Inverted antisemitism in Germany and the United Kingdom
The dialectic of racism in contemporary capitalism
Preface
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) established that critical discourse about and political opposition to Israel is antisemitic. I refer to this spurious definition of antisemitism as ‘inverted antisemitism’, because the IHRA turned the meaning of antisemitism on its head. As was the case with Marx’s critique of Hegel, our task is to radically criticize the IHRA in order to turn this definition right side up.
I am inspired by the writings of the late United States (US) political scientist, Sheldon Wolin, who coined the term ‘inverted totalitarianism’ to describe certain tendencies in the US that pointed away from self-government, the rule of law, egalitarianism, and thoughtful public discussion and toward what he called ‘managed. democracy’, which he referred to as the smiley face of inverted totalitarianism. He asked what inverted totalitarianism exacts from democracy and whether we want to exchange our birthrights for its mess of pottage.
Likewise, as the unfolding events in the United Kingdom (UK) and Germany over the past decade suggest, we have a similar authoritarian and censorious milieu, and breakdown of civil public debate, when it comes to raising our moral consciences about Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
Part of the process of turning inverted antisemitism right side up involves understanding the social power relations at work. Israel projects its view that eternal antisemitism has reared its head yet again in the form of, and coded as, anti-Zionism. In this article I follow the chronology of events in the UK and also in Germany, that illustrate the wielding of power by the British and German states and their ideological apparatuses, in combination with Zionist organisations and the state of Israel to further their compatible objectives: demonization of anti-Zionism as antisemitism (hence the inversion of the meaning of racism) and smothering Palestinian and left-wing voices for liberation.
Jewish identity in the UK: core or peripheral for anti-imperialism?
In 2019 Zionists and the state of Israel succeeded in interpellating key left leaders of the British Labour Party, known for their uncompromising resistance to all forms of racism and bigotry, as antisemites. The immediate impact of this was to bolster the power of supporters of Israel in the party, marginalize anti-Zionists and defeat the left welfare state programme for the UK.
Between 2016 and 2018 supporters of (previous party leader) Tony Blair brought charges of antisemitism against left-wing British Labour Party leaders Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, resulting in the former’s resignation and the latter’s temporary suspension from the party. Underlying the issue were deeper ideological differences of the ‘Blairites’ with Livingstone’s and Corbyn’s left wing welfare programmes. The campaigns against Corbyn and Livingstone had clear links with the Israeli government.
Both Livingstone and Corbyn have a long history as left wingers in the party. Livingstone was the leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981 — the GLC was abolished by Margaret Thatcher in 1986. Livingstone was elected mayor of London from 2000 to 2008. Despite being a backbencher for many decades in 2015 Corbyn became Labour Party leader and developed a strong welfare state campaign, which arguably was the basis for significant electoral support in the 2017 election where Labour almost won the popular vote.
The Blairites and Zionists targeted Livingstone for claiming that Hitler and the Nazis had supported Zionism in the 1930s. I devoted an earlier article to cases where scholars and activists who interrogated the holocaust in order to better understand it as a historic event, were branded as antisemites and hounded and persecuted for this. The underlying reason for this was that they broke the rules of the IHRA, through which the meaning of antisemitism has been inverted. This section of the current article focuses on the campaign accusing Corbyn of (inverted) antisemitism, and its disastrous impact on the potential for left welfare governance as well as on the development of politics as a vocation of public service through, inter alia, democratic, critical debate.
While Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party the party was debating the IHRA definition of antisemitism which ultimately was adopted in full.
At the same time the campaign against antisemitism turned the spotlight on Corbyn whom it claimed was unwilling or unable to take action against alleged antisemites in the party (like Livingstone, who was already being isolated, as explained in the earlier article). In 2018, with Corbyn at the height of his power following Labour’s impressive performance in the election the year before, questions were raised publicly about the possibility that Corbyn too might be guilty of antisemitism. This was in reference to his 2012 praising of graffiti artist Kalen Ockerman for a mural depicting bankers playing monopoly on the backs of oppressed (largely black) workers. The charge was that the mural contained classic antisemitic tropes. Ockerman said that the mural depicted class and privilege and that the figures included both historical Anglo and Jewish
bankers (like the Rothchilds). Corbyn initially resisted the criticism on the basis of defending the free speech of artists but eventually agreed that the mural contained antisemitic tropes and regretted his support for it.
The campaign against alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party — led by inputs from the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) — persisted and resulted in an internal investigation by the party and another by official UK watchdog on bigotry and hate speech, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Meanwhile the campaign to exit the European Union (EU) — known as Brexit — had taken hold, and a snap general election was called in December 2019, at which the Labour party suffered a significant defeat. Corbyn stepped down as leader and was replaced by Keir Starmer. The internal report was leaked during April 2020. According to investigative journalist Craig Murray (referred to in the earlier article about the weaponsiation of the holocaust in service of deflecting criticism of Israel) it found that some antisemitic events had occurred in the party with Corbyn at the helm.
However, the report also found that the problem of not addressing these events rested with Corbyn’s Blairite opponents rather than with the leader’s office. Murray noted that definition of what is antisemitic for the report included critiques of Zionism and Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians. And that following the leak of the report new leader Starmer appeared more concerned to identify the ‘leaker’ than address the political agenda within the party’s administrative apparatus to undermine Corbyn.
The EHRC reported in November 2020 with inputs from inter alia the JLM. The report concluded that Labour had committed ‘harassment against its members in relation to Jewish ethnicity specifically in the cases of two individuals — former officials Ken Livingstone and Pam Bromley.’ It found that Labour had breached the UK Equality Act by
· Political interference in antisemitism complaints
· Failure to provide adequate training to those handling antisemitism complaints
· Harassment
It gave the party six months to put in place adequate training to deal with antisemitism complaints. Corbyn responded saying that the EHRC report greatly exaggerated the extent of antisemitic incidents in the party, following which the party suspended his membership and barred him from taking his seat as a member of parliament, although the National Executive Committee’s disputes panel reinstated him two weeks later.
The interpellation of leaders of a mainstream British political party as antisemites is an important example of the ideological struggle against Palestinian movements like Boycott Divetsment Sanctions (BDS) (and their global allies). Their left critics have argued that Livingstone’s and Corbyn’s failure to recognise the attack and timeously respond by going on the offensive helped bring about the defeat of a progressive UK administration that would have lent ideological support to the Palestinian cause. From the moment the campaign against Livingstone, Corbyn and others started the Labour leadership was on the defensive and apologetic. They did not see the issue as core to their campaign for political power. However, for the critics the lesson is that the war of position (a la Gramsci) around prioritised ideological elements means ‘don’t give an inch’ and ‘attack is the best form of defence’. One area of offensive is the publication of independent news analyses that can challenge the hegemony of the corporate media in interpellating leftists as antisemites. The deeper question is how should the struggle against US imperialism, for welfare policies at home and for solidarity with the Palestinian people be pursued — within, or outside the Labour Party through building new social movements?
Tony Greenstein, an anti-Zionist Jew and socialist activist was one of the early Jewish leftists to be expelled from the Labour Party for being an inverted antisemite. Greenstein has argued strongly for building a mass socialist movement outside the Labour Party. His reasoning could be well expressed in Wolinian terms: because democracy in the party has been inverted into totalitarianism. To this end Greenstein and his colleagues have been campaigning for an amalgamation of the two formations that have been resisting the takeover of the Labour Party by right wing Zionist-supporting types. Their arguments are built on the need to respond creatively to contemporary challenges where Blairites in cahoots with Zionists have effectively taken over the Party. The strategy by Greenstein and his colleagues is to amalgamate the two formations that resisted the takeover, namely Labour against the Witchhunt (resisting within the Labour Party) and the Labour in Exile Network (resisting the Labour Party from outside the party structures).
German criticism of Israel — Where’s the red line?
Introduction
In an earlier article I reported that the vast majority of authentic antisemitic practices in Germany are practised by people and organizations from the right and far-right perspective of the society. Nevertheless, the threat from the new antisemitism, i.e. opposition to Israel and anti-Zionist discourse, has also been identified in Germany. In fact, as indicated in that article, Germany was closely involved in developing and articulating the IHRA definition and examples of antisemitism. But adopting and trying to live by the IHRA guidelines has put the German political class and its economic elites in tension with their professed liberal values.
German liberal political elites’ ideological narratives of free speech, anti-antisemitism and critique of Israel are contradictory. In setting up an inquisition into critique of Zionism they have violated the principle of freedom of speech. They have also strongly criticized Israel’s annexation plans as foreclosing on the establishment of a Palestinian state. From a Zionist perspective criticising Israel’s right to exist as a state and as a Jewish state crosses the red line between acceptable and unacceptable (i.e. antisemitic) critique. The state that is the bearer of these two rights refuses to define its borders, meaning that the IHRA examples are themselves open to interpretation, i.e. is the state that bears these rights located within the so-called Green Line (1949 armistice lines) or between the Jordan and the Mediterranean? In the minds of many Zionists for whom the state’s territory stretches from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, the German state criticism of annexation has crossed the red line and is antisemitic.
At the same time the increasingly popular Eurosceptic right-wing party Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) (in 2018 the third largest party in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, but which fell to fifth place in the last general election) demonstrates strong support for Israel as an ethno-state while at the same time denying the centrality of Nazism in the collective memory of post-war Germany. The latter position could be construed as antisemitic in terms of the IHRA examples of it being antisemitic to downplay the significance of the holocaust. Thus, AfD arguably show a tolerance for antisemitism (defined as othering) and support for Israel. AfD’s view is that it harbours no antisemitism because it ‘loves the Jews’ and based on this in 2018 opened a special branch of the party for Jewish membership, called AfDJ. This special focus about Jews as neighbouring citizens and respect for Jews as Israeli citizens, reflects a historical legacy of Nazism, namely that many post-war West German leaders were implicated in the implementation of fascist rule under the Third Reich. One of these was highly respected Social Democratic Party (SPD) federal chancellor Helmut Schmidt. All parties in the Bundestag, from Die Linke on the left to the AfD on the far right, support a Jewish ethno state in the Middle East: this is Germany’s post-war responsibility, arisen in response to its war-time guilt. From left to right, across the entire spectrum of the
German political class, protecting this Jewish ethno state became a Reason of State.
Beneath the formal party-political system are the civil society solidarity groupings that challenge the interpellation of anti-Zionist-equals-antisemite through street protests, opinion editorials and other BDS supporting campaigns. According to the German chapter of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions are many local groups of citizens acting in solidarity with Palestinians and working for peace in Israel/Palestine and that most major German cities had one or two such groups. It is against these citizens’ groupings that state ideological apparatuses act to suppress their messages and exercise control over the narrative regarding Israel and Palestine.
Antisemitic events?
The following events suggest that the interpellation of anti-Zionism as antisemitism was constructed within the EU. Germany is the strongest political economy of this bloc. This could explain the strong consensus amongst Germany’s political elites and among key EU states about the IHRA definition. Over the past 17 years individual activists and organisations (like Jewish Voices for Peace in the Middle East, henceforth Jewish Voices), local German groups like Antifa and other anti-Right and anti-capitalist formations, and also groups composed largely of activists of Palestinian descent) have resisted the German state’s interpellation of anti-Zionism as antisemitism.
- Silencing anti-Zionist Jews — 1
In 2004 the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia developed a working definition of antisemitism (referred to by the Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism Berlin under ‘operating principles’) with state, civil society and non-governmental organisation participation. These were to be first applied against Jewish critics of Israel, thereby introducing the idea of the antisemitic Jew. The Zionist identification of antisemitic Jews is the logical outcome of the inversion of the meaning of antisemitism.[1]
In 2006 the late Jewish journalist Hajo Meyer (a holocaust survivor) known for his anti-Zionist viewpoints was disinvited from speaking at the Heilige Geist Church in Frankfurt, following pressure from the Zionist lobby. In the same year Israel commenced its blockade of Gaza in response to Hamas winning electoral control of the territory and launched its first of three military attacks. (Between 2006 and 2014 Israel attacked Gaza eight times destroying thousands of lives, tens of thousands of property units as well as substantial sewerage and electrical infrastructure. In 2018 and 2019 Israeli snipers shot and killed about 200 Palestinian protestors in Gaza who had gathered nearby or walked up to the fence of their open air maximum security prison, as part of the Great Walk of Return. They also shot and injured over 22 000 civilians….)
In 2010 Jewish scholars Illan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein (children of holocaust survivors, referred to in earlier articles in this series) were disinvited from speaking by respectively the City of Munich and the Trinitatus Church (Berlin).
2. Germany’s raison d’etat
In 2008 — the year of Israel’s fourth and genocidal attack on Gaza (codenamed ‘Operation Cast Lead’) — German Chancellor Angela Merkel, addressing the Knesset, said that Israel’s security was Germany’s raison d’etat, condemned Hamas as terrorists firing rockets into Israel and committed the German state’s support for a two-state solution. Support for a Palestinian state featured consistently in German government discourse on the Middle East since then. However, as the first article in this series demonstrates, Israel had foreclosed on a viable, sovereign Palestinian state decades earlier.
3. Silencing anti-Zionist Jews — 2
In 2010 my friend and Palestine solidarity colleague Iris Hefets, an Israeli-born psychoanalyst living in Germany, (and who was referred to in an earlier article on Zionism and the genocide of the Jews) critiqued the manufacturing of the holocaust into a semi-mystical religion and its weaponizing to smear critics of Israel’s politics towards the Palestinian people as antisemites. Following the publication of her Pilgrimage to Auschwitz in the left leaning Tagezeitung (Taz) the Jewish Council in Germany and the Jewish Congregation in Berlin organised a panel (including several major German newspapers) to provide guidelines for media criticism of Israel. Reflecting a widely published viewpoint one scholar on the subject of antisemitism decried Hefet’s article as an example of the ‘new antisemitism’.
The panel called to account Taz’s editor. Hefets was not invited, effectively tried in absentia, notwithstanding that the Federal Republic prides itself as being a recht staat [rule-of-law state]). The Taz editor walked out saying the panel defamed her. A few critical Jews present, protested the event, but police were called to take them out. Hefets is a leading figure in the anti-Zionist Jewish Voices organisation. Following the panel Jewish Voices published a public response and the organisation continued to operate in solidarity with Palestinians through protests, publications and offering a shield for Palestinian activists.
Following pressure from Zionists that Jewish Voices’ bank not engage in business with what they deemed an antisemitic organisation, the bank closed the account in 2016. Jewish Voices mounted a struggle against this closure, with support from other community organisations, noting this would be the first time since Nazi rule that a German bank would have terminated a Jewish organisation’s account. In parallel the advocacy for the
German state adopting the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism continued: in 2017 the government endorsed the definition.
In the meantime public petitioning pressurised the bank to reopen the Jewish Voices’ account in 2018. In the same year the Bundestag adopted the motion ‘fighting antisemitism resolutely’, which expressly referred to the IHRA definition and the state created the Office for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism, supported by all parties except the Left party. This office is manned by a commissioner (Mr Klein) who can investigate reports of antisemitism and recommend action and sanctions. This was the context in which the Jewish Council continued attacking Jewish Voices through pressurising their bank to shut down its account.
In 2019 the Bundestag voted in support of a motion that the BDS movement was antisemitic. The AfD party abstained as it wanted BDS banned. The Left party voted against the motion and proposed a counter motion to oppose BDS and to work for political solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict based on UN Security Council resolutions. In the same year the bank let it be known that it wanted to assess whether Jewish Voices was antisemitic, and appointed a scholar from the Centre for Research on Antisemitism to investigate. Jewish Voices refused to cooperate with the scholar and instead sent out a letter calling for international support which was signed by 90 Jewish scholars (including Michael Rothberg referred to earlier in the article on the function of the holocaust in relation to depiction of the new antisemitism). The bank required Jewish Voices to distance itself from the BDS movement which they refused to do. Iris Hefets explained to me that the Centre and the University then withdrew from the appointment. The bank subsequently shut down their account for a second time. Jewish Voices thought that they had made a crucial ideological point in the public domain.
4. The Humbolt 3
Over the last five years the German state’s increasingly strong interpellation of criticism of Israel as antisemitic was resisted by other ideological struggles in Germany over the meaning of free speech and antisemitism. In 2017 three Israeli anti-Zionist activists protested at a Humbolt university meeting addressed by Israeli parliamentarian Aliza Lavie, who was a member of the Knesset’s Defence and Foreign Affairs Committee which oversaw Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014 (code-named ‘Operation Protective Edge’) — the activists vocally challenged Israel’s apartheid policies and more specifically Ms. Lavie’s complicity in war crimes. Needless to say two activists were ejected from the classroom while a third stayed on to continue the challenge during question time. In early-2019, following requests from the Israeli government, the three were put on trial. The state prosecuted not on the basis that they were antisemitic but charged them with trespassing. Their defence was that they were simply exercising their right to peaceful protest and free speech. In late-2020 they were acquitted of the trespass charges but one was found guilty of attempted assault and fined Euros 450. She vowed not to pay and rather to go to jail. They used their trial to make statements justifying their protest on the basis of Israel’s war crimes against Gazans and also Israeli apartheid as a crime against humanity.
5. Censure, for Two States
Notwithstanding its strong push to suppress anti-Zionist protest in Germany the German state in 2020 strongly censured Israel’s plans to annex part of the occupied Palestinian territories, provoking claims that it was antisemitic. The German liberal political elite locates its defence of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state within a framework that also makes provision for the right of Palestinians to a state of their own. In 2020 the US Trump administration announced a Peace Plan that included annexation by Israel of parts of the Jordan Valley, prompting protests from Palestinians. In July 2020 the Bundestag voted to censure Israel against annexation of the OPTs, largely driven by the neo-liberal Christian Democratic Union and SPD, and supported by the Free Democrats. Germany’s demands in the face of Israel’s intransigence have ineluctably led liberal German political elites into criticisms of Israel. Based on the IHRA definition some Zionists have construed this criticism as antisemitic. The AfD opposed this censure on the basis that the Bundestag had no right to tell a sovereign ethno-state how to conduct itself. AfD’s strong support for the state of Israel happens alongside a 2017 critique by one of its leaders of the “culture of guilt” in respect of the holocaust, that he claimed has been imposed on Germans. He called for the removal of the holocaust memorial monument in Berlin, arguing that Nazism was a pimple on top of a thousand-year glorious German history.
6. Suppressing student protest
The Palaestina Antikolonial, a student and youth organisation of Palestinians and German solidarity activists opposing the colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, is based in the German city of Muenster. Through ideological struggle it resists German state solidarity with Israel, and also challenges the demonisation of Palestinians and Muslims through the German ideological state apparatuses. In 2020 it held a protest in the city of Muenster and there was a counter protest by supporters of Israel. This led to the student council of the University of Muenster declaring the Palaestina Antikolonial an antisemitic group and therefore barred from organising on the campus. In response Palestine solidarity movement formations in Germany and abroad expressed their protest at this latest example of the curtailment of freedom of speech and suppression of critique of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. Thirteen German-based Palestine solidarity organisations as well as organisations affiliated to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) (that developed after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s), based in Palestine and organised by Palestinians, issued a letter of protest. ISM also has a strong structure in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the US, which publicly protested the actions of the Muenster university student council. Within Germany solidarity organisations (in brackets) in the cities of Magdeburg (Zusammen Kaempfen), Augsburg (Antifa Jugend), Schwaben (Rote Jugend), Siegen (Internasionale Jugendgruppe), Duisburg (Netzwerk gegen Rechts) and the state of Nord Rhine Westphalia (Palaestina spricht NRW), as well as organisations based in Denmark, the UK, Canada, France, the US and Spain signed the protest letter. Samidoun Deutschland and Studenten gegen Rechte Hetze also signed the letter.
7. Cultural and commercial censorship
Since the 2019 Bundestag resolution that BDS is an antisemitic movement the German cultural state ideological apparatuses have been censoring the works of artists who either support BDS or at the very least are critical of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinian people — like novelist Kamila Shamsie, poet Kae Tempest, musicians Young Fathers, rapper Talib Kwelli, visual artist Walid Raad and philosopher Achille Mbembe. This has created a climate of fear within artistic and cultural communities, prompting self-censorship with respect to artists’ and intellectuals’ views on Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. This censorship and resistance to it forms the context for a final anecdote, based on information I received from a German colleague, Thomas Siepelmeyer, an entrepreneur whose company develops the production of renewable energy through windmills and solar photovoltaic units.
It is mandatory for the company to be affiliated to Deutshe Industrie und Handelskammertag (DIHK) (the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce) — according to Thomas this compulsory
membership was first promulgated under the Third Reich, but not overturned during the denazification of immediate post-war West Germany. Several years ago the Chamber’s president publicly announced his support for Israel’s ‘right to exist’, prompting Thomas to protest to an administrative appeals court that the President had no right to make such pronouncements because the federation had never been canvassed on the issue, nor should it focus on any socio-political issues outside the business interests of its member companies. Furthermore, the federation’s members likely had a range of views on this and related issues (like the internal situation in Iran, which the President had also commented on). In 2019 the administrative appeals court ruled in Thomas’ favour. In response, a Green Party conservative member called him out as a “Nazi entrepreneur” on Facebook , the tabloid Bildzeitung editorialized that the court decision made no sense as it was self-understood that all Germans had a responsibility to protect Israel’s right to exist. Mr Klein, the German government’s commissioner on antisemitism, opined that the core values of German society demanded of all citizens that they defend Israel’s right to exist. Thomas explained to me that he was suing the journalist, the green politician and the antisemitism commissioner of the German government, who supported Bild in the smear article, for insult and defamation. Germany has quite strong laws with respect to these types of offenses.
In relation to Thomas’ litigation the December 2020 statement by 42 German public cultural and research institutions should also be mentioned. The statement announced their initiative to defend a climate of diverse voices, critical reflection and appreciation of difference in ‘their common struggle against antisemitism, racism, right-wing extremism and any form of violent religious fundamentalism.’ The signatories called for an end to censorship of artists aligned to the BDS movement in the interests of cultural and scientific freedom of speech, adding that they also opposed the BDS cultural and academic boycott of Israel. But their main concern expressed was what they saw as the shutting down of free speech in Germany.
Fissures and strategic spaces?
The interpellation of anti-Zionism as antisemitism by the German ideological state apparatuses is a contradictory process. The strongest and principled opposition to this interpellation comes from civil society organisations and solidarity activists in the country, who oppose the narrative as false and correctly call out its sheer mendacity. These individuals and groupings albeit small in numbers appear to be widespread across the country. Notwithstanding German political elite consensus about Israel‘s right to exist, there are contradictions in their ideological discourse about how this right should be realised and defended.
The holocaust appears as a defining feature of the German state’s expressed responsibility to defend Israel as a Jewish ethno-state. Iris Hefet’s critique of the mysticism of the ‘Shoah’ raises the question of the function of collective German guilt in reinforcing the ideology of equivalence of anti-Zionism and antisemitism (in practice cementing the relationship between the perpetual perpetrators, represented by the German state, and the perpetual victims, represented by the state of Israel). However, this symbiosis has its fissures. The right wing AfD articulates a critique of collective guilt and calls for a deemphasis on Germany’s Nazi past, while at the same time proclaiming that it is pro-Zionist and philosemitic. Lending weight to the notion of the oppressive German collective guilt was a 2015 comment by an Israeli official in its Berlin embassy that maintaining German guilt about the holocaust helps Israel. Gabrielle Nissam, in a perceptive 2019 article, echoing Hefets’ point, implies a mass psychological pushback against a Zionist and Jewish-imposed guilt complex on all Germans, contributing to the growth of the AfD, but observes that the AfD is not a classical neo-Nazi party: it proclaims itself philosemitic and fraternizes with Israel.
The tension between being perceived as antisemites while proclaiming fealty to Israel is not confined to the German political right but manifests across the entire spectrum of German political elites. Around the question of an independent Palestinian state a range of German political parties have criticized Israel, something unheard of by US and British political elites. The German legal system has upheld the right of freedom of speech with respect to critique of Israel’s policies and Zionism, as a basic value of German constitutional democracy. An increasingly right Israeli government regards this as antisemitic. But in Germany it is unclear where the red line between antisemitism and legitimate critique of Israel lies. In this fog local anti-Zionists have achieved some significant ideological victories. Going forward these ideological fissures within German ideological state apparatuses represent a strategic opportunity for the anti-Zionist war of position.
Conclusion
The Zionist ideology of inverted antisemitism is strongly established amongst German and British economic and political elites, who were involved in the development of the seminal document that sets out the guidelines for Israel’s thought police in both these countries: the IHRA definition and examples of antisemitism.
In both countries Zionists and their sympathisers have succeeded in capturing the ideas of the full spectrum of political parties. Chomsky and Herman (in their book, ‘ Manufacturing Consent’), noted that already in the 1980s and 1990s ruling Western elites succeeded in manufacturing a consensus about ‘good victims’ and ‘bad victims’ in foreign lands that were either subject to US imperialism or resistant to its orders. Linked to this was the consensus that entrepreneurialism was the only path to sustainable economic growth and development, requiring the constraining of state welfare transfers to the unemployed and working poor, and for governments to behave as private businesses and to tailor their policies accordingly.
In the same way, through the mass media, academia, think tanks, the US Congress and the military-industrial-complex, there developed a hegemonic ideology that claims opposition to Israel and anti-Zionist discourse as the latest form of what is identified as the age-old malaise of antisemitism.
In both the UK and Germany the counter hegemonic discourse of anti-Zionism as authentic anti-racism is located within extra parliamentary formations of the left. The next series of articles will trace the ideological struggles between Zionists and anti-Zionists in South Africa. The South African terrain differs from the terrain in the UK and Germany in that the ruling ANC has a strong historical ideology of support for the Palestinian struggle, notwithstanding the movements’ leadership being complicit in providing cover for Israel through its support for Zionism as a legitimate form of nationalism. The ANC government’s progressive talking points mystifies their being complicit — through standing on the sidelines in a proclaimed neutrality. This reflects the ANC government’s relationship with US imperialism more generally.
Since ascending to ruling party status, the ANC has consistently adopted a relationship of ‘talking left while walking right’, to quote the activist scholar Patrick Bond. Likewise, there has been little to distinguish the ANC government from its German and UK counterparts when it comes to inaction on the BDS front line protests and advocacy for boycotts, divestment and sanctions for the state of Israel. As in the UK and Germany the local BDS movement is extra-parliamentary and presents the greatest potential for the BDS campaign struggles in South Africa. One advantage for these struggles arising from the ANC government’s talking left is that there are as yet no attempts to criminalise BDS activism as in the case of Germany and the UK, both countries having adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. This is not the case in South Africa, where legislature has not even been presented with a motion for adopting the IHRA definition, let alone condemning BDS and other forms of solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 16 December 2022
[1] These Jews are invariably people like Tony Greenstein, left wing activists committed to a social democratic/socialist state and economy and against racism in all its forms — for Zionists they are ‘self-hating’ Jews.
