I was smeared as an antisemite for criticizing Israel’s occupation of Palestine
JVL Introduction
Rebecca Ruth Gould made headlines in 2018 when, as an academic at Bristol University, she was unjustly accused of antisemitism because of a “short polemic” she had written in 2011 called “Beyond Antisemitism”.
The accusation was baseless but, in the frenzy of the time, it gained absurd traction.
In a new book Gould explains the background to her article which was based on her experiences at the time, an academic working in Israel but living in Palestine.
She was, she says “furious at myself — among others — for not being able to stop the abuses of history that had normalized the silencing of Palestinian voices.”
And she stands by “the appropriateness of those words for that time and place: occupied Palestine amid an increasingly brutal conflict and an aggressive state-backed mandate to silence dissent…”
This article was originally published by Jacobin on Sat 26 Aug 2023. Read the original here.
I was smeared as an antisemite for criticizing Israel’s occupation of Palestine
Accusations of antisemitism are regularly used to silence advocacy of Palestinian liberation. Here, a British academic describes how Zionists smeared her as an antisemite and tried to get her fired for her public criticism of the Israeli occupation.
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What does “working in Israel but living in Palestine” actually mean? This is sloppy & confusing writing. Apartheid in historic Palestine is quite substantially based on dividing up non-Jewish Palestinian populations into different groups with different political rights, such as Jerusalemites, people from Gaza & refugees in Gaza, indigenous people & refugees in the West Bank, refugees in other neighbouring countries, & so on. All with different rights of travel, etc, all humiliating and all prevented from organising together as a whole population. This fragmentation is one important basis of the apartheid system; JVL should not be conceptually dividing historic Palestine into these different segments, which is conceding a key tool to the racists, and moreover suggests a befuddled continuing belief, despite its impossibility, in a ‘two state solution.”
The attack on Rebecca Gould marked a new low for the Campaign Against Antisemitism. It might be of interest that Kenneth Stern, when testifying to Congress made mention of Gould’s case when he said:
Perhaps most egregious, an off-campus group citing the definition called on a
university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before.The university then conducted the inquiry. And while it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like.’
However what Gould says about the letter of Claude and Alexander Montefiore to The Times is incorrect:
‘That letter from 1917 was to mark the end of the Board of Deputies’ acceptance of anti-Zionism as a legitimate position for Jews.
The sending of the letter was condemned by the Board, very narrowly because of the way it was sent, not because of its contents. The Board remained anti-Zionist and after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration that November the Board supported the establishmenbt of the anti-Zionist League of British Jews.
Lionel Rothschild, an anti-Zionist Conservative MP was elected President, thus slaying another myth that the Rothschild’s were the power behind Zionism.
At the BOD elections in 1919 Samuel Duiches stood for the Vice-Presidency as a Zionist candidate receiving just 21 votes compared to 123 for Lord Walter Rothschild and 105 for Anthony de Rothschild.
It was not until 1940 that the Zionists gained control of the Board with the election of Selig Brodetsky as President
Solidarity with brave Rebecca.
What an astonishingly brave piece by Rebecca Ruth Gould. It is also beautifully written avoiding academic social science by a social scientist
Always worth repeating that the ‘Campaign Against Antisemitism’ was founded in the final month of Israel’s 2014 bombing of Gaza – clearly designed to invert the status of victims and aggressor.
According to the UN figures released at the time, the resulting dead in Gaza numbered 2000+ including 551 children.
Clearly, neither the CAA or the corporate media argue and report in good faith.
This article highlights the insidious nature of the attacks on academics, politicians and human right activists by pro-Israel lobbyists and institutions, raking through articles and social media to use, taking them completely out of context, and distorting and exaggerating the language, with the aim of ‘exposing’ and bringing down the target, usually with triumphalism, and the backing of mainstream media. Instead of showing outrage at the horrendous and brutal actions of the Israeli state against the occupied and imprisoned Palestinians, and the persistent, over 75 years of the oppressive settler colonial Zionist entity, the whole aim is to silence pro Palestinian voices, and weaponise Antisemitism, to the extent of bringing down leading figures like Jeremy Corbyn, and sullying the reputation of socialists and the left, with a long history of anti racism and the fight for human rights and international law.
We need to stand firm and fight back for human justice.
An interesting post on Tony Greenstein’s blog quotes a FAR more trenchant condemnation of Israel made in 2014 by David Attenbrough. Will the national treasure be banned from the airwaves?
We are dealing with a concerted campaign against the right of free speech.
Who are deaf to the real truth, and the misery of the Palestinian People.
The right People of all races and creeds to live in peace and harmony must always be our call.