Orthodox Jews protest in support of Palestinians in New York City. Demotix/Angel Zayas. All rights reserved.Having
introduced you to the origins of this “Anti-Jewish and anti–Muslim racisms and Palestine/Israel” guest week on openDemocracy, and the
broad principles which underpin it, we want to flesh out the intellectual positions
that we have taken in order to frame what we set out to do, and include some of
the points raised at our conferences that have not made it into the articles we
are publishing.

From the outset, we
wanted this project to explore the multiple, complex and inter-related ways in
which anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim racisms are constructed in relation to the
question of Palestine/Israel. In particular, we wanted to explore how the
histories of Zionist settlement, anti-colonial and nation-building struggles and
twentieth-century warfare in the Middle East region were being transformed in
the current historical conjuncture –
especially in Britain and Europe, but also globally –
and how these related to racialised discourses against Jews
and Muslims.

In bringing together specialists from a variety of backgrounds,
the conferences we organised were intended to serve as a first step towards
building an anti-racist political vision across borders and boundaries (a
vision which some
of us call "transversal"). The aim was to destabilise some of
the oppositional dichotomies which are currently hegemonic in discourses around
Jews, Muslims and Middle East politics.

It would be
impossible to sum up the rich tapestry of presentations and discussions from
both conferences (which were recorded and are available on the CMRB website). Instead, in this
introduction, we will reflect on a couple of the major issues that arose in
them in order to give an overview of some of the concerns that informed what we
plan to publish in this themed week, and in our ongoing online paper series. We
are very conscious that in doing so we are not reflecting any common
perspective of the organisers and participants of the conferences and the
contributors to this series. No such common perspective exists, at least for
now, beyond that of broad anti-racism.

Racisms and
anti-racism

Anti-Zionist protest, Mea Sharim, Israel. Demotix/NSI agency. All rights reserved.Before discussing
some of the major issues that arose, we need to clarify, in a brief and generic
way, what we mean when we describe the perspective of the conferences as
anti-racist. Racism and constructions of ‘race’ are
not the same. When we discuss racism we focus on people’s experiences of perceptions and
practices which construct immutable boundaries between groupings of people,
that naturalise fixed hierarchical power relations between them.

It is not just
physical appearance which can make people the target of racism. Any signifier
of boundaries can be used to construct these boundaries –
from the colour of the skin to the shape of the nose, to
accent, mode of dress, ethnic origin or religious affiliation. Racism has two
generic logics: that of exclusion, the
ultimate form of which is genocide, and that of exploitation,
the ultimate logic of which is slavery. However, in most
concrete historical situations, these two logics are practised in a
complementary way.

Racisms against Jews
and Muslims, therefore, are based on ideological, economic, violent and other
kinds of social constructions of inferiorisation and subjugation, which
facilitate the exclusion and/or the exploitation of Jews and Muslims. However,
not being racist towards Jews or Muslims does not mean an automatic acceptance
and agreement of any religious beliefs or particular political and normative
values and projects, which consider or introduce themselves as representing the
‘true’ Jew
or Judaism, or the ‘true’ Muslim
or Islam.

It is important to remember that both Jews and Muslims can occupy
different places in the continuum between being very religious to fully secular
and, even when religious, can believe in many different versions of the
religion. Also, being a target of racist ideologies and practices does not
necessarily mean that people are not racist themselves. It is for this reason
that we prefer to label our subject topic ‘anti-Jewish
and anti-Muslim racisms’ rather than the more popular labels
(used, alas, by several of our contributors) of ‘antisemitism’,
a label used historically also towards non-Jews (as we elaborate further in
this introduction) and Islamophobia, which does not differentiate between
attitudes towards different types of Muslim and Islam.

Racism
and constructions of ‘race’ are not the same

However, one of the
useful insights that has emerged out of this project is that we need to
differentiate not only between the people and the religion, but also between
aversion or intolerance towards the religion as such (for example, the Swiss
law forbidding the building of Muslim minarets for ‘aesthetic’ reasons,
or objections to Muslim women wearing a headscarf) and critiques of racist and
sexist ideologies and practices which are presented as the ‘only
true way’ to be a Muslim or a Jew.

All religions
and all sacred texts constitute rich cultural resources, which include internal
contradictions and selective interpretations of the religion. Every ideological
and political religious movement uses a particular interpretation of the
religion as its legitimation. Criticising them –
whether one is born to that religious community or not,
whether one is religious or not –
has nothing to do with racism. On the contrary, conflating
the two by seeing any critique of a particular interpretation as automatically
aimed against all Jews or Muslims, homogenises both the people and the religion
and can only legitimise racism on the one hand and religious fundamentalism on
the other.

Although at the
conferences – let
alone outside them – there
have been attempts to ‘quantify’ whether
there is more racism contemporarily, especially in the UK and Europe, against
Jews or Muslims, against Judaism or Islam and, conversely, in the name of which
religion more atrocities are being practised these days, we resist this
tendency, prevalent in identity politics, that some of us call ‘the
Oppression Olympics’.

There is no doubt that given the differential size of Jewish and Muslim
populations globally (and in Britain) we cannot compare the two. However, there
have been murderous racist activities in recent years towards members of both
religious and ethnic communities, as well as murderous racist activities
carried out by fundamentalists in the name of both religions. This does not
mean that we equate or homogenise the two. Indeed, one of the particularities
of recent Islamic fundamentalisms is that their violence is disproportionately
directed towards other people of Muslim origins rather than just against the ‘kofers’.

The Palestine/Israel question

"Real Jews". Flickr/Hammontree. Some rights reserved.Another central
discussion at the conferences related to the Palestine/Israel question, both
historically and in relation to a desired solution to the conflict. We would
argue (and many, but not all, of the participants in the conferences would
agree with this) that Zionism needs to be understood as a nationalist movement
which originally sought to ‘normalise’ the
Jewish people and thus solve the racialisation of the Jews in European modern
history.

To do this, however, the Zionist movement used the strategy of a
settler colonial project in Palestine as the main instrument for achieving for
the Jews a state that claimed to represent the Jews all over the world. The
Zionist settler colonial project has continued during the last 100 years,
before and after the establishment of the state in 1948, before and after the
1967 Occupation. While doing so, in order to confront and overcome the Arab and
especially the Palestinian resistance to this project, Israel has become a
permanent warfare society.

Settler society
projects differ from other colonial projects in that their basic mechanism of
governability has been via the racialised exclusion of the local population
from the new nation building project, rather than incorporating them as the new
national working class, as was the case of immigrant workers from a less ‘desirable’ ethnic origin than the hegemonic
settler communities. (This does not mean, of course, that where possible
the indigenous population were not exploited as cheap labour).

Zionism, like
all settler society projects has its own specificities, the two main ones being
that, firstly, unlike other western settler societies, the Zionist movement did
not have one clear ‘mother country’ but
rather sought alliance with whatever imperial power controlled Palestine at the
time and, secondly, that unlike other settler projects dominated by religious
aspirations to build ‘new
Jerusalems’,
the Zionist movement sought legitimation in claiming the ‘new
Jerusalem’ territory in Palestine as the homeland
of their ‘Old Jerusalem’.

Israel
has become a permanent warfare society

This proved to be a
forceful motivational power for mobilising Jews to immigrate to their ‘Altneuland’ (old-new country –
to use Herzl’s
name for the utopian society he dreamed of building in Palestine). It also
acted, in its common sense link to Christian evangelism, as another source of
legitimation of Zionism in the western world, in addition to the naturalisation
of European colonialism and, later on, the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust. One
common assumption to some versions of Zionism and anti-Jewish racism (as
expressed so eloquently by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu recently, post-Charlie Hebdo and the subsequent events
in Copenhagen) is that Jews do not belong and should not live in the same
societies as non-Jews.

One of the
questions debated in the conferences was the extent to which Israel should be a
Jewish state or a state of all its citizens (more than 20 percent of all
Israeli citizens, even if we do not count the post-1967 Occupied Territories
under the control of the Israeli government, are not Jews). Although all of the
participants in the conferences (at least, those who spoke) objected to the
proposed Israeli law which would define Israel as a Jewish state, rather than a
Jewish and democratic state, some argued that Jews, like all nations, have the
right to self-determination. On the other hand, those who view Israel as a
settler society state rather than a ‘normal’ nation-state,
pointed out that in all settler societies that have come to terms with their
history, the construction of ‘the
nation’ has
not been that of a particular national, religious or racial group but that of
all its citizens.

Hasidic Jews boycott Israel. Flickr/Jonny White. Some rights reserved.For many years,
before and after the establishment of the Israeli state, the dispossession and
expulsion of the Palestinians, as individuals and as a national collectivity,
were almost completely invisible to the west and, to a large extent, are still
in the process of gaining primacy. Originally, the Palestinian national movement
–
like other Arab national movements –
was aimed against both the Ottoman Empire and British
colonial power, before focusing on Zionism and Israel, which gradually became a
regional and then global symbol of western colonial oppression and an invasion
of the post-colonial south.

The notion of so-called ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’ has
played a central role here –
a very late invention, which ignores the fact that Jewish
and Muslim religious practices have much more in common than Judaism and
Christianity and that anti-Jewish racism has been much more prevalent in
Christian than Muslim history.

Another issue that
arose at the conferences was the rise of a subaltern, anti-western ‘common
sense’, in which the critique of the local,
regional and global role of Israel has been transformed into racialised
attitudes to Jews, wherever they are and whatever their engagement was with the
Zionist project, globally but especially in the south. One of the symptoms of
this, but most probably also one of its causes, is the popularity in many
southern locations, such as the Indian sub-continent, of Nazi and other
antisemitic publications (from Mein Kampf to
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Since World War II these
publications have been forbidden in the west (although the copyrights are due
to expire next year, which might have some significant consequences), but not
outside Europe and north America.

The
unwavering support of western powers for Israel has contributed to the
conflation of Israel and the west

The unwavering support of western powers for
Israel and its policies has contributed to the conflation of Israel and the west. The conflation between Israel and the Jews has been helped by the notion
of the ‘new antisemitism’, according to which any critique of
Israel and its policy of occupation is antisemitic. This has had, we would
argue, the effect of constructing a ‘common
sense’ predicated
on the self-defeating logic that if any critique of Israeli policy is ‘antisemitic’, then maybe antisemitism is not such
a bad thing.

Another factor in
this equation, which was highlighted at the conferences, is the way the extreme
right in the west has used a pro-Israeli stance to ‘prove’ that
they are respectable and ‘not
racist’, whatever their stance against ‘the
Muslims’ who are ‘taking
over’ Europe
(although, under this veneer, old antisemitic positions often emerge). This has
also been the case with pro-Israeli positions of the Christian Right. It was
also pointed out that pro-Israeli lobbies and organisations are engaged,
together with pro-Hindutva organisations, in a global campaign against Muslims.

However, as was discussed by Chetan Bhatt during the LSE conference, where
Salafism is concerned, pro-Israeli lobbies often single out the antisemitic
elements in Salafist and other Islamist discourses, when these appear in much
wider hate discourses in which Israel and Jews are but one element. Absurdly,
when the Shia are the main target of Sunni Salafi antagonism, for example,
Israel and the USA are mentioned as part of the global Shia axis starting from
Iran.

In other words,
both anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish racisms have become part of legitimising
discourses of global clashes, between the west and the south, Islamist and
other religious political projects and even clashes within Islamist political
projects, as well as part of daily ‘common
sense’ constructions
everywhere in a time of global crisis, expressing insecurity against ‘the
Other’, ‘the
terrorist’,
‘the
usurper’.
And the Palestine/Israel question has helped to encourage these conflations and
racialisations.