Islamophobia and anti-semitism (Part II). posted by Richard Seymour

Eve Garrard, writing at Normblog , takes up a theme which has been discussed on this blog and also, less importantly, in The Guardian. She makes some points which I think should be uncontroversial, so I'll dally on the ones that I think ought to be controversial. Specifically, Garrard argues that since Islamophobia may be considered unfair criticism that is either untrue or true but also equally applicable elsewhere and therefore selectively applied, those who are concerned about such treatment applied to Muslims should also be equally concerned when it is applied to Israel:

Many people want to say that criticism of Israeli activities doesn't amount to anti-Semitism. And right enough, sometimes it doesn't. But for the kind of reasons I've set out, the matter is more complicated. Criticism of Israel for activities which are excused in others; criticism of Israeli misdeeds when far worse ones, committed by others, are passed over silently; hostility towards Jewish nationalism when other forms of nationalism are tolerated or lauded, all run the risk of being unfair and/or irrational. At the very least, the onus is on the critic to show why the selective attention she is paying to Israel's failures is in some way appropriate.

But criticism of Israel, even unfair criticism, is not anti-semitism. It is often a vehicle for anti-semites, but that does not amount to the same thing. Unfair or selective criticism applied to Muslims is diffuse and general, and usually involves a kind of racism. Unfair or selective criticism applied to Israel is specific and does not necessarily surreptitiously allude to the majority of Jews who choose not to live in Israel, or even to the minority who do. What is usually meant by criticism of Israel is criticism of the state's policies. That is to say, Garrard makes an entirely illegitimate comparison between hostility to a body of people who cannot be accused of being oppressive, tout court, and hostility to a state which definitely can.

The point about hostility to Jewish nationalism is answered, I think, partly by what I have written below. To summarise, nationalism in any form is an insufficient basis for liberatory or democratic politics. In itself, it merely involves the supposition that there is some shared experience rooted in language, history etc. That this supposition is usually false does not make it necessarily malign. The only grounds on which nationalism can be justified is when the self-determination of peoples is a necessary means to achieving the self-determination of people. I don't accept that Israel fulfills this criterion because a) most Jewish people have been able to live in relative security and comfort elsewhere in the world, and b) the condition for the formation of a Jewish state was the ethnic cleansing of approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs.

Garrard continues:

"Moreover, unfair prejudice against Israel, even when not motivated by anti-Semitism, can be as dangerous and damaging to a large sector of the Jewish population as anti-Semitism itself, especially where it takes the form of calls for the forcible destruction of the Jewish state."

Suppose calling for the forcible destruction of the Jewish state, either from without or within, can be considered entirely fair under a certain purview? And further suppose that this view does not entail anti-semitism, but that the call for the destruction of the Jewish state is made on the same grounds as one should oppose anti-semitism? The fact that there is a tenuous connection between the fate of Jews and the fate of Israel (in that some groups use hostility to Israel as a reason to attack Jews) would not make the persistence of the Jewish state necessarily just; therefore calling for it to be dismantled, altered or revolutionised would not necessarily be unjust. What we would then be left with is a very pertinent warning to express such views with diligence and care, to ensure they are indeed free of anti-semitism and to make them known in such a way as to avoid anti-semitism being read into them.

This is a fair warning, and even critics of Israel who resent being made to pass some "anti-semitism" test by its supporters nevertheless need to be on their guard. Anti-Zionism cannot thrive as a reputable position if it connotes anti-semitism, even though it is not in any way an anti-semitic position to hold in itself.