Miller's verdict

David Miller, the former sociology Professor sacked by Bristol University after making a series of hostile public statements about Jewish students at his own university, has won his Employment Tribunal against his former employer. According to the Tribunal’s ruling:

“The claimant’s anti-Zionist beliefs qualified as a philosophical belief and as a protected characteristic pursuant to section 10 Equality Act 2010 at the material times.”

This doesn’t mean that Miller will get his old job back, and as for the wider legal ramifications for the Equality Act, that’s for employment lawyers to work out as they go through the 108-page ruling. My concern is what it means for antisemitism, especially the form that comes cloaked in the language of anti-Zionism.

I wrote about Miller’s antisemitism in October, just before the Tribunal began, and it’s worth rereading that post to appreciate just how objectionable Miller’s beliefs truly are. This is not mere criticism of Israeli policy, or even limited to wanting to see Israel disappear. Miller believes that every Jewish organisation, synagogue, school, charity or youth club anywhere in the world that has a connection to Israel must be “dismantled.” He blithely peddles antisemitic tropes and treats all but the small minority of Jews who wholly reject Israel as an enemy to be “defeated”. His beliefs, were they to be put into effect, amount to an all-out assault on global Jewish life as currently constituted. That’s what “anti-Zionism” means to Miller, and that is what the Tribunal has ruled is a protected belief. It’s hard to fathom.

According to the Employment Tribunal, Bristol University’s defence against Miller’s claim accepted that “nothing the claimant said or did was antisemitic.” There may be legal reasons for this that I don’t fully understand, but analytically it is preposterous. The way that Miller’s anti-Zionism is directed at diaspora Jewish communities, and the language and arguments he deploys, are inseparable from the core ideas and patterns of thought of antisemitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes. The fact that the Tribunal could not see this is deeply troubling and follows a similar failure by Aileen McColgan KC, whose internal reports about Miller for Bristol University “stares directly into Miller’s antisemitism – and fails to see any of it”. This raises a broader question about whether Employment Tribunals have the basic understanding that would enable them to recognise antisemitism that comes in any form other than neo-Nazism.

Miller has made it clear in his response to this ruling that he hopes the rest of the pro-Palestinian movement will now follow his lead:

“This verdict is also a vindication of the approach I have taken throughout this period, which is to say that a genocidal and maximalist Zionism can only be effectively confronted by a maximalist anti-Zionism. The self-justifying and defensive approach of the sort illustrated by many on the left and even in the Palestine Solidarity movement will not work. The Zionist movement cannot be negotiated with. It must be defeated.”

This movement now has a choice to make. Over the past year or so, as Miller’s wild rhetoric and conspiracy theories became even more extreme, and as he increasingly switched from talking about Zionists to explicitly attacking Jews, many supporters of the Palestinian cause distanced themselves from him. Do they now use this ruling as an excuse to bring him back into the heart of their movement, or do they take a principled stand and leave him on the fringes?