I’ve just spent an uncomfortable few minutes completing a pre-European election survey for YouGov. I’m sure Peter Kelner and Friends simply want to thresh the wheat from the chaff, but too many of the questions about immigration, Muslims, Jews and the Holocaust were distinctly overloaded. I’ll be interested to learn the results.
But my main reason for writing now may itself be open to criticism. I’m not simply begging – as so many others have – for U.K. voters to visit their local polling stations next Thursday to vote for any party bar the extremist British National Party.
I am also urging all who care for the Jewish community and Israel and who are planning to put their cross against the Lib-Dem box, to think very carefully indeed. Many of its leading lights have, at best, a very cloudy perception of Jewry and Israel and Brian and I were most disturbed to see North West MEP, Chris Davies’ face on the publicity pamphlet for our particular area. Evidently he and his chums did not do their homework. I have!
Although in January, at the beginning of the War in Gaza (Israel’s Operation Cast Lead) he paid the scantiest lip service against
“the killing of Israeli civilians on both humanitarian and political grounds… ”
he added in the next half-phrase:
“ (what on earth does it accomplish except to provide the Israeli government with an excuse for its actions), but how can Israel´s actions be described as anything other than slaughter?”
But much worse was what happened about three years ago when he was forced to resign as the leader of the Liberal Democrat Group in the European Parliament.
It happened after a reader of the London-based Jewish News criticised him for a remark he made after a visit to Auschwitz in which he said he found it difficult to understand why “those whose history is one of such terrible oppression”, i.e. Jews, “appear not to care that they have themselves become oppressors”.
She criticised him for comparing Israeli policy to the Holocaust. He replied with a one-line email:
“Sounds like racism to me. I hope you enjoying wallowing in your own filth.”
When the woman complained that it was a disgraceful way to reply to a constituent’s email, Davies did not apologise but replied by denouncing Israeli policy and the “Jewish lobby”.
When Jewish News asked him to comment he said that at the time he had received a number of abusive emails. He then offered to enter into a dialogue with his constituent on the condition that she first detail her own disagreements with Israeli policy.
Nearly a week later, Liberal Democrat Central Office reported that Chris Davies had now offered a “fulsome apology” for his remarks to the constituent and Menzies Campbell, the-then leader of the Lib Dems, said that he had agreed with Davies that it would be proper for him to resign.
David Hirsh, who teaches in the Sociology Department at Goldsmith’s College, University of London and who followed the story wrote:
“Some people will try to spin this story as an example of how the powerful and international Israel lobby is able to force the resignation of politicians who criticise Israel. So let’s analyse carefully at how “the lobby” achieved this.
“Firstly, Jewish News reported Chris Davies’ comments which he had already put on his own website. Then a number of people sent abusive emails to Davies. Then the Jewish News reader sent him an email criticising him for comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank with the Holocaust.
“In the meantime, I myself had written a piececriticising Davies’ use of the clichéd Jews-should-know-better argument.
“Jewish News went to the leadership of the Liberal Democrats for a comment, and Menzies Campbell sacked Chris Davies (by mutual agreement).
Hirsh added:
“Chris Davies was not forced to resign because he criticised Israel but he did say a number of things that one could argue made him an unsuitable person to hold the post of Lib Dem leader in the European Parliament. None of these things include criticising Israeli policy. I believe that he is right to criticise Israeli policy.
“Firstly he made use of two analogies which are routinely used not to shed light on the Israel/Palestine conflict, but to demonise Israel and to foster a commonsense popular loathing of Israel. The Israel/Palestine conflict is a nasty and long-running dispute over (on a global scale) a small amount of territory, in which neither party is entirely right or wrong.
“The Israeli occupation of the West Bank relies on organised daily violence, repression and humiliation of Palestinians. Many Palestinian responses to the occupation (and to the presence of Jews in Israel) have been murderous and self-defeating. But the idea that Israel is a Nazi state is absurd and offensive.
“There is not, and there never has been, a genocide of Palestinians; there are no Israeli gas-chambers, concentration camps or Einsatzgruppen; the numbers of deaths on both sides throughout the conflict are analogous to the number of murders that the Nazi regime routinely committed every few minutes.
“The apartheid analogy is also false, employed to elicit an emotional reaction, not to clarify issues. Arabs within Israel have full citizenship, legal rights, representation in the Knesset and freedom of movement. While there is a serious problem of racism against Arabs in Israel, and this includes significant institutionalised racism, this is not an apartheid state. Things are worse in the West Bank, where Jewish settlers, backed by Israel, do live in a colonial relationship with Palestinians.
“But the Jewish settlers ought to go home to Israel; a peace between Israel and Palestine will not be forged in a unitary state (like the new South Africa). It will be a two state solution precisely because this is a struggle between two national communities, not a struggle against an apartheid system of racism.
“So Davies made use of two demonising analogies. He also claimed that Jews had now become “oppressors” and that they don’t seem to care. This claim is particularly inflamatory in the context of the northwest of England, where the BNP is trying to organise the “white” vote and the Islamists are trying to organise the “Muslim” vote.
“And then Davies insulted his constituent who criticised him by denouncing her as a racist (because he assumed she was a “Zionist”) and writing “I hope you enjoying wallowing in your own filth.”
“He denounced what he called the “Jewish lobby” that, he claimed, has too much influence. He later said that he stood by this comment, but admitted that didn’t understand the distinction between the claim that there is a “Jewish lobby” and the claim that there is a “pro-Israel” lobby. The claim that Jews have an inordinate influence is, of course, an old and well-worn antisemitic theme.
“This is an excellent illustration of how the formal care to avoid openly antisemitic rhetoric taken by sophisticates like Mearsheimer and Walt and Robert Fisk is missed by less sophisticated people who seek to use what they understand the respectable academics and journalists have argued.
“Chris Davies is not an antisemite. He is not motivated by Jew-hatred. But he is guilty of serious negligence. Davies has gone out of his way to intervene in the Israel/Palestine conflict and he has taken an extremist position that he has fiercely defended. But he never bothered to educate himself with any seriousness about the conflict. More importantly, he never bothered to educate himself about the nature of contemporary antisemitism.
“He is not a racist but he has shown himself to be careless, thoughtless and ignorant about anti-Jewish racism. When he was publicly challenged over the potentially antisemitic discourse that he seemed to be buying into through ignorance, instead of stopping to think about it, he angrily refused to consider the possibility. You can be sure that he is not similarly careless, thoughtless or ignorant when it comes to anti-black racism or anti-Muslim racism. Liberals and politicians on the left don’t make the same kind of “mistakes” when emailing their black or Asian constituents.
“Davies has not had to resign because he is a racist or because he criticised Israel or because the global Jewish lobby has taken its revenge. He has had to resign because his laudable instinct to side with the underdog was not tempered by care, thought or self-education. His self-righteous anger at one injustice led him to close his eyes to the possibility of another.
“We should not feel that we have to make a choice about whether to oppose anti-Arab racism or anti-Jewish racism. We must oppose both. If we fail to stand against both then we become partisans for the extreme end of one nationalism or the other; we become bigots, not liberals and we cannot rightfully claim to be on the left”.
I have chosen to quote Hirsh’ s remarks – although they are about three years old – almost in full. This is not only because they succinctly reflect my own views but because most sadly, they are timeless.
I understand (ruefully) that Israel is by no means without fault and this is why I am among those who support charities and other organisations which attempt to iron out the myriad flaws in its society. People like me take it warts’n'all.
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David Hirsh’s cites his research interests as antisemitism, Israel/Palestine, nationalism, fundamentalism, cosmopolitanism, socio-legal studies, genocide, crimes against humanity and cosmopolitan law.
On a sad, quiet day I was thrilled to steal a half-hour watching something I had only ever been able to hear before: 
