In the UK, antisemitism is now mainstream. Is it reversible?

Since I have been watching the mainstreaming of antisemitism, the situation has been moving away from us, slowly, step by step; but relentlessly. It is difficult to see how this situation can be turned around.

At Goldsmiths, University of London, where I teach sociology, we recently saw published the report of a two-year, KC-led investigation into antisemitism. The KC described a number of serious incidents of antisemitism and he reported that the college had not done enough to address them. He did not name anybody who had suffered from antisemitism, and he did not even recommend that Goldsmiths should affirm the IHRA definition. He gave as part of his reasoning for both decisions, that they would have resulted in Jewish students and staff suffering from even more hostility. Instead, he made some recommendations and this was turned by the college into an “action plan”.

Except for the fact that it won’t interrupt the rise in antisemitism at Goldsmiths, the action plan is quite good. It resolves to treat antisemitism as seriously as it treats racism; to make sure everybody has antisemitism training; to report and track antisemitism; to look after people who are victimised by antisemitism; to warn Jews on campus when “potentially harmful” (ie antisemitic) events are scheduled.

What Goldsmiths will not do is say that Israel, and those Jews for whom Israel is connected to their Jewishness, are not complicit in genocide, like Nazis.

A few days after the action plan, and a matter of hours before Parliament proscribed Palestine Action, the Goldsmiths branch of the University and College Union (UCU) invited them to speak at its AGM. Palestine Action specialises in bathing office buildings that house Jewish businesses in red, blood-libel paint, to make a point about Israel’s “child-murdering”. They are now proscribed because their core business is criminal damage in a political cause.

Whenever my union asked me to strike, I did, even if Jeremy Corbyn or Lowkey was giving a speech on the picket line. Even when my union offered “100 per cent solidarity” to the Student Union president who was criticised for denouncing me as a “far right white supremacist”, I was there for the union, trying to explain to my students why we were not going to mark their exams.

Palestine Action was the last straw for me. The UCU has been increasingly riddled with antisemitism since, in 2003, it treated the campaign to exclude Israeli colleagues from our campuses, journals and conferences, as legitimate; and since it began to protect the antisemitism that came with that campaign as “just criticism of Israel”. This week I resigned from the union, of which I had been a founder member.

Jews get excluded from spaces where it becomes socially acceptable to relate to Zionists as one would relate to Nazis. Actual Jews, with their diverse and complicated relationships to Israel, know that in this context, the word “Zionist” targets them. And, knowing in advance the contempt that would be heaped upon us, we keep to ourselves the thought that it is obviously Hamas that inherits genocidal antisemitism from the Nazis.

Since October 7, many more Jews have experienced the exclusion that some of us had already been confronted by in the universities. This week, John Mann and Penny Mordaunt are the latest people to raise the alarm about antisemitism. They focus on hair-raising stories of antisemitism in the NHS, inconsistency in the policing and prosecution of antisemitic incitement, the blacklisting of Jewish musicians and artists and the failures of professional regulatory bodies to keep Jewish members of the professions safe.

They too propose an action plan, which is fair, because they are politicians and politics is the art of the possible. They too want more antisemitism training, and they want antisemitism incorporated into “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” programmes, even though the antisemitism comes, in the first place, from the political framework itself that informs EDI. They want university administrators, professional bodies, senior police officers and NHS managers to do better; as they should.

The Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov described antisemitism not as a personal prejudice but as a “cultural code”. A new age, in which a person’s attitude to the “Jewish Question” again defines their identity, in a profound and symbolic way, is upon us. But the Jewish Question, which purported to ask why Jews had such difficulty in becoming ordinary citizens like everybody else, was always in reality an antisemitic question. The Israel Question looks for a solution to Israel’s inherent propensity to commit crimes against humanity, or in Hannah Arendt’s words, “crimes against the Human Condition”.

The mainstreaming of such a cultural code cannot be addressed via action plans or antisemitism training and it cannot be fixed by the Director General of the BBC, the VC of Goldsmiths or by the Mayor of London.

The problem at Glastonbury was not that nobody in the BBC control room understood what was going on clearly enough to cut the live feed. The problem was that thousands of our middle-class young people thought it was completely normal to chant “Death, death, to the I-D-F”, as they decompressed after their university exams.

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David Hirsh is a Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Academic Director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism