Let me begin with a plug: Democratiya is a superb journal and its latest issue is a veritable bounty of enlightened opinion. Particularly recommended are Michael Walzer’s thoughts on how the left can reconstitute its internationalism.

Now to business.

The current issue also carries a debate on antisemitism and the boycott between academics Martin Shaw and David Hirsh. Shaw wrote a short response to Hirsh’s piece in the last Democratiya, which rapidly spiralled into a correspondence between the two of them, helpfully reproduced in full. In marked contrast to what passes for debate within the UCU, their exchange is serious and thoughtful. Both are opposed to the boycott. Where they disagree is on the role of antisemitism in all this.

And because they disagree on that, they disagree on so much more than just antisemitism, which leads me to think that their debate is ultimately about competing narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shaw does not deny that antisemitism is a factor in Middle Eastern politics, but he rejects the idea that it informs the debate on the western left about Israel and Palestine. For Shaw, the root of the problem lies in what Israel is (”a racially based state”) and what Israel does (”60 years of expulsion and 40 years of occupation,” which leads him to conclude that “it is hard to exaggerate the Israeli problem.”)

Hirsh’s response to this is spot-on, I think:

This is a surprising claim, coming from a leading academic expert in war and genocide. In fact it is disturbingly easy to exaggerate the ‘Israeli problem’: we see it done all the time. It can be exaggerated by claiming, as Ilan Pappe does, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza; as Ronnie Kasrils does, that Israel is worse than an apartheid state; as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that Israel is responsible for sending America to war in Iraq. Hamas claims that Israel was responsible for the French Revolution. Hassan Nasrallah claims that Jews are ‘…cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion….’ Clare Short believes that ‘US backing for Israeli policies … is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world.’ Jenny Tonge says that ‘…the pro-Israeli Lobby has got its [financial] grips on the Western World….’ Richard Falk, the UN investigator into Israeli conduct in the occupied territories, feels himself ‘…compelled to portray the … abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as “holocaust.”‘ It is not hard to exaggerate the ‘Israeli problem’.

In one passage, Shaw - who makes it clear that there are, in his view, plenty of states that “are as bad as or worse” than Israel - says the following:

Understood in this way, opposition to Israel is more likely to be a reflex of left-wing opposition to US or British ‘imperialism’ than of antisemitism. I agree with Hirsh that ’serious opposition takes careful precautions against antisemitism and makes its case in such a way as to offer no comfort to antisemites.’ I accept that there are antisemites among Israel’s critics and that as with all long-standing and widely diffused racial prejudices, low-level antisemitism may be widespread - probably even among Israel’s supporters in the US and British political classes. However I do not think that on any serious assessment, antisemitism can be regarded as politically potent in Western societies today - by historical standards it is definitely weak - or a major theme among Western critics of Israel.

Antisemitism is not politically potent insofar as it drives state policies of discrimination and persecution against Jewish communities - the dominant, historically-derived image of antisemitism - in democratic countries. But antisemitism is definitely a potent feature of western political discourse around the Middle East, particularly when it comes to “The Israel Lobby” debate. Shaw, however, doesn’t engage this point, and reproduces the standard left argument that “antisemitism” is a rhetorical device designed to shut down debate about Israel. He doesn’t appear to entertain the thought that while much left discourse on Israel may well be motivated by a particular interpretation of the Palestinian situation - in his case, the one offered by the anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe - it can variously incorporate, indulge, ignore, recycle and enable antisemitism as well. More broadly, it means that dubious orthodoxies (such as “racially based state”) become further entrenched, rather than being interrogated.

For his part, Hirsh is very much focused on the argument about institutional antisemitism, a notion that leaves Shaw unpersuaded, because he sees it as an admission of “the relative weakness of overt antisemitism in Western societies.” Hirsh says, “It is part of my project to try to explain where this anti-Israel enthusiasm comes from without assuming that it originates in an underlying antisemitism.” I think that Hirsh is correct to look at the way in which antisemitic tropes become incorporated into discussion of the Middle East; the question, though, is to what degree this is unwittingly so. My co-blogger Eamonn McDonagh was pretty definitive on this point, arguing that you can’t have antisemitism without antisemites.

Plenty to think about, and no clear answers. At the same time, though, the Shaw/Hirsh debate convinces me that the terms of this discussion have to be wider, and have to pay greater attention to the history of the conflict which polarizes us so.