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The Anglo-Jewish Association and the Union of Jewish Students proudly present:

Rt. Hon. Dr. Denis MacShane MP

Antisemitism on University Campus: a new phenomenon?

Denis MacShane was Chair of the inquiry panel on the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism that delivered its report in September 2006. He is author of Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism (published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, October 2008).

Thursday 27 November 2008, reception 7pm; Lecture 7:30pm
New Theatre
London School of Economics and Political Science,
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE

(Nearest tube stations: Temple, Holborn and Covent Garden)

RSVP: info@anglojewish.org.uk or 0207 443 5169
For security reasons, admittance is restricted to advanced seat reservations only
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This piece, by Benjamin Weinthal, is from Jpost.com.

Roughly 1,000 pupils and left-wing activists who unlawfully occupied Humboldt University (HU) and some of whom destroyed an anti-Nazi exhibition on Wednesday were reacting to the university's close ties to Israel, the university president has said.

Christoph Markschies told The Jerusalem Post that one of the protesters in the lobby of the university said "Damn Israel" when asked by another student to "stop" vandalizing the exhibit "Betrayed and Sold," about the plundering of Jewish businesses under the Nazis.

"Friendship with Israel is part of the HU's identity," said Markschies, adding
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There was an event at Goldsmiths, University of London, last week, which aimed to spread the view that what happens in Gaza today is similar to what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazis. Confronted by criticism of this event, Jennifer Jones, speaking to the Jewish Chronicle on behalf of the Students Union at Goldsmiths, expressed the hope that ‘the few vocal Zionists on campus become involved in a more positive capacity to support those suffering under the occupation’.

The overwhelming majority of living Jews are Zionists if what is meant by the term is that they do not support campaigns to de-legitimize Israel and to disband it against the will of most Israelis. Indeed in this sense, the overwhelming majority of human beings are Zionists too. And they are right to be Zionists in this sense. They are right because Israelis are behaving entirely rationally when they insist that there are lots of people in their neighbourhood who might want to kill them or to drive them out and that they need a state with which to defend themselves.

I hear the sense in which Jennifer Jones uses the term ‘Zionist’ as exceedingly threatening and it is not easy to communicate why, to a person who is unable to see why for themselves. I understand the word ‘Zionists’ in this context to mean 'Jews’, except that it does not include a category of exceptional ‘good Jews’. The category of ‘good Jews’ here should be understood as those Jews who are not disgusted by the designation of Israeli Jews as Nazis – those Jews who are prepared publicly to kosherize such a designation as being legitimate on the antiracist left.

So what Jennifer Jones says sounds to me very much like the sentiment that Jews on campus should stop making a fuss about the Israel-Nazi analogy and should instead support it because it is rightly understood as a campaign to support those suffering under the occupation. She doesn’t allow for the possibility that many of us ‘Zionists’ on campus have spent decades working hard to ‘support those who are suffering under occupation’. But in any case I am reluctant to rely on this because I think that even a ‘Zionist’ who does not ‘support those who are suffering under occupation’ has the right to oppose the antisemitic designation of Jews as Nazis.

Still don’t see why this use of the term ‘Zionist’ is vile? Perhaps it is because you also aren’t disgusted by the analogy between Israel and Nazi Germany. OK. Let me try again.

The Nazis herded the Jews of Warsaw and its surroundings into a few city blocks as the first stage in organizing their murder. Some were murdered by starvation and others were murdered by gas. But they all, except for a handful who escaped, ended up dead. The Nazis were executing a plan to kill the Jews of Europe. The Nazis killed about six million Jews in a set of events which are now often known as the Holocaust. Some Jews were able to get out of Europe and to escape with their lives.

For the previous century or so there had been heated debate on the Jewish left as to how to oppose antisemitism in Europe and Russia. Some, who called themselves ‘Zionists’, thought that the problem of antisemitism was best addressed by a Jewish movement for national self-determination. Others thought that Jews should remain in Europe and should defend themselves against antisemitism as part of the European socialist and emancipation movements. Most Jews were unimpressed by either of these two radical responses and preferred to carry on trying to live their Jewish lives without bothering anybody else. Neither strategy proved very effective in the end, against Nazism. Not many Jews went to Palestine and those who had put their faith in European civilization to keep Jews safe were politically defeated.

The huge material transformation of Jewish life in Europe, the Holocaust, changed everything. It is understandable that Jews, running for their lives from Europe and largely barred from the rest of the world, having seen their friends and families, their children and their parents killed, embraced the nationalist idea that they should build a state with which they would have the capacity to defend themselves and in which they could feel at home. In 1948 The United Nations partitioned Palestine and gave a little statelet to the Jews.

The rationale for claiming that Zionism is racist or is like Nazism is the assumption that the Jewish nationalist project in Palestine necessarily required the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians in order to succeed. Here is Trotsky's biographer, Isaac Deutscher’s telling of the story:

A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune. If both behaved rationally, they would not become enemies. The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and consol the other sufferer; and the latter might have realized that he was the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had control. But look what happens when these people behave irrationally. The injured man blames the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it. The other, afraid of the crippled man’s revenge, insults him, kicks him, and beats him up whenever they meet. The kicked man again swears revenge and is again punched and punished. The bitter enmity, so fortuitous at first, hardens and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison their minds.

You will, I am sure, recognize yourselves (I said to my Israeli audience), the remnants of European Jewry in Israel, in the man who jumped from the blazing house. The other character represents, of course, the Palestine Arabs, more than a million of them, who have lost their lands and their homes. They are resentful; they gaze from across the frontiers on their old native places; they raid you stealthily and swear revenge. You punch and kick them mercilessly; you have shown that you know how to do it. But what is the sense of it? And what is the prospect?

In truth the complex and tragic evolution of the conflicts between Israelis, Palestinians, Arab nationalists and Islamists was not pre-ordained by some kind of historical necessity but has been the result of political decisions, narratives, and ideas, and the result of a number of wars. Throughout this history and on all sides, political movements for Israeli-Arab co-existence were defeated, and belligerent political movements which aimed for victory over the other tended to win out. None of this was inevitable. None of this is the result of an essential Israeli or Jewish or Palestinian or Arab or Muslim racism. It is how things happened.

What we need now is what we have always needed. We need Israelis and Palestinians to find the peace, to find a way to live together and to resist the tendency within both nations to embrace racism and demonization against the other.

It is false to say that Israel is trying to achieve a ‘final solution’ by killing the Palestinians. We should not educate students in London to believe what is false.

It is true that conditions in Gaza are extremely difficult. The borders are tightly controlled by Israel and by Egypt. The de facto government in Gaza, elected in January 2006, which later took total power in a coup against the Palestinian President, promises war against the Jews of Israel to the end. The Israelis pursue the Hamas fighters into the streets and housing estates of Gaza, resulting in the inevitable and routine deaths of civilians. In Gaza there is agonizing poverty and shortages, for example of medical supplies. There is little freedom of movement for Gazans. But talk about Gaza being a prelude to a 'final solution' is just false.

But it is more than false. It is vile. Why can’t you see that the designation of ‘Zionists’ as Nazis is vile? Why don’t you feel it in your political bones? Why doesn’t it set your internal racism alarms ringing?

I think the reason is that too many radical people no longer understand irrational and disproportionate hostility to ‘Zionists’ to be a form of racism. They have internalized a commonsense notion that demonization of ‘Zionists’, in Jennifer Jones’ sense, while perhaps not entirely right, is neither entirely wrong. ‘Zionists’ are thought of as being at the centre of bad things that happen in the world. ‘Zionists’ oppress the Palestinians and the Palestinians stand for the oppressed everywhere. ‘Zionists’ are in favour of war and they are responsible for sending America to war in Iraq and perhaps in Iran. ‘Zionists’ have lots of power – in the media, in Hollywood, on Wall Street. ‘Zionists’ failed to learn the lesson of the Holocaust as we learnt it so well in Europe. ‘Zionists’ failed to learn the lessons of imperialism as we learnt it so well in Europe. ‘Zionists’ are behind Islamophobia, which eats at the heart of the new Europe.

Can you see it now?

David Hirsh
Goldsmiths

NB The graphic which accompanies this piece depicts Anne Frank who was a Dutch Jewish girl who was murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Anne Frank is well known because she wrote a diary about her experiences hiding from the occupying Nazis in Amsterdam. The image of Anne Frank has become iconic and it stands, in the imagination of many people, for all the children murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. This version of the image shows Anne Frank wearing a Keffiyeh, which is iconic of the Palestinian struggle against Israel. The image, which was originally produced as a postcard in the Netherlands illustrates, for me, the Jew-Nazi analogy and why it is inappropriate. DH
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Last night, "formally hosted" and "subsidised" by the Student Union, Suzanne Weiss darkened the door of my institution as an invited speaker. She was invited by the Palestine Twinning Campaign to which the officers of the local branch of my trade union, UCU, voted to donate £200 of our subs. The meeting - From the Warsaw Ghetto to the Gaza Ghetto - had been advertised with a monochrome poster juxtaposing images of the Warsaw Ghetto wall and a segment of wall round Gaza. Beforehand the Activities Officer read out a statement to the effect that the opinions expressed that evening were those of the speakers, and not the Student Union. It was hard to reconcile this with the October motion resoundingly passed by the 16-member student assembly which included the statement, if I have it correctly, that "hosting Ms Weiss would be a great honour to the union and what our union ethos incorporates".

In January 2008 (1) Weiss wrote that Israel deliberately kills Palestinians as part of a genocidal plan. She asserted that

"the Jewish people are the most hated people in the world today - because they are associated with the Zionist policies of Apartheid".

Rather than resisting any such racism against Jews – fully manifest in the language of extreme hostility to Israel - she acquiesces to it. In August 2008 she wrote an article in Socialist Voice (2) titled 'The siege of Gaza: Israel uses Hitler's methods against Palestinians'. In it she writes:

"The Zionists' aim is to remove Palestine from the world's family of nations. They hope that the world will forget that a Palestinian people ever existed. That is the Zionist "final solution" for the Palestinians".

She then pre-empts objections by appealing to 'Zionist' duplicity:

"The Zionists misuse the memory of the holocaust to breed and justify new wars in the Middle East".

Because her comparison between Zionists and Nazis is so dangerous, I and others had simply and without demands written in protest. Free speech and the value of debate had been raised in response. As it turned out, there wasn't debate. The hall was full to capacity with over 120 people with sufficient overflow for a decision to be made to repeat the presentation. The first presentation was made by a refugee from Gaza, the Exeter academic Ghada Ageel who gave an emotional presentation about the shortages food water and medicine in Gaza and their devastating impact on lives there. She had lost family members to poor healthcare. An uncle with liver failure had been prevented from crossing into Israel after refusing a request to collaborate with the Israeli army. She told of her father's death from cancer without even aspirin to relieve the pain. Her presentation was about the human toll taken by the occupation.

Then Suzanne Weiss made her presentation, which had the specific purpose of drawing an analogy between the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza. It began with her sole and spurious claim to authority, "I'm a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust". It became clear over the course of the evening that many audience members, including twinning organisers, believed that Weiss had survived the Warsaw Ghetto, and that this conferred on her the authority to speak on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her family perished in Auschwitz when she was a baby, however she herself was spared the inside of a camp or a ghetto. She was sent to an orphanage in her native France aged three and adopted by Americans at the age of nine. Her brief sketch of the US was as a racist and war-fevered state. Israel - "religious and ethnic exclusive state" - more so, she contended, ignoring the plurality of Israel's population and the absence of a category of race in Israeli law. She talked of the great hate provoked by Zionism and vaguely of Israel's use of methods once employed by Nazis. She said that Zionists did not want to kill all Palestinians but the basic philosophy of Zionism is the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians "off the face of the earth" so that the world would forget they had ever existed. This she declared, is Israel's "final solution". She went on to mention Matan Vilnai's threat to Gazans - which was already unacceptable enough - confidently interpreting it as an "unmistakeable" threat of a holocaust.

Next came a systematic comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza with respect to methods; motivation; resistance, much of which was made up.

"Racism is the ideology of Euro-American colonial settlers"

she said, wrongly leading her audience to believe that Israel is a colony but failing to clear up the mystery of the colonial power. She told us that

"Zionists want their state to expand and dominate the region".

She made much of the alliance between Europe's Jews and the socialist resistance movement. But in those drastically polarised times, many who opposed the Fascists aligned themselves with the Communists. Things are different now and there exists a range of different political opinion and space for free and open discussion. The main obstacle for Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are their respective extremists - they both agree that there should be one state and they would wage war on each other for it if there were. The origins of racism apparently lie with "Euro-American colonialist ruling settlers", not with the Nazis. The "colonialist settler movement" was "hellbent" on depriving the Palestinians of everything. She quoted Avram Burg that "there are two kinds of people coming out of Auschwitz - those who say "Never again" for the Jews, and those who say "Never again" for humanity." The latter, she declared, was her type, meaning that people like me - people who believe that the persecution of Jews which saw its zenith in the Holocaust justifies a Jewish state, a place where Jews do not have to exist on sufferance - are designated the other type. As if you can't say "Never again" for Jews and at the same time "Never again for humanity".

I made a disgusted remark to my neighbour, was overheard and later repeatedly condemned as a racist. It's not the first time members of this campaign have called me racist because I'm not an anti-Zionist. This kind of thing has put a lot of people off badly. But then, that may be the idea - "Zionists out of the peace movement" and all that. We are repeatedly told, almost like a mantra, that we are welcome at meetings. But somehow there is a vast gulf between being told we are welcome, and feeling welcome. Speakers like Suzanne Weiss occupy that gulf.

It was all so adrenal and so insubstantial. You listen to Ageel and learn compassion but no strategy. You listen to Weiss and learn nothing about the Palestinians, but why it is necessary to reject and condemn Zionists. There is already a big problem with rejecting Jewish nationalism while accepting and promoting Palestinian nationalism - a bigger danger arises with the term 'Zionist' being left undefined and being used in such a way that it readily slips between 'Jew' and 'Israeli'. Indeed there is large overlap between the three. Half of the world's Jews are Israeli, and the overwhelming majority of them believe in the existence of their state - i.e. are 'Zionists'. It's a small step from hating Zionists to hating Israeli Jews, and from hating Israeli Jews to hating all Jews who do not condemn Israeli Jews. So, the Hamas Charter wages explicit war on Jews. In their Democratiya review of Al-Qaradawi's book Fatawa on Palestine, Gardner and Rich observe that Israelis, Zionists and Jews are conflated and the terms freely mixed throughout the book. The anti-Israel graffiti last Nakba Day appeared on the walls of synagogues in the in the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill. There is a current of thought which believes, as the erstwhile doyenne of the Socialist Worker Party Gilad Atzmon believes, that

"the Hebraic identity is the most radical version of the idea of Jewish supremacy, which is a curse for Palestine, a curse for Jews and a curse for the world. It is a major destructive force"

and consequently

"For an Israeli to humanise himself, he must de-zionise himself. In this way, self-hating can become a very productive power. It's the same sense of self-hating I find, too, in Jews who have given the most to humanity".

This idea that, while a good Palestinian can be a Palestinian nationalist, Arab nationalist or even an Islamist, a good Jew cannot be a Zionist, is a current of thought which is also familiar in the boycott campaign in UCU which many who oppose it have experienced directly. It is false and corrosive.

Immediately after Weiss had finished the Chair, one of the twinning organisers, attempted to end the event right there. All pretence of debate was abandoned. We were there to be talked at. Protests from the floor persuaded him reluctantly to allow ten minutes for questions. The first few comments permitted from the floor were in criticism of Weiss, and a further question was addressed to the panellists about whether Goldsmiths should twin with an Israeli as well as a Palestinian institution. The panellists were reluctant to answer this, attempting to defer to the chair. Then Ageel was permitted 5 minutes of response before the meeting ended. One audience member rose to her feet, gestured in the direction of the previous commenters and said, "You see, the ones that support Israel have the main power", urging us to act to counter this in the future.

I left with a colleague, a senior academic whose family died in the Warsaw Ghetto, and who is Zionist, optimistic and left wing. A vigorous debate among maybe 15 students was ongoing in the corridor, which we joined. Students asked my colleague about Zionism and several listened carefully to his responses. Some said they felt that they knew too little about Zionism. There seemed to be a will to find out more. My colleague and one of the twinning organisers swapped details. The activities officer regretted the lack of debate and the imbalanced panel. We objected to the title and poster, which Weiss had chosen and the Student Union had accepted unchallenged.

We carried candles to a vigil on the steps of Deptford Town Hall. There the Chair of the meeting called bombastically for Israel to be subsumed into a single state, and Suzanne Weiss called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, in order to (her voice rose above the traffic) "force" Israel to submit.

That more or less wrapped things up. One of the organisers told me that we shouldn't censor such views as Weiss'. I would say in response that the twinning campaign's invited speakers - and Weiss came to London from Canada specially - defines the character of the twinning campaign. Inviting extremists to paint Israelis as Nazis clearly indicates the priorities of the twinning campaign. Although debate is made much of, only anti-Zionist external speakers have been invited, meaning that what debate there is takes place between privileged official speakers and dissenting Student Union members. And the lack of debate or opportunity for response at this, the most contentious and damaging event to date, with a speaker who controlled the title and publicity, has harmed the reputation of the twinning still further. How does implacable, unopposed hostility to Jewish nationalism help the students at Al-Quds University towards a better education or Goldsmiths students towards a better understanding of the conflict? We need to return to these things and away from bad stories about Israel.

Update (15th November): Two relevant pieces of infomration. What the chair promoted that evening as a "vigil" is he is now retrospectively referring to in a circular email as a "picket". It was the promotion of the event on Facebook which gave students the false impression that "Suzanne will be speaking about her time in the Warsaw ghetto in Poland as a child and her experiences in the ghettos of the Gaza Strip".

Mira Vogel
Goldsmiths
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"According to Haaretz, Ali Baher, the chairman of the Hebrew University’s Arab student body, refused to shake Peres’ hand. Moreover, he called him a “murderer of children”, presumably a reference to Peres’ role in the Qana deaths of 1996’s Operation Grapes of Wrath, in which 106 civilians were killed in shelling from Israeli artillery."

"After this snub, Baher was taken away and questioned for three hours over his behaviour. Somebody trashed his dorm-room and an enquiry was held into his behaviour, ultimately deciding that there was no reason to discipline him. “I have a right to not shake hands with those I do not want to shake hands with,” Baher told Haaretz."

Full story from Alex Stein here.
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