Camila Bassi addresses the double standards the ‘anti-racist-Left’ has when it comes to discrimination against Jews and why they are often ignored in the fight against racism
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Camila Bassi, a lecturer in human geography at Sheffield Hallam University, sets out to address the uncomfortable yet intriguing question of why the so-called ‘anti-racist Left’ fails to see Jews as victims of racism in the same way that it does people of colour. She raises the issues of why this political faction only approves of those ‘exceptional’ Jews who are prepared to distance themselves from Israel and Zionism, and renounce the Jewish right to national self-determination while upholding that right for others, including the Palestinians. ‘Why does the anti-racist Left regard Israel as a uniquely illegitimate state which must be eliminated, and Zionism as a particularly deplorable racism, rather than as a nationalist response to anti-Jewish persecution?’ she asks.
In attempting to answer these questions Bassi exposes the contemporary manifestations of anti-Jewish racism on the anti-racist Left that are consistently denied. At the same time, she urges these people to recognise what she defines as their own entrapment in ‘the Jewish question’ and to abandon it in favour of realising a vision filled with co-existence for all.
Bassi highlights how academic enquiry into racism since the 1960s has focused on racism exclusively in relation to colonialism and as a ‘white over black’ relationship. She likewise examines a body of contemporary academic literature that identifies Zionism and Israel as a particularly harmful manifestation of colonialism. She reflects on how currents of the Left have positioned themselves, in her words, ‘on the wrong side of history in the fight for human liberation’.
The narrative takes issue with the Left’s preferred definition of antisemitism as ‘hostility to Jews qua Jews’, an interpretation that the author says fails to take account the political process of ascribing ethnic or racial identities that is central to all racisms.
The book puts forward a plea for solidarity that escapes the restrictions of race and other politicised identities – the basic causes of division and exclusion – and instead calls for a genuinely universal alliance for political and human emancipation. ‘Anti-Jewish racism on the Left is not simply a betrayal to Jewish people,’ Bassi writes, ‘it reflects a tragic inability to realise a future of full democracy and coexistence for all.’
