Five little words: Jews are not discriminated against.

That was enough for me to be excoriated and “cancelled” by a significant part of the British Left. Various attempts have been made by the Stop the War Coalition (STWC), Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Counterfire, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) and the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) to denounce me and to ensure either that I am no-platformed as a speaker, or in the event that I am invited to speak, that their preferred speaker(s) are withdrawn as a pressure technique.

Thankfully not all comrades go along with this absurd Zionist ventriloquism. This is the first of a series of articles looking at the overall question of discrimination in relation to the Jews, mainly, but not exclusively, in the UK.  My argument is that in the round, on average, in aggregate, Jews do not suffer any systematic pattern of discrimination. Later in this series, I subject the apparently anomalous area of “hate crime” to analysis and conclude that at best the statistics showing that Jews are disproportionate victims of hate crime are inadequate to support such a claim.

In this piece, I discuss the arguments made to suggest I had “crossed a line” and critique their validity.

First, the SWP

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Saying Jews are ‘overrepresented’ in positions of power is.

 

Such allegations lump together all Jews without any recognition of class or other differences. Miller targets Jews, not the actual ruling class, and plays on the idea of Jews as ultra-rich and manipulative.

 

And he refuses to see the very real existence of antisemitism which, along with Islamophobia, has become a standard feature of far right propaganda. (17 August)

Next, here is the view of JVL

He presents these three bald statements as “facts”. They are overstatements at best, flattening and homogenising Jews, ignoring any historical, international or social context and creating an impression of Jews exercising power as a cohesive force … This recent tweet, focusing on Jews, is of a different order and has crossed a line.

For BRICUP

In BRICUP’s view, Miller’s recent social media statement (reproduced below) is completely unacceptable. In it, he affirms that Jews are no longer discriminated against, that Jews are ‘over-represented’ amongst cultural elites (cultural, economic, political) world-wide, and hence are now themselves in a position to discriminate against marginalised groups.

 

Miller ignores the persistence of antisemitism across Europe and in the Americas, and its increase over recent decades with the rise of populist movements, and the resurgence of fascist organisations. Moreover, his supposed ‘facts’ are highly susceptible to an antisemitic interpretation; indeed, for historical reasons they are almost bound to be interpreted this way. He uses some of the most historically prominent elements of antisemitic rhetoric. His assertion of ‘over-representation’ inevitably encourages hostility towards Jews. And in treating ‘Jews’ as a homogeneous entity, his post deploys the characteristic feature of all racisms.

 

We make no judgment about David Miller’s personal and political views. Neither his personal attitude to Jews nor his political intention in posting this message make any difference to the consequences his statement is likely to have. As an organisation that rightly defended David Miller against the attempt to dismiss him because of his criticisms of Israel, we urge him now to delete this message, and to apologise for its content. (18 August)

Let us consider these charges, what might be said to be, first, missing or, second, incorrect about them?

What was missing?

• Any actual analysis of what was wrong with what I had written;
• None of the responses mentioned or referred to the context of my statements, which I will discuss shortly;
• None of them cited or even mentioned the existence of a long thread that I posted explaining what I meant and providing evidence to show it was correct and empirically based.

Three members of the BRICUP committee, Deepa Driver, Haim Breesheeth, and Ghada Karmi disagreed with the statement and resigned saying:

We do not agree the tweet was antisemitic or counter-factual but see it as a part of an ongoing campaign of persecution of Professor Miller for his critical stance on the state of Israel. When our own organisation, Bricup, joined the ranks of his antisemitism accusers, the three of us resigned in protest.

 

We find David Miller's persecution reprehensible and astonishing at a moment when more than half of the Israeli population is questioning the policies and actions of the Israeli government; when senior Israeli politicians, ex-generals and former Mossad and Shabak chiefs are combining to condemn Israeli Apartheid - despite the fact they were part of the state which set it up;  and when international commentators and pundits condemn the process of Normalisation of Israel's extremist government. 

 

David Miller is not guilty of any crime and did not deserve to be dismissed from his post by the university. That some university students felt uncomfortable or upset by Professor Miller is not sufficient grounds for depriving him of his livelihood and reputation. (24 September)

Next we turn to what was wrong with the criticism.

Crossing a line

It was advanced that I had “crossed a line” (BRICUP, JVL). However, which line was neither explained or evidenced. It’s like they were embarrassed to say it.

Treating Jews as homogenous and not doing class analysis

Do I treat Jews as if they are homogenous? No, obviously not. What I gave - as can be seen in the evidence cited in part 2 of this article (and in the original thread – Thread reader version here, for those without X accounts) - was an analysis of the question of whether Jews were disadvantaged in UK society on a number of economic levels. Failing to grasp the distinction between a statistical average or propensity and a “racial” characteristic of all Jews is at the root of this misunderstanding. When one says that Jews as a group are better off than Muslims as a group one is not denying the existence of poor Jews or rich Muslims.

What we see with BRICUP is a willingness to suppress inconvenient facts in case they are misrepresented in some way in “antisemitic rhetoric”, or more exactly “the most historically prominent elements of antisemitic rhetoric.”

What on earth is that supposed to be? In fact, of course, what this betrays is a concern with linking the surface characteristics of a discourse (The Nazis condemned rich Jews for being rich, greedy, mean, or malign) intrinsically to a particular political content (Jews are statistically advantaged in the UK and other Western states).

It is tone-policing for the Left. I have always understood that the idea that Jews as a class (“as Jews”) were prone to greediness or meanness (and that was why they had such riches as they did) was a prejudicial libel. And of course it is. I have never understood that referring to uncontroversial (and unchallenged) statistics about the extent of the wealth or poverty of Jews (or Muslims, Hindus, or white people) was not a matter of sociological analysis. It certainly does not impute collective (racial?) characteristics to the Jews or to Muslims or others.

But for BRICUP, apparently, data can now be antisemitic rhetoric. They refer to “supposed ‘facts’” but don’t challenge any particular fact that I cite or even refer to the facts I cite. As Norman Finkelstein notes, “The Israel-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute rhapsodizes that ‘The Jewish People today is at a historical zenith of wealth creation’ and ‘has never been as powerful as now’.” To this, Finkelstein responds: “It is certainly legitimate to query the amplitude of this political power and whether it has been exaggerated, but it cannot be right to deny (or suppress) critical socioeconomic facts” (my emphasis). It appears that Norman Finkelstein can say this without challenge from the left. But if I make a similar statement, in which I actually cite these words, I must be denounced.

It’s like BRICUP were so sensitive to the alleged ever present threat of re-emergence of “antisemitism” that even discussion of the social status of Jews might resurrect it.  Would they be concerned about similar discussion of white people and capitalist elites and thus about white privilege or racism? It’s unlikely. And nor would they be concerned about empirical social analysis of the status of Muslims in society. It’s only Jews about whom we need to be especially sensitive. Again, this looks like tone-policing. We must surely be far past such concerns during an actual Nakba.

As the Marxist writer Ian Donovan noted in his response to these statements:

Far from ‘ignoring’ class differences, this analysis is based on them, when properly understood. The social composition of the Jewish population, its disproportionate representation in positions of property and financial power, has obvious bearing on the influence of Zionist Jews in capitalist society today, simply because the dominant ideology of bourgeois Jews is political Zionism, and disproportionate Zionist influence in ‘high places’ flows inexorably from that. Nowhere in this analysis does any alleged characteristic of Jews as being ‘manipulative’ manifest. Such psychologising is not remotely necessary.

The JVL statement also claims that I create “an impression of Jews exercising power as a cohesive force”. It should go without saying that this is not what I said, meant, or the impression I am trying to create. On the contrary, what I am doing is trying to explain how it is that Jewish privilege in society (a social fact) is related to the question of Zionist power, as we will see below.

The most obvious level of this is that an overwhelming proportion of Jews are Zionist. Research by Pew in the US in 2021 showed that “Eight-in-ten U.S. Jews say caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them. Nearly six-in-ten say they personally feel an emotional attachment to Israel,”. In the UK, a 2024 study by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research reported, “73% say that they feel very or somewhat attached to the country. However, the proportion identifying as ‘Zionists’ has fallen from 72% to 63% over the past decade.” Obviously, ultra-Zionists of one sort or another are likely to say that even more Jews are Zionist than this. 

For example, the so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism conducted a survey in late 2023 which apparently gave even higher figures. It reportedly “revealed that 97 per cent of British Jews feel “personally connected” to events happening in Israel... 80 per cent of respondents considered themselves to be a Zionist.” Obviously, it does not require a model or concept of Jews as a “cohesive force” in order to understand that the level of privilege - on average - amongst Jews is related - perhaps in complex ways - to the ability of Zionists to exercise power and indeed commit genocide.

Do I ignore the rise in antisemitism?

I don’t ignore it. I say: Where is the evidence that it is happening? In my view, Judeophobia - meaning prejudice against Jews - does not exist outside specific pockets. All of the evidence I quote shows that Jews are not disadvantaged and discriminated against, in general in the sense defined by the government (at work, in education, as a consumer, when using public services, when buying or renting property, as a member or guest of a private club or association).

The SWP pointed to Viktor Orban as an example of the continued existence of anti-Semitism. But of course he is in Hungary and not the UK.

But Orban is not the slam-dunk it might appear to be. While Orban has attacked George Soros in terms seen as anti-Semitic, he is of course a strong ally of the actual Zionist entity, as even Western-funded think tanks recognise. The criticism of Soros may express Judeophobic prejudices, but it’s far from clear that the status of Jews in Hungary is any worse than in any other European country. Some argue that their status is significantly better.

Furthermore, we should also mention that any Judeophobia Orban displays is part of his wider Islamophobia. He appears to believe that liberal Jews (e.g. Soros) are encouraging a Muslim takeover of the country, a version of the far-right Great Replacement Theory, most of whose adherents, and all of its originators, such as sometime Mossad operative Bat Y’eor who popularized the version known as Eurabia, or French Islamophobe Renaud Camus, are, like Orban, staunch Zionists.

But let us suppose that the SWP is right about Orban. No one is saying that pockets of Judeophobia don’t exist on the far right. But that is such a weak argument that it more or less concedes the points I am making about the disproportionate privilege of Jews (in aggregate) in the UK and elsewhere. Yes, there are pockets of Judeophobia on the far right as I have said on many occasions. But it’s virtually non-existent elsewhere. Most far right groups in Europe have substituted Zionism and Philo-Semitism for anti-Semitism - Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson, and the EDL are examples in the UK. They are militantly Zionist and are also bankrolled by Zionist groups like the Middle East Forum and foundations associated with US ultra-Zionists like Nina Rosenwald and Robert Shilman, as even The Guardian has reported, more than once. The same can be said for the Dutch far right leader Geert Wilders and many others in the so called CounterJihad movement.

In Ukraine, as I have noted, the actually-Nazi Azov Battalion was co-founded by a former member of the "Israel" occupation forces, and some Ukrainian Jews have signed up to fight with Nazi battalions. One would have no idea of any of this if one took the BRICUP statement at face value on “the persistence of antisemitism across Europe and in the Americas, and its increase over recent decades with the rise of populist movements, and the resurgence of fascist organizations.” So my message to BRICUP is: Let’s have some data on this rather than easily falsified generalizations.

In my view, the left has, for many decades now, been penetrated by Zionist infiltrators. This means that there is a systematic turning away from the idea that Zionism is racism and a pressure to focus “anti-racist” work on “anti-fascism” instead of on the most important forms of racism we face at any particular time. This has various names: structural racism, institutional racism or State-led racism. In the 1970s and 1980s these focused particularly on Black people and the Irish. Today, they focus on Black people and Muslims. The systemic backbone of such racism is the institutionalized racism of the state, led in particular by the counter-terrorism apparatus (meaning the police, military, intelligence services, border force etc). This apparatus, of course, embodies all sorts of assumptions about the threat of Islam which originated with the Zionist regime/movement - such as the racist notion of the “Islamist” or the idea that there is a specifically “Islamic” form of “terrorism”. I have written about this here.

BRICUP also said that my “assertion of ‘over-representation’ inevitably encourages hostility towards Jews”.  But does it? Let us take the similar example of white people.

White people are over-represented in the civil service, in higher economic roles, amongst the billionaire class. Does noting this inevitably encourage hostility against white people? Or does it rather point to the way in which privilege is created and reproduced? And is it something we should not mention in case it leads to demands for equality or justice? Putting the question this way indicates that - on the contrary - we are dealing here with special pleading for a particular section of the white population which would not be advanced for white people in general.

We might ask why it is that left-wing Jewish, Zionism-critical, or anti-Zionist groups, want to soft pedal economic advantage and disadvantage for religious/ethnic groups while nominally being anti-racist organizations?

I suppose I would also, on a personal note, want to raise the issue of the alacrity with which others on the Left - some of whom I have worked with over more than two decades - jumped on the “antisemitism on the Left” trope. This is a conspiracy theory which many of them had spent several years rejecting in the case of the witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn. My feeling is that one should treat this as an interesting research question rather than as a point of hostile demarcation. And that is what I am attempting to do in this and many other pieces which I will shortly publish.

In the next part of this article, I will go into some detail about the “over-representation” of Jews in elite positions in inegalitarian societies like the UK, and to ask what significance this has for understanding the power of Zionism in the UK and worldwide.