1. Not One Of Us
There's an odd sort of family resemblance between prejudice, bullying and gaslighting. Sandi Toksvig summed it up once, talking about sexist expectations around having children - if you don't have children you're not fulfilling your biological destiny, but if you do have kids you should give up your job or else you're a heartless career woman, but if you do stay at home you're making yourself dependent on a man so you're betraying generations of feminists...
There's no right answer - it's all double standards and double-binds. The point of going down one of these lines of questioning isn't to find anything out but to be the one asking the questions and judging the acceptability of the answers. Bullying works the same way: bullies don't want answers, they want to ask questions that victims can't answer (or not without making matters worse for themselves). This is the case up and down the scale of sophistication - whether the question ostensibly being asked is "Why are you hitting yourself?" or "The following social media posts have been flagged as problematic. Do you have any comment?".
Prejudice against outgroups, is, among other things, a form of bullying: one way you know you're being treated differently is when the questions you're being asked have no right answer - because the underlying question is: "You're one of them, aren't you?". And there's no answer to that. What makes it particularly difficult to deal with is that, as well as being expressed through the medium of bullying and gaslighting, prejudice itself is very often gaslit. In a society where everyone's, formally, equal, it clearly isn't OK to put members of outgroups on the spot and ask whether they're "one of them", so it's generally seen as something that doesn't happen... until it does. After which, it's seen as something that doesn't happen, again... until it does, again.
Now: what happens when you become aware of this enormous, society-scale double standard - as some people, for obvious reasons, will do sooner than others? It's a realisation you can't go back from. From that point on, you've got to assume that prejudice (against your group or others) is a factor, even when everyone's denying it; even when it looks as if they're right to deny it. When you start to think about it, denying racism or sexism is just the kind of thing a racist or sexist would do - and a setting with no apparent racism or sexism is just one where nobody's openly exhibited racism or sexism... yet.
There's no way to deny the logic of this position - on the contrary, there's plenty of evidence that society at all levels is saturated with a whole variety of prejudices, and less than keen on acknowledging them. It's not a comfortable outlook, though. Just to get through the day, you need to be able to put this awareness to one side and assume good faith and neutrality from the people you actually deal with, even when you know that sooner or later that assumption will be disproved - sooner or later you'll be gaslit. You need to remain innocent, in the teeth of experience, if only for your own peace of mind. This means parking your righteous anger at the state of things pretty much indefinitely - or else calling people out more or less at random, which wouldn't be great for your social life - but you can live without righteous anger.
The only other possibility, and one that lets you hold on the anger, is to treat the ubiquity of prejudice as the big deal it indubitably is, but do so selectively: assume good faith, give people a pass (and yourself a break) apart from the people who have aroused your suspicions in some other way, and unload your anger on them. This is certainly more comfortable than the state of generalised paranoia you'd end up with if you assumed prejudice from everybody you encounter, but it isn't any more rational; if anything, it risks using the reality of prejudice to validate - and intensify - your personal dislikes. It also, ironically, reproduces the self-contradictory, gaslighting quality of prejudice itself. You only have suspicion to go on, so - unless you've picked your audience very carefully - you'll have to talk about your targets as if they deserve as much good faith and interpretive charity as anyone else, while letting it be known that they do in fact represent the distilled essence of prejudice in human form.
2. ...and everybody hates Tottenham
And so to Daniel Harris's Graun article last Thursday on antisemitism and football. Caveat: I don't really follow football, or know very much about it - think John Thomson's Fast Show middle-class football supporter. But we'll see how we go.
Harris makes a number of points, some of which I even agreed with. I certainly agree that football fans calling each other "Yids" (and worse) is Not OK. However, Harris overcomplicates this issue (in my view) by treating it as a problem of fans' attitudes and beliefs, which leads him to insist on differentiating (racist) language from those attitudes and beliefs, rather than treating the language as the problem. (This in turn leads him to propose a wholesale re-education effort, with fans having to read literature on prejudice and answer questions before they can buy a season ticket. It's one way to sort out the problem of overcrowding at the home end, I guess.)
Thus:
while as fans our antipathy to everyone who is not "us" mainly constitutes harmless fun … sometimes it doesn't.
I'm not convinced by the 'harmless fun' argument - the argument that football hatred is a special, harmless kind of hatred. On a podcast I heard recently, Simon Mayo said that he'd brought up his kids to follow Spurs, but also to stay seated when someone shouted "Stand up if you hate the Arsenal!". Maybe you deeply, sincerely want the team to lose, but does that have to go with hating the people who support them?
Tottenham ... [are] labelled a Jewish club by rival fans and targeted with antisemitism. As such, hatred for "the Yids" proves loyalty in an environment which fosters competitiveness in that aspect. Unwittingly, Tottenham fans then became part of the problem by "reclaiming" the "Yids" moniker and applying it to themselves
First Spurs are (collectively) labelled as "Yids" because of the club's historic association with the Jewish community; then the collective ingenuity of rival fans - taking advantage of the assumption that football hatred is a special, harmless kind of hatred - mines the aggressive possibilities of that nickname, not hesitating to go there (for every tasteless and offensive value of 'there'); then Spurs fans endorse the nickname by claiming to own the identity and be proud of it, no doubt reasoning that it's all right when REDACTED REDACTED THIS POST IS BORDERLINE ALREADY HAVE YOU GOT A DEATH WISH OR SOMETHING (internal ed.) Ahem. It's all fun and games; it's all banter! And, following this logic, Harris stresses that it is - in fact - not just banter:
Jews are asked to believe that no one lustily shouting an antisemitic insult enjoys it on that basis – itself insulting
According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2.4% of British people - about one in 40 - profess multiple antisemitic beliefs, which seems like a decent proxy for being the kind of person who would enjoy shouting antisemitic insults. Unless the prospect of supporting Spurs actually attracts a disproportionate number of antisemites, what Jews (and the rest of us) are being "asked to believe" is that the rival fans mouthing off about 'Yids' are thinking about Tottenham Hotspur FC and its fans - and not about Jews in general - in about 39 cases out of 40. Which seems pretty believable to me, and I can't see how asking anyone to believe it would be 'insulting'.
But this all misses a larger point. The important thing that Jews are being asked to believe, in this case, is that an antisemitic insult is OK if it is just bants - that hatred is OK for as long is it's just football hatred. (Hence Harris's rather unconvincing attempt to demonstrate that it's more than banter.) This, to me, puts an unacceptable burden on the people hearing the racist insults. The point is about the prevalence (and acceptance) of antisemitic language, not the prevalence of individual antisemites. There's no need to prove, or even to raise the suspicion, that the people using antisemitic language really are antisemites; if antisemitic language is a problem, it's a problem whether it's being used by Nigel Farage or the Archbishop of Canterbury. And if somebody shouts something that uses racist language and sounds insulting, it doesn't really matter whether they think it's a racist insult or not.
3. Hate is all around
Harris would argue that I'm underestimating those "individual antisemites" and the threat they pose:
Antisemitism ... is present and rising. Communal institutions are protected by professional and lay security, while in Jewish schools kids practise hiding in case they're attacked by armed invaders seeking their murder.
But here again I'm not sure Harris's approach is correct. I know that far-Right vandalism of Jewish religious and community institutions is a reality, but "armed invaders seeking their murder"? I remember a Jewish friend telling a group of us that his kids' school had stepped up security after 9/11, and that there was a sense of waiting "for the other shoe to drop"; I don't think it ever did. The question here isn't whether people are scared but whether they have reasons to be scared - which is to say, reasons over and above a background assumption of the ubiquity of antisemitism. Googling "jewish school" "attack" site:uk brought back news stories on a number of Jewish schools - in Auckland, in Baku, in Toulouse - but none in Britain.
The WhatsApp conversations of the Ashburton Army, a prominent Arsenal supporter group, were riddled with antisemitism ... Though I wasn't surprised when I heard about them because to a Jew, antisemitism is never surprising, when I saw them I was staggered by their harrowing specificity, blasé ferocity and mind-boggling abundance
Staggered but not surprised, because "to a Jew, antisemitism is never surprising" - it's always there, even when it's not there. Unlike Jews at football matches, who are never (visibly) there, even when they are there:
because, for reasons of community, most of the UK's 270,000 Jewish population tend to live in or near big cities, most clubs have few, if any, Jewish supporters, while at the game Jews tend to go incognito, often for reasons of safety.
Incognito? How many Jews are Orthodox enough in their observances to be visibly Jewish, while also being relaxed enough to go to football matches on a Saturday? Unless he means something else by 'go[ing] incognito' - 'not displaying flags or banners bearing the Star of David', perhaps (I'm guessing here). But if that's the case, you really do have to take into account the fact that that emblem is generally seen as the emblem of the State of Israel.
4. Another country
Which brings us neatly to what Harris describes as "Israel-related antisemitism".
it's worth acknowledging a view curiously absent from the discourse whenever non-Jews debate the existential legitimacy of the world's lone Jewish state: Israel exists because the Holocaust forced the world to accept finally the centuries' worth of evidence proving it could not be trusted to refrain from annihilating its Jews. Whether these debates are antisemitic per se can be argued, but their deployment in the service of antisemitism cannot. Broadly speaking, they are found on the political left wing
For Harris the Holocaust proved that, whatever the appearances, in the long run the rulers of the Gentile world are so many Hamans, simply waiting for the right moment to annihilate their Jewish populations - and in agreeing to the creation of the state of Israel, those rulers accepted the charge. This in turn makes "the existential legitimacy of the world's lone Jewish state" a live and personal issue, for Harris and by extension for any Jew: if its existential legitimacy was brought into question, what would stand in the way of challenging the existence of the world's lone Jewish state, and Jews' only permanent security with it? Any threat to the continuing viability of the state of Israel, on this basis, is an indirect threat to all Jews - and is inherently antisemitic. Which is probably the way to understand that odd conclusion, that debates about Israel - debates that go beyond its current political situation to question the basis on which it was founded - might be legitimate in the abstract, but that they are being deployed in the service of antisemitism, on the Left.
In the Ashburton Army group, Holocaust-related antisemitism was directly linked to Israel-related antisemitism, but the latter trope also stands alone and in my view clearly exists in football. It happened in Qatar during the World Cup, has been an issue at Celtic and with the Scotland national team, frequently follows when a club communicates with its Jewish fans, and there are players and nations who refuse to play against or shake hands with Israelis – but no one else.
What's at stake in the first and third of these examples is political opposition to Israel, possibly rising to anti-Zionism: not antisemitism, unless (like Harris, apparently) you define the existence of Israel in its current form as essential to the survival of Jews worldwide. (As for that last minatory flourish towards people who protest in actions against Israel but no one else - leave it out. Campaigning against the state of Israel is either within the legitimate range of politics or it isn't, and if it is - as currently it is - then you can't draw any adverse inferences from somebody engaging in it.) What's interesting here is that the second example - a Tweet about Passover being answered with messages about Palestine - similarly derives from anti-Zionism, but clearly is antisemitic, in its disrespect for Judaism and its use of ordinary Jews as a proxy target for Israel. It would be far more constructive for Harris to distinguish these two things from each other than lumping them together.
Polling showed persuasively that the overwhelming majority of Anglo-Jews believed Jeremy Corbyn to be antisemitic
A survey of British Jews carried out by Survation in December 2017 found that 62% of them intended to vote for the Conservatives and 15% for Labour; the national polling averages at the time were 40% and 42% respectively. In March 2018 Luciana Berger (a Labour MP) publicly questioned Jeremy Corbyn's endorsement of the Freedom for Humanity mural; in July 2018, Margaret Hodge (a Labour MP), with the protection of parliamentary privilege, called Corbyn an antisemite to his face. In September 2018, Survation polled the Jewish members of their survey panel and found that 85% of them thought that Jeremy Corbyn was an antisemite. (I wrote about that poll here.)
The idea that 'antisemite' was a label that could reasonably be applied to Corbyn was very much in the air in September 2018 (and later); given that a large majority of British Jews weren't intending to vote for Labour, it's not surprising that a large majority of British Jews were willing to endorse it. (Nor was Jewish disaffection from Labour the product of Corbyn's leadership; the paper linked above makes clear that it predated Corbyn by several years.) What is surprising is that widespread belief itself - or, if not an outright 'belief', that widespread acceptance that Corbyn was (or might be, or could reasonably be suspected of being, or needed to reassure people that he wasn't) an antisemite. It's a decidedly odd charge to lay against a politician with Jewish allies and supporters, who campaigned against a local council's attempt to bulldoze a Jewish cemetery and was an invited guest (also in 2018) at a Passover seder. But it's not so odd if you're using 'antisemitism' to mean 'anti-Zionism' - or if you're identifying Corbyn and Corbyn supporters as your political opponent and loading them up with all the guilt of societal antisemitism. While also giving them the benefit of the doubt, of course:
In 2017, a Corbyn banner was displayed at Anfield and the Oh Jeremy Corbyn song ... was aired by Liverpool fans during a football match in December 2019. I'm confident those involved did not intend to make Jews feel uncomfortable and were instead supporting Corbyn for his anti-establishment defiance in a city eager for a left-wing government. But given the confrontational nature of football crowds and the community's well-publicised fear at the time – Luciana Berger, the former MP for Liverpool Wavertree, left Labour because of antisemitism at both national and local level – these were disquieting developments for me and other Jewish matchgoers.
Good old Liverpool fans with their left-wing anti-establishment loyalties, nothing dodgy going on there - it's just that they were also 'confrontational' and didn't care how they might exacerbate 'the [Jewish] community's well-publicised fear'. It's all a bit 'disquieting' - or it would be if we weren't confident that Liverpool fans aren't antisemitic. Which we are, so there's nothing to worry about - although, then again...
We've heard this tune before. Here's James Bloodworth from back in 2015:
While I genuinely believe that Corbyn does not have an antisemitic bone in his body, he does have a proclivity for sharing platforms with individuals who do; and his excuses for doing so do not stand up.
Say what? If you're absolving him of antisemitism, what does he then need to find excuses for? I've never heard a coherent explanation of this argument (and I've seen it advanced many times). English libel law is a scary thing, but I don't think everyone arguing like this was just boxing clever; I genuinely believe (if he'll pardon the expression) that James Bloodworth genuinely believed the first half of his sentence. Unfortunately, he also genuinely believed the second half, which it flatly contradicts. Ultimately, the trouble with this mindset is that you end up gaslighting yourself.
5. What to do about all this?
So, what to do about all this? Well, discrimination is defeated with clarity and policy
Let's try for a bit of clarity first, and maybe build policy on that. We could start by defining antisemitism, following the OED, as "prejudice, hostility, or discrimination towards Jewish people on religious, cultural, or ethnic grounds"; or else, following Brian Klug, as "a form of hostility towards Jews as Jews, in which Jews are perceived as something other than what they are"; or, following me, as "a range of forms of hostility towards Jews, considering Jews as fundamentally and inherently different from non-Jews".
Any one of those definitions would give the right answer to the question of whether it's antisemitic for Arsenal supporters to sing about "gassing the Jews", or for followers of Man U to respond to a "Happy Passover" tweet with "Free Palestine". They would also give the right answer to the question of whether it's antisemitic to regret the establishment of the State of Israel and seek justice for the Nakba; or for a politician to endorse the cause of people who seek justice for the Nakba; or for a group of football fans to sing a chant in support of a politician who endorses the cause of people who seek justice for the Nakba, in a city one of whose MPs has publicly disagreed with that politician. The answer to those questions would be No, of course - which is why those definitions won't be adopted by people who see the state of Israel as the last line of defence for Jews globally, and use anti-Zionists as a lightning-rod for their anger at all the antisemitism in the world. The rest of us may find them useful, though.
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