JFJFP

January 2, 2000

News

Richard Kuper

Tags: academic boycott, antisemitism, singling out Israel

Norman Geras continues the extended debate between Martin Shaw and David Hirsh

The practice of discrimination
Norman Geras, Normblog, 19 Sep 2008

(1) If some people are picked out for specially favourable or specially unfavourable treatment relative to the norm, that’s discrimination; and discrimination is wrong. Yes? No. It depends. To be able to tell whether a policy that treats some people in a selectively better or worse way is discriminatory in the pejorative sense, we need to know the context for that policy. We need to know whether there are relevant and good reasons for the selective treatment in question.

Here are a few examples. If an organization grants sick leave to an employee who is sick, most of us would think that that was fine (unless we just believed the sick should go to the wall or learn to be more lucky). We might, on the other hand, frown if some employees were allowed to take holidays at will when most employees could not, and we might call this, critically, favouritism. If I mark certain student papers at 70 percent or more, on the grounds that those papers are exceptionally good in terms of knowledge of the subject matter, evidence of the analytical abilities of the students whose papers they are, originality of thought, etc., I’d be doing my job as an examiner. If, however, I only awarded 70 or more to the students I liked best or who’d slipped me a bribe, I’d be a disgrace to my profession. Again, if the police arrest five people from Didsbury on suspicion of a crime, and arrest no one from Hounslow, this is neither police harassment nor discrimination against the residents of Didsbury provided that the police have some genuine and compelling evidence linking the five Didsbury-dwellers with the crime, and have nothing similar for anybody living in Hounslow. And so on.

To know whether a policy is unjustly or perniciously discriminatory, we need to know what reasons, in the given context, would be relevant to justifying differential treatment, and whether or not there are good reasons of that relevant kind.

These remarks serve as an introduction to the discussion between Martin Shaw and David Hirsh in the latest edition of Democratiya on whether the proposed academic boycott of Israel is anti-Semitic or not. That discussion, I am bound to say, is less illuminating than it might be. This is because Martin’s position is vitiated – so I shall be arguing here – by a weakness at its very heart, a grave logical weakness; but David, though he is surely aware of it, does not concentrate attention on this strategic point and consequently Martin is not obliged to defend the point, to try to make the weakness good (assuming this is possible). The two of them give us a general tour of the issues in a way unlikely to enlighten anyone unless they are quite new to the debate.

Martin’s view is stated succinctly at the start. The academic boycott of Israel is not anti-Semitic, even if, he says (referring to a formulation of David’s), it disadvantages Jews more than others.

By this topsy-turvy reasoning, the boycott of apartheid South Africa must have manifested anti-white or anti-Afrikaner racism, since it harmed whites and Afrikaners more than others. It simply will not do to say that action against a racially based state like Israel is itself racist because it must by definition harm the interests of the groups that benefit from that state.

Does Martin think, then, that there are good reasons for the academic boycott of Israel? He does not. He emphasizes, right from the off, that he has never supported the academic boycott, and one has, therefore, to assume that he doesn’t think the reasons for supporting the boycott are good. But if the reasons aren’t good, then the academic boycott of Israel is, by Martin’s own lights, a piece of unjustified discrimination. Might it be that I am thrusting upon him a logic he does not himself recognize – that, while he might accept my attributing to him the view that there is no good justifying case for the academic boycott, he doesn’t see that this absence makes the boycott policy discriminatory in the bad sense? I will not pursue these hypotheticals. For he does see it. Martin later makes plain his own awareness of the perniciously discriminatory character of the boycott. He says:

As it happens, the main reasons why I oppose the academic boycott of Israel are indeed that it can be perceived as collective punishment of Israelis for the crimes of their state, and that it disadvantages Israelis who make criticise [sic] their government’s policies as well as those who support them.

It is difficult to read the final clause in any other way than as saying it is morally inappropriate to treat Israelis who are critical of their government disadvantageously (whatever may be the case with regard to uncritical Israelis). The boycott is a form of unjust discrimination.

A summary so far, then: Martin doesn’t think there are good justifying reasons for the academic boycott of Israel; and he does think (as I claim amounts to the same thing) that the boycott is discriminatory in the pejorative sense. (I urge readers to keep a hold of this central point, since other arguments Martin makes, and which I now come to, may seem to obscure it.) The anti-Semitism of the boycott, on the other hand, for Martin is merely ‘alleged’.
(2) If there are not good justifying reasons for the academic boycott, Martin does think there are good reasons for campaigning against Israel. Here’s one of them:

Unlike Burma or China (and actually plenty of opponents of Israel’s policies also oppose these regimes), Israel claims to be a democracy and receives enormous support from Western governments.

Another is the ‘racial basis of the Israeli state’. Now, I don’t feel any argumentative obligation to examine whether these are or are not good reasons for campaigning against Israel. Even if they are, we know that Martin himself does not judge them to be good reasons for a boycott targeted on Israeli academics, a piece of unjust discrimination against them by his own lights. And the question at issue is whether the boycott is anti-Semitic, not whether some other possible forms of protest or campaign against Israel would be anti-Semitic.But, even though I am not obliged to, I will nonetheless point out two or three problems with these reasons for campaigning against Israel. Though Martin doesn’t think they justify a boycott, he does think they are telling as a basis for campaigning. But since what they are being used as a basis for in fact is not campaigning in general but a boycott of Israeli academics in particular, what they tell is a different story from the one Martin suggests.

Thus, Israel is a democracy and supported by Western governments. Well, the US and Britain are also democracies, and they are themselves governed by Western governments. If these serve as grounds for boycotting Israeli academics (as for the boycotters, though not for Martin, they do), how come there has been no thought of action against US and British academics, whether on account of Western support for Israel or of the Iraq war (which many of the boycotters opposed as an illegal war)? That Martin considers them good reasons for campaigning does not detract from the charge of unjust discrimination against the precise form of campaigning that is the boycott. On the contrary. Israeli academics, and they alone, have to stand answerable for the putative misdeeds of their government, because it is a democratic government and supported by the West. No one else.

Nothing could be more telling, furthermore, than the fact that Martin lets this argument sit beside the analogy of the anti-apartheid campaign, without the slightest trace of mental discomfort. Somehow, solidarity action in that case could go ahead though South Africa was not notably democratic vis-à-vis the majority black population, and white Afrikaner society not especially open to the influence of liberal and left pressure from the West. Now, on the other hand, Israel is apt for being campaigned against, and Burma and China perhaps less so, because Israel is a democracy. This is, transparently, an argument of convenience.

As to the racism of the Israeli state, I will limit myself to noting that the selectivity of the academic boycott movement applies not merely with respect to the rest of the great wide world – to Burma or China, Sudan or Zimbabwe, Britain, the US; it applies even within the narrow geography of the land that is at issue here, Israel and Palestine. Israeli academics, yes, for the racism of the Israeli state, but not Palestinian academics – though their national movements, one of these officially and in its very charter, are compromised by poisonous forms of anti-Semitism.

So – reasons for campaigning as may be, but when looked at under the glass of the UCU boycott and the reasons given for that, not altogether reassuring ones.
(3) If Martin isn’t troubled in the way that others of us are – or if he is less troubled – by the unjustly discriminatory character of the academic boycott, it is because, on his own account of things, he understands the way in which political activism alights now here and now there:

[A]s a sociologist as well as an activist [he writes] I understand that there are many reasons, good as well as bad, why particular causes attract support in particular periods.

By way of sociology of activism, this is fine, but apart from that it won’t do. Martin is right that people gravitate towards some causes rather than others under the influence of many different things. Moreover, individuals are entitled to devote their political energies as they see fit, and if many of them happen to converge on one campaign rather than another, no one can legitimately tell them that they ought to be doing something else. You work in support of the Medical Foundation and Amnesty International but not of various old-age charities; you campaign over Burma but not China, or Zimbabwe but not Burma… you’re one person and can do only so much. Better that you do something and not nothing. And if you are several or many persons and are attracted to the same cause, so be it.

Still, there is, as well as a sociology of activism, a morality of political action and this applies differently to organizations than to individuals. If I want I can spend all my free time campaigning against Israeli policies I regard as mistaken and unjust, like the occupation of the West Bank and (once) Gaza, or the Jewish settlements on that occupied territory. But the University and College Union is not a random collection of individuals that may do as it pleases with its limited resources and the efforts and the reputation of its members. It is an academic union and bound by its very nature to have relations with the academics of other countries. For the UCU to adopt a discriminatory policy disfavouring academics of one and only one nationality cannot be justified by any sociology of activism, even if it may be partially explained by that. For the union to do this because of the actions of a subset of its members who happen to have a particular activist focus on Israel that is not shared by the majority of the membership accentuates the point.
(4) Since Martin Shaw does not support the academic boycott, why should he see it as pertinent, and indeed persuasive, to enumerate what he regards as good reasons not for the boycott itself, but for campaigning against Israel in other than academic-boycott ways? It’s the anti-Semitism or otherwise of the academic boycott that is at issue, rather than whether campaigns against Israel of some other kind are justified. The answer to my question isn’t hard to come by. It is given by the terms he uses in the first two paragraphs of his opening contribution to the debate between him and David Hirsh. Martin writes as if to be racist, a policy must ‘manifest’ racist attitudes. He takes David to task for ‘the suggestion that anti-semitism must lurk behind the choice to campaign against Israel’ (my italics). The anti-Semitism, I infer from this way of putting it, must inhere in the minds of those responsible for the action or policy in question, before we can reasonably say that it is anti-Semitic. If this were true, it would make anti-Semitism a singular form of prejudicial discrimination. So far as I’m aware, no other type of racism is treated as requiring so high a threshold as motivational animus or attitudinal hostility. It is well known that there are racist symbols, prejudicial patterns of speech and, above all, discriminatory practices. These may or may not be accompanied by matching states of mind and it is, generally, better when they are not. But even in the latter case, the symbols, patterns of speech and practices, if they are racist or perniciously discriminatory in some other way, matter. They are to be opposed and not excused.

Imagine, here, an ancient university in which certain positions of authority are closed to women. In most other ways the institution has kept pace with the modern world, and its members in their vast majority have properly liberal attitudes towards gender equality. But they are attached to the tradition that reserves these positions for men. Without feeling any hostility towards women (which is what 37 percent of them indeed are), they want to stick with the aforesaid tradition, and keep the positions ineligible to those of their number who are of the said 37 percent. Many of these women protest and some of the men do as well, but they are outvoted on the university’s McCallum-FitzHugh Council – all feminists to a man, where they are men – and the outcome of a university-wide referendum, which the Council agrees to sanction, is in line with the vote of the Council itself. Could anyone say with a straight face that there was not a sexist restriction in operation in this ancient university?

Imagine, next, that a music academy in Paris or Berlin, the governing body of which is vigorously opposed to the Iraq war, decides that it will cease to admit US citizens as long as the war continues; or that a chain of restaurants in one of these two countries, and on the same grounds, declines for the duration of the war to serve Americans, who are asked to leave the premises as soon as their identity as Americans has been ascertained. Someone tells you that this is not anti-Americanism, it is merely a protest against the Bush administration. I don’t think so. The would-be reasons for the policy may be as cogent as you find them when applied to some other kind of protest or campaign against the Iraq war; but they are not good reasons for excluding American musicians or diners. This exclusion is therefore a wrongful form of discrimination, and is anti-American just by reason of the criterion for the exclusion, and regardless of the attitudes towards Americans of those doing the excluding. Maybe they love Americans, but are misguided in the way they have shaped their protest; it is the policy, and not necessarily the attitude, that is anti-American.
(5) It might be argued now in defence of Martin’s position that, even if I have said enough to show the academic boycott is unjustly discriminatory (as he accepts), and even if this is so whether or not the boycotters are motivated by attitudes of animus or prejudice, I have not shown that the boycott is anti-Semitic. Its target, after all, is Israeli and not Jewish academics. Yes, the two categories are not identical. There is a link between them, all the same, and it is therefore a matter of some interest how Martin – or anyone – can be as confident and categorical as he seems to be that this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

Consider where we now are. (a) The academic boycott is unjustly discriminatory. (b) It discriminates unjustly whatever might be the inner attitudes of those who support it. (c) The people it discriminates against are Israeli academics, who are, in their overwhelming majority, Jews. (d) And there are no reasons specific to their ‘Israeli-ness’ that pick out a justifying reason for boycotting them. The academic boycott, in sum, targets Jews, though not all Jews, and for no good reason that anyone, including (by his own admission) Martin, has yet come up with. That seems to me to provide prima facie grounds for describing it as anti-Semitic.

I will now go further, however, further than I think I need to in rebutting Martin’s argument, but in a way that strengthens the rebuttal. I do so by asking how Martin can be so sure that no attitudinal anti-Semitism, that is, no anti-Semitism on his own very restricted definition of it, is at work in the academic boycott campaign. Even if attitudinal anti-Semitism is not of enormous weight there, anti-Semitic tropes do sometimes turn up amongst boycott activists – such as alleged Jewish control of the media and other centres of power and influence, or the equation made between the Jewish state and Nazi Germany – as do apologetic discourses about movements that are unambiguously and unashamedly anti-Semitic. If one adds to this that anti-Semitism is an ancient prejudice in Europe, how does Martin exclude the possibility that, even in his own terms, there might be at least threads of anti-Semitism staining the boycott campaign?

Well, when all is said and done, and despite the dominant drift of his argument, he doesn’t so much exclude the possibility as make light of it. Martin writes:

I accept that there are antisemites among Israel’s critics and that as with all long-standing and widely diffused racial prejudices, low-level antisemitism may be widespread – probably even among Israel’s supporters in the US and British political classes. However I do not think that on any serious assessment, antisemitism can be regarded as politically potent in Western societies today – by historical standards it is definitely weak – or a major theme among Western critics of Israel.

I have no quarrel with this as an overall judgement. Attitudinal anti-Semitism in this country is not potent by historical standards, and as for its weight in the boycott campaign, Martin may well also be right to say that ‘opposition to Israel is more likely to be a reflex of left-wing opposition to US or British ‘imperialism’ than of antisemitism’. But why is the historical standard the relevant standard in this context, and why, equally, is the fact that there are weightier influences on the boycotters than attitudinal anti-Semitism any reason to treat the worry about such anti-Semitism as there is dismissively? One tradition and one duty of the left, or so I understand it, is to oppose racism in all its forms and to call it by its proper name wherever it manifests itself. To say that it has been or could be worse, is not a commendable impulse. The point, rather, is to try to ensure that it gets no worse.

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The new anti-anti-semitism
Martin Shaw, theory and politics, 21 Sep 2008

In recent months I have become publicly engaged for the first time with the issues surrounding Israel and Palestine – although obviously I have long held private views about this conflict. On the first page of my book What is Genocide? (Polity 2007) I wrote, among several examples of how past genocides figure in current politics, that ‘The spectre of the archetypal genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, stalks twenty-first-century relations between Israelis and Palestinians.’ By this I meant no more than that the Holocaust influences thinking about the conflict on both sides, so that, for example, some Israelis see the Holocaust in every attack on Jews in Israel, and some Palestinians go so far in their opposition to Israel as to deny the Holocaust. Later in the book, however, I used the Zionist drive to expel Arabs from Mandate Palestine, in the run-up to 1948, as one example of how forced migration involves genocidal thinking.
In the light of this later analysis, my opening statement was picked up by an Australian academic, Mark Baker, writing in Australian Jewish News, as an indication that I believed that Israel might be planning to do to the Palestinians something like what the Nazis did to the Jews – although my words bear no such interpretation. This in turn led Baker to imply, through a thoroughly distasteful anecdote about a scientist in the Nazi era, that I am not only incorrigibly anti-Israeli but also anti-semitic. I requested and eventually received an apology which was published in Australian Jewish News’ print edition (although it is not to be found on their website, from which the offending article has also been removed).
Following this I read an article by David Hirsh in Democratiya, an online centre-left journal on whose advisory board I serve, implying that the academic boycott of Israel, proposed at one point by the British Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), was not only wrong but inherently, ‘institutionally’, anti-semitic. I fired off a short letter challenging this idea, which provoked a long reply from Hirsh, who it turns out runs an organisation called Engage devoted to this issue. I responded also at length; he replied again; and I was given the last word – so a brief comment turned into an extended debate.
Now Norman Geras, another supporter of Engage, has joined the fray. His is also a lengthy piece, but unlike Hirsh, Norman (whom I know a little from our days in different fragments of the far left many years ago) does refer carefully to my argument. He also makes some reasonable points – yes, I agree that the boycott (which I never supported) discriminates against Israeli academics, but this is hardly the clincher that he seems to think it is, since no, that still does not mean the boycott campaign is anti-semitic.
Norman’s version of the latter argument is that ‘The academic boycott … targets Jews, though not all Jews, and for no good reason that anyone … has yet come up with. That seems to me to provide prima facie grounds for describing it as anti-Semitic.’ This is truly bizarre, since the boycott targeted Israeli Jews, on the manifest grounds of their being Israeli rather than their being Jewish, and while it is not justified to discriminate against all Israelis, or all Israeli academics, simply because they are Israeli, it was quite clear in this case that it was because of their Israeli citizenship and presumed linkage to the policies of the Israeli state, and not because of their Jewishness, that these academics were targeted. It is exactly the same principle, misguided though it is, that guided the boycott of academics from apartheid South Africa in the previous generation, and in neither case has the campaign been inspired by racism. While it is not justified to discriminate against academics because of the policies of the Israeli state, there is simply no good reason to doubt that the stated rationale of the boycott, opposition to these policies, rather than hostility to Jews as such, is in fact the reason for this campaign. Why not answer it on these terms rather than resorting to the argument of implicit, ‘institutional’, anti-semitism?
Nevertheless Norman cannot let go of the idea that there is an inherent link between anti-Israelism and anti-semitism, and therefore he asks ‘how does Martin exclude the possibility that … there might be at least threads of anti-Semitism staining the boycott campaign?’ And he wonders ‘how Martin can be so sure that no attitudinal anti-Semitism, that is, no anti-Semitism on his own very restricted definition of it, is at work in the academic boycott campaign’. So I am being called to account for not being more concerned about the possibility of anti-semitism, that is to say, a hypothetical danger. While I accept that one should be concerned about this possibility, it does not seem to me to weigh very heavily against all the actual, clearly existing dangers to Palestinians from Israel’s repressive policies, or indeed to Israelis from the attacks of Palestinian armed groups. As Norman goes on to write, ‘If I want I can spend all my free time campaigning against Israeli policies I regard as mistaken and unjust, like the occupation of the West Bank and (once) Gaza, or the Jewish settlements on that occupied territory.’ These policies include, one might add, the confinement of Palestinian academics which is far more harmful than anything that has been done to any Israeli academic. So that would seem very much more appropriate than spending one’s time worrying about the hypothetical anti-semitism of what is now, in any case, a failed boycott campaign, which has hardly harmed a single Israeli scholar.
The other big problem with Norman’s discussion is that he refuses to accept my broadening the argument from the boycott to opposition to Israel in general. This was for the good reason that the ‘anti-semitism’ charge is not merely an argument of those who oppose the UCU boycott. It is widely made or insinuated by supporters of Israel against its critics in all sorts of specific arguments, as I experienced myself withAustralian Jewish News, and as John Meiersheimer and Stephen Walt have extensively documented inThe Israel Lobby. Since Norman has ‘no quarrel’ with my ‘overall judgement’ that ‘on any serious assessment, antisemitism [cannot] be regarded as politically potent in Western societies today – by historical standards it is definitely weak – or a major theme among Western critics of Israel’, it seems to me that he really ought to question why he gives his support to David Hirsh’s dogged campaign to tar the boycott movement with anti-semitism. This charge, in this and many other cases, is little more than an underhand way of attempting to discredit opposition to Israel. In the end it raises more questions about the commitments of the anti-anti-semites than it does of the anti-Israelis.

This is quite interesting, Prof. Shaw. I have taken a stab at the question of singling out Israel for moral criticism on my own blog, here:http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2007/09/singling-out-israel-for-moral.html

I would add to your last response to David Shaw that one does not need to accept Pappe’s claim that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was an essential pillar of Zionist policy, or that it was deliberately undertaken as part of a master-strategy, to view the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as central to the development of political Zionism in the 1940’s and 1950’s. (Let us not forget that there were a few cultural Zionists, like Magnes and Buber, who opposed it)

Even Benny Morris’s weaker claims are sufficient to demonstrate that such ethnic cleansing was approved by many main Zionist players before, and by all others after, the fact.

Indeed, the decision of the Zionist leadership and the State to bar Palestinians from returning to their homes, on the basis of their ethnicity, a ban that included Palestinians who took no part in the hostilities, should be viewed as the primary act of ethnic cleansing — even if, contrary to facts, all the Palestinians left during the hostilities because they were exhorted to do so.

Indeed, even if one accepts the rightwing Zionist narrative of 1948 put forth by scholars such as Yoav Gelber and Efraim Karsh, Israel engaged in ethnic cleansing in its refusal to let Palestinians return.

And a small point: as you point out, the foundational document of the State of Israel, as interpreted by subsequent legislation, speaks of a state of the Jews, which is defined as a religio-ethnic category. The non-Jewish citizens of the state are excluded from the nation-state, whereas a pork-eating Russian atheist whose paternal grandfather was Jewish yet whose father was a Russian Orthodox priest, is privileged to “return” to his homeland.

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The practice of discrimination 2
Norman Geras, Normblog, 26 Sep 2008

When responding to criticism of an intellectual or political position it’s a useful practice to identify at what points the criticism puts pressure on that position, the apparent vulnerabilities in your argument that may need further support, clarifications that you might offer to deflect a misunderstanding by the critic, and so on. This practice is useful in a purely tactical way, because it speaks not only to those who already share your view, but also to others who are not persuaded of it and want to see whether there is anything more to be said in its favour than was said first up. But the practice is useful in another way too since it obliges you to examine carefully the criticisms made by your critic and to try to understand where he or she is coming from (in the modern phrase) and how that place may look different from the one you occupy. It discourages you from just seeing it from afar and through the prism of your own certainties.

In responding to the criticisms I made of his contribution to the debate with David Hirsh at Democratiya, Martin Shaw doesn’t bother with any of this. He simply reaffirms the claim which those criticisms of mine had challenged, and does so pretty much without addition. Wrong-headed though they may be, according to Martin, the boycotters are targeting Israeli academics ‘because of their Israeli citizenship and presumed linkage to the policies of the Israeli state, and not because of their Jewishness’ (his emphasis). But I had already understood this to be Martin’s opinion, and my criticism was based on having thoroughly absorbed it. By merely repeating the same thing, he offers nothing (new) for me to respond to here. I will therefore itemize, instead, just how many points of criticism he might have addressed himself to but preferred to pass over unremarked.

(a) A central point, indeed the main burden, of my post was that there are symbols, discourses and, above all, practices of prejudicial discrimination, and though these are often accompanied by prejudicial attitudes and motives they are not identical with, or reducible to, them. This is a well-known theme in the sociology of racial, ethnic and gender prejudice, a fact to which I also alluded. Martin says nothing in reply.

(b) I drew attention to the consideration that reasons which might (though they also might not) look credible as reasons for general campaigning over Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians look distinctly dubious as reasons, specifically, for singling out for disadvantageous treatment Israeli academics – Israeli academics alone – among the academics of this wide and heavily-populated world. Martin passes this argument by without comment.

(c) I asked how a ‘sociology of activism’ could justify an academic trade union – not merely, be it noted, this or that individual or a voluntary assemblage of like-minded activists – treating the academics of a single country differently from the academics of every other country (despite, I will add here, records of oppression and mass murder elsewhere than in Israel sufficient to keep the human rights NGOs very busy indeed). Martin doesn’t trouble himself about this one either.

(d) I gave reasons for thinking that, even if attitudinal anti-Semitism isn’t of preponderant weight in motivating the boycotters, it plays some role among them. And I said that, given that it does, we should call it by its proper name and oppose it. This Martin also doesn’t answer – except by dodging it. What he does is to transmute the strains of attitudinal anti-Semitism that I suggested there are into a mere possibility, a ‘hypothetical’ anti-Semitism. Where, before, I said that Martin makes light of such anti-Semitism as he allowed there was ‘among Israel’s critics’ and more widely than that, now he makes even lighter of it. It’s a possibility and no more than that.

Since Martin spares me the difficulty of having to work out a response to any challenging rejoinders from him, let me use the energy I’ve been saved from such a task by taking up two other features of his thinking on this matter: one is something new that he says, not by way of replying to me, but as a diversion from having to do so; the other is something old, namely, the South African comparison he now makes again, as he did in the discussion with David Hirsh.

(e) The new thing is the suggestion: ‘Norman… refuses to accept my broadening the argument from the boycott to opposition to Israel in general’. The only sense in which this assertion is true is that it is my preference in debate to avoid what might be termed the ‘kitchen sink’ or ‘all round the houses’ approach to the issue under discussion, and to focus on the issue itself. In this case I joined a debate about whether or not the academic boycott of Israel is anti-Semitic, and the arguments I made are pertinent to that question. Had the debate been about Israel and Palestine in general my arguments would have been differently shaped and focused. For the rest, if Martin is interested in what I think about that broader question I refer him to my last answer in the interview here and, if he wants, I can direct him to a few other things I’ve written besides. (He might also be interested in reading the series by Sam Fleischacker currently running on this blog.)

(f) For the second time, Martin has invoked the academic boycott of South Africa as if it might provide a good analogy. But it doesn’t and, by its very nature, it couldn’t. Martin writes:

It is exactly the same principle, misguided though it is, that guided the boycott of academics from apartheid South Africa in the previous generation, and in neither case has the campaign been inspired by racism.

And in the discussion at Democratiya, he wrote similarly:

By this topsy-turvy reasoning, the boycott of apartheid South Africa must have manifested anti-white or anti-Afrikaner racism, since it harmed whites and Afrikaners more than others.

First of all, South African universities were not staffed only by Afrikaners, but by English-speaking South Africans as well – I don’t know exactly in what proportions but both groups had a substantial presence there. Consequently, the prejudicial discrimination involved in that boycott was against South Africans and not against Afrikaners. It is, in any case, not credible to suggest that that boycott could have been racist or have contained a racist component. Martin might choose to discount the fact that there is no history to speak of in the West of anti-white racism that could have been at work in the boycott of South African universities, whereas there is a very long history of anti-Semitism. But others of us are less inclined to feel complacent about the latter. It is one of the many unhappy consequences of the Israel-Palestine conflict that there is today a sector of left and liberal opinion become both blasé and cynical about that history, and which is ready to treat others who are less lightminded about it as if we looked upon the long persecution of the Jewish people and its most calamitous outcome as a mere convenience of political argument.

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A final (?) reply to Norman Geras
Martin Shaw, theory and politics, 26 Sep 2008

Norman Geras responds to my last post to the effect that I haven’t responded to several of his points. Here they are (as he now summarises them) with my responses:

Of course there are such symbols, discourses and practices. But neither Norman nor David Hirsh has provided evidence of any that actually play a significant part in the Western opposition to Israel. Indeed Norman appeared in his previous post to endorse my statement: ‘I do not think that on any serious assessment, anti-Semitism can be regarded as … a major theme among Western critics of Israel.’ Absent evidence, what are we arguing about?

Put another way, this seems to be a question about why other current solidarity campaigns (e.g. over Tibet, Burma or Zimbabwe) do not target academics as a way of getting at oppressive regimes, whereas the anti-Israel boycott, like the anti-apartheid boycott before it, has done so. I don’t really know the answer to this – although perhaps because Israeli academics are (unlike academics from many other oppressive states) significant players in global English-speaking academia, they seem plausible targets to some anti-Israeli campaigners, where academics from China, Burma or Zimbabwe aren’t? But I can’t exactly see how anti-Semitism explains the discrepancy – unless, absent evidence, anti-Semitism explains all discrepancies?

Clearly the sociology of activism does not justify this – but it might explain it, as I suggested in my response to David Hirsh.

I am more than happy to recognise and condemn attitudinal anti-Semitism wherever it plays a role – but unless I missed something, while Norman suggests reasons why there could be anti-Semitism, neither Norman nor David has presented any evidence that it actually plays a serious role in current Western opposition (as distinct from some Arab opposition) to Israel. Indeed the absence of such evidence seemed to be the reason for David’s original argument that the boycott campaign represents ‘institutional’ anti-Semitism.

(e) … I joined a debate about whether or not the academic boycott of Israel is anti-Semitic, and the arguments I made are pertinent to that question. Had the debate been about Israel and Palestine in general my arguments would have been differently shaped and focused. …

Norman still misses the fact that for me the debate was always broader than the academic boycott of Israel, as I made clear in my original arguments with David.

(f) For the second time, Martin has invoked the academic boycott of South Africa as if it might provide a good analogy. But it doesn’t and, by its very nature, it couldn’t. … First of all, South African universities were not staffed only by Afrikaners, but by English-speaking South Africans as well – I don’t know exactly in what proportions but both groups had a substantial presence there. Consequently, the prejudicial discrimination involved in that boycott was against South Africans and not against Afrikaners. It is, in any case, not credible to suggest that that boycott could have been racist or have contained a racist component. Martin might choose to discount the fact that there is no history to speak of in the West of anti-white racism that could have been at work in the boycott of South African universities, whereas there is a very long history of anti-Semitism. But others of us are less inclined to feel complacent about the latter. It is one of the many unhappy consequences of the Israel-Palestine conflict that there is today a sector of left and liberal opinion become both blasé and cynical about that history, and which is ready to treat others who are less lightminded about it as if we looked upon the long persecution of the Jewish people and its most calamitous outcome as a mere convenience of political argument.

I’m sorry, Norman, but this will not do. I am not at all light-minded about the history of the persecution of the Jews, let alone the Holocaust (I’ve long recommended your own book concerning the latter to students), but I don’t think you’ve presented a good reason for dismissing the analogy with South Africa. First, there are good reasons for comparing the Israeli and South African situations in general. Israel is and South Africa was a settler state in which the pre-existing populations were dispossessed and then confined. True there are important differences – Zionists were not motivated by doctrinal racism towards Arabs, but nevertheless perpetrated, in 1948, a more radical destruction of Arab society than anything the South African Nationalist regime achieved against the blacks. Second, this is the major past example we have of an academic boycott. That boycott was indeed of South African academics as a whole, but few of them were from the oppressed black majority (just as few Israeli academics today are from the large Palestinian minority); and most came from the white population that benefitted from apartheid (just as most Israeli academics come from the Jewish population that benefit from the Israeli state). And contra Norman, ‘reverse’ black racism against whites was not unknown in the period of the anti-South African boycott, not least in the USA, but would anyone have thought of assuming that even blacks who supported that boycott must be motivated by such racism? I agree that anti-Semitism has a longer pedigree and may be more deeply ingrained, although pretty certainly it is declining in importance compared to other prejudices such as anti-black racism and Islamophobia in the populations of Western societies. But does is there any good evidence for supposing that in Western academia or the Western left today, the milieux that generated the boycott, anti-Semitism is a significant current, strong enough to have a major influence on the boycott or any other anti-Israeli campaign?

Norman, like me you’ve lived in these milieux for four decades or more – admittedly I’ve experienced them as a non-Jew, while you’ve lived in them as a Jew – but do you have any real evidence? I for one am not prepared to spend any more time debating suppositions, conjectures and hypotheses.

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The practice of discrimination 3
Norman Geras, Normblog, 02 Oct 2008

In his latest reply to me, Martin Shaw gives a pretty clear indication that he’s had his fill of this debate (which may be followed in the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I have no wish to prolong it myself. But as, in my previous contribution (4), I said that Martin had responded to none of the points I’d put to him, and he has now (5) tried to do just that, I feel I owe him the courtesy of acknowledging that he has.

On the basis of what Martin says in responding, it looks like the debate between the two of us has nowhere left to go. He accedes now – see his (a) – to the sociological truth that racism is not only a matter of overt expressions of hostility, but can also inhere in symbols, discourses and practices of discrimination. Still, in the same paragraph Martin insists on being presented with evidence of attitudinal anti-Semitism among the boycotters. He thereby undoes his apparent acceptance of the point.

Again, Martin confesses – his (b) – to not knowing why the boycotters should pick out Israeli academics, and Israeli academics only, for unfavourable treatment. Previously (2), I gave the hypothetical example of a university that closed certain positions to women, and argued that this would constitute sexist discrimination whatever the attitudes of those supporting it. Martin offered no answer to that. Yet he remains confident that a boycott policy targeted solely on academics of the Jewish state, and who are therefore mostly Jews, has nothing of anti-Semitism about it. Feebly he suggests the following: ‘perhaps [the reason for the boycotters’ focus is] because Israeli academics are (unlike academics from many other oppressive states) significant players in global English-speaking academia’. This is a reason of the kind he earlier mooted (see 1) – the fact that Israel claims to be a democracy. Just like that proposal, it fails to explain (see 2) why boycotter opponents of the Iraq war have not thought about boycotting American, or indeed British, academics.

So I, too, am content to leave the debate where it is. I believe my original claim (2) that Martin’s position is vitiated by a grave logical weakness at its heart is vindicated by the content of his replies.

A word on evidence. Martin wants some, beyond the practical fact of a boycott with an exclusive focus and for which not even he can give a good reason. In my first reply to him I alluded to anti-Semitic tropes that sometimes turn up amongst boycott activists. He thinks perhaps I have sucked these out of my thumb. What, then, does he make of the fact that those who campaign for the blacklisting of Israeli academics refer to the opposition to the boycott as being ‘well-funded‘? Of course, as anybody can see, this doesn’t explicitly mention wealthy or powerful Jews. But if Martin does really know – as he does – that there are traditions of prejudicial language, then he ought to be able to recognize a certain lineage here. What does he make of the fact that on the UCU activists’ list Israeli actions in Gaza are compared to those of the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto? I won’t insult the state of Martin’s historical knowledge by giving details of the conditions of life in the Warsaw ghetto or of the fate of its population.

One last thing. Martin asks me directly whether, having been part of the left for four decades, I have any personal experience of anti-Semitism. I’m glad of the long historical perspective he defines. For it allows me to say that in the whole of my 20th-century experience of that milieu I can remember only one serious episode, affecting me personally, of anti-Jewish attitudes; and in the seven years since 2001, several.

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Yet more on Israel and anti-Semitism
Martin Shaw, theory and politics, 5 Oct 2008

As our debate about ‘anti-Semitism’ in the opposition to Israel winds down, Norman Geras thinks he has found another weakness in my argument, in my agreement with ‘the sociological truth that racism is not only a matter of overt expressions of hostility, but can also inhere in symbols, discourses and practices of discrimination. Still, in the same paragraph Martin insists on being presented with evidence of attitudinal anti-Semitism among the boycotters. He thereby undoes his apparent acceptance of the point.’ No – because we still need evidence and analysis of the ‘symbols, discourses and practices of discrimination’, just as we do of attitudinal racism – and Norman’s argument relies hugely on assumption and assertion and hardly at all on evidence or analysis.This is clear when Norman returns to another of his arguments that I hadn’t addressed: ‘I gave [he says] the hypothetical example of a university that closed certain positions to women, and argued that this would constitute sexist discrimination whatever the attitudes of those supporting it. Martin offered no answer to that. Yet he remains confident that a boycott policy targeted solely on academics of the Jewish state, and who are therefore mostly Jews, has nothing of anti-Semitism about it.’ My answer is this: while any campaign against the racially exclusive character of the Israeli state will necessarily be experienced as hostile by many Jews who support this state, it need not target Jews as a whole, even within Israel, and indeed many Jews are among those who support such campaigns. This is clearly different from a blanket ban on women.

Norman makes much of my confession to not knowing precisely why the boycotters should pick out Israeli academics for unfavourable treatment. A correspondent has drawn my attention to Stan Cohen’s chapter, ‘The Virtual Reality of Israeli Universities’, in the collection A Time to Speak Out, just published by Verso. Stan makes the point that Israeli universities ‘have been intimately connected with the project of nation-building’, and are effectively nationalist institutions – and that the idea of a ‘nationalist university’ is an oxymoron. He analyses the ‘culture of denial’ in Israeli universities concerning the crimes of the Occupation. His account suggests that there are good reasons for criticising most Israeli universities and academics. While these are not reasons to boycott all Israeli academics (a policy that Stan, like me, does not defend) they do help me point, again, to the glaring logical flaw in Norm’s own position. Just because there are no good reasons for such an all-embracing boycott does not mean that the not-so-good reasons have to do with anti-semitism. They are more obviously to do with the policies of the Israeli state – and the complicity of too many Israeli universities and academics in these policies.

A couple of final responses. First, I am concerned, and somewhat surprised (since I don’t have similar reports from other Jewish friends), to hear that Norm has personally experienced several instances of anti-Semitism in recent years, but I still doubt that the academic and left milieux in which we have both worked for four decades are saturated with anti-Semitism to the extent that this significantly explains the boycott campaign, let alone the wider concern about Israel and the Occupation.

Secondly, to end on what may be a controversial note. What do I make, Norm asks, ‘of the fact that on the UCU activists’ list Israeli actions in Gaza are compared to those of the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto?’ I do indeed indeed find this an extreme comparison, and it is not one I would have made, since Jews in the ghetto were subjected to a confinement far more complete, brutal and life-threatening than that of Palestinians in Gaza, and of course it turned out to be a precursor to mass murder, which the Palestinians are not facing. However the use of an exaggerated comparison, a common ploy in political campaigning, is not necessarily anti-semitic. Nor do I find the comparison objectionable in principle. Gazan Palestinians in 2008, like Polish Jews in 1939-40, are confined in a small territory and subjected to systematic depradations of their conditions of life. The difference is one of degree, certainly a large one, and probable final outcome, rather than of kind. I find it shocking that 70 years after the confinement of Polish Jews in the ghettos, a self-proclaimed Jewish state should be content to confine another people in the manner that the Gazans are confined, and that some Jewish socialists should use indiscriminate accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ to discredit the outcry against this and other policies of the Israeli state.

This correspondence is now closed.

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On the furthest Shaw
Norman Geras, Normblog, 9 Oct 2008

Despite an earlier indication that he might already have signed off on this debate, Martin Shaw has come back for one more round. He should have left things where they were. To say that his arguments are getting no better would be charitably euphemistic. (The debate to this point may be followed via these links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.)

[a] I think I may say without fear of contradiction that Martin has emphasized a need for evidence of anti-Semitism throughout this exchange. In my last post (6), I offered some: reference by the boycotters to the well-funded groups lined up against them – a theme, as Martin must know, with a long tradition behind it in anti-Jewish vilification and innuendo. What does he say about this evidence? Why, nothing at all.

[b] In the same ballpark… Martin asked me (5) whether I had personal experience of anti-Semitism on the left. I answered (6): before 2001, hardly any; since then, a few instances. Martin is both surprised and sorry about this, but says other Jewish friends report differently, and he still doubts that ‘academic and left milieux… are saturated with anti-Semitism to the extent that this significantly explains the boycott campaign’ (italics Martin’s). I shall come back to ‘saturated’ directly. It deserves a paragraph of its own. But for anyone who is concerned with the collection of evidence, and indeed for anyone at all, it is a matter of elementary logic that if some of your friends don’t have the same experience as others of them do, it doesn’t mean there is no experience of that kind; a positive quantity isn’t cancelled by the addition of a zero but remains exactly what it was.

[c] The denial of ‘saturation to the extent that etc’ is a retreat by Martin, but not avowed as such. To the best of my knowledge, no one is alleging that the boycott campaign is ‘saturated’ with attitudinal anti-Semitism – or dripping with it, or mainly fuelled or driven by it. And to my exact knowledge, I for my part have never claimed any such thing. At an earlier stage of the debate (2), I spoke merely of ‘threads’ of attitudinal anti-Semitism in the boycott campaign, as against anti-Semitism’s being a potent force there; but I urged upon Martin, all the same, that in the context of left activism it wasn’t a commendable impulse to say that anti-Semitism could be worse. His insistence throughout, though, has been that he wants evidence – quite properly so. To say now that what evidence there is, isn’t evidence of ‘saturation to the extent that etc’ is a belittling move designed to avoid having to recognize what he earlier denied exists.

[d] In his ingenuity of riposte, Martin now discovers a new threshold for regarding a policy as prejudicially discriminatory. Although it targets Jews, the academic boycott, he says, ‘need not target Jews as a whole’. This is a nonsense. Imagine a golf club that did not permit Jewish membership but allowed those who were members to bring Jewish guests. Imagine a racially divided society in which whites were dominant, public facilities for whites and non-whites were separate, and various forms of racial ‘mixing’ were legally prohibited. Then suppose that non-white visitors from outside the country were treated as honorary whites – for whatever reasons – and allowed to use the facilities normally prohibited to non-whites. Imagine a country in which women were treated as the inferiors of men, and excluded from certain public places, except that this exclusion did not kick in until women reached the age of majority, namely 21. Would these policies not be, in turn, anti-Semitic, racist and sexist, because they did not affect the relevant category (of unjustly discriminated-against person) ‘as a whole’? The academic boycott targets Jews and Jews only, and on Martin’s own admission there is no good justifying reason for it. Yet he blithely assures us there is nothing anti-Semitic here, this after professing (5) to accept the fact that practices as well as attitudes can be prejudicial – however, just in the given case he takes back that acceptance by insisting on the need for evidence of an attitudinal, rather than practice-related, kind. (And the evidence, when he is given some, he either evades or belittles.)

[e] Next, and worst, is what Martin has to say about the Warsaw ghetto and Gaza. It’s an extreme comparison, and not one that he himself would have made ‘since Jews in the ghetto were subjected to a confinement far more complete, brutal and life-threatening than that of Palestinians in Gaza, and of course it turned out to be a precursor to mass murder, which the Palestinians are not facing’. Very clear. All the same, Martin doesn’t find the comparison ‘objectionable in principle’.

The difference is one of degree, certainly a large one, and probable final outcome, rather than of kind.

If you wanted an example of having it both ways, you could not do better than this. He wouldn’t make such a comparison, but… he gives it a clean bill of health.

In little over a year after the Warsaw ghetto was sealed, some 50,000 of its inhabitants had died of starvation, and in the end the population there was ‘liquidated’ – deported to the death camps. Despite this rather significant difference between the two historical experiences, Martin is content to validate the comparison on account of the similarity, confinement. It’s an easy game to play. Watch. Palestinian liberation movements have made use of suicide terrorism against the inhabitants of Israel. Therefore, although it is an extreme comparison, their objectives being different from those of the planners and functionaries of Auschwitz, a comparison with Auschwitz is not ‘objectionable in principle’, because Palestinian terrorists and the architects of the so-called Final Solution respectively murder and murdered people not for anything they had done but for who they are and were. So, the Palestinian movements are like Nazis (do you see?), just like the Israeli government are like Nazis.

More sober intelligences avoid comparisons like these, because they understand the freight of moral and political meaning now carried by references to the Nazi policy of extermination, and its most notorious sites; and they understand the moral taint associated with saying of others that they are behaving like the Nazis. There is something specially ugly about this charge when levelled lightmindedly against Jews, two thirds of whose number in Europe were annihilated by the Nazi regime, one of the most criminal regimes in the history of humankind. Along with Holocaust-denial, this trope can be counted, indeed, as one of the newer themes of a very old hatred, and as a calumny to be set beside the traditional blood libel. But it may be expecting too much of him, given his developing standpoint in this debate, to ask Martin to see it as such. In the way of evidence of anti-Semitism, he blinks at nothing. If it ain’t ranting, foaming-at-the-mouth Jew hatred, Martin becomes unShaw.

[f] Finally, the following passage of his I will not leave without an answer. He writes:

I find it shocking that 70 years after the confinement of Polish Jews in the ghettos, a self-proclaimed Jewish state should be content to confine another people in the manner that the Gazans are confined, and that some Jewish socialists should use indiscriminate accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ to discredit the outcry against this and other policies of the Israeli state.

Coyly put: ‘some Jewish socialists’. Martin neglects to say whether or not I am amongst these ‘some’. I shall avail myself of a more direct language. He – Martin Shaw – here chooses a locution permitting, if not actively encouraging, the inference that I am one of those who use indiscriminate accusations of anti-Semitism to discredit criticism of Israeli policy over Gaza and more generally. This he bases on my characterization of the academic boycott, and on my reference to the Gaza/Warsaw ghetto comparison (6) as evidence of anti-Semitism. But my characterization of the academic boycott is not an attempt to block criticism of the Israeli government; it is an expression of opposition to a campaign that would penalize Israeli academics without just cause. And my reference to the Gaza/Warsaw ghetto comparison as evidence is also not a defence of Israeli policy; it is a view of that comparison as a politically vicious one. As the stickler for evidence he claims to be, Martin might have taken a little more care here than he has.

Shaw-Geras debate