Defend Academic Freedom, Defend David Miller

Speech given for the above online meeting on 4 March 2021 with Tom Mills, Tariq Modood, Lindsey German and Harriet Bradley.

There is no doubt that what is happening to David is symptomatic of a dangerous wave of repression aimed at silencing and delegitimising radical left politics and undermining the struggle for Palestinian justice. And I have little doubt there are journalists in the audience tonight who are here with the sole purpose of trying to twist the words of anyone who speaks into something that can be made to sound offensive. So for their benefit, let me make one thing clear at the outset: I don’t believe, actually, that concerns raised about some of David’s comments can or should be dismissed as part and parcel of a McCarthyite campaign against the left. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t such a campaign which is exploiting those legitimate concerns in a particularly vicious and dangerous variant of McCarthyism.

That is why I think this meeting is so important and why I’m so glad to be speaking here today to offer my support and solidarity to David in the same spirit in which I have defended Chris Williamson and others who have faced the full front of that wave of repression. However (and I’m afraid it’s a fairly big and maybe uncomfortable however): as with Chris and Jackie and Ken, I not only disagree with some of David’s views, but I also think it’s important to understand why they have caused offense.

Lets start with a basic truism. Some Zionists are racist and some expressions of Zionist thought are racist. There is no question that there has long existed a far right nationalist form of Zionism that is hell bent on the establishment of a greater Israel at the expense of any notion of Palestinian rights or justice. Sadly, this particular form of Zionism has gained an ascendancy within successive Israeli governments and is arguably embedded in the Israeli state as it has been constituted for the last 70 odd years. To that extent, it is a completely understandable position to be critical of Zionism as a political ideology.

But there is another important truism: not all Zionists are racist and the existence of Israel — as a nation state imbued with the cultural symbolism, values and identity of a Jewish nation — is not contingent on privileging the rights of Jews as an ethnic group any more than the existence of an independent Scotland would necessarily privilege the rights of people of Scottish heritage and culture.

I don’t want to reduce this to a debate about the rights or wrongs of Zionism or the historical context of the establishment of Israel. But I do think it’s important to highlight one point. In 1947, a year before the establishment of Israel, the vast majority of Jews living in Palestine were not settler colonialists. They were refugees; asylum seekers who had fled horrific persecution in Europe, not least during and following the Holocaust. And contrary to much of the narrative of anti-Zionism, by 1947 Jewish people living in Palestine were the victims not the vanguards of imperialism, at least as much as their Arab neighbours.

So whilst it may be an understandable position to be critical of Zionism as an ideology, and certainly the kind of Zionism that is ascendant in Israel today, I believe it is based on a somewhat flawed, over-simplistic and ahistorical analysis.

But there is another truism. Just like some Zionists are racist, it is also true that some anti-Zionists are racist. On the right, you only have to look at the output of any neo-Nazi publishing platform to become aware of and sensitive to this reality. And on the left, you only have to look at some of the examples of utter hatred expressed by a small number of individuals on Facebook groups like Palestine Live. Ideas about Zionists controlling the US or UK governments, or indeed the world, are a staple of antisemitic propaganda wherever in the political spectrum it stems from.

Now of course that doesn’t, in and of itself, mean that no one can or should be critical of Zionism. But it does surely mean that we can be a bit more nuanced, a bit more qualified and a bit more sensitive in the way that we talk about Zionism. More importantly, we can do so without compromising on our analysis, and without tempering our expressions of outrage over the policies and actions of successive Israeli governments — carried out in the name of Zionism.

I know David very well. Both his academic and advocacy work going back decades on ideology, on the conflict in Ireland, and political lobbying has made a huge contribution to the various fields in which it intersects. It has provided an invaluable resource for activists and been a major influence on my own work. In 2019 I was privileged to co-author a book with him, Greg Philo, Mike Berry and Tony Lerman on the coverage of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

David is not in the least an anti-semite. And I completely understand and empathise with the sense of anger and outrage that he must feel over the shameful and hateful campaign being waged against him and embroiling even significant sections of the left.

But I think there is a conceptual trap that we all too often fall victim to here. In our indignation in the face of repressive and personal attacks, we are often driven to double down on our rhetoric. We want to say loud and clear: “I will not be silenced. I will not be intimidated into silence.” Yet in doing so we get caught up in a vicious cycle of outrage and counter outrage, that ultimately achieves nothing other than deepening the intolerance and fuelling the repression that has become such a stain on our fledgling democracy.

And we are also liable to making a fundamental strategic error. Rather than appealing to the moral mainstream of society, rather than trying to assuage the fears of the majority of British Jews (who, by the way, are overwhelmingly opposed to the greater Israel project), rather than engaging in political education and deliberation, we engage exclusively — and thereby legitimise — the relatively small number of antagonists and extremists that are trying to silence us.

It does not matter whether or not that relatively small number of people claim to represent the mainstream Jewish community or whether they are right wing agitators in the Labour Party, or whether they work on behalf of the Israeli government or whether they own newspapers or run TV stations. The people that we should be trying to talk to are not the producers of propaganda and disinformation, but the people who are exposed to it.

And when we make that distinction, we are compelled to shift the tone of our rhetoric. We are compelled to try to understand why the establishment of Israel is, for the majority of Jewish people from all backgrounds, intimately bound up with the collective trauma of the Holocaust. We are compelled to consider why anti-Zionist rhetoric can so easily — and often so wrongly — be interpreted as anti-Jewish rhetoric.

As progressives, as democratic socialists, it is surely our duty to try to arrest that vicious cycle of outrage and counter outrage. If we don’t, who else will? The right aren’t going to. They don’t need to. Because the right are in power. They are in power here, in Israel and, believe it or not, in Gaza: I’m afraid you don’t have to look deeply into the policies of Hamas to determine just what a reactionary, nationalist and repressive regime it is.

The way we expose the vacuities and injustices of ascendant right-wing ideologies is not by mimicking their intolerance of dissenting views but by doing the very opposite. What are we for if not for a politics based on justice, compassion and inclusivity?

Isn’t it precisely in that spirit that barely four years ago this country came within a hair’s breadth of having its first ever democratic socialist government? And I’ve no doubt that only in that spirit can there be any hope of a just and democratic future — in Britain, in Israel and in Palestine.