After Corbyn, Israel Lobby Turns Its
Guns on UK Academia
BY JONATHAN COOK
OCTOBER 18, 2021
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/18/after-corbyn-israel-lobby-turns-its-guns-on-uk-academia/
The Israel lobby appears to be readying for a campaign
to root out left-wing academics in the UK critical of Israel’s continuing
oppression of the Palestinian people – echoing its efforts against the previous
leader of Britain’s Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn.
As with the attacks on Corbyn, the assault on academia
is being led by the Jewish Chronicle, a UK weekly newspaper that speaks for the
most ardent supporters of Israel among the UK’s Jewish community.
The move follows the lobby’s success this month in
pressuring Bristol university to sack one of its professors, David Miller, even
after the university’s own investigation – headed by a senior lawyer – concluded that
claims of antisemitism against Miller were unfounded.
Miller was formally dismissed on
the unexplained basis that he “did not meet the standards of behavior we
expect from our staff and the University”.
The lobby has struggled to disguise its glee that,
apparently fearful of bad publicity, Bristol university capitulated to a
campaign of unsubstantiated claims Miller “harassed” Jewish students.
A sociologist, Miller had been at the forefront
of research into
the sources of Islamophobia in the UK. His work includes a detailed examination
of the Israeli lobby’s role in fomenting racism towards Muslims, Arabs, and
Palestinians.
Israel has long promoted the idea that it is a bulwark
against supposed Islamic savagery and terrorism, in what it and its supporters
have presented as a “clash of civilizations”.
More than a century ago, Theodor Herzl, the father of
political Zionism, argued in the colonial language of the time that a Jewish
state in the Middle East would serve as
“a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against
barbarism”.
This was a key argument the Zionist movement used to
lobby the great powers of the day, chiefly Britain, to help remove the
native Palestinian people from much of their homeland so that a self-declared
Jewish state of Israel could be established instead.
To this day Israel encourages the view both that it is
under permanent existential threat from a supposedly irrational hatred and
bigotry from Muslims and that it plays a critical, first-line role in defending
western values. As a consequence, the Palestinians have found themselves
diplomatically isolated.
‘Tip of the iceberg’
Signaling the likely direction in which the lobby
intends to head next, the Jewish Chronicle published an editorial this
month headlined “Miller’s sacking should be the beginning, not the end”. It
concluded: “Miller is not some lone voice but representative of a school of
thought embedded in almost every part of academia.”
At the same time, under the headline “Miller is gone
but he is only tip of the iceberg” its news pages reported that
scholars in “74 separate British higher education bodies” had signed a letter
of support for Miller earlier in the year, revealing “the extent of the network
backing him at universities across the United Kingdom”.
Those signatories included, it noted, “a significant
number representing Russell Group establishments, some of the UK’s most
prestigious higher education institutions”.
The Chronicle highlighted the fact that 13 of the
signatories were from Bristol university, and identified several academics by
name.
The barely veiled implication is that there is an
antisemitism crisis in British universities, which is being tolerated by senior
staff.
The lobby used the same argument with Corbyn,
claiming, despite a dearth of evidence, that he and his inner circle were
indulging a supposed explosion of antisemitism within the party – with the
strong implication that they were encouraging it.
The lobby’s claims were eagerly amplified by the
billionaire-owned media and by a right-wing Labour party bureaucracy deeply hostile to
Corbyn’s socialism.
Playbook revived
Over the past three years, the Chronicle has had an
astounding number of rulings against
it from the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the newspaper
industry’s feeble, self-appointed “press regulator”.
Most of those misrepresentations relate to the earlier
campaign against Corbyn that the Jewish Chronicle played a central role in
advancing. It regularly claimed that there was a plague of antisemitism on
Britain’s political left.
In fact, the Chronicle appears to be reviving the
playbook it and the rest of the pro-Israel lobby used against Corbyn – an
outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights – that saw him and large numbers of
Labour members smeared as antisemites.
Famously, the Chronicle and two other Jewish community
newspapers shared a front-page editorial in
summer 2018 claiming that Corbyn posed an “existential threat” to Jewish life
in the UK.
The editorial was published in the wake of a general
election the previous year in which Corbyn fell short by only a few thousand
votes from winning a majority of seats in the British parliament. With the
ruling Conservative party mired in permanent crisis at that point, it looked
like a rerun election was imminent.
The stakes for the lobby were high. Had he won, Corbyn
looked like he might be the first leader of a major European state to recognize
Palestinian statehood and impose sanctions on Israel – including a ban on arms sales –
of the kind used against apartheid South Africa.
Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s successor, has been waging a war on
the party’s leftwing, again using antisemitism as the pretext, cheered on by
the Chronicle and others.
The paper’s misrepresentations of the Labour party –
which repeatedly fell foul of press regulator IPSO – are now being pressed into
service against academia.
The Jewish Chronicle’s two-step maneuver in the
Miller case is familiar.
First, it has suggested that the professor lost his job
because the university concluded that his actions were antisemitic – when, in
fact, all indications are that its investigation found in Miller’s favor.
And second, the paper has strongly implied that the
more than 200 scholars who signed a letter to
Bristol expressing concerns about Bristol’s investigation of Miller share his
supposedly antisemitic views.
Placating the lobby
Just as the Chronicle sought to create the impression
of a plague of antisemitism in the Labour party under Corbyn, despite the lack
of any evidence, it now hopes to suggest that antisemitism is rampant in
British universities.
In fact, even those who signed the letter do not
necessarily share Miller’s views about Israel or its role in fomenting
Islamophobia. The letter chiefly defends the principle of academic freedom and
Miller’s right to pursue his research wherever it leads him, without fear of
losing his job. No one signing it has to agree with all of his findings or
everything he has said.
What is truly shocking is that more academics have not
come to his defense – especially given the fact that the allegations against
him made by the Israel lobby were discounted by Bristol university’s own
investigation.
Corbyn and his inner circle chose a similar course of
action to Bristol’s, seeking to placate the lobby. But Corbyn’s office found
every concession they made to the antisemitism smears only fuelled the lobby’s
belief that its intimidation campaign was working and that the net could be
widened further.
Soon the lobby was not only claiming that widespread
support on the Labour left for the Palestinian struggle against Israel’s
decades of belligerent occupation was antisemitic, but that anyone who denied
that it was proof of antisemitism was also outing themselves as an antisemite.
As with its attacks on Corbyn, the Chronicle’s claims
against Miller are hyperbolic, with the paper reporting uncritically that
members of the Union of Jewish Students at Bristol had accused the professor of
“harassment, targeting, and vicious diatribe”.
In fact, this supposed “harassment” refers either to a
lecture about propaganda by Miller, based on his research, that cited the
Israel lobby’s promotion of Islamophobia or to critical comments he made about
Zionism and the Israel lobby in forums outside the classroom.
Miller did not harass anyone. Rather, those who
identify as Zionists – for whom Israel is an abiding political priority – have
chosen to take offense at his findings. They have not been bullied, intimidated, or threatened, as the Chronicle implies. Their political beliefs about Israel
have been challenged by Miller’s academic work.
Notably, Miller’s research also shows that
conservative movements like the ruling party in the UK have played a central
role in promoting Islamophobia, as several key figures in Britain’s
Conservative party such as Baroness Sayeeda Warsi have repeatedly warned.
But would Bristol have seriously investigated claims
by Conservative party students, for example, that they were being “harassed” by
Miller for presenting his research in class or his speaking at political events
outside the classroom? Would the university have considered sacking him based
on those claims?
The question does not even need posing. The political
nature of the complaints – and their threat to academic freedom – would have
been instantly obvious to everyone.
And therein lies the Israel lobby’s special usefulness
to the establishment. The lobby’s own highly partisan, politicized campaigns
against the left can – perversely but all too often effectively – be disguised
as anti-racism or the promotion of human rights.
Mounting scrutiny
But, as the Chronicle implicitly recognizes in its
call for the targeting of a much wider circle of British academics, ardent
Zionists are facing a much bigger challenge than a single political leader or a
single professor.
They feel personally affronted as their political
passion project, Israel comes under mounting scrutiny. Like the Chronicle,
Zionists hope to reverse various political developments over the past decade or
two that have made it much harder for them to publicly defend Israel.
Those developments include:
* The success of Palestinian civil society’s calls
since the mid-2000s for an international boycott of Israel to end its
oppression of Palestinians;
* The horrifying images of Israel’s repeated military
assaults on a Palestinian population in Gaza besieged by Israel for 15 years,
living in what has become effectively an overcrowded, open-air prison;
* Israel’s sabotaging of a two-state solution offered
by the Palestinian leadership by illegally building ever more settlements on
Palestinian land, while also rejecting the alternative of a single state
guaranteeing equal rights for Jews and Palestinians in the region;
* and recent reports, from Israeli and international
human rights groups, clearly make the case that Israel qualifies as an apartheid state.
The Chronicle and the ardent Zionists in the UK speak for fear that Corbyn represented the moment when this view of Israel
broke into the political mainstream.
And now they fear that, unless drastic action can be
taken, scholars like Miller will introduce a more clear-eyed discourse in
academia about Israel, exposing the lobby for the anti-Palestinian racists they
are.
Financial penalties
Under threat of financial penalties from Johnson’s
right-wing government, dozens of British universities have been pressured to
adopt a new definition of antisemitism.
This was the prize the lobby sought against Corbyn. He
was forced to accept not just the International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance’s imprecise definition of
Jew-hatred but also 11 appended examples,
most of which openly conflate strenuous criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
The lobby has argued that any denial that these examples amount to antisemitism
is also a form of antisemitism.
In detailing how Israel is an apartheid state in
recent reports, both the New York-based Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem,
Israel’s most respected human rights organization, would have fallen foul of
the IHRA’s claim that it is antisemitic to describe Israel as “a racist endeavor”.
Similarly, large numbers of Israeli scholars – and
almost all Palestinians and their supporters – would breach the example against
requiring of Israel “behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic
nation”.
They question the notion that Israel is a democratic
nation. Israeli scholars have instead termed it an “ethnocracy” because it
mimics a democratic state while actually according rights and privileges to one
ethnic group, Jews, that it denies to another, Palestinians.
Corbyn quickly found himself trapped by the IHRA
definition and its associated examples. Any meaningful support for Palestinians
against Israeli oppression – including his past actions, before he became
Labour leader – could be twisted into evidence of antisemitism.
And any argument that antisemitism was thereby being
weaponized by the lobby could be similarly adduced as proof of antisemitism. It
provided perfect conditions for a witch-hunt of the Labour left.
Now, the lobby hopes, the same conditions can banish
scholarly criticism of Israel.
One of the early targets for the lobby’s new campaign
is likely to be the University and College Union (UCU), a higher education
union representing over 120,000 academics and support staff. It has so
far held out against
the pressure campaign.
Its resistance appears to have galvanized some
academic bodies to stand their ground too. Notably, in February the academic
board of University College London revolted against
the adoption of the IHRA definition by the university’s governing body, calling
the wording “politicized and divisive”.
A report by the UCL board in December had warned that
the IHRA definition conflated prejudice against Jews with political debate
about Israel and Palestine. That, it said, could have “potentially deleterious
effects on free speech, such as instigating a culture of fear or self-silencing
on teaching or research or classroom discussion of contentious topics”.
That is exactly what the Israel lobby, and its
activists in the Union of Jewish Students that targeted Miller, will hope for.
With their new war on academia – assisted by a right-wing government – they may
be able to inflict as much damage on academic support for Palestinians as they
did political support.
Jonathan Cook won the
Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto
Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s
Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed
Books). His
website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/
