Oliver Kamm

Israel's anniversary

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. There is a fine article in the Washington Post today by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke on the divisions within the Truman administration over recognition of the Jewish state. As Holbrooke tells it, the issue was the most serious division between President Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall. Truman prevailed, and the United States became the first country to recognise the new state.

Holbrooke concludes:

Israel was going to come into existence whether or not Washington recognized it. But without American support from the very beginning, Israel's survival would have been at even greater risk. Even if European Jewry had not just emerged from the horrors of World War II, it would have been an unthinkable act of abandonment by the United States. Truman's decision, although opposed by almost the entire foreign policy establishment, was the right one -- and despite complicated consequences that continue to this day, it is a decision all Americans should recognize and admire.

This is well said. In the late 1940s, the US - as is still not widely understood - was militarily enfeebled and might easily have reverted to isolationism. President Truman's decisions in the essential issues of postwar diplomacy were extraordinarily prescient. This one was a straightforward moral case; so is the United States' continuing commitment to Israel's security.

My position on this is not complex. I have no interest in the fortunes of Judaism but a great interest in the resilience of persecuted peoples. There is no people more historically persecuted than the Jews, and a Jewish state is their guarantor. It also represents the intrusion of Western constitutional principles into a region where these are not widely observed. Though there are organised religious extremists in the Israeli political system, they have never attained power - unlike, say, their counterparts in Iran.

I am no uncritical supporter of Israeli government policies. Some - such as the attempt to implement regime change in Lebanon in the 1980s - I have strongly opposed. I hope for, without expecting any time soon, a pacific two-state territorial settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the fact and the independence - not merely, in the demeaning phrase grudgingly advanced by her enemies, the "existence"- of Israel, a Jewish state and a vibrant democracy, are causes for celebration.

Israel in counterfactual history

The historian Walter Laqueur has just published a paper under the auspices of Middle East Strategy at Harvard, and has kindly alerted me to it. It's called Disraelia: A Counterfactual History, 1848-2008 and it can be downloaded here. It's a fascinating read. I recommend printing it and setting aside time to digest it.

In his influential study A History of Zionism (1972, p. 593), Mr Laqueur noted that: "A mass influx of Jews into Palestine in the early part of the nineteeth century (provided the Ottoman government had agreed to it) might have proceeded without much resistance on the part of the native population, because the idea of nationalism had not yet grown roots outside Europe. But there was no national movement at the time among the Jews either: east European Jewry had not yet left the ghetto; central and west European Jews had not yet experienced the new antisemitism."

Disraelia, told through the medium of imagined historical documents and correspondence, is this counterfactual history of the emigration of Jews from Europe in the mid-nineteeth century. The inspirer of the Jewish national movement is not Herzl but Disraeli, in an interregnum in his political career and before he became Prime Minister. The outcome is different from the modern state of Israel: a state of sixty million at the beginning of the 21st century, with extensive natural resources, and for whom the forces of global realpolitik have worked to render it secure and its legitimacy unquestioned. (This notion allows Mr Laqueur some nicely acerbic imaginings: "BBC correspondents had been shown weeping uncontrollably at the recent funeral of the prime minister of Disraelia.")

Walter Laqueur maintains that this state might have come about - "assuming that the great anti-Semitic wave would have occurred in Europe eighty years earlier than it did, provided the Ottoman empire would have disintegrated eighty years earlier, and provided that the Jews of Europe would have read the signs of the times correctly, and under wise leadership would have followed a policy leading them to peaceful solutions."

Would it have been a desirable outcome? Well, see this blog post by the Middle East scholar Martin Kramer, who argues that Laqueur's Disraelia lacks a national dimension:

Laqueur's Disraelia is perhaps aptly named, precisely because it is de-Israelized. It also might not have lasted into this century. Middle Eastern states that lack a primary nationality are today vulnerable precisely because they are empty of identity at the core. Multi-ethnic, religiously diverse Iraq is a case in point - and had a Disraelia emerged, it is just as easy to imagine it reaching the same tragic impasse, oil and all.

So pardon me, Walter, for preferring Israel as it is. I'll take my chances.

I don't agree with this either historically or prescriptively. In the real world, the Jewish national movement took root and gained impetus as one of a variety of nationalisms that emerged quite late. National claims in the twentieth century and still today have been bedevilled by boundary issues, stemming in particular from the collapse of the multinational empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Turkey. I'm sympathetic to the Wilsonian idea in foreign affairs, but the principle of creating small new republics from the ruins of empire, without regard to their vulnerability to more powerful neighbours, plainly did not work in the twentieth century. In the early years of the last century, US diplomacy saw few precedents in the post-Napoleonic history of Europe and thus overlooked the importance of maintaining a balance of a power. America entered WWI too late, when it might have prevented that war altogether by siding much earlier with Britain and France against German expansionism.

By extension, Laqueur's Disraelia - in taking root a century earlier than the state of Israel - might have exercised an important and benign role in the balance of power in the Middle East. My own views of the Jewish state perhaps differ from Kramer's. I wrote a piece for The Times a couple of years ago (about the Pope's visit to Auschwitz) in which I stated briefly my philosophy on this point. I have no interest in the fortunes of Judaism, but an intense interest in the fortunes and welfare of persecuted peoples. I'm a friend and supporter of Israel, not because it's a Jewish state but because it's a liberal democracy in a region where constitutional and secular principles are not widespread. Disraelia might have thrived and might also have caused the expansion of those principles - inside the country, as well as more widely within the region.

There is one final aspect of the counterfactual history of Disraelia worth noting. The A-bomb is developed in the early 1930s, by scientists in Disraelia - to the consternation of the German ambassador in Tel Aviv. This is entirely plausible. Mr Laqueur certainly has in mind the exiled physicists Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, who in 1940 first explained how a uranium fission bomb might be developed. Had their forebears left Germany and Austria for Disraelia in the nineteenth century, then this discovery might have been developed by that country's research institutes. Had it been done early enough, then conceivably WWII might not have taken place. As it was, we can only be thankful that in the real world the absolute weapon was developed by the Western democracies before Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan acquired it; the history of the twentieth century, bleak as it is, would have been unimaginably worse with a Nazi A-bomb.

(Incidentally, I had the good fortune to meet Peierls in the 1980s; he was a fellow of the Oxford college where I was an undergraduate, and I listened to him expound his view on the urgency of a nuclear freeze between the superpowers. As military strategy, this would in fact have been a bad idea - it would have frozen everything, good or bad, when the development of more accurate and lighter weaponry made the nuclear stand-off less perilous. But to be in the presence of this remarkable intellect and one of the most significant figures in human history was a humbling experience that has remained with me. I should add - before anyone puts it in the comments box - that Peierls was accused after his death of having passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. I know of no evidence that this is true, and the source of that claim - the former Tory MP Rupert Allason, whose pen name as a popular historian is Nigel West - is not a source I find credible.)

I digress. Do read Walter Laqueur's paper; it's profound and thought-provoking.

Exiled nations

There is a fine piece by Howard Jacobson in The Independent today:

Why the rhetoric of sympathy for Palestinian homelessness – "When we lost our country, we lost respect," Pilger has a Palestinian refugee lament – but no answering sympathy for the lost respect and homelessness that found expression in Zionism? I am one of those who believe that Jewish experience of exile obliges Israel actively to comprehend the sorrows of Palestinian exile. But I also believe this must cut both ways. If it is terrible to lose your home today, then it was terrible to lose your home yesterday, whoever you are. For Pilger, there are no such competing claims on his understanding. There are the forgotten, disrespected Palestinians on the one hand, and the "fanatics of Zion" on the other.

The issue of justice and nationhood is intractable, and not only when two peoples have national claims to the same territory. But the Jews' claim to nationhood is as just as any, even without taking account of its particular urgency in the 1940s. It is a perplexing omission in much modern discussion of nationalism; as Jacobson says, that dismissal is the rhetoric of bias.

The Milibands, the Jews and foreign policy

Stephen Pollard, on his Spectator blog, cites an interesting case of "idle and gratuitous mindreading" in a BBC correspondent's analysis of how Tony Blair will be perceived in his new role. The technique is clearly standard among the corporation's journalists: this is from a profile of the new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, by the BBC World Affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds:

David Miliband's Jewish background will be noted particularly in the Middle East.

Israel will welcome this - but equally it allows him the freedom to criticise Israel, as he has done, without being accused of anti-Semitism.

I find this an extraordinary remark. Reynolds is an experienced correspondent, yet I can't begin to work out what he means. Surely he can't be saying that Israel regards it as relevant to its diplomatic goals whether the foreign minister of a particular democracy is a Jew. If that premise is what Reynolds is insinuating, then the least you can say is that he's plainly wrong. I have had the good fortune to speak in recent years to some of the most senior figures in Israeli politics and diplomacy, and I have never heard such a suggestion, even by implication, from any of them.

Perhaps they just determine on keeping it from me - but even then, such an aim would make no sense. Has Reynolds never heard of, say, Bruno Kreisky, Chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983? Kreisky, who died in 1990, was the most ferociously anti-Israel politician to lead any Western democracy since the founding of the Jewish state. Nor did he confine his invective to Israel. In a notorious statement to an Israeli interviewer, Zeev Barth, and reported in Der Spiegel on 17 November 1975, Kreisky described the Jews - not "the Zionists", or some similar equivocation - as "a wretched people" (ein mieses Volk). Kreisky was, of course, a Jew. I know of no evidence that a statesman’s being Jewish – not only incendiary figures such as Kreisky but also urbane politicians such as Sir Malcolm Rifkind - is any predictor of his views on foreign policy. Nor, I surmise, does Reynolds. Nor, I further surmise, does Reynolds have any evidence that Israeli statesmen believe there is. If he does, and he happens to be reading this, I'll be glad to acknowledge my error; but I'm sure he's making it up.

The problem with the sort of unsubstantiated and implausible notion that Reynolds has trailed here is that you don’t have to take it much further before you get into dangerous territory. Why might a Foreign Secretary of Jewish background be expected to favour Israel, not just historically and emotionally, but in current diplomatic disputes? The answer is, of course, that he might if he has some sort of “dual loyalty” – to Israel as well as to the UK. You don't need me to explain why that's an illegitimate and pernicious charge to make in political debate, against anyone. It’s an accusation about someone’s mental states and as such is unfalsifiable; it is thereby not a criticism but always and in all cases a slur. (A few years ago the writer Will Self, on an edition of BBC's Question Time, exemplified this technique by demanding of Melanie Phillips whom she would support if Great Britain were at war with Israel. I have, incidentally, an objection on similar grounds to the charge that someone – say, Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky – is a “self-hating Jew”, and I never use the term.)

I’m certain Reynolds doesn’t have this in mind – I just don’t think he’s examined what he’s saying. I’m none too convinced, either, by his suggestion that mere critics of Israel run a routine danger of being castigated as antisemitic. Some fringe elements do level that charge indiscriminately (and I do mean indiscriminately; this bunch of far-right nutters has me on its list). The notion that this is a standard part of the political debate that a Foreign Secretary would occupy himself with is – again, unless Reynolds can adduce evidence to the contrary - frankly risible.

The question of the Miliband brothers’ Jewish antecedents is interesting in itself, without trying to draw inferences from them about views on foreign policy. Their father, the late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, is a man for whom I have a certain intellectual respect leavened with real contempt. See, most particularly, his essay for the annual Socialist Register in 1980 entitled “Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism” - anticipating an issue that has much exercised the Left more recently.

Miliband argues: “In socialist terms, the overthrow of a regime from outside, by military intervention, and without any measure of popular involvement, must always be an exceedingly doubtful enterprise, of the very last resort.”

You might think, with the failures of our intervention in Iraq in mind, that he’s stating a mere truism. But if you read the essay, you’ll see that he’s not. The examples he has in mind, and discusses at length, are the then recent military interventions by Tanzania to overthrow Idi Amin in Uganda and by Vietnam to overthrow the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Miliband considers them alongside the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which he objects to on the grounds that it “has obviously provided a very powerful reinforcement to the worst reactionaries in the Western camp”. You have to believe me – and you can check if you don’t – that he treats the overthrow of Pol Pot as analogously objectionable:

No doubt, a pliant regime now exists in Phnom Penh. But it lacks legitimacy and requires the support of a Vietnamese army of occupation. The enterprise has reinforced secular suspicions of Vietnamese designs upon Kampuchea. Like the Russians in Afghanistan, the Vietnamese have been drawn into a permanent struggle with Kampuchean guerillas, with the usual accompaniment of repression and the killing of innocent civilians. The invasion has also weakened Vietnam's international position, and strengthened reactionary forces in the region and beyond. Here too, it does not seem unreasonable to ask 'What kind of security is this?'

A few years ago a highly sympathetic biography entitled Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left, 2002, rose and fell without trace (despite Tony Benn's prediction in the foreword that it would "help a whole new generation of socialists to appreciate the unique role that Ralph played in the progressive politics of the period"). Even the author, Professor Michael Newman of London Metropolitan University, conceded (p. 294) that Miliband's essay "was flawed because it understated the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime and the justification for intervention following its crimes against humanity." And to be fair to him, Newman - daintily but not evasively - identifies the intellectual origins of that "flawed" position (p. 318, n. 124):

... Miliband's judgement in aligning his position so closely to that of Chomsky appears questionable. Without any real expertise on the area, he had understated the enormity of the crimes and endorsed a particular interpretation which appeared to minimise the responsibility of the Pol Pot regime itself. It is not entirely clear why he took this position, but three factors were probably particularly important. The first was the depth of his condemnation of American policy in Indochina: having opposed the war against Vietnam so bitterly, he may have had a predisposition to hold the US responsible for all the crimes in the region. Secondly, there was the perennial problem that the Right was exploiting the crimes of the Khymer [sic] Rouge regime as part of its general anti-communist propaganda and he was probably reacting against this. And, thirdly, he was trying to develop a general theoretical argument against socialist regimes intervening in the way that the Vietnamese had done and his case would have become more difficult to sustain had he accepted that the [sic] Pol Pot had carried out crimes against humanity on a massive scale.

Amazingly enough, Newman goes on to say that (his emphasis) "Miliband's general points [in his essay] were important and have considerable relevance for the post-Cold War interventions by Nato". In my view, a general argument whose practical application involves denying the atrocities of the worst regime since the Third Reich can reasonably be dismissed out of hand. (Recalling this episode, I read with complacence an accusation from the same Noam Chomsky, a quarter-century later, concerning my "standard reaction of tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes". The stars will burn out and the heavens implode before I manage to match the Professor's own accomplishments in that field.)

But I digress, a long way. This is a post about the Milibands and the Jews. And I am indebted to Newman's biography in that respect, because he does indicate that the late Ralph Miliband took a position on the Middle East that, while not much better informed than his views on Indochina, was incomparably more thoughtful. Writing in May 1967 to the American Marxist Leo Huberman, Miliband set out his views on what was clearly coming, and that came to be known as the Six-Day War. In effect he uses socialist categories to reason himself into a statement of the obvious (pp. 130-31 of Newman's biography):

[T]here would, from a socialist point of view, be a real problem here if it could be shown that Israel, for all its imperialist or rather Western-oriented commitments, was a genuine obstacle to socialist Arab revolutions, in Egypt or anywhere else. But this is nonsense. On the contrary, Israel is an excuse which most of these regimes use for not pushing further their revolutions. It is a bad excuse.

He concluded:

Naturally, I have asked myself many a time whether my views are influenced or shaped by the fact that I am Jewish. One cannot tell, though I would hope that even if I were not, I would still think that the liquidation of two million people, a large number of which are survivors from the camps, would be an appalling catastrophe. And certainly, being Jewish does not mean that one must, to prove one's socialist bona fides, be Nasserite à outrance [to the utmost].

I find this, once you make allowance for Miliband's political premises, not only admirable but also moving. In Miliband's mind's eye must have been the fate of those Jews who, unlike him and his father, had failed to escape from occupied Europe in 1940. I can't imagine - I don't know - how such statements would be received if they were, say, declaimed from the platform of a Respect party rally today. But for all their honesty, they are sentiments of no practical significance in forecasting the views of Ralph Miliband's son as Labour's Foreign Secretary. Of course no British government will be sympathetic to bellicose threats against Israel, and any government will rightly seek in that region a pacific two-state territorial settlement. There is a risk that Gordon Brown's government will not perceive fully, as Tony Blair undoubtedly did, the threats that Israel contends with, or understand that security is a prerequisite - not an outcome - of a lasting peace settlement. We can only judge that in practice.

I'm sorry to have taken 1,800 words and various diversions to say this, but David Miliband's antecedents give us no clue whatsoever to his stance as Foreign Secretary.

A herd of independent voices

Much has been heard this week of a new organisation called Independent Jewish Voices, which is "resolved to promote the expression of alternative Jewish voices, particularly in respect of the grave situation in the Middle East". I know and respect many of the statement's signatories. Many of its signatories whom I don't know I also respect. And that's about it.

I rarely link to an article without comment, but this one from Howard Jacobson in The Independent today says everything that can usefully be said on this subject. I agree with every word. Here's his conclusion:

The broad spectrum to which IJV appeals turns out to be a narrow political sectarianism uninterested in conversation or the subtleties to which conversation might expose them. Hence the narcissism of its statements, as of a group talking only to itself.

None of which is much help to Palestinians or Israelis. But then this is gesture politics, not politics proper. If you wonder why statements such as IJV's are always signed by a disproportionate number of theatre people and academics, that's because they are members of the play professions, with time on their hands and the licence to pretend. I am paid to play myself and value the activity highly. In play we can go where politicians and soldiers cannot. In play we hypothesise the world. But we shouldn't go confusing it with the real thing.

Respect and antisemitism

Socialist Worker is the newspaper of the principal constituent organisation for which the Respect 'Coalition' (a coalition only in the sense that it throws together secular and theocratic advocates of totalitarianism) is an electoral front. In this week's issue an author called Michael Rosen writes of "Antisemitism accusations - an attempt to smear anti-Zionists into silence". He attempts to demonstrate that a sober Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, published this week, "blurred the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism".

Rosen's is a somewhat imprudent and self-defeating venture, as it turns out that on his own account Socialist Worker itself promotes antisemitism. Here is what he says (emphasis added):

What is curious here is that, in my experience, if people both hate Jews and the state of Israel then they say so. One of the classic forms of antisemitism is to say that “the Jews” are in a “conspiracy” to take over the world, or that they are running the world.

Sometimes, they may say there’s a “Zionist” conspiracy to run the world - but that’s hardly a cunning disguise for a hatred of Jews.

Within this bit of conspiracy theory is the antisemitic idea that “the Jews” or “Israel” or “Zionists” run the US. Again, the people who believe this say so.

Here is what a well known jazz musician and anti-Israel polemicist called Gilad Atzmon said in an article entitled "On Antisemitism", dated 20 December 2003 and posted on his web site:

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously.... American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.

Here is the same passage, as artfully doctored by its author (or by an agent with access to his web site) in the last few weeks, since I last checked his wording:

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that Zionists are trying to control the world very seriously.... American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews (in fact Zionists) do control the world.. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.

Here is how Socialist Worker described Atzmon's message in an article entitled "Gilad Atzmon: 'Zionism is my enemy'", 5 June 2004:

Gilad Atzmon wanders on stage in Brighton tugging on a customary cigarette. "Smoking kills," he announces. "But Blair kills more." On clarinet or saxophone, Gilad is now among the top UK-resident jazz musicians, winning awards and plaudits from all corners. Last year his Exile album won both the Radio 3 and Time Out awards for jazz album of the year.

But Gilad's fearless tirades against Zionism — the ideology behind the Israeli state — have cost him in terms of lost gigs and constant vigilance about personal security.

Socialist Worker was indeed so taken with such "fearless tirades against Zionism" as that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately describes the state of modern America that it pointed out to readers of the article where they could hear more:

Gilad Atzmon will speak and perform on Tuesday 13 July at the Marxism 2004 festival and conference in London. You can find out more about his life and work at his website, www.gilad.co.uk.

You certainly can.

Atzmon's views were so congenial to the audience at the Socialist Workers' Party's 'Marxism 2004' jamboree, that the peerless racist crank was invited back the next year. And the next.

I'm sure they went together like a horse and carriage.

Keeping the faith

It's at this time of year that I ask this sort of question.

Where would you go if you wanted to hear at a public event someone who believes the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is an accurate depiction of the state of modern America? ("American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews (in fact Zionists) do control the world. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.") That, where Holocaust 'revisionists' (i.e. deniers) such as David Irving are concerned, there just aren't enough of them? ("If history shapes the future, we need to liberate our perspective of the past, rather than arresting revisionists [i.e. Holocaust deniers], we simply need many more of them.") That Holocaust deniers, instead of being frauds and charlatans, "engage themselves in detailed archive work as well as forensic scrutiny"?

If you guessed the Ku Klux Klan or David Duke's National Association for the Advancement of White People, you would be venturing a shrewd but mistaken judgement. If you guessed the British National Party, you would be closer - very close indeed, in fact - but still wrong. The correct answer is the annual Marxism jamboree, this year to be held from 6-10 July, of the Socialist Workers' Party. For the third year running, "acclaimed jazz musician Gilad Atzmon" will be entertaining the proceedings with his very own - in reality, highly traditional - brand of crank racism.

I referred just before the municipal elections this month to the ideological identity of the Respect 'Coalition', which is the electoral front for the Socialist Workers' Party, and the BNP. Atzmon is not an aberrant eccentric within this political culture. There was a time when the SWP, in the form of its predecessor organisation, held a view of Middle East politics that was other-worldly but not racist (something like the views of the early Noam Chomsky in his 1973 book Peace in the Middle East). But the current SWP has no difficulty in commending Atzmon's bigotry as "fearless tirades against Zionism". Respect/SWP and the BNP are not merely comparably repellent organisations: they stand for the same thing.

Atzmon, Mosley and Respect

After his recent pronouncement that we need more Holocaust deniers, the jazz musician and antisemitic crank Gilad Atzmon has outdone himself. In an interview published last week, he expounds again his mission "to expose the hypocritical nature of Jewish and Israeli culture and mindset". This requires personal courage on his part, for "by doing that I touched a Jewish nerve. I learn to live with it, they rather prefer to crucify me. This was always their method, nothing changed."

Crucifixion, indeed, was always "their" method. As Matthew's Gospel (27:22-5) puts it, in the most historically catastrophic passage in Christian scripture (emphasis added):

[22] Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. [23] And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. [24] When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. [25] Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

Not content with alluding to ancient antisemitic libels, Atzmon throws in more recent ones too. I've noted before that he contends that the notorious Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately depicts the state of modern America, whatever its status as history. Here he is saying it again: "I argue ... that with the current state of Jewish (political and economical [sic]) power, the debate concerning the truthfulness of the protocols is meaningless." He seriously believes that the historicity of this document is an open question!

For good measure, Atzmon pays gracious tribute to the pseudonymous bigot Israel Shamir as an "intellectually crucial and genuine voice", an accolade he also bestows on a distributor of Holocaust-denial tracts called Paul Eisen. Their opponents among Jews on the Left are easily diagnosed as suffering from "a Talmudic intellectual obsession".

This is crude and foul, and from that source also predictable. I mention it once more because it is relevant information in the campaign for effective labelling in politics. Atzmon is, after all, a twice-invited speaker to the annual 'Marxism' jamboree of the Socialist Workers' Party, whose newspaper describes his rants not in the way I have just done, but as 'fearless tirades against Zionism'. The SWP is, of course, the controlling organisation behind the Respect 'Coalition'.

Respect's latest campaign is to liken Condoleezza Rice, who is visiting the UK this week, to - get this - the wartime fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. There is, I suppose, the merest tangential and chronological connection between the two. When Mosley was conducting a demagogic racist campaign in West London in 1958 against the background of the Notting Hill riots, Ms Rice was experiencing racism at first hand as a small child in segregated Alabama. It would be easy to say that Respect lacks a sense of history and decency, but that would be too kind. Look closely at the organisation, its methods and propaganda, and you find what is, alongside the British National Party, the most prominent racist and fascist organisation in Britain today.

Atzmon: we need more Holocaust deniers

I have written regularly here about the curious case of Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon is a jazz musician, formerly an Israeli who now lives in the UK, but his most prominent characteristic is that he is a loudmouthed antisemitic demagogue. (See also here. Atzmon defends himself against my charge of antisemitism by pointing that I am a supporter of the Iraq War. Seriously, that's his defence. The man also describes himself as a philosopher.)

Atzmon's latest article, published in part on a political site declaring itself for "compassion for ourselves and our fellow human beings" and in full on his own site, goes beyond even his assertions of the accuracy of the diagnosis given in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It is long, incoherent and execrably written. ("In the past, I suggested a skeptical philosophical take of the notion of the personal narrative in the light of Heidegger’s Hermeneutic criticism of Husserl’s Phenomenology.") It is bizarre, unhinged and contemptuous of those who call attention to oppression. ("As we know, it was different American feminists’ networks that were the first to call a war on the Talibans, spreading the personal accounts of some abused Afghani women. Whether consciously or not [!], they were laying the groundwork for Clinton and Bush’s war against Islam.")

But what is most remarkable and disturbing about Atzmon's piece is his commendation of overt Holocaust deniers. So far as I can work out from the article - and it is difficult to work out from the obscurity and preciousness of his prose - Atzmon declares himself uninterested in the facts of the Holocaust, and is agnostic on whether it even took place. He accepts that Auschwitz was "state terrorism", but goes on to say:

The question of whether there was a mass homicide with gas or ‘just’ a mass death toll due to total abuse in horrendous conditions is no doubt a crucial historical question. The fact that such a major historical chapter less than seven decades ago is scholarly [sic] inaccessible undermines the entire historical endeavour. If we cannot talk about our grandparents’ generation, how dare we ever say something about Napoleon or even the Romans? Personally speaking, I may admit that I am not that interested in the question above. I am not an historian, I am not qualified as one.

Atzmon refers not to historically established facts of the gas chambers but to "the Holocaust belief system". He declares that "unlike David Irving and his bitter academic opponent Richard J. Evans, I do not know what historical truth is". (Evans was an expert witness for the defence in Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000. He demonstrated that Irving systematically distorted the historical evidence to deny the Holocaust.) Atzmon goes on (emphasis added):

While left academics are mainly concerned with signalling out Holocaust deniers telling us what is right and who is wrong, it is the revisionists [i.e. Holocaust deniers] who engage themselves in detailed archive work as well as forensic scrutiny.

That's one way, I suppose, of describing proven fraud (e.g. by the denier Robert Faurisson).

In a preposterous appendix written with lumbering sarcasm, Atzmon makes clear that he believes Irving and his associates are being persecuted because they "aim at establishing a rational, dynamic, lucid empirically grounded narrative based on forensic evidence". And he concludes (emphasis added):

Stopping Bush and Blair in Iraq, stopping those warmongers from proceeding to Iran and Syria is a must. If history shapes the future, we need to liberate our perspective of the past, rather than arresting revisionists [i.e. Holocaust deniers], we simply need many more of them.

Atzmon's judgements speak for themselves and require neither annotation nor labelling from me; you can do it yourselves. But the reason I return to the man's ignorant bigotry again and again is his association with one fixture on the British political scene. Atzmon was an invited speaker at successive annual 'Marxism' jamborees, in 2004 and 2005, organised by the Socialist Workers' Party, the controlling force behind the Respect 'Coalition'. He is touted by the SWP for his "fearless tirades against Zionism". The admiration is reciprocated, for Atzmon declares, as well he might, "I love Socialist Worker. It is the only newspaper in Britain which campaigns against Israel."

SWP Polibureau member and Respect national secretary John Rees, with whom I recently had the rare pleasure of debating an issue of high civic importance, declared at the last general election that "everyone in Respect has a long record of fighting anti-semitism". There must be a misprint in there somewhere.

Irving and others

After his disastrous libel suit again Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books six years ago, the historical writer David Irving was the beneficiary of some bizarre excuses by genuine historians who ought to have known better. Donald Cameron Watt wrote in The Standard: "Show me one historian who has not broken into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment." Sir John Keegan wrote in The Telegraph that Mr Justice Gray, presiding, had "decided that an all consuming knowledge of a vast body of material does not excuse faults in interpreting it". (Quotations are from Professor Lipstadt's History on Trial, 2005, p. xiii.) These scholars had apparently not only failed to follow the evidence - which demonstrated that Irving's "faults of interpretation" were systematic and ideologically driven rather than accidental - but also overlooked who was the defendant and who the plaintiff in the case.

But in the case being heard today in Vienna, Irving is the defendant. I agree with Richard Evans, who was expert witness for the defence in the libel trial, that Irving ought not to be there:

Richard J Evans, the Cambridge history professor whose forensic demolition of Mr Irving's research was key to that defeat, also criticised Austria's decision to charge Mr Irving, which he said risked making him a martyr to freedom of speech.

"I think the media circus that we see in operation now, with hundreds of reporters and TV and radio crews crowding around the courtroom, shows how counter-productive it all is," Professor Evans told Times Online.

"Irving was virtually forgotten before this trial came up and it's simply drawing unjustified attention to a discredited figure."

The issue for public policymaking is not that Holocaust denial is offensive (though it certainly is that) but that it is false: malevolently, systematically so. The proper policy with regard to malevolent falsehood is to expose it rather than suppress it. That is the task of historians rather than legislators or the judiciary.

But there are three other aspects of the pre-trial report in The Times that are worth commenting on. First, recall that during the Lipstadt/Penguin trial, "Irving radically modified his position: he accepted that the killing by shooting had been on a massive scale of between 500,000 and 1,500,000 and that the programme of executions had been carried out in a systematic way and in accordance with orders from Berlin" (The Irving Judgment, 2000, p. 116). That is, Irving was a Holocaust denier even though he accepted that the Nazis followed a deliberate programme of mass murder. The fact that he now accepts the historical fact of gas chambers at Auschwitz does not necessarily mean he has renounced his past as a Holocaust denier.

Secondly, while there's always a danger of being excessively sensitive about a choice of words, The Times's list of "Death-Camp Challengers" (scroll down the page) is an unfortunate headline. To challenge findings is an integral part of scholarly practice. Men such as Robert Faurisson don't challenge history; they deny it. In a liberal society they have freedom of expression, but the corollary is that a liberal society makes no attempt to rein in criticism of bogus and bigoted manipulations of the truth. Derision, denunication and (in my view, and for reasons that are explained in the next link in this post) removal of Faurisson from his academic post are entirely legitimate forms of counterattack.

Thirdly, note The Times's contention:

In 1979 Noam Chomsky, the linguist and intellectual, courted controversy by supporting M Faurisson’s right to express his views on the ground of free speech.

That is, of course, not an adequate description of the stance that Chomsky took in the Faurisson affair. If it had been, I should have supported him. Chomsky is not himself a Holocaust denier, but he defended the political legitimacy of Faurisson's claims, even if not their factual accuracy. It was a tawdry and discreditable way to behave, and Chomsky's reputation has rightly never recovered. If you seriously believe Chomsky's stance on the issue was an unexceptionable defence of the right to freedom of speech, then I would modestly recommend my own brief account of the case here.