Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

Little Tich

(6,171 posts)
Wed Feb 17, 2016, 11:09 PM Feb 2016

Labour opens inquiry into antisemitism allegations at Oxford student club

Source: The Guardian

Decision by university’s Labour society to support Israeli Apartheid Week prompts MPs to call for party to sever ties with club

The Labour party’s national student organisation has launched an inquiry into allegations of antisemitic behaviour and intimidation at Oxford University Labour Club. Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, who was due to address the club’ s annual John Smith memorial dinner in a few weeks’ time, said he was “deeply disturbed” by the reports and was postponing his appearance until an investigation had been carried out.

A co-chairman of the club, Alex Chalmers, resigned earlier this week, claiming a large proportion of members “have some kind of problem with Jews”. He alleged that some members had expressed support for the Islamist group Hamas.

A decision by the club to support Israeli Apartheid Week, which seeks to highlight Israel’s “ongoing settler-colonial project and apartheid policies over the Palestinian people”, has angered some Labour MPs, who have called for the party to dissociate itself from OULC.

In explaining his decision to resign, Chalmers wrote on Facebook: “A large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews. The decision of the club to endorse a movement with a history of targeting and harassing Jewish students and inviting antisemitic speakers to campuses, despite the concerns of Jewish students, illustrates how uneven and insincere much of the active membership is when it comes to liberation.”

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/17/labour-condemns-antisemitism-oxford-university-labour-club-claims

16 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight: NoneDon't highlight anything 5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Labour opens inquiry into antisemitism allegations at Oxford student club (Original Post) Little Tich Feb 2016 OP
Isn't this Ben White's alma mater? grossproffit Feb 2016 #1
Ben white graduated from Cambridge. Little Tich Feb 2016 #2
Sounds like Jeremy Corbyn's platform 6chars Feb 2016 #3
That's appears to be because FarrenH Feb 2016 #4
Corbyn's, and hence Labour's, positions concerning Israel branford Feb 2016 #5
What I don't see FarrenH Feb 2016 #6
You may have grown up with Apartheid as a white South African King_David Feb 2016 #7
I'm not the grand poobah of Apartheid definition FarrenH Feb 2016 #8
I'll leave it, because it's crap... King_David Feb 2016 #9
"There is no similarity, whatsoever."........... Israeli Feb 2016 #10
Unlike anyone who posted in this thread, here is a real authority on Apartheid: King_David Feb 2016 #11
Don't make me laugh FarrenH Feb 2016 #12
I laugh whenever you claim to be an authority, Benjamin Pogrund most certainly is one.... King_David Feb 2016 #13
It is his opinion KD .... Israeli Feb 2016 #14
It took me almost two decades to fully appreciate FarrenH Feb 2016 #15
Wishful thinking FarrenH..... Israeli Feb 2016 #16

6chars

(3,967 posts)
3. Sounds like Jeremy Corbyn's platform
Thu Feb 18, 2016, 01:55 AM
Feb 2016

I can't see why the Labour party would worry itself about this at the same time they choose Corbyn as their leader.

 

branford

(4,462 posts)
5. Corbyn's, and hence Labour's, positions concerning Israel
Thu Feb 18, 2016, 07:55 PM
Feb 2016

do indeed appear to be entirely copacetic Oxford University Labour Club.

I simply assume that other parts of Labour are simply now trying to distance themselves from Corbyn, just as they are doing with other issues such as the Falkland Islands, Trident, EU migrant benefits, and a host of other matters, foreign and domestic, that are sinking Labour even further in the polls.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/15/britain-wants-to-ban-boycotts-on-israeli-goods/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/israel-boycott-local-councils-public-bodies-and-student-unions-to-be-banned-from-shunning-israeli-a6874006.html

http://jeremycorbyn.org.uk/?s=israel

FarrenH

(768 posts)
6. What I don't see
Fri Feb 19, 2016, 04:10 PM
Feb 2016

is Corbyn endorsing in any way the parts of the Oxford U Labour Club antisemitism allegations that actually have some substance, like some members stating that reprisals against Jews are legitimate because Israel. And the borderline case of tossing around the word "zio", an abbreviation that does seem to be popular among anti-semites although it depends on the context. i.e. Where people use it interchangeably with "Jew". Don't see any of that in Corbyn's positions. Neither does he call the Israel's occupation of the West Bank and permanent blockade of Gaza Apartheid. Although as someone who grew up under Apartheid and knows it when I sees it, I do, so hell no that isn't antisemitic. But Corbyn doesn't even go that far. So again. No, the allegedly antisemitic behaviour in no way reflects Corbyns position. The rest is not antisemitic. That's just a bullshit slur used by opponents of fundamental and non-conditional human rights (like, oh, self-determination and the right not to have your land stolen) to deflect criticism of ethnic supremacism by portraying the perpetrators as victims.

King_David

(14,851 posts)
7. You may have grown up with Apartheid as a white South African
Fri Feb 19, 2016, 05:11 PM
Feb 2016

But that doesn't make you an expert on apartheid ( suffice to know I'm in a position to judge) and definitely does not make you in any position whatsoever to know anything at all about antisemitism - so drop the "I am an expert " stance , please.

FarrenH

(768 posts)
8. I'm not the grand poobah of Apartheid definition
Fri Feb 19, 2016, 08:18 PM
Feb 2016

and not claiming to be

I'm just telling you that I'm one of those people who was a beneficiary of Apartheid, grasped that it was wrong at a very young age and spent a LOT of time thinking about the ethics of it and examining the rationalizations deployed by ethnic nationalists, analysing the victimhood narrative of White Afrikaners who were its primary architects, although white English South Africans mostly insipidly tagged along, content to profit from it - "the Brits screwed us over and put us in concentration camps where our women and children died in large numbers - some estimates say 100,000 - during the boer war so we'll oppress these people over here who had nothing to do with that while all the time inculcating our children with a rationalization for nationalism that rests on same". Decades of thinking about it a lot, and processing all the bullshit and self-deception that comes with it in the minds of the beneficiaries.

And it's all so familiar to me. As is the incapacity of people inculcated with such a narrative to even see the flaws in their reasoning and rationalization. To routinely speak of the oppressed as a single, homogenous barbaric mass whose desire for justice is a secondary consideration to their putatively singular and hateful purpose, while seeing your own self-inflicted and only partially valid existential dread in a completely different light. To discount the fact that *we* started it with a colonial enterprise (an aside - I utterly reject appeals to 2000 year old folk history to make the claim that it's "our" land - my ancestors came from Africa 35,000 years ago but I'm still a descendant of colonists - again, that line of thinking only makes sense because you've been pretty much brainwashed into accepting it as a valid argument - a special case of modal logic just for your cause - Palestinians, too, can mostly trace their ancestory to the same stock from the same time so its entirely bullshit) and instead point to the violence of the people that we *stole* land from and say "look at their barbaric response and bigotry - they're forcing us to deprive them of basic human rights for our own safety".

And that experience has equipped me with intuitions about who are really honest observers and reporters of the facts, too, in such situations, a thousand little signals of self-critical and self-aware personalities that are able to rise above their cultural conditioning and examine their privilege and report the hard truths that undermine their own privileges in such situations. And I see it clearly in those voices in the Israeli left who confirm my impression of the moral landscape there.

This is all so, so familiar. I'm not speaking down to you as some self-appointed authority. I'm just telling you that as a moral being who consistently applies the same morals and ethics to all peoples, I have no doubt about what the occupation really represents. The differences with the hateful dispensation I grew up with are tangential to the really important similarities, the ones that make it an anti-egalitarian crime of the same kind, deserving of the same name.

Take it or leave it

King_David

(14,851 posts)
11. Unlike anyone who posted in this thread, here is a real authority on Apartheid:
Sat Feb 20, 2016, 09:22 AM
Feb 2016

Israel has many injustices. But it is not an apartheid state
Benjamin Pogrund

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/22/israel-injustices-not-apartheid-state

Israeli

(4,151 posts)
14. It is his opinion KD ....
Sun Feb 21, 2016, 05:34 AM
Feb 2016

....and he is entitled to it .....as I am not to agree with him .

You forget that much of my political development was shaped by Shulamit Aloni and by living in this country for 65 years and by trusting my own two eyes .

Now if you would like an opinion that I agree with then you can take that of Amos Schocken,
take it or leave it , you do know who he is I take it ?

For those that dont see here :
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.662793

Here is what he has to say on the subject :.....

Only International Pressure Will End Israeli Apartheid

The growing delegitimization of Israel is this country's own handiwork. Should Israel decide to end apartheid, it will return to being legitimate in every respect.

Amos Schocken Jan 22, 2016

There are many differences between conditions in South Africa during the apartheid era and those current in the land from the Jordan River to the sea, especially in the territories that Israel controls beyond its internationally recognized borders. However, there is one important feature they share: two peoples living on one piece of land.

One people has all the rights and protections, while the other is deprived of numerous rights and lives under the former's control. Israel determines the fate and day-to-day life of millions of people who have no influence over its decisions. The government of Israel is the party that will debate whether or not to accept the Israel Defense Forces’ recommendation to ease policies toward the Palestinian Authority and its people. In South Africa, there were similar discussions about easing apartheid for blacks.

Israel as an apartheid state is not a viable situation, not only because of the corruption of values but also because this predicament is liable to lead Israel, like South Africa in its time, to banishment from the family of nations. It is not for nothing that Israel insists on defining itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, although in fact it is only a democracy for part of its residents, and therefore is not a democracy. (South Africa was a democracy for white people only, and therefore not a democracy). It is not for nothing that Israel insists on stressing the “common values” it shares with democratic countries, firstly the United States. Indeed, there are such common values, and they certainly speak well of Israel relative to other countries in the Middle East. However, the most basic democratic values of equality before the law for all people under Israel control, and equal rights to vote and be elected, do not exist.

The nearly 50 years of Israeli apartheid are not based on security considerations. Zionism, which was always prepared to divide the land of Israel with its Arab inhabitants, was replaced by the godly promise of the Land of Israel for the Jewish people. This promise is being fulfilled by constant, methodical settlement in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) along with the pushing of Palestinians into defined enclaves and small, crowded population areas.

This is the reason for the abuse of Palestinians, for the expulsion, exclusion, construction bans, lack of freedom of movement and prevention of development in Area C, which makes up roughly 60% of the West Bank. This settlers' ideology drives the state, and it is also the ideology of the prime minister (either that or, sadly, he realized he had to commit himself to it to get reelected). In any event, by the tenets of settlement ideology, Israeli apartheid is only temporary. In the end, according to this political program, which has gained a foothold among the Israeli public, there is no place for Palestinians except perhaps as a small minority. The murders in Duma, which caused widespread shock, are just the most extreme means to fulfill the goal of getting rid of the Palestinians.

Israel has several options to end the apartheid regime and the control of people who are deprived of rights. The two-state solution is the Zionist way to go, but Israel does not show any interest in finding a solution. The decades-long reality, whose sole variable is the constant growth of settlements, is what will continue to be in the future.

Such was the position of the South African regime for many years, but the world decided that this position is illegitimate. The Israeli apartheid regime is also illegitimate, and it is no surprise that the complete identification which the government is creating between Israeli policy and apartheid is causing the world to question not only Israel’s control of Palestinians without rights, but also the legitimacy of the state itself and the whole Zionist idea. If, as in the government's policy, apartheid is a necessary condition for the fulfillment of Zionism and the existence of Israel, then Zionism and the state are illegitimate.

Was there a way to eliminate South Africa's apartheid regime from within, without South Africans investing years in spreading the word internationally? It seems not. Ruling classes tend not to concede their advantages willingly. In Israel, as noted, the ideological goal goes even further, and doesn’t end only with the control of people lacking rights.

Many South Africans who worked against apartheid, and in practice against the policy of the white regime, were denounced as traitors, imprisoned or forced into exile. However, as a result of their determined, widespread activity in the world, South African apartheid was recognized as an illegitimate system, international sanctions were levied against it, and the system came to an end. Non-whites won equal rights, and anti-apartheid activists won respect and admiration.

The growing delegitimization of Israel is this country's own handiwork. Should Israel decide to end apartheid, it will return to being legitimate in every respect. Anyone who acts against Israeli apartheid is essentially acting on behalf of the renewal and strengthening of Israel's legitimacy as the national home of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, a secure refuge that enable self-determination for Jews in a Jewish and democratic state.

Whoever fears Israel’s insistence on maintaining its apartheid regime and understands that there is no chance of eliminating it from within, should view the EU labeling of settlement products, the pressure FIFA has placed on Israel and Brazil’s refusal to accept Dani Dayan as ambassador as encouraging signs. This is a crucial beginning of global action against an illegitimate situation that Israel insists on maintaining, but will be forced to give up. The government will predictably take “appropriate Zionist responses” to this pressure and pass anti-democratic initiatives to suppress and silence Israelis who, understanding that only external pressure will bring change, draw world attention to displays of Israeli apartheid.

It is no surprise that students at the privileged, mainstream Interdisciplinary Center rushed to sign a petition to oust Alon Liel from his job as lecturer at the center because of his work against Dayan's ambassadorial appointment, and his support for Breaking the Silence. When opposition parties Zionist Union and Yesh Atid ignore Israel’s core problem and fail to act against apartheid, while condemning moves like the labeling of settlement products or Brazil's refusal to accept Dayan, they signal Israeli society and the entire world that apartheid is not a controversial topic in Israel, but a matter of national consensus.

Such political, institutional and popular moral corruption has characterized other societies in other times. In Israel’s case, in addition to its moral failure, this corruption contributes to the state’s creeping delegitimization in the world. When Israel shakes off the anti-Zionism and apartheid that it has adopted and returns to the Zionist, democratic path, the IDC students and anyone encouraging the persecution of apartheid's active opponents will hurry to hide their activities of today.

The government's responses to anti-apartheid activism are pitiable. Anti-Semitism? It probably exists, but Israeli apartheid gives it legitimacy to raise its head and provides it an easy target. In any event, anti-Semitism in the world cannot justify the disinheritance and oppression of Palestinians. Undermining the policy of democratically elected government? Any government whose policy is apartheid, which is patently anti-democratic, forfeits the right to make claims in democracy's name. There's no boycott against states worse than Israel? Israel, which aspires to and can become one of the world's most enlightened countries, a light unto the nations, is not allowed to make such an argument.

It is hard to believe that what is written here escapes the understanding of those holding the reins of power, but the fact is they fail to draw the necessary, practical conclusion from the vision the prime minister said he believes in, the two-state vision. They will object and protest, but it may be that international pressure is precisely the force that will drive them to do the right thing.

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.698874

FarrenH

(768 posts)
15. It took me almost two decades to fully appreciate
Wed Feb 24, 2016, 07:37 AM
Feb 2016

That Zionism itself is a deeply flawed ideology, not just its current configuration. My proximity to many Zionist positions among those I knew and loved clouded my views on the topic when I was younger. The final nail in the coffin of Zionist reasoning for me was the revelation from genetic work done by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and others showing that Palestinians can trace their ancestry to common genetic stock with pre-Israel Jewish populations millenia ago, strongly bolstering the idea that a large part of Palestinian ancestry is Jews who converted to Christianity and Islam under successive rulers. Which renders arguments to land rights from millennia-old folk history (a deeply flawed concept) ineffective.

Having said that, some of my left-Zionist friends (a distinction I'm willing to make despite the fact that people like Chomsky have repudiated the idea along with their former Zionism) have pointed out that many early Zionists honestly believed that a mutually beneficial arrangement with the native population could be forged. I think many sincere efforts towards same were attempted. And I don't believe that Zionism and ethnic supremacism* have always been joined at the hip. I think its obvious that there is a species of idealistic, egalitarian and left-wing Zionism that been progressively eroded by the inherent contradictions of the Zionist enterprise on the ground over several decades.

What is mind-numbingly strange to me is that despite these things becoming more and more obvious to fair-minded egalitarians the world over, the door is still open to a two state solution with some semblance of equitable distribution of land between a state as envisioned by early Zionists and a Palestinian state, if Israel was willing to come to the party and take a firm line on settlers - an option that wasn't available to white South Africa. And the last few Israeli governments have done everything they can to undermine even that possibility, opting instead to relentlessly drive the situation towards one where long-term deprivation of Palestinian rights and increasing Apartheid seems to be the only possible outcome, absent external intervention.

It's extremely salient that on several occasions the PLO/Fatah have called for the situation in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem to be resolved by the expulsion of the Israeli army and their replacement with UN troops under a Chapter 7 resolution. When your opponents, who overwhelmingly hold the balance of power, and have exercised it for decades in service of creeping colonialism, are reduced to arguing that they won't get fair treatment under a neutral international peacekeeping force, claims about necessity and security become farcical.

There is no doubt that antisemitism is still widespread, that antisemites support anti-Zionist movements and that crude parsing on the anti-Zionist left actually gives rise to antisemitism in much the same way that 22 years after Apartheid, continued white domination of the post-Apartheid South African economy has led to crude anti-white bigotry of the Nation Of Islam variety among a fraction of South Africans. There is also no doubt that the Islamism of Palestinian groups like Hamas is saturated with crude antisemitism. We can't hand-wave that away as a minor phenomenon. Or indulge or tolerate it because of some ostensibly more important issue. But "either you accept and endorse Apartheid or you support the explicitly antisemitic elements of opposition" doesn't fly. If Israel and its state sponsors instead supported the intervention of the UN when opportunities arose, the door would be open to addressing both issues simultaneously.

*a label I will apply to any situation where fundamentally different understandings of basic rights are applied to any two putative ethnicities in conflict

Israeli

(4,151 posts)
16. Wishful thinking FarrenH.....
Fri Feb 26, 2016, 08:20 AM
Feb 2016
What is mind-numbingly strange to me is that despite these things becoming more and more obvious to fair-minded egalitarians the world over, the door is still open to a two state solution with some semblance of equitable distribution of land between a state as envisioned by early Zionists and a Palestinian state, if Israel was willing to come to the party and take a firm line on settlers


The two state solution is a dream that some of us had .......once upon a time .

Its over .

The settlers have won ....there is not one political party strong enough or willing enough to take them on .

Its not about a two state solution today .... its about what kind of one state solution .


Latest Discussions»Issue Forums»Israel/Palestine»Labour opens inquiry into...