First came the Muslim woman from King’s College London. Sporting the lanyard of the university that gave us James Clerk Maxwell and Virginia Woolf, she nonchalantly told LBC: “Freedom will be achieved when the Israelis go back to where they were born, which is probably America, Poland”.
Asked whether she understood that telling Jews to leave the state of Israel on the second anniversary of the 7 October massacre might upset them, she said she did, but that “I don’t think their feelings are valid”.
Then came Samuel Williams, from Balliol College. As half a million people marched for Palestine on 11 October, he led a chant that had not sprung spontaneously from his angry heart, but had been “workshopped at Oxford”. It asked Gazans to “make us proud; put the Zios in the ground”.
As Williams has been arrested, and police were seen removing firearms from his family home, the matter is sub judice. But these two examples of antisemitism among students, radicalised during two years of the Gaza conflict, should force us to ask the whole of academia, and the whole of the broadly defined left in politics, how we got here.
Calling for all the Jews in Israel to “go back to Poland” was heard by many as “go back to Auschwitz”. And while one Oxford posh boy shouting “put the Zios in the ground” might be heard as tiresome in Tel Aviv, I would imagine that among Jewish students at Oxford it had a sharper ring.
At the same protest, the Palestinian Youth Movement (a group of largely non-Palestinian students whose slogan is “Honour Our Martyrs”) issued leaflets for a clandestine conference where they promised to teach students “a new framework for dealing with repression and strategic risk, and encourage students to take up strategic campaigns to better confront Zionism on campus to achieve concrete victories.”
Minus the euphemisms, that means they intend to go on intimidating Jews in Britain’s universities, to present fully-theorised justifications for doing so, and to find new ways of avoiding arrest. So the question for every vice chancellor, every lecturer, every student who wants to achieve justice for the Palestinian people is: when are we going to call a halt to this? And, more fundamentally, what is the intellectual root of this fact-free, sub-rational politics of hate masquerading as leftism?
If you want to trace it back to Marx’s essay On The Jewish Question in 1843, or to Mikhail Bakunin’s diatribes against “the Yids”, or to the invention of “anti-Zionism” by Stalin in the late 1940s – the traditionally recognised sources of left-wing antisemitism – feel free.
Suggested Reading
End this stupid Palestine Action ban now
But as I wrote in the aftermath of October 7, I think we are now dealing with an intellectual tradition that has evolved beyond all of the above. In the space of ten years, decolonisation theory has become a new theory of everything.
“Settler colonialism” describes not only what the British did to Australia and the French to Algeria, but a framework wherein an alliance of asylum seekers, “queer people”, Palestinians, people in jail and indeed the flora and fauna of the natural world (I am not kidding) is ranged against “colonisers” – who are understood as white people, straight people, settled migrants, feminists, the police and above all academics who don’t agree with this bullshit.
Summarised in a comically bad academic paper in 2012 by the US academics Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, entitled Decolonisation is not a Metaphor, this is a Manichean worldview, in which good and evil are preordained. Israel is described as a “settler colony” despite the fact that – unlike the US, Canada, South Africa or Australia – the “oppressors” actually lived on the territory for 3,000 years before the oppressed.
But while the decolonisation theorists march down New York’s Broadway chanting for the Houthis to “make us proud” by sinking container ships, few ever call for the expulsion of Anglos, Italians, Hispanics and Koreans from “Occupied Turtle Island” (their name for the US). No, the only place where “decolonisation” is a practical project is – as the woman from KCL suggested – Israel.
It follows that those seeking to achieve this aim fall into the category of good, and those who oppose it are classified as bad. Hamas, good; Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, the United Nations, Keir Starmer, the Jewish student sitting alongside me in class, therefore, all bad.
I was a student radical and said some crazy things: we all do when young and on the receiving end of injustice. So I would rather persuade than repress people like Samuel Williams and the KCL woman.
What I would say to them is: your theory does not match reality. It takes no account of relationships between classes, sexes, ethnicities and nation states; it subsumes them within an invented category (colonised/decolonised), conflates society with nature and makes it impossible to grasp complexity.
And you know what the funniest thing is? It’s just a dumb reiteration of the Messianism that Marxism borrowed from Christianity, and Christianity from Judaism. The most alarming word the KCL woman said was “freedom”: freedom comes when the Jews are gone from Israel.
Owen Jones, the YouTube blogger, made an adjacent point in his recent Message to the Palestinian People: over a movie-style backing track he told them, “Your spirit, your determination has inspired so many people all over the world. And one day, it’s my firm belief that you will not just free Palestine – you will free us all.”
Like many viewers I was left wondering: who from? I passionately want to see a sovereign Palestinian state, the removal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank, Netanyahu at the ICC and a two-state solution agreed by treaty. But I do not think that will liberate the whole of humanity.
The French philosopher Michel Henry wrote that, for Marxists, “the proletariat is Christ”: it has the quality of bringing universal liberation through its own self-sacrifice, destroying not only the evil of its own exploitation but all evil.
That should be the starting point for any rational conversation with the decolonialists: yours is a millenarianism in which the Palestinians have replaced the proletariat. Equating the defeat of Zionism with the liberation of humanity is, as the German left understood more than a century ago, “the socialism of fools”.
And as with the proletariat – I speak here as the son of a lorry driver – maybe all that the Palestinians want is dignity, respect, control, sovereignty, peace, justice and prosperity. Maybe globalising the intifada is your fantasy, not theirs?
Most popular
Paul Marshall, the man who owns the right
Matt Goodwin’s fall into the abyss
Why Trump should never be given the Nobel peace prize
Have we reached peak podcast?
