ABSTRACT
In 2020, Bristol University Professor David Miller announced that ‘Britain is in the grip of an assault on its public sphere by the state of Israel and its advocates.’ He claimed that Bristol University’s Jewish Society, ‘like all JSocs, operates under the auspices of the Union of Jewish Students, an Israel lobby group’ and is part of ‘a campaign of censorship and manufactured hysteria’ that is ‘directed by the State of Israel’. Perhaps to the surprise of the wider society, he received fulsome messages of support from many parts of the academic left that went beyond defending his free speech rights to endorse his world view. David Hirsh, author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism, explores the wider meanings and deeper roots of the fact that a fantasy of Zionist conspiracy, in form similar to explicitly anti-Jewish antisemitism, came to be so widely accepted and defended in parts of British academia. He sets out the manifold dangers of what happened, including the explicit rejection of the Macpherson principles regarding the handling of claims of racism by minorities; the mainstreaming of some old conspiracist modes of thought about Jews, and the corruption of empirical social science by such modes; the routine use of ‘the Livingstone Formulation’ to casually redefine all claims of antisemitism – and even the fact of an interfaith soup kitchen, in Miller’s case – as bad faith efforts to protect Israel by Zionists; and the subsequent creation of a hostile environment for Jews on campuses. Hirsh also argues it is not possible to understand the meaning of David Miller without grasping the role of the lecturers’ trade union the UCU in incubating and normalising the culture which made Miller possible.
