The Left's Jewish Problem by Dave Rich

Author:Dave Rich [Dave Rich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785901515
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2016-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

The Socialist Workers Party and its student arm were effectively trying to separate the two parts of the No Platform policy that NUS had adopted in 1974. This involved denying union funds or facilities for Zionist speakers or meetings, but not preventing their meetings from taking place. This approach ignored the consequences of such restrictions, as the withdrawal of Students’ Union funding often meant that Jewish Societies could no longer operate. Some anti-Zionist students from that period assumed that Jewish Societies had independent financial resources not available to other student societies – an assumption that was uncomfortably close to yet another anti-Semitic stereotype. In practice, the Socialist Workers Party’s attempt at nuance passed many people by; even other anti-Zionists thought they were responsible for motions banning Jewish Societies. Richard Burden, who succeeded Wragg as BAZO’s NUS organiser, wrote in Free Palestine in 1978 that Socialist Workers Party members had a ‘policy of refusing union recognition of Zionist organisations within NUS’. While Burden criticised the Socialist Workers Party for this, BAZO was also believed by many to be behind the campus bans on Zionism. Free Palestine hailed BAZO’s ‘campaign in British universities to bar explicitly Zionist groups under the National Union of Students ruling that no platform should be provided by university facilities to racists’. BAZO, like the Socialist Workers Party, denied supporting the bans, but few believed them. For the Union of Jewish Students, a policy equating Zionism with racism naturally raised the question of a ban on Zionism, whether it was mentioned explicitly in the policy text or not.19

It is a sign of how Zionism and Israel divided the left that, while the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party were the main activists trying to ban Zionism on campus, the Union of Jewish Students’ most important allies were the Communist and other left-wing students in the NUS leadership. Sue Slipman was on the Executive of the Communist Party of Great Britain and most of the top posts in NUS were taken by students from the Broad Left, an alliance of Communist, Labour and unaffiliated socialist students. Jewish student activists spent a lot of time trying to build a relationship with the NUS leadership, helped by the fact that their offices were conveniently located on the same central London street. The Union of Jewish Students’ political officer (and later the eminent historian) David Cesarani remembered Slipman being genuinely sympathetic to their concerns and she spoke in their support in the debate at SOAS in October 1977. Slipman found Union of Jewish Students activists to be politically naive at first, but felt a vague affinity with them.

It helped that there was a meaningful difference between the Communist Party’s position on Israel and that of the Trotskyist groups. Communist students like Slipman followed Eurocommunism, a popular idea in the late 1970s that tried to combine Communist Party membership with a more critical attitude towards the Soviet Union. This included a more moderate stance towards Israel. The Communist Party itself was hostile to

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