Our kids and the problem of Zionism

I REMEMBER being present a few years ago at an introductory meeting for firstyear university students. The rep from the students’ union had his five minutes to explain what they do.

“We run political campaigns,” he said. “Currently we’re running three: one against fascism, one against fees and one against the occupation.” And then he moved on to talk about sports clubs.

I looked around the room. How does everybody know which occupation? How does everybody understand why this occupation?

These students were being socialised during their first week on campus to understand that the Israel/Palestine conflict was going to be one of the key symbolic markers of who they were becoming politically.

Anti-Zionism, and the boycott campaigns that come with it, leave Jews with three options and none of them are easy. First, they can remain silent and concern themselves with other issues. This strategy can work but it can become humiliating. Sometimes the issue will find you anyway, no matter how much you keep your head down.

One students’ union decided to sew a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions patch onto its rugby shirt, together with a Palestinian flag. If you wanted to play rugby, remaining silent would now come with a cost.

In political milieus where the word “Zionism” is used interchangeably with racism, Nazism and apartheid, there tends to be an unspoken presumption of guilt with regard to Jews. This presumption just lurks, like a dark cloud, if one remains silent.

The second possible strategy is to speak out and to argue one’s politics in a rational and informed way. The drawback is that if one raises con- cerns about standard anti-Zionist ways of thinking, one tends to be put into the dock to answer for Israel’s crimes, both real and imagined.

To go with this strategy, you need to be able to handle yourself in a political scrap and you need to learn how to bring people with you. You need to know quite a lot about Israel, about Palestine and about antisemitism; but you also need to know about the narratives which pass as commonsense on campuses.

If you try to argue for Palestinian rights while defending Israel and opposing antisemitism, it can consume your time and energy. It is a strategy which, no matter how critical you are of Israeli human rights abuses, will tend to leave you politically homeless. It is a strategy which has trouble preventing the hostile culture from allowing you to be just a person; it relentlessly drags you back to being always and only a Jew.

The third strategy is to go along with it all, and even to put yourself at the very head of it. An antisemitism which is not explicit, which is difficult to see, which is ridiculed by the cool and the good people, but feared

We need to teach our children to think critically about Israel/ Palestine ’