STEVEN ROBINS

The University of Cape Town historian, Emeritus Professor Milton Shain, an accomplished author of numerous influential books on anti-Semitism in South Africa, recently responded to Western Cape High Court affidavits deposed by Dr Jared Sacks and Professor Steven Friedman on behalf of South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP). This case has been brought by UCT’s Professor Adam Mendelsohn against the UCT Council because of its resolution on the Gaza genocide, and Professor Shain’s affidavit specifically targets Steven Friedman’s book Good Jew, Bad Jew. Friedman’s book offers a critique of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism for its role in attempting to delegitimize criticism of Israel and allowing Zionist Jews to decide upon the nature of Judaism and Jewishness itself.

Despite having written nuanced and compelling books on the history of anti-Semitism in South Africa, Professor Shain’s response to Friedman ends up conforming to the standardized Zionist script of primordial Jewish hatred across time and space. This narrative of timeless hatred of Jews contributes towards decontextualizing and emptying anti-Semitism of any real meaning and content. In this account Jews, and the State of Israel, are represented as perpetual victims without any responsibility for their actions.

The definition of anti-Semitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that Professor Shain discusses in his affidavit identifies 11 examples of antisemitic conduct. These are wide-ranging and include applying “double standards” to Israel, comparing Israel’s policies and actions to Nazism, or describing Israel’s establishment as part of a ‘racist endeavour’.^{[1]apnews.com} How is it possible for this IHRA definition to cover such a broad range of conduct and utterances? Surely, one needs to examine the historical, cultural and political specificity of the conduct and utterances that are being framed as ‘anti-Semitic’?

While there is no doubt that anti-Semitism continues to rear its head in certain political spaces and settings, Professor Shain’s litany of examples of anti-Semitism fails to adequately acknowledge the specific context in which accusations of anti-Semitism are being routinely deployed to try to silence legitimate political criticism of Israeli military actions in Gaza.

Instead of engaging with current realities in Gaza that inform the substance of the UCT Council’s resolution, Professor Shain’s affidavit interrogates Professor Friedman’s account of how, in the 1970s, Zionists became deeply concerned about strident criticisms of Israel by ‘the New Left’ in the US because this directly challenged the intellectual hegemony of Zionism. Zionists then initiated a coordinated campaign to label left-wing anti-Zionism as antisemitic, and Jewish anti-Zionists as ‘self-hating’.

Professor Shain claims that these critiques of Zionism carried within them “well-worn anti-Jewish tropes [that] blended Jew-hatred with an emergent ‘Third-Worldist’ Weltanschauung [world view] that labelled Israel as uniquely evil and an outpost of European (‘white’) colonialism.” This political discourse, Professor Shain argues, used “classic anti-Jewish motifs” that harboured “a special hatred” of Jews: “Within the Muslim/Arab world in particular tropes and language long associated with age-old antisemitism have been employed.” Professor Shain claims that such expressions of antisemitism were also on display in Durban in August 2001 during the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances (WCAR).

But what has any of this got to do with UCT Council’s Gaza resolution? Well, from my reading, it appears that Professor Shain’s affidavit tries to draw a straight line from ancient, primordial hatred of Jews to the WCAR conference in Durban and to the UCT Council’s Gaza resolution. For Professor Shain, it would seem, anti-Semitism is everywhere across space and time.

It is surprising for such an accomplished historian to have such an ahistorical perspective when it comes to his more public role in the Mendelsohn case. For instance, the contemporary context that he is trying to address in his affidavit is not a time where Jews are racially and religiously marginalised and discriminated subjects of European states. Instead, those being criticised in UCT’s Gaza resolution include the leaders of the most powerful militarised state in the Middle East, which is backed to the hilt by the most powerful superpower on the planet. Similarly, Professor Shain’s historical account of New Left criticisms of Zionism in the 1970s does not adequately address the historical and political context of Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territory following the 1967 ‘Six Day War’.

The Jewish-Israeli writer and podcaster, Alon Mizrahi, describes these ahistorical narratives as the product of a quasi-religious, mystical conception of Jewish victimhood – a perspective that cannot comprehend the present. While there is no doubt that the mass killing and kidnapping of civilians by Hamas on October 7, 2023 was a devastatingly real atrocity, in an article in The Guardian entitled “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war”, Naomi Klein observed how public exhibitions, memorials and installations in Israel were used to splice this traumatic event onto a timeless narrative of primordial hatred of Jews.^{[2]theguardian.com} For Mizrahi, these kinds of representations circumvent having to address current realities on the ground:

… Nothing ever happens in the present moment, everything happens on a symbolic historical plane of time. This is not today, this is the eternal struggle between the good part of the universe, which Jews represent, and the bad part of the universe that everybody else represents. And this is part of the eternal persecution of and hatred of Jews. And if you listen to Zionist speakers in the US, this is how they talk: ‘We have always been hated, you have always hated us.’ It’s not about now… It is symbolic [mystical-time] and this is why they can’t get it that this is about actual people in the present day, that those babies [dying in Gaza] are real, that every woman, every old man [that is killed] is a particular human being… I think this is what young liberal Jews are rejecting. They want to be in reality… They don’t want to live in this asylum of mystical thinking…^{[3]“They don’t see Arabs as human” Alon Mizrahi interviewed on Makdisi Street, youtube.com}

This world of ‘mystical-time’ is enabled by historians such as Professor Shain who reproduce narratives of primordial hatred of Jews and innocent victimhood. Such historical narratives also enable interpretations of anti-Semitism whereby the ‘discomfort’ a Zionist student might encounter at a Palestinian solidarity campus protest can be seamlessly spliced onto histories of anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe in late 19^th or early 20^th centuries, or the lethal Nazi anti-Semitism of the 1930s. This is how definitions of anti-Semitism acquire their timeless, primordial quality – which is used to divert attention from the real-time genocide in Gaza. I will now turn to more personal reflections on this problem.

In the late 1960s, I attended Theodor Herzl Primary School in Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth) where I was taught how, following thousands of years of exile and anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust, Jews heroically fought to achieve their biblically ordained dream of a Jewish homeland.

The idea that Jews have always been victims of anti-Semitism was, and remains, tightly tethered to the belief that Israel has to be defended at any costs and by all means necessary to secure it as a sanctuary for all Jews.

However, my personal experiences of growing up in South Africa raised questions for me about this narrative of perpetual Jewish victimhood propagated by Zionist ideology.

In Germany in the 1930s, my father had experienced firsthand the lethal anti-Semitism of Nazism. He was imprisoned in Erfurt by the Gestapo and his parents and siblings were murdered in Auschwitz and Riga. By contrast, I lived most of my life in a bubble of white privilege in the middle-class suburbs of Gqeberha, and only occasionally encountered what I call ‘anti-Semitism-lite’. Yes, we lived next to a golf course and country club that would not accept Jews as members, but nobody seemed to mind as Jews had their own bigger and better Wedgewood Park Country Club. Yes, I experienced the discomfort of the unflattering portrait of ‘Shylock the Jew’ when we read Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice while at Grey High School, but this was nothing compared to the brutal and systematic everyday racism experienced by millions of Black South Africans.

Clearly, my own experiences of anti-Semitism-lite were fundamentally different to anything my father and his family encountered in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. Similarly, my father’s experiences are completely different to those of pro-Israel Jewish students who may feel ‘uncomfortable’ at Palestinian solidarity protests. It is a very serious error of judgement not to contextualise how these experiences diverge across space and time.

Fixating on a timeless history of Jewish victimhood allows Zionist historians to disengage from the horrific current realities – the mass killing of over 60,000 Gazans, mostly children, women and the elderly, the use of mass starvation as a method of war, and the destruction of the infrastructures of life – houses, hospitals, universities, mosques and so on. By conforming to this ‘ancient script’ of primordial hatred of Jews, Professor Shain’s affidavit supports litigation that ultimately seeks to deflect attention from the ongoing genocide by the silencing of UCT students and academics who insist on speaking out about the catastrophe currently unfolding in Gaza.

David Saks of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies recently insisted that “the [Mendelsohn] litigation is not about Zionism and the war in Gaza,” but is instead primarily about procedural matters and the UCT Council resolution’s infringement on the right to academic freedom “by prohibiting individual academics from pursuing research collaborations of their choice”.^{[4]dailymaverick.co.za} Yet, Professor Shain’s affidavit devotes extensive space to his historical account of how criticisms of Israel and Zionism since the 1970s have morphed into anti-Semitism.

These kinds of histories can indirectly contribute to the endorsement of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has become a blunt instrument for throttling academic freedom on so many US campuses.

If a version of the IHRA definition were to be applied in South Africa, it would severely stifle the intellectual and political freedoms of our universities, much like it has done to my Alma Mater, Columbia University. The observations of Rashid Khalidi, the internationally acclaimed Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, are worth quoting at some length:

Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.^{[5]theguardian.com}

Professor Khalidi’s account of the demise of Columbia University can be read as a warning at a time when the UCT Council’s resolution on Gaza is being subjected to litigation because of the University’s political and ethical response to an ongoing genocide.