By Roger Cohen
Monday, March 07, 2016
LONDON — Last month, a co-chairman of the Oxford
University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, quit in protest at what he described as
rampant anti-Semitism among members. A “large proportion” of the club “and the
student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews,” he
said in a statement.
Chalmers referred to members of the executive committee
“throwing around the term ‘Zio’” — an insult used by the Ku Klux Klan;
high-level expressions of “solidarity with Hamas” and explicit defense of “their
tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians”; and the dismissal of any
concern about anti-Semitism as “just the Zionists crying wolf.”
The zeitgeist on campuses these days, on both sides of
the Atlantic, is one of identity and liberation politics. Jews, of course, are
a minority, but through a fashionable cultural prism they are seen as the
minority that isn’t — that is to say white, privileged and identified with an
“imperialist-colonialist” state, Israel. They are the anti-victims in a
prevalent culture of victimhood; Jews, it seems, are the sole historical victim
whose claim is dubious.
A recent Oberlin alumna, Isabel Storch Sherrell, wrote in
a Facebook post of the students she’d heard dismissing the Holocaust as mere
“white on white crime.” As reported by David Bernstein in The Washington Post, she wrote of Jewish students, “Our struggle
does not intersect with other forms of racism.”
Noa Lessof-Gendler, a student at Cambridge University,
complained last month in Varsity, a
campus newspaper, that anti-Semitism was felt “in the word ‘Zio’” flung around
in left-wing groups.” She wrote, “I’m Jewish, but that doesn’t mean I have
Palestinian blood on my hands,” or should feel nervous “about conversations in
Hall when an Israeli speaker visits.”
The rise of the leftist Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership
of Britain’s opposition Labour Party appears to have empowered a far left for
whom support of the Palestinians is uncritical and for whom, in the words of
Alan Johnson, a British political theorist, “that which the demonological Jew
once was, demonological Israel now is.”
Corbyn is no anti-Semite. But he has called Hamas and
Hezbollah agents of “long-term peace and social justice and political justice
in the whole region,” and once invited to Parliament a Palestinian Islamist,
Raed Salah, who has suggested Jews were absent from the World Trade Center on
9/11. Corbyn called him an “honored citizen.” The “Corbynistas” on British
campuses extol their fight against the “racist colonization of Palestine,” as one
Oxford student, James Elliott, put it. Elliott was narrowly defeated last month
in a bid to become youth representative on Labour’s national executive
committee.
What is striking about the anti-Zionism derangement
syndrome that spills over into anti-Semitism is its ahistorical nature. It
denies the long Jewish presence in, and bond with, the Holy Land. It disregards
the fundamental link between murderous European anti-Semitism and the decision
of surviving Jews to embrace Zionism in the conviction that only a Jewish
homeland could keep them safe. It dismisses the legal basis for the modern
Jewish state in United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947. This was not
“colonialism” but the post-Holocaust will of the world: Arab armies went to war
against it and lost.
As Simon Schama, the historian, put it last month in The
Financial Times, the Israel of 1948 came into being as a result of the
“centuries-long dehumanization of the Jews.”
The Jewish state was needed. History had demonstrated
that. That is why I am a Zionist — now a dirty word in Europe.
Today, it is Palestinians in the West Bank who are
dehumanized through Israeli dominion, settlement expansion and violence. The
West Bank is the tomb of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Palestinians,
in turn, incite against Jews and resort to violence, including random
stabbings.
The oppression of Palestinians should trouble every
Jewish conscience. But nothing can justify the odious “anti-Semitic
anti-Zionism” (Johnson’s term) that caused Chalmers to quit and is seeping into
British and American campuses.
I talked to Aaron Simons, an Oxford student who was
president of the university’s Jewish society. “There’s an odd mental noise,” he
said. “In tone and attitude the way you are talked to as a Jew in these left
political circles reeks of hostility. These people have an astonishingly high
bar for what constitutes anti-Semitism.”
Johnson, writing in Fathom
Journal, outlined three components to left-wing anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.
First, “the abolition of the Jewish homeland; not Palestine alongside Israel,
but Palestine instead of Israel.” Second, “a demonizing intellectual discourse”
that holds that “Zionism is racism” and pursues the “systematic Nazification of
Israel.” Third, a global social movement to “exclude one state — and only one
state — from the economic, cultural and educational life of humanity.”
Criticism of Israel is one thing; it’s needed in vigorous
form. Demonization of Israel is another, a familiar scourge refashioned by the
very politics — of identity and liberation — that should comprehend the
millennial Jewish struggle against persecution.
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