JOCK HASTON E-MAIL .. HOWARD JACOBSON

Never heard of Howard Jacobson previously and what a pity that is (for me). Here, in a powerfully expressed and closely reasoned argument, Jacobson exposes the vilification of Israel by Sue Blackwell and her Association of University Teachers. D Day is tomorrow, 26 May, for the AUT’s meeting to reconsider its boycott of Israel’s academic fraternity. Jock (Joshua) L. Falksonfalkson@barak-online.net Howard Jacobson on anti-Zionism Thursday, April 28th, 2005 at 10:24 am by Administrator http://liberoblog.com/howard-jacobson-on-anti-zionism/ Allow me, in the light of the Association of University Teachers decision to boycott Israeli Universities, to voice a heresy. Anti-Zionism is, after all, anti-Semitism. I say after all because until now I have always resisted the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I have suffered very little anti-Semitism personally, and don’t find it under every stone. I don’t think Jews, by virtue of their victimization in the past, have any right to expect exemption from the usual rough and tumble of opinion. And I don’t consider it a mark of ill will towards Israel - indeed it might well denote the very opposite - to oppose its policies when they are inhumane. It is important to hammer in this nail. No, no, and no again, I do not accuse all those who censure Israel of hating Jews. Which nail hammered, it is equally important to drive in another. In the boycott by the Association of University Teachers what has been expressed is not criticism or censure but villification. Criticism, the more particularly as university teachers should be expected to understand it, implies the free exchange of judgement and idea, the give and take - however harsh - of argument and counter-argument. Anything less is merely the closing of minds. And a boycott - especially a boycott of thinkers, scientists, philosophers, etc, those for whom open-mindedness should be paramount - is an expression of the closing of minds en masse. There is some fancy abroad that where large numbers of people agree to close their minds together you have democracy in action. You don’t. What you have is mobilized prejudice. In this instance, therefore, it is plain to me that the mantra ‘Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic’ has no bearing, because we are not confronted with any operation of judgement or debate to which the word ‘criticism’ approximates. But if we are not dealing with fair or open minds, does it necessarily follow that we are dealing with anti-Semitic ones? Let me explain the reasons why I believe it does. No other country has been singled out for similar treatment. No boycotting of Chinese universities, or Universities in African or Arab countries where infringements of human rights are state sponsored and racism is so routine it is part of the curriculum. Were all the charges brought against the State of Israel true, that would still leave it as one sinner among many. By isolating Israel as the worst offender of all - the ne plus ultra of criminal brutality - those who support this boycott consent to conferring unequivocally upon Israel the status of pariah. A degraded and despised place. An outcast from civilized society. The very position, in fact, which Jews have occupied in most countries of the world, not least the countries of the Middle East, for as many years as you care to quantify. Is this merely coincidence? Or do we bring it on ourselves? One thing is clear, in the case of Israel, as in countless instances in Jewish history, an exception has been made of Jews. A Jewish enterprise, this time the Jewish state itself, is found to be unlike no other, not only to be censured more comprehensively than any other, but to be kept outside the city walls, not to be conversed with, a thing unclean, untouchable. ‘Jewish science’ was how the Nazis referred to psychoanalysis and relativity. Because Freud and Einstein were Jewish, the German people had to be protected from the contamination of their work. Now the contaminating science is not Jewish but Israeli. Which we are told is somehow different. I ask the question again and defy the authors of the boycott to answer it - is this merely a coincidence or do we bring it on ourselves? Coincidence or not, Sue Blackwell, the prime sponsor of this boycott, has insisted that yes, Israel is uniquely reprehensible, illegitimate as no other country is illegitimate in that ‘it is founded on ethnic cleansing’. Not occasionally guilty of this heinous crime, notice. But founded on it - ethnic cleansing, if you like, written secretly, as is the way of Jews, into its inauguration and constitution. Here is not the place to detail the socialist aspirations of those Zionist pioneers who saw in Palestine an opportunity to reconfigure their own ethnicity - who, far from wishing to drive out the local Arab population, dreamed an almost Utopian dream of co-operation with them. I have met such idealists myself in kibbutzim up and down Israel, still active despite all their disappointments so far. To talk of ethnic cleansing as hardwired into the Zionist enterprise is a violence not only to history, it is a violence to Jews living and dead. It hates Israel before there was an Israel to hate. And before Israel there were only Jews. The ethnic cleansing accusation has taken hold recently as a sleeker alternative to the charge of Nazism. While it is simple to refute the claim that the Israelis are the new Nazis - show us the extermination camps, show us the gas chambers, show us the will to wipe out an entire culture - Œethnic cleansing¹ sticks the easier for being vaguer while doing the same job of making Jews guilty of the very crimes of which they were once the victims. Call it a sort of retroactive justice. In a number of public letters over the last months, Ken Livingstone, for example, has accused Israel of systematic ethnic cleansing, citing not some ‘virulently anti-Israel critic’ but the Israeli historian Professor Benny Morris. If a Jew says it, you see, it cannot be anti-Semitic. In fact Professor Morris denounces Livingstone for quoting from his book ‘without invoking the context in which this occurred. It was in a war of aggression launched by the Palestinian Arabs in November/December 1947 against the Jewish community in Palestine with the aim of preventing the emergence of a Jewish state and possibly throwing them in the sea.’ A context is not, of course, an excuse. But the villification of Israel of which the academic boycott is the latest example rests upon contextlessness, Israel’s every act an unprovoked aggression, at every turn the doer and not the done to, all mention of war waged by the other side expunged. Here, too, I recognize the age-old strategies of anti-Semitism. Jews clung together unwholesomely, the anti-Semites said, and never mind that as a deliberate act of segregation they had been herded into ghettos. They were money-lenders and financiers, and never mind that all other opportunities had been closed to them. The Jew was contextless. He came evil into the world. As did, for those who would shun it, Israel. Like the Jews who founded it in their image, Israel - alone among nations - stands outside history. But then for Sue Blackwell the argument of history is only circular anyway. It is no defence of Israel that it has had to fight against being driven into the sea, because the sea, in her view, is where it belongs. Again, alone among the peoples of the earth, Jews are to have no home but must seek shelter wherever they are lucky enough to find it. A ‘Holy Land in which people of all races and religions have equal status’ is Sue Blackwell’s ambition. Forgive a Jew for wondering like unto which other harmonious Middle Eastern country, where Jews have enjoyed equality of status, this would be. St Augustine saw perpetual exile as our mark of Cain, the price Jews paid and must go on paying, for being murderers. Not much has changed. It is anti-Semitic to refuse in principle a homeland for the Jews, or to suppose that they have yet again showed themselves to be unworthy of one. Never mind that there are Jewish academics among those who have signed up to the boycott. The admiration of one¹s fellows is a seduction few of us can resist, and in the current climate a Jewish academic is a hero (isn¹t this the very logic of the academic boycott?) only when he publicly signs up to be no friend of Israel. Dark rumours surround Sue Blackwell’s feverishly pro-Palestinian website. A Commons committee is said to be investigating possible links with a site blaming Jews for 9/11. An ‘inadvertent’ link, Sue Blackwell insists. Whatever the truth of it, the University of Birmingham, where Sue Blackwell teaches, currently disowns her site. Myself, I don¹t think it makes much difference to her position whether she has links with overt anti-Semites, or simply wants to sell olive oil made by Palestinians on the web; her politics are virulent either way. More to the point is that she teaches in an English Department. English as an academic subject has lost its way in the last three or four decades, deconstructing itself into a relativism which leaves its practitioners hungry for anything that looks like an absolute. Thus, whereas every text yields itself to a thousand interpretations, the state of Israel yields itself to only one. In this manner do minds which should be enquiring box themselves at last into that darkness where no enquiry, no departure from enforced orthodoxy, is permissible. To a Jew, then, who understands the history of his people as one long subjection to absolutism - where all else shifts, the Jew at least is constant in his graspingness and inhumanity - no, it is no coincidence that in our time the one pariah state is the country of a pariah people. Anti-Zionism, now, is anti-Semitic because by the actions of its members the Association of University Teachers has made it so.