Daniel Randall reviews the Runnymede Trust’s report “Facing antisemitism: the struggle for safety and solidarity”.
The Runnymede Trust, an anti-racist and civil rights think tank, has published a new report on antisemitism, co-authored by David Feldman, Brendan McGeever, and Ben Gidley, entitled “Facing antisemitism: the struggle for safety and solidarity” (hereafter “Facing Antisemitism”).
The authors are affiliated with the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, and co-wrote the 2020 essay “Labour and Antisemitism: A Crisis Misunderstood”, an important reflection on the antisemitism crises in the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Ben Gidley is also co-author, along with myself, of two more recent texts critical of antisemitism on the left specifically, the 2023 document “Left Renewal: For a Consistently Democratic and Internationalist Left”, and a 2024 article “‘Zionists out of Finchley’? Issues for anti-fascist and anti-racist activists”.
Central to “Facing Antisemitism” is its authors’ conception of antisemitism as a “reservoir”, deeply entrenched beneath our political culture, from which actors from across the political spectrum draw motifs, images, and narratives, “sometimes knowingly, sometimes not”. The metaphor is a useful one for understanding the persistence of antisemitism, and how it is often recycled. However, it can risk flattening out specificities, and thereby avoiding specific, direct confrontation with distinct forms of antisemitism — something “Facing Antisemitism” suffers from in places.
“Facing Antisemitism” affirms an important distinction between antisemitism and antisemites, showing how picking up and recycling antisemitic ideas does not necessarily indicate a person’s entire worldview is shaped by the identification of malign Jewish power. Borrowing from Moishe Postone, “Facing Antisemitism” explains how antisemitism can manifest as a form of reactionary anti-capitalism, by appearing to personify and concretise, in the figure of the “Jewish financier”, the seemingly impersonal and intangible domination to which capitalism subjects us.
“Facing Antisemitism” also criticises narrow conceptions of racism which reduce it solely to a matter of oppressive power structures that privilege white people over black people: “In the UK, dominant paradigms for making sense of racism in recent decades have been colour-coded and synchronised with ideas about ‘white privilege’. These paradigms have tended to leave to one side the history and ongoing significance of antisemitism, and have positioned Jewish people as unambiguously ‘white’ and therefore not among the victims of racism.”
It rightly criticises statist responses to antisemitism, highlighting in particular the danger of a Jewish communal embrace of “model minority” narratives, by which the state seeks to weaponise the apparent integration of longer-established migrant-origin communities such as Jews against newer, often darker-skinned, immigrant communities.
The core aspiration at the heart of “Facing Antisemitism” is the reintegration of a critique of antisemitism into a broader anti-racist politics. Given this, and the reference to the far-right riots of summer 2024, it seems a missed opportunity that the report does not contain a survey of the extent to which antisemitism remains politically constitutive for much of the organised far right, even while some far-right leaders have given themselves a lacquer of performative philosemitism and vicarious Zionism. US President Donald Trump has recently blamed “globalists” for the negative impacts of his tariffs on the stock market. There is surely a danger of Britain’s own Trumpist movement, in the milieu around Tommy Robinson and Reform UK, making promotion of similar antisemitic narratives about “global financial elites” more central to their agitation.
Other ideas which are key to the contemporary far-right imaginary, for example the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, often have a central antisemitic element, identifying figures such as George Soros as the architects of an alleged plan to demographically displace white people with black and brown migrants. Despite being principally US-focused, the anti-racist activist Eric K. Ward’s description of antisemitism as providing the “theoretical core of white nationalism” was surely worthy of some consideration in a report that calls for “a new approach to combating antisemitism that is based on building alliances between Jewish people and other racialised minorities.”
A section in the report on the definition of antisemitism serves mainly as an opportunity to promote the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, of which two of the co-authors, Feldman and McGeever, are prominent signatories and advocates, against the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition. “Facing Antisemitism” claims that “the IHRA definition reflects a marked tendency among mainstream Jewish organisations over the last two decades to extend the meaning of ‘antisemitism’ to encompass not only attacks on the equal rights and dignity of Jewish people but also some criticisms of the State of Israel and its founding ideology, Zionism.” But the fact that some criticisms of Israel and Zionism can be antisemitic — for example, criticisms which inflate Israel to the status of a unique and essential evil — has been acknowledged for much longer than “the last two decades”. “Facing Antisemitism” thereby does a disservice to contestation over the definition of antisemitism by presenting it as primarily a matter of recent jostling between the JDA and the IHRA.
The report’s brief survey of antisemitism on the left, and in the Palestine solidarity movement, mainly targets low-hanging fruit, for example a 2018 social media post claiming “Rothschilds [sic] Zionists run Israel and world governments.” The report states that “antisemitic placards that have been brought to mass demonstrations since October 2023 illustrate how a current within Palestine solidarity activism can draw on the reservoir of antisemitism in its representations of the Israeli state and its supporters globally.” However, it goes no further, saying nothing about what the ideas of this “current” consist of, or even what the (unspecified) “antisemitic placards” actually said. There is no direct confrontation with the central way in which much far-left common sense about Israel-Palestine has antisemitic implications, by insisting on the inherent illegitimacy of the entire claim to nationhood of the Israeli Jewish national group.
At points, in their haste to criticise dominant trends in “the politics of anti-antisemitism”, the authors make statements I find it hard to imagine they actually believe. It may well be the case that, in some quarters of the British establishment and certainly for the Tory right, Holocaust remembrance is part of a “model minority” effort of contemporary racialisation, helping to integrate Jews into whiteness, or at least “Britishness”. But do Feldman, McGeever, and Gidley genuinely think that the reason Britain has not undertaken a “serious reckoning with its role in slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism” is that such a reckoning has been “replaced” by “state-sponsored Holocaust remembrance”?
The report’s call for the development of a “multidirectional politics of anti-racism capable of addressing the specificities and harms of antisemitism as well as the racism of the Israeli state” is, on its own terms, a good one. But two caveats must be added here. Firstly, it is rare to encounter insistence that opposition to the racism of, say, the Chinese state must be integrated into anti-racist politics in Britain, and that a domestic anti-racism which doesn’t centre Uyghur and Tibetan liberation struggles is hopelessly compromised. It is true that anti-racism is ultimately ineffective unless it is universal. But the question of why Israeli state racism specifically is so often insisted upon as the kind of ur-racism, opposition to which almost automatically gives any anti-racism a universal character, is worthy of some interrogation. Secondly, the “multidirectional politics of anti-racism” the report calls for must involve a critique of forms of politics which, whilst ostensibly directed against “the racism of the Israeli state”, are predicated on implicit hostility to most Jews alive.
A left common sense which sees the Jewish presence in Palestine as nothing more than a colonial invasion cannot conceptualise diasporic Jewish affinity with Israel, or Israeli Jews, as anything other than conscious adherence to Israeli state racism. Hence “Zionism is racism” (not just “Zionism is racist”, but implying “Zionism” and “racism” are completely coterminous), or even “Zionism is fascism”. Hence “Zionists out of Finchley”. Hence activists standing outside a Jewish community centre hosting a conference on Israel-Palestine, addressed by multiple Palestinian speakers all calling for an end to the occupation, and chanting ”Settlers, settlers, go back home”.
“Facing Antisemitism” does not meaningfully confront these political dynamics. As such, its tentative gesturing towards the “growing minority of non- and anti-Zionist [Jews]” as “a key political actor” feels limited. As a member of that minority, I agree it has an important role to play. But the anti-racist left needs a way of engaging with “Zionist” Jews too. Part of this is about unconditional defence against the racialised antisemitism of the far right, which does not take time to check what Jews think about Israel-Palestine before it targets them. But it must also involve defence of Jews against “Zionists out of Finchley”-type politics emanating from self-proclaimed “anti-fascists”. Such a defence might, in turn, create more favourable conditions for the left to critically engage with Jewish attitudes to Israel, and promote a consistent internationalism. In other words, might it not be more constructive to conceive of a break from nationalist or particularist consciousness (and not only amongst Jews, but other racialised groups) as an outcome of the work of anti-racist solidarity, rather than a precondition for it?
Engagement with two concepts from the work of other progressive critics of antisemitism would, in my view, have improved “Facing Antisemitism”’s perspectives in this regard — Steve Cohen’s “anti-Zionist Zionism”, and Keith Kahn-Harris’s “sullen solidarity”.
Steve Cohen, the seminal critic of antisemitism on the British left, argued the left needed to oppose the racism of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, whilst maintaining sensitivity to the experiences which impelled Zionism, itself a response to racist oppression. Whilst the tongue-in-cheek term “anti-Zionist Zionism” itself, which Cohen used as a provocative intervention into intra-left debates, would obviously not be appropriate in a document like “Facing Antisemitism”, something of its spirit might have helped to clarify its thinking and recommendations.
Keith Kahn-Harris, in his 2019 book Strange Hate, proposes “sullen solidarity”, a way of confronting bigotry against a community that doesn’t require you to “like” them, or to silence your own criticisms of the community’s dominant politics.
Kahn-Harris argues that left-wing efforts to critique and ultimately break down the default-Zionism of contemporary Jewish identity will be stronger if the left is sensitive to the ways in which, for reasons of historical experience, certain political commitments can become integrated into ethnocultural identities. Reading Kahn-Harris’s book alongside “Facing Antisemitism” might help extend the report’s answers, and in some instances, provide better ones.
This article originally appeared on the website of the Alliance for Workers Liberty.