Anti-Zionism after the pogrom

Is the desire to dismantle Israel worthy of respect in modern Britain? This question lies at the heart of an employment tribunal that begins today between former sociology Professor David Miller and Bristol University, who sacked him two years ago. It is a case that, with sobering timing given last week’s horrific attack in Israel, gets to the heart of whether anti-Zionism can ever truly be detached from antisemitism.

Miller is arguing that the University discriminated against him when he was fired, because his anti-Zionism qualifies as a philosophical belief under the Equality Act. The verdict will not just have consequences for Miller’s own career; if he wins it will have ramifications for the accommodation of antisemitic and anti-Zionist ideas across academia and beyond.

It’s important to be clear what Miller’s anti-Zionism entails. This is no mere critique of Israeli policy or solidarity with the Palestinian people, neither of which would be controversial: he firmly believes that Israel should disappear completely. “Our cause is not to establish a Palestinian state, but to dismantle Israel”, he tweeted in August. Hamas has provided a barbaric, blood-soaked demonstration of what their version of dismantling Israel looks like in practice, so it feels like an appropriate time to be asking whether this general desire can ever be, as the law states, “worthy of respect in a democratic society, compatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”

Miller’s anti-Zionism is an extreme case, mixing outright rejection of Israel’s existence with an extensive set of conspiracy theories about the complicity (as he sees it) of diaspora Jewry in Israel’s crimes. He originally got in trouble back in 2021 not because of anything he had said about Israel or Hamas, but due to comments about Jewish student groups here in Britain. The head of Bristol’s Jewish Society and the President of the Union of Jewish Students, he claimed, were both trying to censor him as part of “an all-out onslaught by the Israeli government… on the left globally”. When challenged on this, Miller doubled down. Bristol Jewish Society is “directed by the State of Israel” to attack him with “manufactured” complaints of antisemitism, he said, and the Jewish students who make up its membership are used as “political pawns by a violent, racist, foreign regime.”

Miller says that his views are rooted in his academic research and that he takes care to distinguish between Zionists and Jews, and there is nothing illegitimate about ordinary academic study of Israeli policies, the structure of the Israeli state, or the history of the country’s formation. However, Miller’s research is not even primarily about Israel itself but about those in this country who he deems to be its accursed supporters. The TV show he currently produces (and appears on) for Iranian state broadcaster Press TV may be called Palestine Declassified, but its weekly spotlight is focused determinedly on Jews, not Palestinians. Unwittingly, his output and focus highlight why anti-Zionism and Palestine solidarity are not the same thing.

When Bristol University announced a new disciplinary investigation following these comments, hundreds of academics and activists shamefully rallied to Miller’s side. He is an “eminent scholar”, they wrote, who “has made highly valuable contributions to his academic field of political sociology.” Despite this misplaced acclaim, the truth about Miller’s scholarship is very different. As soon as you take his theories seriously and examine the evidence, they fall apart, a combination of conjecture, weak circumstantial evidence, and guilt by association. For example, he places great weight on the fact that Bristol Jewish Society is affiliated to the Union of Jewish Students, which is affiliated to the World Union of Jewish Students, which, in turn, is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, an NGO based in Israel. But this five-stages-removed organisational relationship isn’t evidence that some functionary in an Israeli ministry is instructing the head of Bristol Jewish Society to invent fake allegations of antisemitism to spike Miller’s career. He has no concrete evidence to justify this claim at all – no smoking gun email or text message telling Jewish students what to say and do – because no such evidence exists. I’m sure Benjamin Netanyahu had better things to be doing in 2021 than organising pub crawls or bagel lunches.

An analogy would be a Sunday league footballer playing in the Watford Friendly League, which is affiliated to the Hertfordshire FA, which is in turn affiliated to the national English FA, which, in turn, is part of FIFA. Much as every amateur footballer likes to imagine themselves playing in the World Cup or having a direct line to Gareth Southgate, it would be ludicrous to infer from this chain of affiliation that this is how the world of football actually works.

But all of this is to take Miller seriously, when he is to academia what David Irving was to popular history. Miller has argued that the Syrian regime never used chemical weapons against its own people (the Douma massacre in 2018 was a hoax staged by the White Helmet rescue organisation, he says), and that the Russian bombing of the Mariupol theatre (which a thorough AP investigation estimated killed 600 people) never happened. Most recently he has been denying the Hamas atrocities in southern Israel, despite all the eye-witness and photographic evidence to the contrary. This is atrocity denial in real time.

It is impossible to ignore the echo of antisemitic tropes in Miller’s depiction of ordinary Jewish students as the agents of a global conspiracy directed from Jerusalem. More recently his mask has slipped completely. “If you are not Jewish, do not be cowed by racial supremacists who want to hector you into political subservience”, Miller tweeted in August. Jews are “over-represented… in positions of cultural, economic and political power” (even some of his supporters distanced themselves at that point). The Zionist movement “want to colonise every single public institution… I think we don’t realise how long and how deep the Zionist penetration of British society has been”, he told a meeting in December 2021. “There has been a long, long history of Zionist attempts to penetrate this country and to take on and to colonise parts of the power structure of this country.”

This is not dissimilar from the contents of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the 120-year-old antisemitic hoax that claimed to reveal the inner secrets of the supposed global Jewish conspiracy. It is not a coincidence that champions of The Protocols claimed it to be the minutes of meetings held on the fringes of the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. Modern, conspiracist antisemitism has always had Zionism in the frame as the ultimate string pullers, and Miller stands squarely in that tradition.

Nor does Miller limit himself to modern political Zionism. He has developed a bizarre theory that the occupation of Palestine began in 1777 – over a century before political Zionism existed as a formal movement – when a bunch of Orthodox Jews from Russia emigrated to the holy city of Tzfat in northern Israel. He has even suggested that the entire Jewish diaspora is not an organic collection of Jewish communities, created by centuries of dispersal and migration that began in ancient times, but is a “transnational movement” of Zionist activism implanted around the world by Israel. Any distinction between Jews and Zionism is long gone by this point.

To grasp just how egregious Miller’s conspiracy theories are, it is worth doing a thought experiment to imagine the implications if they were true. What if it is genuinely the case, as Miller suggests, that Britain’s national institutions are in the grip of a hostile foreign operation to penetrate and colonise our political parties, national media, universities and every single public institution in the country? What if he is correct that this operation has been ongoing since the 1940s, targeting Britain’s elite culture, power structure and establishment? And what if, right now, it is being implemented by the thousands-strong membership of the Union of Jewish Students and student Jewish Societies up and down the country, along with hundreds of synagogues and other Jewish community organisations? This would be the greatest threat of subversion ever experienced by this country. It would outdo anything attempted or achieved by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or by Nazi Germany, or by any of Britain’s other historic adversaries.

If these claims are all true, then the vast majority of Britain’s Jewish community would have to be treated as a threat to national security and a disloyal enemy of the state. But if his claims are not true, then it is simply an antisemitic conspiracy charge, similar to that levelled at Jews in Nazi Germany, in France during the Dreyfus Affair, and most pertinently in the Soviet Union under Communist rule.

Perhaps this is indeed what Miller believes. He has calculated that there are thousands of Zionist organisations in the UK, including synagogues, charities and community groups. He once tweeted that “every single Zionist organisation, the world over, needs to be ended. Every. Single. One.” Put these together using his definition of a “Zionist organisation” and, if he got his way, it would put an end to organised Jewish communal life in this country.

I don’t know what Miller thinks of the Hamas terror attack that slaughtered huge numbers of Israeli civilians last weekend. I do know that when Hamas gunmen murdered a British-Israeli mother and her two daughters in the West Bank in April, Miller callously described them as a “family of British Zionist colonists partially eliminated by the Palestinian Resistance” after “invading Palestine”. His version of anti-Zionism is an extreme example of a rot that has set deep in those parts of academia, politics and civil society that have elevated anti-Zionism - the belief that Israel must not exist and that Zionism is a subversive presence in British society - to an article of faith.

When Miller made his original comments about Bristol Jewish Society and the Union of Jewish Students, it was in a speech that included a much broader call to arms against “The enemy we face” – Zionism and the State of Israel – which, according to Miller, is “trying to impose its will all over the world.” “It’s a question of how we defeat the ideology of Zionism in practice… to end Zionism as a functioning ideology of the world”, he said.

The anti-Zionist theories that Miller taught in his university seminars may not have envisaged this, but Hamas has just shown the world what trying to defeat the Zionist enemy entails in reality: mass murder, rape, kidnapping, babies slaughtered in unspeakable ways. Anti-Zionism has a very different meaning now from whatever it may have meant in the past. If Miller’s views qualify as a protected philosophical belief, this week of all weeks, then so does all modern antisemitism. And that, surely, cannot be.

An abridged version of this post appeared in Friday’s Times.