this, however, is that supporting Palestinians without saying anything about Israeli rights is one sided and counter-productive. The anti-Zionists who (through ignorance) flirt with antisemitism do damage to the cause of Palestinian liberation and to the cause of peace in the Middle East. Those who have abandoned the left and who are accepting the political leadership of racist, nationalist and fundamentalist-religious movements can have nothing positive to add to the debate and have nothing positive to offer Palestinians or Israelis who are fighting against the occupation and against the racist attitudes of the right wing of their own communities.

The tradition of the authentic left is not to pick good nations over bad nations, 'oppressed' nations over 'oppressor' nations, 'anti-imperialist' nations over 'imperialist' nations - the tradition of the authentic left is to work within all nations against nationalism and against the demonisation of the others.

There have always been people who hang around the left, who pretend to be part of the left, who speak the speak of the left, but who are in reality not of the left.

There is a long tradition of antisemitism on the left and in the Labour movement; the 'socialism of fools'. Karl Marx mocked the antisemitic ultra-leftism of Bruno Bauer, who argued against Jewish emancipation in 19th century Germany. The Stalinists in the 1930s organised around antisemitic campaigns, and again in the 50's with the 'doctors trials'. Before the second world war, Oswald Moseley came out of the Labour Party to campaign on an 'anti-war' antisemtic platform in the East End. Since the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, left antisemitism has routinely clothed itself as anti-Zionism. The Polish Communist Party launched a purge of 'Zionist' academics in 1968. In the 1970s and 80s the Soviet Union imprisoned Jews who wanted to live in Israel in the Gulag. Anti-Zionists attacked the rights of Jewish students to organise Jewish societies in the UK in the 80s. Also in the 80s, Jim Allen wrote a play that put some of the blame for the Holocaust onto 'Zionism' and that represented Zionism and Nazism as being ideologically related belief systems. There is a commonsense notion present amongst much of the posturing left today of Jews as 'oppressors'; Jews are Nazi-Zionists, Jews are rich Capitalists, Jews are scheming Communists, Jews are the shady neo-cons pulling the strings of American imperialism. This fake and racist leftism has to stop. The left has to radically re-educate itself so that it can recognise antisemitism when it sees it.

Armed with these kinds of nonsense ideas, the left cannot do effective Palestine solidarity work - or effective work of any kind.

David Hirsh
Goldsmiths College