Deafened by his splatter-gun attack on 'the left'

This contains Richard Kuper’s account of his dealings with the Jewish Chronicle, the article he wrote in response to Alan Johnson’s, and Johnson’s initial diatribe.

Stephen Pollard, editor, Jewish Chronicle

Jewish Chronicle and JfJfP

By Richard Kuper
October 07, 2015

Introduction

I wrote the piece below and sent it to the Jewish Chronicle on 15th September, with a brief covering note to the editor saying this:

Dear Stephen Pollard
In the hope that you will accept a rejoinder to Alan Johnson, as I suggested in my earlier email to you, I am attaching just such a piece. I trust I will be consulted if there is to be any editing of the contribution.

I’ve written it to a similar length as the original, indeed a tiny bit shorter.
With best wishes

I followed up a few days later with a phone call to the editorial department who suggested that I copy the article to Alan Montague which I did. About a week later I phoned Alan who seemed to know what I was talking about and said he would have to consult the editor and would get straight back to me shortly. He didn’t. On 1st October I sent him an email asking for a response, but heard nothing. Finally, on 7th October I phoned again and spoke to Alan who told me they would not be publishing the article because they “didn’t have space”. I asked if this was because they didn’t want to debate the issue but he assured me it was simply because they didn’t have space. I did ask why at no point they had acknowledged my emails and said it would have been easy to email me a reply saying they didn’t have space. I didn’t get the impression that courtesy is one of their dominant values.

 Richard Kuper

 Letter to Jewish Chronicle
 7th October 2015

 Response to Alan Johnson

In his “Antisemitic anti-Zionism and the Left” (JC, 10 September), Alan Johnson is quick to amalgamate an amazing array of individuals, ideas and issues into a global, portmanteau enemy which seems to encompass most of “the left”. It neither helps us understand the world nor contributes to combatting the real dangers of antisemitism.

Johnson forgets that the British left had a decades-long love affair with Israel. It has taken a lot of Israeli expansionism, arrogance and intransigence, violation of human rights, and ongoing occupation to shake this commitment. Three recent wars on Gaza have undermined any remaining tolerance of Israel’s impunity. This has nothing to do with antisemitism, but with the experience of seeing Israel behaving like a bullyboy in its own backyard.

Rephrase the question. Imagine, for a moment if what we see happening to Palestinians – in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza – were happening to Jews? Wouldn’t we be fundamentally right to condemn the racism and the violation of human rights we saw Jews suffering, and the impunity enjoyed by those who were lording it over them? Wouldn’t we be outraged to see a besieged and blockaded Gaza being bombed last August with over 500 Jewish children losing their lives? If the victims of the Duma firebombing were Jewish, wouldn’t we be outraged that perpetrators were still at large?

Johnson says “[what] the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is”. What criticism of Israel would Johnson accept as justifiable and non-demonising? Is it unfair to point to the regular arrests of Palestinians during night raids, the use of administrative detention, the daily humiliation and misery of the checkpoints, ongoing demolitions of Palestinian homes when securing building permits is nigh impossible, the growth of rabid Israeli-Jewish anti-Palestinian racism, the near total refusal of asylum to African refugees in Israel?

Of course, criticism of Israel can be antisemitic. But most of it, most of the time, just isn’t. Indeed, much of it comes from people who care passionately for Israel’s good name and its security – and are horrified by the damage that Israel is doing to itself by its behaviour.

What is antisemitic about wanting Israel to be a state of all its citizens? or pointing to the massive and increasing discrimination against its Palestinian minority? (If Jews in Britain were subjected to the same discriminations that Palestinian citizens of Israel suffer, I’m sure Johnson would rail – rightly – against the antisemitism.) What is antisemitic in wanting Israel to end its occupation and abide by international human rights standards, particularly those contained in agreements that Israel has signed up to, such as Fourth Geneva Convention.

Why is any analysis Johnson disagrees with deemed part of a “demonising intellectual discourse”? Why not examine Israel as a ‘colonial-settler society’ (a well-recognised term which has equally been applied to the USA, Australia, French Algeria, Northern Ireland etc)? It is simply historical fact that Mandate Palestine was overwhelmingly Arab when settled by new arrivals from Europe pre-1948, and that 80% of the indigenous population was forced to leave in 1947-48.

For Johnson, ‘the global social (BDS) movement’ is one of the three components of ‘antisemitic anti-Zionism’. But what is antisemitic about a boycott strategy? It was used as a first, and tragically unsuccessful, response by American Jews immediately after Hitler came to power, with a call to boycott Nazism. BDS is a long-standing and non-violent way of putting pressure on states which infringe human rights – Spanish fascism, Burmese militarism, South African apartheid, the US civil-rights movement and now, Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

Yes there is sometimes antisemitism on the fringes of the Palestine solidarity movement – as there was recently on the anti-Netanyahu demonstration. Demonstrators rounded on a tiny number of antisemites present and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign issued an immediate, fierce condemnation.

Johnson should stop shooting the messengers and listen to the message.

641 words

Richard Kuper
Spokesperson, Jews for Justice for Palestinians
15 September 2015

Antisemitic anti-Zionism and the Left

By Alan Johnson, Jewish Chronicle
September 10, 2015

 Alan Johnson

Left-wing antisemitism got going during the foundations of  the socialist movement in the late 19th century when some  parts of the left, often as a tactical ploy, identified “the Jew”  with finance and capitalism.

August Bebel, the German Social Democrat leader, shook his head and called this the “socialism of fools”.

There was much foolishness in Britain, too. “Wherever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumours of war circulate and men’s minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity,” warned the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1891, “you may be sure that a hooked-nosed Rothschild is at his games somewhere near the region of the disturbances.”

Left-wing antisemitism never went away. It became the “anti-imperialism of idiots” in the last third of the 20th century, when vicious, well-funded and long-running anti-Zionist campaigns were conducted by the Stalinist states, in alliance with the authoritarian Arab states and parts of the western New Left.

Those campaigns laid the ground for the form taken by left-wing antisemitism today – antisemitic anti-Zionism.

Antisemitic anti-Zionism bends the meaning of Israel and Zionism out of shape until both become fit receptacles for the tropes, images and ideas of classical antisemitism. In short, that which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is: malevolent, full of blood lust, all-controlling, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world.

Antisemitic anti-Zionism has three components. First, it is a political programme aiming at the abolition of the Jewish homeland.

Second, it is a demonising intellectual discourse and system of concepts: “Zionism is racism”; Israel as a “settler-colonialist” which ethnically cleansed the “indigenous” people, went on to build an apartheid state and is now engaged in an incremental genocide against the Palestinians.

Third, it is a global social movement (the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions or BDS movement).

The concern about Jeremy Corbyn is not that he indulges in antisemitism himself. It is that he indulges the antisemitism of others unless they come wearing a uniform and speaking German. When he is faced with antisemitic anti-Zionism, he overlooks the antisemitism. For example, he defended the antisemitic Palestinian Islamist Raed Saleh, even though Saleh’s vile Jew-hatred was a matter of public record (hell, a matter of court records, come to that).

Today is springtime for left-wing antisemitic anti-Zionism. We have a left-wing poet, Tom Paulin, who compares the IDF to the SS; a left-wing Church of England vicar, Stephen Sizer, who links to an article saying the Jews did 9/11, and then says, anyway, prove that they didn’t; a left-wing comedian, Alexei Sayle, who jokes that Israel is the Jimmy Saville of the nations; a left-leaning peer, Jenny Tonge, who demands an enquiry into whether the rescue mission sent by Israel to Haiti had a secret agenda of harvesting organs for Jews in Israel. And so on.

The left got into this mess because it wanted to dissolve Jewish peoplehood in the solvent of progressive universalism. We thought the proletariat would make a revolution that would solve “the Jewish question” once and for all.

But when the European socialist revolution failed and fascism and Nazism triumphed, culminating in the Holocaust, the appeal of the left’s universalism was in tatters.
In response to that rupture in world history – when Europe “vomited up its Jews” to quote the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell – the Jews insisted on defining their own mode of participation in universal emancipation: ie, Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel.

Tragically, parts of the left – not all – didn’t get the memo. And everything hinges on this failure of imagination.

Anti-Zionism became the reactionary programme to eradicate the Jewish homeland, a programme which converged with Arab nationalism and, latterly, even with radical Islamism, both of which could now be coded as singularly progressive by the left.
Leading academic Judith Butler said Hamas and Hezbollah are now “part of the global left”. Or, put more simply by Jeremy Corbyn, they are “friends”.

At that point, of course, the left is lost.

Professor Alan Johnson is senior research fellow at the Britain Israel Research and Communications Centre