Weekly Worker 693 Thursday October 18 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Basic act of solidarity

Tony Greenstein responds to Hillel Ticktin on the question of a boycott of Israel

I confess I expected a professor of Marxism to have provided us with new insights and at least the semblance of a class analysis on the subject of boycott, if not an appreciation of the wider role of imperialism in the Middle East. Yet they were conspicuous by their absence in Hillel Ticktin’s meandering and rambling article (‘Toothless motions and hysterical attacks’ Weekly Worker September 20).

Indeed there is no indication that Hillel even understands the scale of the tragedy that is unfolding in Palestine, still less that he understands the plight of a Palestinian population beset by daily pogroms and attacks by settlers and the might of the Israeli military.

As I write, the Israeli government is proposing to extend its food and energy blockade of Gaza. True, people are not dying in the streets, though many have died and will die. However, that is not because of Zionism’s humanitarianism, but because politically it is unable to achieve what it wants: the mass deportation - ‘transfer’ - of the Palestinian population. Instead it is using the weapon of hunger to impose its will on the open prison called Gaza. In Britain it is cheered from the sidelines and urged to go further still by rightwing Zionist columnists such as Melanie Phillips and Geoffrey Alderman.¹ 

There are of course precedents. When the Nazis occupied Poland, Ludwig Fischer, district governor of Warsaw explained: “The Jews will disappear because of hunger and need, and nothing will remain but a cemetery.” ²  And Hans Frank, governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland affirmed, when reducing the rations for Jews to below that necessary for a human being to survive, that “it must be done in cold blood and without pity; the fact that in this way we condemn 1,200,000 Jews to death by hunger is only of indirect importance.”³ 

Of course comparisons between Israel and Zionism, on the one hand, and Nazism, on the other, are taboo. According to the European Union Monitoring Committee’s working definition, anti-semitism includes “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”.⁴  This definition was accepted in toto by the report of the all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism.⁵  Of course, it is permissible for imperialism to label its opponents - Nasser, Chavez, etc - as the new Hitler.

No doubt the well known Israeli army refuser and pacifist Jonathan Ben-Artzi was also anti-semitic when, in a letter to all Israel’s MPs, in the wake of the passage of the first stage of a bill which would allow the Jewish National Fund to continue denying Arabs use of 93% of Israeli land, he wrote:

“I’d like to save you some work phrasing the new law regarding purchase of JNF lands. I hope you will be able to appreciate the help. On May 4 1939 a law was implemented, forbidding a certain minority in a certain country from purchasing and leasing the majority’s lands in that country. Instead of rewriting this law now, why don’t you translate and implement that law?”⁶ 

Hillel’s ahistorical references to anti-semitism play into the hands of those who use the term to defame and intimidate supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism.

Abram Leon, a leader of Belgian Trotskyism, murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz, wrote: “Zionism transposes modern anti-semitism to all of history; it saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-semitism and their evolution.”⁷ 

Unfortunately Hillel is guilty of exactly this when he states: “Trotsky was also right when he said that in every economic crisis anti-semitism grows ... unfortunately some of the movers of the UCU motion failed to condemn the real anti-semitism in Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Hillel locates the answer to the question, ‘Why is there such a hue and cry over the question of a boycott?’, in “the increasing insecurity of the Jewish population outside Israel and to the decline of Zionism”, coupled with an economic crisis. Unfortunately this could have been written any time in the past 50 years. It tells us everything and nothing.

It is plain as a pikestaff that the racial anti-semitism of the 1930s is today a marginal phenomenon, certainly in western Europe. Trotsky was right for his era, but times change. That is why Zionist leaders and neo-conservatives write about the “new anti-semitism”.⁸  It is not anti-semitism, but racism against asylum-seekers, muslims, black and Asian people which have been the constants of British racism in the post-war period. Anti-semitism is a relic of a bygone age. As Leon noted, “The Jewish masses find themselves wedged between the anvil of decay­ing feudalism and the hammer of rotting capitalism.”⁹ 

Earlier this year, I was interviewed for Channel 4’s War against Britain’s Jews? Who hosted this programme and railed against ‘anti-semitism’? The same Richard Littlejohn who regularly rails against muslims, gays and gypsies (“pikeys”). How is it that this unreconstructed bigot can wax lyrical about anti-semitism and even pay tribute to the anti-fascist demonstration at Cable Street 1936, when his view of the Rwandan genocide was thus: “Does anyone really give a monkey’s about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe, then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them.”

Hillel believes that the problem is a failure to condemn “the real anti-semitism” of Hezbollah and Hamas. Now I would have many political criticisms of these groups and their reactionary social politics. Anti-semitism would figure pretty well down the list. If Hezbollah are anti-semitic (I’ve yet to see any real proof) then it is an anti-semitism without Jews, since it was Israel’s allies, the Phalange, who drove out Beirut’s Jewish community. If Hamas are anti-semitic, then this is reflective racism, a sign of their political backwardness. They have also hosted meetings with Uri Avneri, an Israeli peace campaigner. And even the arch ‘anti-semite’, Ahmadinejad of Iran, presides over the Middle East’s largest Jewish community outside Israel, some 25,000 Jews. Possibly the only minority that is not persecuted in Iran.

Of course, Hamas in its charter speaks of the notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, without every understanding them or the context in which they were written.¹⁰  No doubt they rail on occasions against ‘the Jews’. Inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto used to talk of ‘the Latvians’, not Latvian fascists. When Israeli soldiers come to beat and shoot them and demolish their homes, all in the name of the ‘Jewish state’, is it any wonder that they will curse the Jews?

Jews today still curse ‘the Germans’, as opposed to the Nazis. Zionist scribes like Daniel Goldhagen write books ‘proving’ that all Germans, not just Nazis, were complicit in the holocaust.¹¹  But anti-semitism is meaningless if it is divorced from existing power relationships. Jews in the Europe of the 1930s were weak and defenceless and thus anti-semitism represented an ever-present danger. Today it is the Palestinians who occupy that role.

Ironically, if one really wants to oppose anti-semitism, then the one place where it is thriving is the Jewish state.¹²  The statement of ‘Eli the Nazi’ that he would never have children because he would not want to be the parent of a “piece of trash with even the smallest percentage of Jewish blood” is one of the most chilling examples of racist self-hatred that I have read. Usually racism tends to break down on a personal level. Hitler complained that 80 million Germans might think the Jews were swine, but they each had their favourite Jew who was not like the rest. Even the most fervent Nazi, when discovering a Jewish grandparent, would seek a dispensation making him a full Aryan.

I can testify from personal experience that the most vicious anti-semitism, including the posting of excrement from a Jewish feminist group, comes from Zionists.¹³ 

Another throwaway remark concerns the emigration of the Arab Jews to Israel after 1948, which Hillel Ticktin attributes to the “anti-semitism of the Arab regimes”. It is a remarkable coincidence that some of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities, pre-dating the birth of Christ, such as the ancient Babylonian Jewish community, should emigrate within a few years of the establishment of the Israeli state. There are, of course, two explanations. One is that Jews had spent 2,000 years dreaming of ‘returning’ to Palestine. The other explanation is that the events of 1947-48 and the naqba, the expulsion of the Palestinians, were the primary cause.

In the case of Iraq - the largest such community, over 100,000 strong - neither explanation suffices. Of course, there was a reaction against the Arab Jews as a result of the naqba, which was perpetrated in the name of ‘the Jews’. And imperialism coopted Arab Jews, Copts and other minorities as their intermediaries during the colonial era. In Africa many Asians emigrated after independence because of the hostility of the local populace, so it is not surprising that in Syria, for example, there were riots and a bomb explosion at the main synagogue in Aleppo.

Nonetheless, Jews in the Arab countries were extremely reluctant to leave their countries and the Zionist movement decided to force the issue. In Iraq the Zionist underground decided to plant bombs to simulate anti-semitism. On April 8 1950 a bomb was thrown into a Baghdad café frequented by Jews, injuring a number of people, and on January 14 1951 another bomb was thrown into a the Masuda Shemtov synagogue in Baghdad, killing three and injuring 25 others. This was the trigger to the mass evacuation of Iraqi Jews. Later revelations in Israel, partly as a result of one of those injured, Kadouri Saleem, while claiming compensation, revealed what had really happened.¹⁴ 

The Israeli state reached an agreement with the British puppet ruler of Iraq, Nuri e Said, and Imam Yahya of Yemen that the regimes could keep the Jews’ property in exchange for their exodus. Iraqi Jews were the most prosperous community in the Middle East and this deal was extremely attractive to the regime. Having obstructed the rescue of European Jews from the Nazis, the Zionist movement set out to ‘save’ the Arab Jews.

This was explained by Zionist writer Uri Harari: “But does the state of Israel have duties towards the Jews who are able, but do not wish, to come here? Moreover, do we have the right to tell them: we know better than you what is best for you - and we shall therefore act to make you come here, and we shall perhaps even try to make your position more severe, so that you will have no choice but to immigrate to Israel? Note that this last question is not imaginary. We have confronted it in some very concrete situations and we may still have to confront it again.”¹⁵ 

Nor was Iraq an isolated instance. In Egypt there was a veritable bombing campaign in July 1954, whose perpetrators were mostly caught. Despite denials at the time by the Israeli state, which protested that the victims of ‘anti-semitism’ were being blamed for their own persecution, the story of the ‘security mishap’ leaked out and led six years later - when it was discovered that the signature of defence minister Pinhas Lavon approving the operation had been forged - to the resignation of David Ben Gurion as prime minister.¹⁶ 

We should not be surprised that there was an adverse reaction against Arab Jews post-1948. What should surprise us is the relative mildness of the reaction, given that the massacres and expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population were carried out in the name of the Jewish people. It should be recalled that after the Irgun, the militia led by Menachem Begin, hanged two British sergeants in August 1947, there were anti-Jewish riots in Glasgow, Cardiff, Liverpool, Manchester and London. In Liverpool, where there were five days of rioting, a synagogue was burned down and hundreds of windows shattered in others.¹⁷ 

Hillel Ticktin observes that institutions cannot be boycotted without it affecting individuals. Agreed. The point, though, is not to have a situation whereby people are singled out, solely because of the fact that they are Israeli nationals, for boycott.¹⁸ 

We should not forget the complicity of Israeli universities in supporting the military repression of Palestinians and the penetration of racism into the heart of academia. In April 2005 a political science lecturer at Haifa, Dr Bukay, was accused by an Arab student in the Communist Party’s Democratic Front for Peace and Equality of saying, “The Arabs are stupid and have contributed nothing to humanity.” Bukay is the author of The first cultural flaw in thinking: the Arab personality.¹⁹  It was the student that was disciplined. This year the Haifa Seven, a group of DFPE students, were subject to discipline by the racist rector of Haifa, Yossi Ben Artzi, because they had silently protested against a racist statement from the student union calling for the banning of the Arab student society.²⁰ 

Haifa is Israel’s most liberal university, yet in May 2005 professor Arnon Sofer, father of the apartheid wall, held a conference on ‘The demographic problem and Israel’s demographic policies’ (ie, too many Arabs). Of course, Haifa is not as bad as, say, Bar Ilan University, which validates the College of Judea and Samaria on the West Bank and bars Arab students from living on campus.²¹ 

Hillel, in his emphasis on ‘anti-semitism’, overlooks the extent of anti-Arab racism in Israel. 62% of Israeli Jews want Arabs to leave the country.²²  Over 75% do not believe Arabs and Jews should share apartment buildings and 40% believe Arabs should lose the right to vote. A majority consider marriage between Jew and Arab to be ‘treason’.²³ 

It is not surprising that in this sea of virulent racism neo-Nazi groups have begun to flourish in Israel. It is preferable to admit white European Nazis to the Jewish collectivity than to allow the Palestinian refugees to return.

The tactic of boycott was been the weapon of the oppressed through the ages. No-one believes that the towers of Babel will fall because of a boycott, but it focuses on the actions and nature of the Israeli state, a state which consciously favours one ethnic group over another. It is no accident that boycott has been supported in the first instance by trade unions in Britain, despite the opposition of the TUC’s Brendan Barber and other rightwing bureaucrats like Sally Hunt of the University and College Union, who has used the law to prevent even the discussion of a boycott. It has also met wall-to-wall opposition from the Tories and New Labour, US political leaders, as well as every single national paper. Despite this, support for boycott and disinvestment is growing.

Of course boycott did not directly cause the downfall of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Yes, apartheid’s days were numbered when the US capitalist class pulled the plug. But this begs the question, why did US capitalism withdraw support? The massive boycott campaign clearly made it politically untenable to continue to support the apartheid system.

Israel is the last settler colonial state in existence. It is a state not of its own people, but of ‘the Jewish people’. That is the reason why we single out Israel for boycott, disinvestment and sanctions. Israel is the armed surrogate of the United States, fulfilling its mission to suppress any revolutionary movement or popular opposition to imperialism in the region.

The best service in the fight against anti-semitism is uncompromising opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state. Boycott is one weapon in that battle. Socialists who find pretexts for opposing the boycott are in reality giving succour to imperialism.

Notes

 1. “Turn off Gaza’s water and fuel,” demands Alderman, while Phillips declares: “We are too focused on the welfare of our enemies and so are reluctant to defend ourselves properly” Jewish Chronicle September 28.

 2. CR Browning The origins of the final solution London 2005.

 3. Records of the Nuremberg trial. Frank Diary No2233.

 4. http://fra.europa.eu/fra/material/pub/AS/AS-WorkingDefinition-draft.pdf.

 5. www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm70/7059/7059.pdf, p6.

 6. Occupation Magazine July 20.

 7. A Leon The Jewish question: a Marxist interpretation London 1974, p247.

 8. See N Finkelstein Beyond chutzpah - on the misuse of anti-semitism and the abuse of history pp21-84, London 2005.

 9. A Leon op cit p226.

 10. See www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html.

 11. D Goldhagen Hitler’s willing executioners - ordinary Germans and the holocaust New York 1996 - a book which was praised to the sky by US neo-conservatives, the New York Times, etc.

 12. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6985808.stm; and The Independent October 9.

 13. Having been active against fascist groups all my political life, comments from NF members were mild in comparison to those of Zionist opponents. More than one Betar/Herutnik has told me that when I was circumcised they threw away the wrong bit (a favourite ‘joke’ of the fascist wing of Zionism) or what a pity it was that Hitler hadn’t got me. The depths to which the ‘logic’ of anti-semitism has penetrated the Zionist psyche outweigh anything I have ever heard an Arab say.

 14. See, for example, Haolem Haze April 20 1966; Black Panther November 9 1972; M Woolfson Prophets in Babylon London 1980, pp182-201.

 15. ‘Our responsibility towards the Jews in the Arab countries’ Yediot Aharanot February 9 1969.

 16. See D Hirst The gun and the olive branch New York 2003, pp290-96; also M Woolfson op cit pp201-07.

 17. N Bethel The Palestine triangle: the struggle between the British, the Jews and the Arabs 1935-48 London 1979, pp336-40.

 18. Moshé Machover deals with this in more depth in his article ‘Rights and wrongs’ Weekly Worker October 4.

 19. www.acpr.org.il/people/dbukay.html http://acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/authors/bukay-d.htm.

 20. See www.alternativenews.org/news/english/haifa-university-harasses-jewish-and-arab-students-who-participated-in-peaceful-anti-racist-picket-20070809.html.

 21. See ‘How Bar Ilan University keeps out Arab students’ Hadashot June 30 1987.

 22. Yediot Aharanot September 5 2006.

 23. www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3381978,00.html.

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