Mick Hartley

My take the other day on the David Miller Employment Tribunal ruling that anti-Zionism is a protected characterisic:

It's not hard to see why the tribunal might reach that decision. In a sense, no doubt, anti-Zionism is a political position that can be defended. The point is: can anti-Zionism ever be separated from antisemitism – and the answer in Miller's case is clearly no.

David Hirsh at the JC takes a more detailed look:

This was a fight between Bristol University and David Miller, whom it had honoured with a professorship. It had stood by him, and the conspiracy fantasy he passed off as academic sociology, for years while taking a cut of his research money, much of it from public funds. Bristol had, for years, trusted Miller with the power to shape his teaching curricula and to assess students’ work. The Tribunal is critical of the university’s sudden change of mind, for steadfastly refusing to criticise or censure Miller at all for years, but then suddenly veering straight to dismissal for conduct that it had until then defended.

Well, one might have thought that it should have been obvious to the tribunal, nevertheless, that Miller’s anti-Zionism is antisemitic. But the tribunal refused even to consider the question:

“233. We pause to note that [Bristol University] confirmed …that its position was that nothing [Miller] said or did was antisemitic or in contravention of the Equality Act…”

And then later:

“305. Although, as we have indicated, there is fault in what [Miller] did, we also remind ourselves that even on [Bristol University’s] analysis what [he] said was accepted as lawful, was not antisemitic and did not incite violence and did not pose any threat to any person’s health or safety.”

If his conduct was not antisemitic, if it was not a violation of the Equality Act, then why was he fired? Bristol said that the problem with Miller was not with his beliefs in the abstract but with his explicit identification of his own Jewish students as Zionists and therefore racists. The university also said that miller’s antizionism was “inflammatory and unnecessarily aggressive”, but what was inflammatory or aggressive about them if they were not antisemitic?

Why was Bristol University fatally afraid of accusing Miller of antisemitism? It had commissioned two internal reports from a barrister, Aileen McColgan, who had reported back that nothing that Miller had said was antisemitic. Having accepted these reports, Bristol found it difficult subsequently to say that he in fact was antisemitic, or that his threat to students, to whom he had a duty of care, was antisemitic.

Since his sacking, David Miller has made a whole stream of antisemitic programmes for the Iranian propaganda station, Press TV. Former MP Chris Williamson plays Watson to Miller’s Holmes, as they spin conspiracy fantasies about one Jew after another, one Jewish institution after another. The independent barrister who found Miller not guilty of antisemitism in Bristol’s internal process had previously represented Williamson in his unsuccessful case against expulsion from the Labour Party.

Perhaps there is another reason that Bristol refused to make the case about the relationship between Miller’s anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Perhaps it was just too hard; perhaps they were advised by lawyers who didn’t understand the importance of it, that it was a losing strategy for Bristol; perhaps Bristol just didn’t want to stand up for Jews against antisemitism.

By determining that anti-Zionism is protected, but without considering the issue of antisemitism, the tribunal risks protecting antisemites against Jews. It risks turning the Equality Act on its head, making its effect the very opposite of what was intended.

The tribunal might have accepted that political anti-Zionism, in the abstract, was protected, but what they actually did was worse; they said that Miller’s specific anti-Zionism was protected. It is worse because Miller’s anti-Zionism is significantly more clearly antisemitic than many other more mainstream forms of antizionism.

Since October 7, British Jews, as Anthony Julius has said, have been painfully aware of “a partial failure by state institutions — the BBC, the police, the universities, the Crown Prosecution Service— to meet the challenge of this antisemitic moment”.