Earlier this year, at a screening of the film Israelism hosted by my local Palestine society, I asked the question, 'Is it possible to say something about Israel that is derogatory and incorrect, but isn't an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory?'
The response I got was that even negative statements about Israel that are correct are considered to be anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. I think everyone who tries to secure freedom for Palestinians has experienced this at times, but for the sake of this argument I wanted to focus on things that were incorrect. No one is right 100% of the time. Everyone goes through life at some point being led to believe something about someone else that turns out not to be true, often things that are unflattering. Upon learning something is untrue, sometimes your opinion about that person or that body changes. At other times it doesn't change, because your general opinion of them was built on other things that were true rather than just the one that isn't (for example, I don't believe that Keir Starmer was the reason that Jimmy Savile wasn't convicted in his lifetime, from what I've seen I think this claim is unfair, but my giving Starmer the benefit of the doubt on that one thing doesn't change my negative opinion of the hordes of other things he's done of which I disapprove).
Every state in the world will occasionally have people make claims about it that turn out not to be true. Sometimes these claims might be made on purpose to spread disinformation, and sometimes someone may have just made a mistake. Israel is not exempt from this. But I have never heard an inaccurate statement on Israel being corrected without the person concerned being accused of spreading an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Naturally, some inaccurate claims might be; if a claim relied on offensive tropes about the Jewish community (such as the idea that Jews have great money and power, for example) I can understand why that would be anti-Semitic. But if something was just inaccurate, in the same way a claim about China or Russia might be, the anti-Semitism complaint doesn't quite seem to make sense.
A prominent example of this is when the then Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked from her role as Shadow Education Secretary after she shared an article from the Independent on Twitter by the actress Maxine Peake. The article, which was about police brutality and had only mentioned Israel in passing, had claimed that the technique used to kill George Floyd in the USA (kneeling on his neck) had been taught by the Israeli secret services. This, of course, is not provable. Even if that technique is used by Israeli law enforcement (something I have no idea on) it cannot be proved that that this was where the officer who killed George Floyd learned of it. Peake herself acknowledged that making this claim had been a mistake, and apologised. But Rebecca Long-Bailey's decision to share the article (which was published in the Independent, considered to be a reputable news source) caused her to be accused of spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Is suffocating people by kneeling on their necks something that's typically associated with Jews? If so, I have never heard of it. I think Maxine Peake shouldn't have made that claim and it's right that she apologised for doing so, but I think she was just wrong rather than acting with racist intent.
Of course, as I said at the very start, accusations of anti-Semitism fly around constantly even when people say accurate things about the actions of the state of Israel, let alone inaccurate ones. The ongoing genocidal war in Gaza has had countless instances where people have been accused of anti-Semitism merely for calling it a genocide, even when the highest courts in the world have argued a plausible case for this. It's important to make clear that there is very little consistency here in terms of what words or actions constitute anti-Semitism. The only consistency in it comes from not what the person has said, but from what politics they support. Most of UK politics subscribes to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, not all of which I agree with, but there are a fair few points that I do support as well. For instance, I agree strongly with the IHRA's assertion that Jewish people should not be held collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel. Judaism is a peaceful religion, and I have met so many Jews, many of them through Palestine campaigns, who are appalled by the actions of the state of Israel and are indignant to be used as a justification for them. But this rule is applied very inconsistently. The rules about not equating Zionism inherently with Jewishness only apply to people who oppose Zionism. People who support Zionism equate the two things all the time without any criticism or consequences. And anti-Semitic tropes are used frequently in other ways as well. A few years ago, Labour MP Lisa Nandy appeared on BBC Radio 4 to talk about kicking anti-Semitism out of the Labour Party, during which she described anti-Semitism as 'a very specific form of racism that punches up rather than punching down'. To the best of my knowledge, Nandy has never qualified what she meant by this, but it seems to me that her logic did rely on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. The concepts of punching up or punching down mean the morality difference between attacking someone of higher or lower social standing to you (for instance, a stand-up comedian making fun of the Prime Minister is in a very morally different place to someone who makes fun of a disabled child). For anti-Semitism to primarily involve punching up, you have to take it as read that Jews are likely to be people of high social standing - those with power, money and influence. This is one of the most common anti-Semitic tropes and if a politician on the left had made that comment they'd surely get into trouble for it (and I would support them getting into trouble for it as well). But because of the general political standpoint that Lisa Nandy had, she apparently didn't face any consequences for this and is still a senior frontbencher within the Labour Party.
With what's been happening in Gaza over the last year, the way that anti-Semitic discourse has increased in public life far outshines the days when you could argue about punching up or punching down though. Within the last week, Labour MP Clive Lewis has faced calls to have the whip withdrawn after writing this tweet:
I don't believe Clive Lewis will be suspended from the party for this tweet, mainly because I think it would have happened by now if it was going to. But more broadly, if we're to achieve any kind of peace, either domestically or internationally, we need to be abundantly clear what the rules are about what you can and can't say, and be safe in the knowledge that they apply equally to everyone. If they're applied inconsistently, we all suffer - but Jews are some of the ones who suffer most. The actress Miriam Margolyes, who is Jewish, has been quoted as saying that the way in which the Zionist movement has caused the peaceful Jewish community to look on the international stage almost feels as if Hitler has won. I was very moved to hear this, and I know a lot of Jewish people who feel similarly. The mental gymnastics that are used just to shut up political opponents on this will in the long run benefit no one.
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