Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: Decoding the Relationship
In May 2003, senior Labour MP Tam Dalyell accused Tony Blair of ‘being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers'.12 Having made a traditionally antisemitic attack, Dalyell then fearlessly relied on the Livingstone Formulation to get him off the hook: ‘The trouble is that anyone who dares criticize the Zionist operation is immediately labelled anti-Semitic...'13
When one faction in the University and College Union persuaded the union's conference to support the campaign to boycott Israeli academia, it built the Livingstone Formulation into the motion itself, making it official union policy: ‘...criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic.'14 First, they supported an antisemitic campaign - one which aimed to exclude Israelis and nobody else - from universities around the world. Second, they portrayed this campaign as ‘criticism of Israel'. Third they declared that criticism cannot be antisemitic. Again, the second element of the Livingstone Formulation is present, the one which accuses somebody (usually un-named), of dishonestly portraying (in this case construing) criticism of policies as antisemitism.
Professor Jacqueline Rose employed a variant of the Livingstone Formulation to legitimize the campaign to exclude Israelis, which she supports: ‘The opponents of the boycott debate argue that a boycott is inimical to academic freedom, yet they are engaged in a campaign of vilification and intimidation in order to prevent a discussion of this issue.'15 Her claim is that that vilification and intimidation (by which she means the people alleging antisemitism) are dishonestly employed by people who oppose the boycott campaign. The boycott campaign here, again, is presented as though it were nothing more than criticism of Israeli policy, when in reality it is a campaign for the exclusion of people from British campuses.
If Jacqueline Rose's version is subtle, journalist Richard Ingrams' is anything but: ‘The Board [of Deputies of British Jews] ...thinks nothing of branding journalists as racists and anti-Semites if they write disrespectfully of Mr Sharon....'16
The BBC website greeted David Miliband's appointment as British Foreign Secretary with the following comment: ‘[his] Jewish background will be noted particularly in the Middle East. Israel will welcome this - but equally it allows him the freedom to criticize Israel, as he has done, without being accused of anti-Semitism.'17 The assumption is clear; that there is some power out there ready to accuse anybody who criticizes Israel of antisemitism.
Anatol Lieven, a professor at King's College, London, claimed that ‘this accusation of antisemitism... has no basis in evidence or rationality.' Lieven said that it is ‘not the kind of accusation which in any other circumstances would even be allowed to be printed.'18 What is the power which licenses this accusation when other similar ones would not be allowed to be printed? ‘It is simply being used' he went on ‘as a way of trying to terrify, to frighten, critics of Israel and of American support for Israel into silence'. There is some powerful ‘Zionist' conspiracy ‘trying to terrify, to frighten critics...'.
Lieven said this on the radio in defence of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. It is one of the central and recurring tropes of different historical antisemitisms that Jews have been held responsible for conspiring to start wars in their own interests in which other people would die. The ‘cosmopolitan Jew' is portrayed as recognizing allegiance only to other Jews, while betraying the interest of the nation where they reside. There have been antisemitic claims that ‘the Jews' or ‘the elders of Zion' or ‘the Jewish diamond interests' or ‘Jewish Bolsheviks' were behind the French and Russian Revolutions, the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam war. Mearsheimer and Walt now say that ‘the Israel lobby' is responsible for the current war in Iraq.19 Naturally, they make use of the Livingstone Formulation to innoculate themselves against any accusations of antisemitism: ‘[a]nyone who criticizes Israel's actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy ... stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite'.20 Note again that their claim that the ‘lobby' is behind the war is subsumed into mere criticism and note also that there is somebody out there, in this case ‘the Israel lobby', actively and dishonestly ‘labeling' people as antisemitic.
