I am grateful to Engage for inviting me to respond to David Hirsh’s analysis of my recent article on anti-semitism in the Guardian (6th March). One of the points I sought to make was the need for new ground rules about how the Middle East is debated that sensible people on both sides can respect. That is something that can only be achieved through discussion and dialogue. It is a difficult thing to do in this emotionally charged atmosphere, but it is essential to try. While the extremists on each flank have often worked in tacit alliance, those of us who support a negotiated two-state solution from the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli perspectives have tended to treat each other with a wary suspicion that has only served to undermine our common objective. That, for me, is the tragic lesson of the failure of Oslo.

Let me begin by describing the origins of my article. The idea first came to me four years ago when I wrote another Guardian piece challenging what I saw (and still see) as the myth of Camp David and the notion that Barak made a “generous offer” that the Palestinians spurned. This self-righteous claim seemed to me to lie at the root of the argument that a negotiated settlement was impossible because Israel had no partner for peace and the Palestinians were incorrigible terrorists who wanted nothing less than to wipe Israel off the map. It was a version of events I believed to be fundamentally at odds with the truth.

The rights and wrongs of the issue are open to debate, but what struck me was the response. Of the several hundred emails I received, most were either supportive or critically challenging. Indeed, the responses from Israel were largely thoughtful and measured in their criticisms, something that has proved to be generally true in the years since. But a significant minority – mostly from America, it seemed – consisted of the most lurid and hateful allegations of anti-semitism. After the initial anger had subsided, it occurred to me that there was something profoundly illogical in sending a private message accusing me of anti-semitism. If I was an anti-semite, it is unlikely that I would be offended by the charge. The most likely explanation is that my accusers knew very well that I wasn’t, but hoped that I would be so stung by the suggestion that I would modify my views. It was, thus, a deeply cynical tactic.

Unfortunately, there is evidence that it works. I spoke to two journalists the day after my latest article who confided that they no longer write about Israel/Palestine because of precisely this sort of bullying invective. As an instrument of censorship, the charge of anti-semitism is brutally effective and I maintain that that’s the real reason why many people resort to it. The same tactic has been deployed against politicians, activists and church leaders – and now even playwrights and architects. It has reached epidemic proportions and in America has taken the form of a kind of modern McCarthyism. The intention of my article was to draw attention to this.

In his response, David Hirsh makes several points, many of which are also reflected in the numerous emails I have received. But I must start by querying the list of examples he cites to establish the premise that anti-semitism is rife on the left. I regard myself as instinctively non-sectarian in my politics, but there isn’t a definition of the left I would accept that is broad enough to include President Ahmadinejad or Hamas. Their anti-semitism speaks for itself and should be deplored. I do, however, take issue with the idea that Ken Livingstone’s verbal spat with a journalist from the Evening Standard proves that he is similarly guilty. He has been using the Nazi jibe against Associated Newspapers for years and it is pretty obvious that his infamous outburst had nothing to do with the reporter’s Jewishness. As it happens, I think he should have apologised, not for insulting the reporter, but for comparing the Evening Standard’s vendetta against him to the persecution suffered by the victims of Nazism. Livingstone was insensitive, but the suggestion of anti-semitism is baseless.

A more serious charge relates to Livingstone’s relationship with Yusuf al-Qaradawi and contacts between sections of the left and Islamism more generally. Qaradawi’s views are odious in many respects and I have serious reservations about the terms on which Livingstone relates to him, but his views on women and gays are equally revolting and I have yet to hear anyone accuse Livingstone of misogyny or homophobia by association. This is illustrative of a bigger problem. I don’t think anyone outside the far right would argue that we don’t need dialogue with the Muslim world. But speaking to any significant body of Muslim opinion will often bring us into contact with people who hold some pretty reactionary views. How can this be done while upholding liberal values? It’s a real dilemma and I don’t pretend to have the perfect answer. All in know is that the issue is too important to used as a political football in this way.

The rest of David’s examples consist mostly of cases where individuals have expressed their opposition to Israel or Zionism in extreme terms. I don’t doubt that “Israel” and “Zionism” can provide convenient cover for anti-semites to peddle their hatred, but we are not entitled, by reverse logic, to infer that anyone opposing Israel or Zionism is by definition an anti-semite, however vehemently they express it. I write here as someone who supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state within its 1967 borders, which by any definition makes me a Zionist. But however much I disagree with it, anti-Zionism is a perfectly respectable viewpoint and people ought to be entitled to advocate it without being accused of anti-semitism.

One of the most frustrating things about this debate is the way the goalposts are constantly shifted. Those who imply that Jews are collectively responsible for Israel’s actions are rightly condemned as anti-semites. And yet anyone who attacks Israel or Zionism risks being accused of attacking the Jewish people as a whole, whiles Jews who criticise Israel are denounced as “self-haters” as if the affinity of Jews for Israel should be automatic. Israel is a state, Zionism is an ideology and the Jews are a people, and the distinction between them should not be fudged for the political convenience of anyone. While states and ideologies should always be fair game for criticism in a free society, the demonisation of whole peoples should be vigorously opposed. I can’t think of another way to police this that makes sense.

But in a way this is tangential to the main point I was trying to make. Although I support the right of people to challenge Zionism, or even question the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, without being accused of anti-semitism, those who do so nowadays belong almost entirely to a miniscule ultra-left fringe whose size and importance has been grossly exaggerated in this debate. The main purpose of my argument concerns the mainstream, or what used to know as the Tribunite, left. This part of the left was the moving force behind the 1944 Labour conference resolution supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and became the strongest critic of Ernest Bevin’s resistance to that position as Foreign Secretary after 1945.

It remained strongly supportive of Israel throughout the 1950 and 1960s, and yet the inheritors of that tradition today by and large take the view that the occupation, and the intransigence of successive Israeli governments in refusing to end it, is the main reason for the absence of peace. They do so, not out of a loathing for Israel, let alone the Jewish people as a whole, but out of a strong moral conviction that the occupation is wrong and an instinct to support the underdog. Whereas that instinct once led them to support the creation of a Jewish state, it now leads them to support the creation of a Palestinian state. It seems to me, therefore, that the obsession of pro-Israeli commentators and bloggers with the activities of a few Trotskyite sects is an alibi for ignoring the implications of this much bigger and more important shift. It is Israel that has changed, not the left.

The idea that most left-wing criticism of Israel is motivated by opposition to its very existence, and ultimately by a hatred of the Jewish people as a whole, is demonstrably false. If it were true, the criticism would have continued throughout the Oslo period since the envisaged settlement would have enshrined Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. It didn’t, it died away as most people happily assumed that the parties were moving towards a two-state agreement that would end the occupation. It reached a new high with Ariel Sharon’s rejection of Oslo, just as it had with the start of the Israeli settlement programme in the 1970s and the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s. It seems pretty clear from this that the hostility of the left towards Israel relates to its behaviour and not its existence, let alone its Jewishness.

Many of the points raised in response to my article apply to all critics of Israel, whether they support its right to exist or not. The most frequent concerns the extent to which Israel is singled out for criticism when there are so many other examples of human rights abuses around the world, some far worse than Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. It is a familiar argument. I heard versions of it from Serbs in the 1990s when I was campaigning for military intervention in Bosnia and from white South Africans in the 1980s when I was a young Anti-Apartheid activist. As I characterised it in my article, it is the “others get away with it, so why can’t we” position, and it is invoked by every country that finds its misdeeds the subject of unwelcome international attention.

But just as there were very good reasons for focussing on the Balkans and South Africa in the past, there are perfectly valid reasons for focussing on Israel/Palestine today, none of which have anything to do with Jew-hatred. I mentioned a couple of them in my article, but they include the following:

1. The Israel/Palestine dispute occupies one of the central fault lines of what is in danger of becoming a full-blown clash of civilisations and is seen by many (probably most) Muslims as a microcosm of their relations with the west as a whole. With much justification, it is taken as a symbol of our double standards and the emptiness of our claim to care about their rights. As Saddam Hussein found to his cost, the Middle East is a bad place to look inconspicuous. In strategic terms, it matters in a way that other parts of the world do not.

2. The point is not just that Israel mistreats the Palestinians, but that it does so as part of an illegal occupation. Countries that abuse human rights are condemned; those who do so as part of a project of territorial dispossession and expansion are doubly condemned. No, that doesn’t make it okay for states to abuse their own citizens. It simply means that international law must count for something.

3. As I said in my article, Israel is a democracy. While some people seem to think that this gives Israel dispensation to ignore accepted standards of democratic conduct, I take the opposite view. Let me illustrate with reference to the Abu Ghraib scandal. The abuses carried out by American troops there were mild compared to those carried out under Saddam Hussein, but was there not something uniquely horrifying about the fact that they were done in the name of the world’s leading democracy? Democracies have to be held to the highest standard, because if we don’t uphold our own values, who will?

4. Although I can think of several states guilty of foreign occupations and systematic human rights violations that are worse than Israel’s, I can’t think of another where western complicity is so clear-cut. Israel is the single largest recipient of American foreign aid, which includes many of the weapons that make the occupation possible. For good measure, President Bush has now sanctioned Israel’s policy of territorial expansion. The European Union’s response has been feeble. It couldn’t even agree to apply its own laws by banning the import of goods produced in the West Bank and illegally exported as Israeli. These sins of omission and commission mean that there are good reasons for western leftists to feel a special sense of shame and anger about the plight of the Palestinians.

There is another dimension to this. When I hear people argue that Israel is unfairly singled out, I wish I could persuade myself that what they mean is: “If only people cared as much for the people of Tibet/Darfur/Zimbabwe as they do for the Palestinians”. But since those who make this point never seem to be partisans of the Free Tibet Campaign, I suspect that what they often mean is: “If only people cared as little for the Palestinians as they do for the people of Tibet/Darfur/Zimbabwe”. That way the Palestinians could join the Armenians and Kurds as a forgotten people and Israel’s project of unilaterally annexing parts of the West bank could proceed without effective opposition. That’s why, as a matter of deep principle, many of us refuse to abandon the Palestinians and allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence.

This brings me to my final point, which concerns the gulf of perception that seems to divide the two sides of this debate. This was well represented in David’s critique. I was frankly startled by his assertion that “few people anywhere defend the Israeli occupation”. This is the polar opposite of how I, and those who think like me, see things. The occupation is carried out by the Middle East’s strongest power and supported to the hilt by the world’s only superpower. In many western countries, a broadly Israeli account of the situation is accepted by the strongest political parties and the largest media outlets. It is the Palestinians and those who stand with them who constitute the embattled minority struggling against power and injustice. And yet, Israel’s supporters talk as if that mantle belongs to them.

I don’t doubt the sincerity with which many of them do so. It is clear that the way the Middle East is debated leaves many Jews with a feeling of being got at and that this extends beyond language to include concerns about physical safety. I was struck at the first session of the Parliamentary Inquiry on Anti-Semitism by the steps Jewish communities are taking to protect their schools and places of worship from the rising level of vandalism and violence. And while there may be other communities at greater statistical risk of attack, there isn’t another one that fears the consequences of racism so acutely. I think there is an obligation on all anti-racists to take this seriously. The question is to what extent this should influence the debate about Israel/Palestine.

Here I am not clear about what critics of the pro-Palestinian left are demanding. Do they want us to criticise Israel less or to criticise it differently? If it is the former, I suspect there is no possibility of common ground. For reasons I have already stated, Israel will continue to be the target of vehement and justified criticism until it ends its occupation. The hurt of those who misinterpret this as anti-semitism cannot take precedence over the rights of those living under that occupation. If it is the latter, in what ways should criticism be modified? I think some common ground rules are possible. There should be broad agreement that anything implying collective responsibility on the part of Jews for Israel’s actions is unacceptable and that conspiracy theories about “Jewish cabals” should be condemned. Even to toy with this theme, as the New Statesman did with its “Kosher Conspiracy?” cover, is wrong. The most prevalent version of this idea, which exaggerates the significance of the “Jewish lobby” in explaining America’s support for Israel, should also be challenged.

Criticism to the point distortion or unfair demonisation is also something that needs to be checked. As I said in my article, comparisons with Nazi Germany are beyond the pale since they either exaggerate Israel’s misdeeds or diminish Nazi Germany’s. Accusing Israel of genocide is wrong for the same reason, but “ethnic cleansing” is a different matter, as long as it is not used as a synonym for genocide. Israeli policy has involved a conscious and successful attempt at ethnic gerrymandering in favour of its Jewish citizens and that is why comparisons with apartheid are also justified, provided they are properly qualified. I personally felt that Chris McGreal’s careful treatment of the issue in the Guardian was fare comment. The furious response of the Board of Deputies and BICOM, on the other hand, did little to establish confidence in their willingness to accept legitimate criticism of Israel.

There is something else that Israel’s critics ought to be more willing to consider. One common complaint about the way the issue is debated is that it leaves many Jews feeling that Israel, and by extension Jews in general, are being vilified as a unique source of evil in the world. The left is willing – rightly, as I see it – to understand the frustrations that generate Islamist terrorism, even as it condemns terrorist acts. Should it not be equally understanding of the forces and experiences that drive Israeli policy even as it condemns the militaristic excesses of the occupation? I believe it should, but the inhibiting factor is not an inability to empathise with Israelis. It is equation of power and belief that Israel already enjoys the support of the strongest. This is clearly not how many Jews see it and I think it’s time that Israel’s critics did more to take account of that fact. A thoughtful reappraisal along these lines might be one area where both sides could reach an understanding. An initiative of this kind is certainly needed if we are to break out of the cycle of mutual recrimination that has done so much to sour this debate.

David Clark