The fourth ACRPS Conference for Arab Graduate Students in Western Universities launched on Saturday, 2 March 2024. Azmi Bishara, General Director of the Arab Center, delivered the opening lecture, “The Question of Palestine, Anti-Semitism, and the New McCarthyism”.
Bishara began by drawing attention to the ongoing war against the Palestinians in Gaza. He noted that describing the suffering of the people in Palestine without any expansion in the discussion would amount to repetitive linguistic rhetoric. He focused the topic of his lecture instead on the conflict currently taking place in Western public opinion regarding what might be considered a narrative shift in the centre of the discussion. Instead of focusing on the suffering of the people in Gaza and justice for the Palestinian people, a matter that the resistance in the Gaza Strip has brought back to the forefront, the discussion has been taken over by a debate over anti-Semitism and the language used to describe Israeli actions. As a result, those in solidarity with the Palestinian people and cause are forced into a discourse of self-defence and self-justification and to police the terminology they use.
This shift did not happen spontaneously. Rather, multiple parties have coordinated to organize campaigns that change the topic and the trajectory of any discussion about it, in a fashion that can be described as the new McCarthyism. Many of the ongoing procedures in the US Congress are reminiscent of McCarthyism, a phenomenon that spread under “the threat of communism” in the early 1950s. These procedures have so far included investigations into three university presidents in the House of Representatives, and the formation of a committee to investigate the conditions of US universities and the extent to which they combat anti-Semitism on campus.
In the same context, Bishara moved on to address the relationship between the Palestine question and anti-Semitism, pointing out that the Holocaust was used in Israeli propaganda in the run up to and the aftermath the 1967. At that time, Israeli accusations that Gamal Abdel Nasser was another Hitler spread and were then rehashed against Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein. Weaponizing anti-Semitism in this way transcends different contexts, allowing Israel to monopolize the role of the victim, despite being the perpetrator, branding every opponent the Nazis of the era – the contemporary anti-Semites.
In this regard, Bishara emphasized that anti-Semitism is a European phenomenon, which grew from the religious hostility that persisted since the Middle Ages. This developed into the redirection of class tensions towards the Jews and eventually to theories based on racist eugenics labelling Jews as Semites, creating a Jewish “race”. Some elements of anti-Semitism, in the form of the global Jewish conspiracy, were imported into the Arab region, at times on the margins of the Arab nationalist movement, and at others within Islamist movements, in periods of crisis, when it seemed to the Arabs that the Jews were controlling the world. However, instances in which religious minorities were persecuted in the Arab region cannot be characterized as anti-Semitism, never specifically targeting Jews, and are incomparable to the historical hostility toward Jews in Europe and its religious, ethnic, and social roots.
Bishara emphasized that hostility to Zionism is neither Arab nor Islamic in essence, but arose within Jewish currents, just like Zionism. Before the conflict with Israeli settler colonialism arose, anti-Zionist thought centred on the definition of Jewish identity. A religious conflict emerged over the definition of the Jews as a nationality, and many Jews rejected the establishment of a state. Judaism describes the earthly state as a secular entity. Other Jewish sources of hostility to Zionism emerged that included secular arguments expressed by socialist and communist Jews, who believed that the salvation of Jews, like other peoples, would be achieved through the establishment of a socialist system. Moreover, many Jewish liberals believed that the European secular state did not contradict religion, and that converting Judaism into nationalism would prevent the integration of Jews into their respective communities, while the establishment of a Jewish state would create a problem of dual loyalty. This is a liberal Jewish opinion, not anti-Semitic incitement. Arab and Palestinian hostility to Zionism emerged as a direct response to a colonial movement unrelated to the Jewish religion and does not represent inherent hostility to Jews.
Bishara concluded by refuting the second part of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the US State Department, while indicating that the first part can be accepted. The definition provides eleven examples, seven of which deal with Israel and three of which directly prevent criticism of Israel in practice. Bishara stressed the importance of organizing responses to the “new McCarthyism,” through an alliance of those in solidarity with Palestine and supporters of the Palestinian cause with Western liberal forces affected by these attempts to restrict freedom of expression in universities. He called for a shift from defence to attack on two levels. First, it is not enough to merely defend the victims of these measures and attacks in the courts. Rather, this slander must be translated into defamation lawsuits for which their perpetrators can be prosecuted. Second, there is a need to engage in a discussion on the very concepts that are being subjected to distortion and the content of the accusations, not just defending the right to free expression, but also defending the content of positions critical of settler colonialism, occupation, the apartheid system, and genocide. All of these are defensible positions, not in any way close to the language, thought, and discourse of anti-Semitism. Those who claim otherwise and make such inflammatory allegations should be held accountable.
