Someone calling herself "Cath" has posted the following comment on Jon Pike's piece about a racist attack on a Brighton Synagogue. She says:

"The same drives that caused you to react directly against racist graffitti in your neighbourhood- drive me to start a Boycott Israeli Goods Group.Three years reading about the facts, studying the real statistics and effects on lives, fruitless attempts to stop the wall being built on Palestinian lands wrecking villages and lives all lead to this point for many people.Zionism is not just any form of nationalism its actualised itself by trampling a whole people and continues to do that with our consent & moral complicity. The human suffering is collosal breeding hatred.The settlements mean the likelihood of a viable Palestinian State is almost hopeless.A boycott shows recognition for this injustice and solidarity with the Palestinians.Is there another effective way to bring about change peacefully? Zionism in my view is not like Rastifariansim- its a fundamentalist political theological ideology actualised geographically which by its very nature excludes the Arabs and non Jews who lived there.How's that not racist?"

"What's scary is talking to some young Jewish people that live in Israel how ignorant they are of the other narrative, intelligent articulate students who can read....but hold distorted perceptions of what happened.They have the same blindness Martin Luther King wrote about when people asked how could Christians treat blacks like this and go to church.Simple he said they are blind to us.Israel needs to take off the blind fold and so do the academics!"

David Hirsh replies
Cath, Jon's headline to this piece is important. "The left needs consistent anti-racist action". So when racists scrawl "Hezballah" on a Glasgow synagogue, or write "nuke the Jews - you're next" in Brighton - what do we do?

What you do is respond by re-stating the horrors that Israel is responsible for against the Palestinians. This is right. We should all be reminded of those horrors. But how do we understand them and what do we do about them?

At Natfhe conference in April, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign had a stall - the stall had a video display of images of dead Palestinian children. They presented the horrors and acted as though the politics could be read off directly from the horrors. But politics can't be derived only from moral revulsion, can they? Israelis can show pictures of dead babies too. Important, to remember the horrors, but they are not a substitute for politics.

You say your attitude comes from "the facts" and "the real statistics". But it is also your analysis, which insists that Zionism is not nationalism, that Israel can only exist by "trampling a whole people", that the struggle for a Palestinian state is hopeless - which is part of the problem here. You put forward a simplisitc and one-sided essentialism. Not "the facts" but some facts. Not "the real statistics" but some statistics.

We need a consistently anti-racist response. But you seem to have nothing to say about the fact that politics like yours leads people to attack synagogues with racist graffitti. Why do you think that is?

The fact is that your analysis is not simply based on "facts". You come to us with a politics of despair and a "not in my name" politics. One that has given up on peace between Palestine and Israel and so throws its weight behind what you call "one narrative". You are scathing of "some young Jewish people" that you have met because they don't accept your "narrative" - yet it is also clear that your "narrative" is as partial, as one-sided, as the one that makes you so morally outraged. By giving up on peace between Israelis and Palestinians, you back those Palestinians that want war against Israel. By giving up on any possibility of normalizing relationships between israelis and Palestinians, you give up the aspiration for a normal Middle East.

Your political project to treat Israel as though it was a demon - aparthied South Africa, the American South under the Jim Crow laws - and the Jews that support it as though they were demonic - is a project of despair and of war, not one of hope and of peace. You are aware that one result of your "narrative" is that it leads people to attack synagogues - but your judgment is that the unleashing of a racist movement against Jews is a relatively benign by-product of the real struggle for Palestine and against Israel.

Most people in the Palestine Solidarity movement that currently exists stay silent about antisemitism. They cast the blame elsewhere. It is Middle Eastern Jews that bring antisemitism on themselves and on other Jews - antisemitism is not the responsibility of the antisemites but of the Jews. Or the contemporary politics of Palestine Solidarity denies antisemitism, it charges that antisemitism is one of the demonic tricks of "the Zionists", it is an illusion that is held up by "the Zionists" to hide and cover the horrors that Israel perpetrates.

So you press on with your political campaign to demonize Israel, your campaign to exclude Israeli academics from the universities of the world, your campaign to that is based on half-truths.

And when you comment about a racist attack on a synagogue, you don't mention the racist attack on the synagogue. Neither do you mention the fact that many in your movement are currently throwing their weight behind racist outfits like Hamas and Hezbollah - because they are thrilled by the apparently anti-imperialist militancy of those movements - and they manage to close their eyes to the danger that those movements pose to Palestinian women, to Palestinian democracy, to Palestinian lesbians and gays, to Jews. Again, the politics of despair, the politics of the last atrocity, the politics of anger - not the politics of building a better world. In this narrative, the global war against imperialism sacrifices Israeli Jews - and this sacrifice is hidden behind fantasies of peace through conquest and equality through the victory of movements like Hamas and Hezbollah.

And close to home, in my university, where I work and where I teach, there is a danger of one single exclusion - Israeli Jews won't be allowed to speak, won't be listened to. And close to home, we have to endure the rise of anti-Jewish racism - attacks against Jewish kids and Jewish synagogues - and we are asked to regard this as collateral damage in the war for Palestine and against imperialism.

What should we on the left be doing? We should be organising solidarity with those that fight for peace and against racism in both Israel and Palestine. We should be publicising the horrors committed by those that reject peace and co-existence. We should be helping, politically, morally and materially, those who live through the horrors.

Academics should be organizing exchange programmes; they should be teaching in Palestine and Israel; they should be supporting Palestinian universities, sending books, money, equipment and friendship. Palestinian academics need political and practical solidarity. They need us to campaign against the occupation, against the Israeli regime in the West Bank that makes it so difficult to organize a university. They need to us to campaign for freedom of expression and freedom of movement for Palestinian academics and students.

So stop picketing Marks and Spencer, stop campaigning to exclude Israeli Jews from our universities, stop picking off Israeli film makers, musicians, dancers, academics and writers.

Stop spreading conspiracy theory which claims that Jews control foreign governments and the global media.

Stop pretending that Israelis exist only to murder their neighbours.

Recognise the fact that Israelis are descnded from refugees from racism in Europe, in Russia and in the Middle East.

Recognise the fact that there are millions of people accross the Middle East who think that Israelis are foreigners in their own homes. Recognise the fact that there are millions of people accross the Middle East who support the random or wholesale killing of Israeli Jews.

We need a solidarity movement with those who work for peace between Israel and Palestine, not with those who work for war against Israel.