Let us take the case of Ms. Bouattia as a starting point. If I were a Jewish student at this moment, I think I might have some misgivings about her election as president of the NUS. I am a long-standing supporter of the Palestinian people's fight for a state of their own and fully support their struggle against the colonial policies ruthlessly employed by the state of Israel, with the full support of the USA and other Western powers. It is, though, essential in this conflict to always be completely clear on separating Jewish ethnicity from Israeli politics, particularly since Jewish ethnicity is the central plank of the current Israeli administration's policy of creating " a Jewish state for the Jewish people", a clear statement of a country to be defined purely in racial terms. Israeli Palestinians would have to know their place - almost certainly under current Israeli policies in something equivalent to apartheid era South African Bantustans. (Israel was always a close ally of the old South Africa).
Ms. Bouattia has not always been sufficiently scrupulous in this vital separation of ethnicity and political policy. She has spoken of Birmingham University as a "Zionist outpost" because it has the largest Jewish Students Society in the country, thus melding ethnicity and ideology in a thoughtless, and possibly revealing way. To refer to the media's undoubtedly biased reporting of Israeli politics as "Zionist-led", with its connotations of a Jewish conspiracy, serves only to give ammunition to those who try to counter the misrepresentation across the whole of the mainstream press and TV by allowing accusations of anti-Semitism to deflect attention from the very real bias against the Palestinian cause in the media.
To be fair to Ms. Bouattia, she must look at events in Israel and the middle-East generally from the experience of her own ethnic background (her parents came to Britain to escape the violence of the Algerian civil war - a horrifying end-of-Colonial rule period in which violent resistance by the Algerian people, countered by French military brutality did finally achieve independence) and her studies in post-colonial theory. This would suggest that she would see the struggle of the Palestinian people against what they regard as a colonial power in a broad historical context of indigenous peoples fighting to liberate themselves from foreign occupation as has happened in almost all parts of the old European empires with varying degrees of success. Add to this the current fears surrounding all things Islamic, whipped up by irresponsible media reporting, but complicated by the undoubted horrors of militant jihadism, and it is easy to see how analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict lends itself so easily to accusations of implicit or explicit racism on both sides. In such circumstances it is all the more vital for their to be no ambiguity over distinctions between ethnicity and ideology/ political policy. Malia Bouattia needs to demonstrate very clearly that her long-standing opposition to all forms of racism includes anti-Semitism as strongly as any other form of ethnic discrimination.
Naz Shah re-tweeted a map of Israel superimposed onto a map of the USA with the suggestion that Israel should be re-located in the USA to solve the problem. Any suggestion of re-locating Jews is bound to be a sensitive issue, but this was so clearly intended as a joke - albeit in questionable taste - that the absurdly over-the-top reactions in the press are clearly more a means of embarrassing Corbyn's Labour Party than any real outrage on behalf of Britain's Jews.
What it has allowed is to encourage long term supporters of Israel to make statements like " Zionism is the Jewish people's right to self-determination in Israel. All people have the right to self-determination, so denying that right just to Jews is antisemitic" (Spokesperson for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism). This immediately demands the response 'why, then, do you deny the Palestinians the right to self-determination in their land, Palestine, the land you continue to occupy? And by what right is Palestine the site for the state of Israel? (We know the answer to this, of course - it is the word of God. End of argument.) And why did the creation of the state of Israel, by force of arms, demand the violent removal of 750,000 Palestinians with no right of return and the deaths of some 13,000?
The right to self-determination is itself fraught with difficulties in international law since there is no agreed definition of what constitutes a state, or how it is formed or which groups can legitimately claim this right. What is clear is that, even a cursory glance at the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights will show that, of the first thirty articles, Israel routinely disregards over half of them in its treatment of Palestinians. The map that Naz Shah re-tweeted,was clearly intended as a joke and has been treated as such by most Jews in America where the image was first tweeted, and who have felt no particular threat from it. You can judge for yourselves, but it's worth noting that the map originated from the Jewish Virtual Library, to show the relative size of Israel =though not, of course, the added text!
As for Ken Livingstone's comments, well, at best you could say that they lacked nuance! But to suggest that he is an anti-semite is utter nonsense. His reference to the Nazi government's interest in using the Zionist movement as a means of removing Jews from German territory in the 1930's has some basis in fact, but equally the Nazis rejected any notion of Jewish self-determination, since this gave Jews a human status that was denied them in Nazi racial theories. Ken Livingstone, an experienced politician, should have known how his words would be used by a media hostile to everything that Corbyn's Labour Party stands for. Corbyn himself needs to stand up to this obvious attempt by those who wish to depose him much more forcefully and expose this media hyped witch-hunt for what it is. His performance at PMQ's when Cameron attacked him and the Labour Party for harbouring anti-Semites was dismal. He, more than most, should see that the pro-Israeli lobby is in full cry at the moment and the Labour Party should be making a firm and principled stand in support of the Palestinian's just demands for a homeland and for the removal of the ever-increasing settlements built for Jews only (who are the racists here?), defended resolutely by the Israeli Defence Force and all built on occupied Palestinian territory against every principle of international law.
Media coverage of this spat has been universally appalling in its obsessive focus on the alleged disintegration of the Labour Party and attacks on all those attempting to put some perspective on the furore. The worst example I saw was, surprisingly, Krishnan Guru-Murthy on channel 4 news whose only question appeared to be "Does Israel have the right to exist?" repeated several times. This is - frankly - a stupid question. Israel does exist, it is the most heavily armed middle-East state, the only nuclear armed state and has the total support of the world's greatest superpower. It's existence is never seriously in doubt. What gives any state a right to exist is simply the fact of its existence. Does Australia or indeed the USA have the right to exist since they were founded on the genocide of the indigenous population? It's an irrelevant question. They do exist, and, like just about every other state, historically, their existence was created through force. Guru-Murthy might have put a more pertinent question- "Does a Palestinian state have a right to exist?"
Back in 1961, the problems of Israel and Palestine figured nowhere on my 11 year old consciousness. It is worth remembering, though, how racial insults permeated the language of children at this time - and these were almost certainly acquired through imitation of adult usage. In the playground a common remark made to any kid who refused to share sweets or kept lunch snacks to themselves would be "come on, don't be a Jew, hand some over." Even at this tender age I always felt some discomfort at these kinds of remarks. I came from a household where any kind of racial insult would be unthinkable, and even though I wasn't quite clear on the implications of "don't be a Jew" I always felt discomfited when such a phrase was used. Later in my school career I would experience much worse examples of overtly racist language, but not in the playground from my friends, but from adults in the classroom and elsewhere as I shall explain later. The kids in the playground almost certainly had little idea of what the implications of their insults were, but adults certainly did.
Since I've mentioned ant-Semitism in this post, I'll leap ahead a few years for a moment to when I was about fifteen and in the fifth form at school. We used to bunk off school at lunch-times, and on this occasion walked round to my friend Brian's house. I'd not been there before, and it was obvious that Brian came from a very poor background. I could identify with this. The house was a tiny terraced home, very dark, poorly furnished and Brian's very large family somehow squeezed into it. It smelt badly. While we were there, his dad came home, got himself a beer and joined us. For some reason something to do with Jews entered the conversation. Brian's dad, quite calmly and with no emotion, remarked, "that's one good thing 'Itler did - got rid of a few of the buggers." The comment hit me as hard as a physical blow. I'd read quite a lot about the genocide of European Jewry and regarded it as the benchmark of human depravity. Brian glanced at me. He knew how I might react to this. But I found I couldn't react at all. I was literally dumbstruck. I left the house in a state of shock that I still feel fifty years later when I recall this incident. The casual approval of inhumanity on a scale that defies imagining is still, I think, the most shocking utterance I have encountered in a life that has not been especially tranquil or sheltered.
If you read my last post, you will know that I now faced THE INTERVIEW for a place at a Technical High School having come unstuck in my 11+, but presumably having showed enough of something to warrant a temporary reprieve from the terrors of the Sec. Mod. I remember being taken by my mother to the school for my performance which would be judged by I knew not who or, indeed, what I would be expected to do. Everything about the school I found intimidating. The long concrete driveway lined with tall, dark hedges, then the school itself. Huge, very modern-seeming in design, which should have been reassuring, but frightened me even more. I wasn't comfortable in such a plush environment. All I can remember is being seated outside a door, and then being ushered in on my own, my mother remaining outside, to find myself confronted by a large desk, with a seat for me in front, and two besuited men sitting intimidatingly behind it. They proceeded to ask me a lot of questions, none of which I can remember. All I can recall is feeling frightened and wanting to get out. Which, finally I was allowed to do. I felt huge relief, went to find my mother, only to be guided by one of the besuited gents further up the corridor to another set of seats, outside another door, where, it appeared I had to be interviewed all over again.
I waited anxiously until the door opened and I was summoned inside. Here, again, was a desk, a single chair, and two men in suits sitting waiting to interrogate me. I remember some of this interview, since a part of it focused on my reading. I was asked what I enjoyed reading. I ran through my list of C.S. Forester novels, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dorothy L. Sayers who I had recently discovered and they asked me a bit about some of these. "Anything else before we finish?" one asked, which I took to mean, 'there must be more than this'! All I could think of was James Thurber, an author I had recently found among my mother's books (The Thurber Carnival) and found very, very funny. I hadn't liked to mention this because, well, a funny book didn't seem appropriate. I also found the cartoons at the end of the book the funniest things of all, and cartoons, I felt, would not impress my interlocutors (I still think those Thurber cartoons are among the funniest ever created). The two men looked at each other for a moment. "You like Thurber do you ? " one of them said. I wasn't sure if this was good or bad. "Yes", I said, hesitantly. " You .. understand his humour do you? I mean, you get it - it makes you laugh?" "Yes".
I think the great James Thurber got me my place at Bromley Technical High School for Boys, for good or ill. Certainly better than the Sec. Mod. Of course, I never hit the heights of my fellow allumni, David Bowie, Peter Frampton or Hanif Kureishi, but that was obviously because I only remained there for one year, before my mother moved us away to the wilds of the deepest Kent countryside, and negating my opportunity for superstardom. But more of that later.
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