Isaac Deutscher anti-semite?

Deutscher advised Israelis to 'beware of being carried away by their
new-fangled and already red-hot nationalism . their state is not above
criticism; it is an earthly creation not a Biblical sanctity, not a "chosen"
nation state.'

Objective commentators would probably describe Deutscher as prophetic or
prescient. I suspect that UJS and the EUMC would not hesitate to describe
him as antisemitic.


Had this from Simon Lynn....Greens against a boycott seem to be arguing that it was wrong for Caroline Lucas to appear at the Palestine Solidarity Rally and have prepared a motion which they are putting to conference which argues that anti-zionism is anti-semitism.

I challenge anti-semitism but I am very worried that solidarity with people in Gaza is going to be diminished.



below an article by David Rosenberg published in Jewish Socialist (no 53)
challenging the new EU's definition of antisemistism with arguments relevant
to the motion we are opposing at conference. Simon Lynn



Freedom without flags



A narrow definition of self-determination, which ignores the reality of
Jewish life in the diaspora, is skewing the debate on antisemitism, says
David Rosenberg



In the late 1970s, there were clumsy attempts to ban Jewish student
societies (JSocs) at British universities on the basis that Jewish societies
were Zionist, Zionism was racism (the UN said so), and racists shouldn't
have a platform. These actions, and the assumptions they relied on,
reflected gross over-simplifications. Many Jewish students joined JSocs for
religious rather than Zionist reasons; Zionism in practice was racist but
many Zionists were not, and many countries voting to condemn Zionism as
racism in the UN had questionable records with regard to their minorities.
No-platforming fascists who were declared enemies of democracy had a clear
basis, but attempting to no-platform racists was more complicated. The
designation of 'racist' was often subjectively applied and, as racism is a
matter of degree ranging from mild or even unconscious, to extreme, some
racists could be won to anti-racist positions in open argument.

Those who attempted to ban JSocs ultimately discredited the left and
probably strengthened both Zionism and antisemitism.

Today, though, the boot is on the other foot. The Zionist-dominated Jewish
student body, the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), wants to stop political
opponents of Zionism, and they have dragged the National Union of Students
(NUS) executive behind them. They have found a powerful weapon - a document
drawn up by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia
(EUMC) - which promotes a contemporary definition of antisemitism as 'a
certain perception of Jews which maybe expressed as hatred towards Jews'. It
adds: 'Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed
towards Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards
Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.' The definition
comes with a page of interpretation. As a whole this has been incorporated
in the recent report of the All Party Parliamentary Inquiry on Antisemitism.
After an emergency motion at the NUS executive, it has won approval from the
student movement's nationally elected representatives.

But this definition, which is gaining such significance, contains at its
heart a lie. A big and pernicious lie. But quite a clever lie, built on
many layers of distortion and disinformation relating especially to the
Jewish people, Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.

It says: 'Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with
regard to the State of Israel . could include: Denying the Jewish people
their right to self determination eg by claiming that the existence of a
State of Israel is a racist endeavour.'

This lie should be exposed - but it requires a lot of dissection. The nub is
'self-determination', which it locates exclusively as being in the form of
the Israeli state. It takes the Zionist version of Jewish self-determination
to be the sole legitimate and true form of Jewish self-determination.

And yet, the Zionist version of Jewish self-determination belittles the
Jewish life of the majority of Jews in the world. Zionism holds that you
have to live in Israel to be complete as a Jew and that Jews outside are
incomplete Jews: homeless, threatened and in exile.

Last year, nearly six decades after Israel came into being, it was estimated
that there were 14.5 million Jews in the world of whom 6.2 million lived in
Israel. If anything, this underestimates the global total - since
self-identifying Jews who do not belong to a synagogue or any official
Jewish institution don't get counted except as 'guesstimates'; and it
overestimates the Israeli proportion, since Israel's Jewish population
includes many church-going non-Jewish Russians who opportunistically claimed
Jewish ancestry as a way of emigrating from Russia.

Today, any Jew anywhere has the opportunity to go to live in Israel to
determine themselves there, and nearly all have the means to do so. But they
continue to choose the diaspora. So Israel is not the only place where
Jewish self-determination happens, or even where it mostly happens, but the
only place where Zionists recognise it as happening. The EUMC report
colludes completely with this view.

Jewish self-determination means to live life freely and make choices as a
Jew, both individually and collectively. It means having the right to form
and join Jewish organisations and institutions, read Jewish newspapers and
literature, speak Jewish languages, eat Jewish food, carry out Jewish
religious practices, celebrate Jewish festivals, be buried in a Jewish
cemetery, and bring Jewish concerns - for example, about antisemitism - to
the attention of government and civil society organisations. Nearly all Jews
are able to do this today, whether they live in Israel or the diaspora. But
most prefer to do it in the diaspora. And if you look at emigration patterns
from Israel, there are lots of Israelis who prefer to practice their
self-determination in the diaspora too.

Ideas of Jewish autonomy and self-determination preceded Zionism. And
Zionism was only one model among several that have been fought for. In
Eastern Europe, religious Jewish communities formed kehillas - autonomous
collective institutions - which levied taxes on Jewish families, provided a
range of Jewish services, and organised their own legal systems.
Ultra-orthodox Jewish communities today still live very much within their
own collective frameworks. These are not democratic and they don't provide
for secular Jews but, in themselves, remain a form of Jewish
self-determination.

In 1897, the same year that the Zionist movement was declared in Basle, the
Bund (General Union of Jewish Workers) was formed in Vilna. The Bund
developed the idea of national cultural autonomy - Jewish self-determination
that was not contingent on territory but recognised the multinational
character of the Jewish people.

In 1905 a group calling themselves 'territorialists' split from the Zionist
movement and were active for two decades pursuing the idea of forming a
Jewish territory or compact Jewish territories in various parts of the world
and not necessarily in Palestine.

In the Soviet Union, a Jewish autonomous region was formed called
Birobidzhan. While remaining under strict party control in an authoritarian
state, Yiddish was (and continues to be) taught in schools there, and a
range of Jewish institutions operated.

Stalinists, Zionists and territorialists chose to understand Jewish
self-determination as contingent upon a defined and ghettoised territory. In
the case of the former, the territory was far from where Jews were already
living but within the territory of the state in which they lived. In the
latter two cases the territory in question was under the jurisdiction of
other rulers.

The insistence on connecting Jewish self-determination with a distinct and
hermetically sealed territory runs completely against the grain of Jewish
history. Writing in the 1950s, Professor Leibman Hirsch of Geneva University
stated that, 'the period when the entire Jewish nation was united in a truly
independent state of its own was limited to 80 years (the combined reigns of
David and Solomon), or only about 2% of the period described in Jewish
history.'

Israel's 59 years, with a significant proportion of Jews united in a Jewish
nation state, will not have increased this percentage substantially. Which
means that the normal condition of the Jews has been that of practising
their self-determination as a minority living within various nations. In
certain places in certain periods they struggled against discrimination
which limited many or few aspects of their self-determination, but, in
general, the Bund's notion of achieving full self-determination in the
diaspora chimed in with the reality of the Jewish condition.

The Bund was not alone in its view that national cultural autonomy was both
possible and necessary in diaspora communities. The Jewish historian Simon
Dubnow was instrumental in forming the Jewish Folkists - a secular liberal
movement which supported Jewish cultural autonomy in the diaspora, published
a Yiddish daily newspaper in Warsaw, and was represented in the Polish
parliament during the1920s and '30s.

So it has been, and it remains, perfectly possible to completely reject and
oppose Zionism's version of Jewish self-determination while supporting other
kinds of Jewish self-determination and supporting full equality for Jews and
non-Jews in the world.

The EUMC says anti-Zionists are antisemites for 'claiming that the existence
of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour'. If Jewish people had located a
remote place on Earth where they would settle in a territorial unit without
harming the rights of people indigenous to that territory, I can't imagine
that anti-Zionists would condemn this, or see it as a racist endeavour.

Of course, the EUMC know that anti-Zionists are not objecting to 'a' State
of Israel in abstract, but to the impact 'the' State of Israel has had on
the Palestinians - the people living within the territory that the Zionists
selected for their state. They know, too, that it is not the desire for
self-determination that is condemned as racism but the attitudes of Zionist
leaders to the population of the land they had chosen to settle, and the
exclusivist laws made by that state to privilege the new Jewish majority.

Many Jews arrived in Israel in the late 1940s as refugees who had no desire
to treat others as they themselves had been treated, but they were
incorporated into a system which granted them permanent privileges at the
expense of the indigenous population of Palestine.

This state was founded against the wishes of the neighbouring states whose
hostility to a Jewish enclave in the Arab world was probably more pressing
than their concern for the Palestinians. But more significantly, it was
established against the wishes of the majority who were already living on
that territory, and was firmly established through terror and expulsion,
through razing Palestinian villages and building Jewish settlements on this
land. The discriminatory character of the state was established through laws
that reserved ownership of most of the land exclusively for Jews and denied
the right of Palestinian refugees to return.

The Bundist approach to Jewish self-determination was the opposite to that
of the Zionists. Bundist theorist Emanuel Scherer described it as: 'Rights
and justice for Jews everywhere without wrongs and injustice to other people
anywhere.' The Bundists separated statehood from peoplehood and rejected the
idea that Jews living outside of a Jewish nation state were homeless. They
argued that, for their full liberation, the Jewish people did not need to
change territories, but to make changes within their territories. The Bund
argued that there were no separate Jewish solutions for the problems Jews
faced; these would be found within solutions to humanity's problems of
majorities and minorities, oppression and inequality.

While Zionism proclaims that the answer to antisemitism, especially in the
form of Nazism, is found through self determination in a nation state,
Bundists argue that they have failed to identify the root of the problem:
the national chauvinism encouraged through the nation state itself.

So, in effect, Zionism has lined up in philosophy and practice with the
nationalist systems that have inflicted the greatest misfortunes on the
Jews, and is inflicting its own misfortunes on its national minorities.

On Israel's 10th birthday, the renowned Polish Jewish Marxist, Isaac
Deutscher, wrote: 'The Jews were conditioned by the circumstances of their
existence to rise above the limitations of the nationalist outlook, to
overcome the fetishes of state and empire, and to look forward to
supra-national forms of social existence. Now, however, when the
nation-state is decaying, when it has become as crass an anachronism as the
feudal princedoms once were . Jews are investing their boundless enthusiasm
and their great talents in their own nation state.'

Deutscher advised Israelis to 'beware of being carried away by their
new-fangled and already red-hot nationalism . their state is not above
criticism; it is an earthly creation not a Biblical sanctity, not a "chosen"
nation state.'

Objective commentators would probably describe Deutscher as prophetic or
prescient. I suspect that UJS and the EUMC would not hesitate to describe
him as antisemitic.