Mick Hartley

From Philip Spencer's review of David Hirsh's new book Contemporary Left Antisemitism:

In Britain, the Labour Party is led by Jeremy Corbyn, a formerly marginal figure, who has long associated with virulent anti-Semites from whom he has previously shown little inclination to distance himself.

Meanwhile, the academic wing of the trade union movement has adopted a policy of boycotting only Israel, which has led many Jewish members to feel so intimidated they had to leave.

The campaign against that boycott was largely led by Hirsh himself, at no little personal cost, as he relates in some moving reflections on how and why he embarked on and conducted what is, in the circumstances, a remarkably thoughtful study.

What is particularly impressive is the way Hirsh takes seriously the protestations of those who espouse contemporary anti-Semitic tropes. Unable or unwilling (not quite the same thing, of course) to understand that, as he explains, anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in structures of power and thinking (even as it takes different forms over time), they claim that they cannot possibly be anti-Semites because they are on the left, because they are committed anti-racists.

They “know” that anti-Semitism, after the Holocaust, is no longer a problem. Instead, Jews have purportedly become “white” themselves (which will be news to many Jews!) and are supposedly now an integral part of the Western imperialist power structure for which Israel is either a local agent or its directing force.

If not before, then now at last Jews can legitimately be blamed for provoking anti-Semitism themselves. Contemporary left anti-Semites can then claim that those who raise the question of anti-Semitism on the left can only be acting in bad faith, with malign intent, using it as a weapon to discredit their beloved leader and, even worse, to shield Israel from criticism….

As he explains here, Hirsh first identified and provided a compelling critique of this self-deceiving strategy when it was used by Ken Livingstone, then Mayor of London, wittily terming it the “Livingstone formulation”.

But he shows that it is now no longer a local phenomenon, as it has been embraced with disturbing enthusiasm by anti-Zionist activists globally. However, as Hirsh also argues, this development is connected with a broader and potentially still more alarming development and what he identifies as a disastrous ossification of left-wing thinking.

This has to do with the construction of what he calls the “community of the good” on the left, from which all who question this now axiomatic stance, who seek reasoned debate, have to be cast out.

In some of the most thought-provoking sections of this book, Hirsh draws on the philosopher Hannah Arendt to suggest that this new form of anti-Semitism is integral to the re-emergence of a totalitarian element on the left (as much as on the right), intolerant of disagreement, demanding unconditional loyalty and infatuated with a leader upon whom it can project all its fantasies.

Update: very much to the point, Howard Jacobson in the NYT:

To this Mr. Corbyn and those closest to him are tetchily indifferent. Mr. Corbyn goes out of his way not to use the word “anti-Semitism,” and when he is forced into condemnation of it he invokes the platitude that Labour opposes all racism and discrimination. The “all” is important. Burying anti-Semitism among offenses such as bullying and sexual harassment is a dodge to equalize things that are not equal and in the process ensure that anti-Semitism is rarely privileged with a mention of its own.

There is method in this evasiveness. To implicitly deny the existence of anti-Semitism — as some continue to deny the Holocaust — is to render it as a sick fantasy of the Jews’ own making, a pathology whose function is to blunt the edge of the anti-Zionist critique. That Jews invoke anti-Semitism primarily to silence critics of Israel is a tired canard, but it continues to be pressed in to service. It serves a purpose: It libels the Jews as liars in the act of protesting innocence of any such offense. And if anti-Semitism is a chimera, then anti-Zionism, so often conflated with it, has nothing after all to apologize for….

What needs to be insisted on is that Zionism — the idea not the political events to which it has given rise — is integral to the Jewish mind and imagination. Those who say they are against Zionism but not Jews are speaking in riddles. It is not the Jew who needs to see himself apart from anti-Zionism; it is the anti-Zionist who needs to ask himself what feeds his fervor and whether, in his righteous rage, he is committing what Moses Hess called “moral suicide.” Until then the Labour Party’s slogan will go on reading, “For the many, not the Jew.”