nothing to do with me?
Yesterday I had a conversation with a fellow blogger about the minefield that is online politics. That is, the vitriol with which political matters get discussed in the blogosphere. It seems dangerous to get involved, even if you think you know what you think, because really - life's hard enough.
One subject I've steered well clear of is the Israeli/Palestinian issue, because I just don't feel well-enough informed to be able to defend my position. Even so, I was nonplussed and chagrined some time ago when I had an email from my union - the NUJ - describing its AGM, at which, no, I hadn't been present.* This email went all through the kinds of things you'd expect it to say, and then at the bottom, tucked into a sentence containing three separate issues which had been voted on, there was a small item about a protest boycott against Israel...
Well. I thought that was a little bit strange, a little bit overtly partisan for a union which represents journalists, who are supposed, after all, to pursue (I thought) the facts, and the truth, not opinions. Especially not mass, crowd opinions. This boycott is being compared to the boycott against apartheid South Africa, but even in my Woman-on-the-Clapham-Omnibus state I can see that the situation is a mite more complicated than that was. And my distrust of trendy mobbishness is such that I had my doubts about that one, too.
Anyway, shortly thereafter I found Norman Geras posting frequently on his blog with reference to a similar boycott, by the academic union, against Israeli academics. This also seems strange! I thought academics operated on an international "Academics Code" (more like guidelines, evidently) whereby they were supposed to be impartial - pursuing pure research, facts and the truth, etc - and to stand above politics. But here they are, boycotting their (non-political) fellows, for political reasons!
The hoo-hah over Rushdie's knighthood - and the fact that the honours committees were supposed to have not offered honours to people who might spoark off a reaction elsewhere - illustrates, to me, the urgency of our need to establish some kind of line and then stick to it regardless of what those who disagree with it might think, say or do.**
Here's Norm, making a pretty damn good point:
"Imagine two situations, both involving a religion with influence over large numbers of people. (1) The religion teaches that all are children of the same God and have a spark of the divine within them; and therefore one must treat others with respect. (2) The religion teaches that only some people are favoured by God and those who are not so favoured are contemptible and inferior or some such."
So, today I happened to look in on a favourite blog of mine, The Shaigetz, which is written by a Hassidic Jew living somewhere in my neighbourhood. This writer is apparently someone who left the Hassidic fold and then went back, at a cost of much soul-searching, and having confronted and accepted the anomalies inherent in true multiculturalism. This quality makes him or her a wiser person than many. I was struck by this most recent post:
"Of course our Universities and College Union, the UCU, voted overwhelmingly in favour of seeking 'a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli institutions'. They represent the students, the loony left, the ones who are going to right the world's wrongs – with, of course, special focus on those perpetrated by societies or groups perceived to be more consistently successful than their own.
What really bugs me is the muted reaction by everybody else. Is it just because we don’t blow up trains that nobody cares very much that blatant anti-Semitism has become the hallmark of the British left? Is it just because nobody is scared of us that nobody minds that British academia has been turned into a hostile environment for anyone Jewish? Not for being Jewish, of course. But, because as Jews, they represent the State of Israel.
In an ironic twist of fate the wandering people now carry a state as their cross as they traverse Europe.
I am a British Jew and I am not prepared to carry the torch for anyone. But neither am I prepared to use a different yardstick for my people than for anybody else. I therefore never ask brown people for their views on Africa, slant-eyed ones about Tiananmen Square or short, fat, white ones with loud shirts their position on the war in Iraq. I likewise do not wish to express my views on the occupation except to declare, that if I were to feel under siege, unwelcome and unwanted in the UK, I could hardly be blamed if I recalled the justifications for fighting occupation, I heard on the BBC."
I may not know much, but I do know that if we believe in the right to free speech our journalists union should not be throwing its weight into one side of a story. And that if we really truly believe in the right to free speech we should not be "worried" about our decision to knight Rushdie. You know? We should remember what happened before.
* I do realise that this is a living lesson in the cost of not participating - being an activist - and that if I'm not there to vote I can't expect to be represented. Then again, I also feel this motion should have been discussed more widely, debated maybe by emails etc, before being passed. I may have been lazy in trusting the union not to throw a curve ball, but then you can't be everywhere at once.
** I also happen, as regular readers might recall, to be deep into Louis MacNeice's long, brilliant poem Autumn Journal, which is about the atmosphere in the autumn of the Munich crisis. Do we all know what that was? That was when the European leaders got together and tried to appease Hitler by selling Czechoslovakia down the river. Result? Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
"But once again
The crisis is put off and things look better
and we feel negotiation is not in vain -
save my skin and damn my conscience.
And negotiation wins,
If you can call it winning,
And here we are - just as before - safe in our skins;
Glory to God for Munich.
And stocks go up and wrecks
Are salved and politicians' reputations
Go up like Jack-on-the-beanstalk; only the Czechs
Go down and without fighting."
The moral cost of political inactivity - or individual nothing-to-do-with-me-ism - is one of the main issues in Autumn Journal, and MacNeice points the finger at himself as much as at anyone else.
10 comments:
That is a lovely piece and I find myself totally agreeing with you.
It seems to me that a union has one job, to protect and serve the interests of the people it represents. This move is blatently political, it serves nobody and nothing but their own opinions.
More than that the descisions seem to ignore that the one side that has actually followed their line in Israel, that is a pro-Palestinian one, is Israel's academics.
I do not think it is true to say that British Academia has become a hostile environment for anyone Jewish. And I also do not think it is fair to say that non-jewish people (in general) view jewish people as representative of the state of Israel. Personally, I view british jewish people as representative of the state of great britain - is that wrong?
Dandelion, who said it was wrong?
Except that citizens aren't representatives of the state - the state is supposed to be a representative of them.
And while people in general may not hold a particular view, and while a certain environment may not be hostile in general, how hostile is too hostile? The general population can tolerate a certain amount of discrimination against a particular group - we do it all the time. It also behooves us to keep an eye on that.
I'm just making a connection here. I think the boycotts are inappropriate and strange; I think the fact that the British government is taking the Pakistani threats about Rushdie to heart - that is, analysing whether or not he should have received this honour, on the grounds that it might offend people in another country on religious grounds - is strange (though it is also exceedingly strange that that idea seems never even to have occurred to them, poor lambs); and I think if you put appeasing the Pakistanis and boycotting the Israelis together as cultural trends, they make a third strange thing.
Another strange thing: the graffiti on my front wall saying "jewish idoits" (sic) is still there.
There is a lot of tension and heat around the whole subject of religion these days, & the point where it gets really poisonous is where it starts getting mixed with politics. Well, I say "starts." We passed that ages ago. And atheists are just as intolerant as others, if not even more so. The fracas with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens is bringing out a very pugnacious side to people.
Personally, I think most people are indeed reasonable, but no one is reasonable about everything. This post just constitutes me keeping a bit of an eye on things; that's all.
An excellant piece katy, conecting with macneice in a solid register with a bit of real bluddy gravitas, bleddy heck the things one learns that were until now concealed, the self-pointing before all, else woman whose cauldron's experienceing some proper blooming poetry now..baroque sounds
grown up at last the clock-head clackering auto-bollocks, fecked from three till whenever a little twotter binlid clattering lost, connected to flourish life, ones utterance, you a survivor and free blog heading your own note calling in the woods..now ;-> ogam fact tree
ciphers for love
in dublin and london
call and return, bring
to life again, off
the page time forgot
to hear on bush's rag
waving not red, muslim
inclusive, sophisticate
dreamer with talent
for wordplay, feeds
and thrives, not jealous
of the gift gods gave
to another, for sidhe the green army, saints and scholars, drippy brits droning robotically as newspapers change opinion depending on ruperts want, the telly brigade in los angeles, chattering class of great imperialists to capitalise everything. Institute, Ideas, what a palava, prove one alone why sidhe rites are best, low-key katy, c'mon and believe a great island queen of memory didn't need envy on ones pyramid of sidhe at the top, fawned over by minions, don't be a clone, but sing your own note, shamelessly imitate the best..
James famously remarked that being an American is a complex fate. Surely (is it okay if I call you Surely?), being Jewish is no less so in this day and age. It's hard enough figuring out the differences among social and ethnic and cultural and religious Judaisms--I am a thoroughgoing atheist, but it would never occur to me to deny that I'm Jewish--but now we must be responsible for the foreign policy of a foreign country. Your correspondents may deny it if they like, but it is true that Jews--American Jews, at least--are thought somehow to be accomplices of Israeli policies, as in, "How can you do this to the Palestinians?" And then there are all those cloak-and-dagger novels suggesting that Israel is an instrumentality of American foreign policy--or that we are instruments of theirs.
Sometimes I am sympathetic to Israeli policy, sometimes not. And I confess that I almost always feel an interest in the affairs of the Jewish state that is absent from my consideration of goings-on in, say, Bulgaria or Uruguay, but I am no closer in spirit to the zealots of right-wing militantly Orthodox Israelis than I am to Mormons for Polygamy.
I wish the strain of anti-Semitism in England were new and temporary, but it's been a feature of elite cultural life there for an awfully long time. It's disheartening how often, reading in one of my culture-heroes, I am brought up short by a disdainful, dismissive reference to the Jewishness of some acquaintance or another.
I don't know, Ms B, I was just asking a question.
Good point about the rel. bet. state and citizen - personally, I think it goes both ways, but on different levels.
A non-hostile environment can't at the same time be too hostile - can it? By definition, it's not possible?
I can't quite get my head around all the strange things you highlight, but strange they certainly are. A very thought-provoking post
Sorry, my manners!
Jan, you are so right. And I did feel personally let down by my union.
I'm sure what you say is true, about the academics...
Desmond, thanks!
Richard, you can call me anything you like except late for dinner.
I think - though of course I'm never in the USA these days - I think there are subtle differences between English and American anti-semitism. In America there are massive numbers, which means Jewishness is more mainstream than it is here - the UK has 267,000 Jews, mostly in London (London has roughly 10m residents). You have nothing like New York here. But oddly, I think the influence of American popular culture over here has probably made Jewishness feel a little more mainstream. People here often assume I'm Jewish, purely based on my hair colour and the twang of New York that still clings to my speech.
I live in the middle of the second-largest Hassidic community outside Israel, after Brooklyn - when I moved in we had a little joke, which was worse, for my neighbours to think I was a secular Jew, or a shiksa?
Anyway, sadly, I agree with your third paragraph except I'd say "hear" instead of "read" - and THAT is the worrying thing. It's never overt, either. It's always just an undercurrent that makes you wince.
As you say, it is the conflation of Jewishness with Israeliness which complicates things. I think what's changing is the strength of anti-Israeli feeling; and while most people would never say they were anti-semitic, there still is this conflation of the two things.
Dandelion, I can only write about MY environment. It is full of Jewish people who say they are experiencing low-level anti-Semitism. My environment includes anti-semitic graffiti, desecration of Jewish graveyards, and mundane, low-level incidents - like, the traffic wardens who show up every single Sunday just at the moment when all the parents drop off, or pick up, their kids from Hebrew school, so that you simply can't take your kids there without expecting to get a ticket. Or the teenage chavs my kid saw screaming insults and taunts at a couple of Hassidic kids in the park.
If a bunch of Jewish academics say they consider a boycott against Israeli academics to be compromising for them, I'm more than prepared to listen to them. Especially in light of the conflation of Jewishness/Israeliness mentioned above.
Anyway, it's easy to see who I am, or Norm, or RHE. The Shaigetz is personally anonymous but culturally identified. All of us have a visible stake in the issue.
Who are you?
And that's even before we get to the issue of the current attitude to Muslims!
Re the other issue. Someone more political than I am could maybe help me out here, but a private citizen cannot be considered to represent a STATE. That is a political entity. Only an ambassador or an employee of the state represents it, just by being. The state is elected (in a democracy) by the people, to represent THEM.
Think about it: you're saying a person is a representative of his or her country's policies - every one of 'em. First of all, that sounds like totalitarianism. Secondly, it sounds like the kind of thinking terrorists engage in when they kidnap westerners.
I agree that private people do bear a certain responsibility towards their country. In certain cases this can be enforced, such as by conscription, but even this is not about representing the state, except - once conscripted - in a professional capacity.
And I think you'll find, anyway, that the discussion wasn't even about representing the state of one's own country - it was whether all Jews should be carrying the can - or the cross - for Israel. (Um, and the answer is no.)
Hi Ms B!
I was just commenting on the "academic environment" comment. I'm sorry to hear about the grafitti outside your house et al.
If any academics consider a boycott against Israeli academics to be compromising for them, then that's not surprising, and yes, such a boycott is wrong, in the absence (for good reason) of government sanctions.
I just don't think you can say that objecting to certain Israeli policies is by definition anti-semitic, or reflective of one's attitude towards british people of any race or creed. If it feels anti-semitic to british jewish people, then I think that's worthy of further debate.
So I am wondering exactly who it is that is conflating Jewishness/Israeliness? As a non-jewish british person, I can tell you it isn't me.
I am most definitely not saying that "a person is a representative of his or her country's policies - every one of 'em." If you read what I wrote you will see this. I will post a post on my own blog explaining what I mean about representativeness, so as not to clog up your comments box any more than I already have.
I think it's a shame, because my comments were exactly about whether all Jews should be carrying the can for Israel, and IMHO too, the answer is no. I was agreeing with you. I was only questioning who it is that thinks they are. That's all.
Vis a vis who I am - what would you like to know?
oh dandelion "sorry about the grafitti" .... no no no
it's hysterical -
"Another strange thing: the graffiti on my front wall saying "jewish idoits" (sic) is still there.
ANYBODY seeing it, sees the proof of the vandal's small brain.
Being far far away from the conflict on/in/at Gaza West Bank, I have no view of it at all, beyond wishing they would stop hurting each other.
I do however, live in a country where the Government is not the Party I voted for, and I do not wish to be connected to ANY of it's views actions or pronouncements, as none of them are similar my own.
World-wide, we are all just little tribes. not 'Nations' at all.
Sunnis.
Shiites.
shites.
tribes of emos.
tribes of colour: black yellow white etc.
tribes of obese.
tribes of freckled redheads.
tribes of wealth.
tribes of welfare.
tribes who 'Lunch'.
we each belong genuinely and exactly, to at least ONE of these tribes, and from that vantage-point, tend to sneer (illogically)at all the others.
Time and again, I find myself thinking of Virginia Woolf, sniffing snootily about Jews while leaning on Leonard. It seems somehow paradigmatic.
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