I depart here from some of my more usual concerns to deal with a subject of a different kind. This is a story of harassment at work; or so the putative victim of it thinks, and so it also strikes me on the basis of everything I've been told about it. I've decided to blog it - with the permission of the person concerned - because it raises a more general issue which I think is of interest. But I'll get to that. Here, first, is the story.
A woman friend of mine who works for a large institution (the precise nature of which I shall not disclose, for obvious reasons) has found herself the object, during the past few months, of unwelcome remarks and gestures from a male colleague with whom she comes into contact on most days, and occasionally has to work closely beside for reasons related to their respective functions in that institution. This male colleague (call him Bob) started by making unfriendly - tending towards hostile and even aggressive - comments, which my friend (call her Joyce) at first tried to ignore. It didn't work, and the comments then moved towards the sexually suggestive, becoming more extreme as the weeks passed and abusively so. Bob began using explicit, insulting and obscene language about Joyce's looks and her sexuality, and he has on several occasions resorted to graphic descriptions of how he would like to see her 'mistreated' by groups of men.
Joyce finally took a complaint to her and Bob's common 'line manager' who, according to her account, has been unsympathetic from the start, declining even to enquire further into the matter. He (call him David) says she has no real basis for the complaint, nothing in the way of solid evidence. This isn't true, as I'll shortly come to; but I need to fill in on two other background matters before I do so.
First, Bob has a previous history of this sort of thing, it is known to his employers and it is known, in particular, to the 'line manager' David. A few years ago, there were complaints against Bob by several female colleagues in close succession, which resulted in his receiving an official warning from the organization, a warning making reference to the available sanction of dismissal. It is possible that David's knowing this history is what motivates his reluctance to pursue Joyce's complaint; but that is merely a speculation on her part, and I'm in no position to assess it. In any case, since the earlier complaints against him there has been no history, or no known history, of further such misconduct on Bob's part, and this clean recent record is cited by David as one of the reasons for his scepticism about Joyce's complaint.
Second, the origin of Bob's harassing behaviour is tied up with a dispute Joyce was engaged in with another colleague, Maya, a dispute in which she - Joyce - concedes that she behaved badly, on more than one occasion shouting at Maya abusively in a way that was witnessed by several of their workmates. Joyce says there was some provocation on Maya's side, but whether or not there was it is known that she herself is not blameless. And Bob's first unfriendly comments to her began shortly after these incidents of semi-public altercation with Maya, and were explicitly linked by him to Joyce's conduct then. Still, in Joyce's perception, and not only hers, Bob's behaviour soon came to exceed any justification which her bad conduct towards Maya might initially have provided him with. David has used that bad conduct of Joyce's, as well as Bob's recent better record, in defence of his not being willing to take up the complaint and look into it.
Here we come to the crux of the thing. Failing to persuade David of even a prima facie need for him to take this matter up, Joyce has involved two other people, one of them a colleague with a reputation in that workplace for good sense and fair-mindedness, the other a union representative. Both of these have made it their business to try to be around at strategic moments, and both have observed, more than once, the kind of behaviour by Bob of which Joyce is complaining. On the last occasion that she met with David to press her complaint, the union rep accompanied her and he advised David that he should now take the complaint seriously; otherwise he (the rep) would feel obliged to take the issue further together with fellow union officials. As of the end of last week, David remains unmoved. In so far as he's willing to allow that Bob's behaviour reflects any animus towards Joyce at all, he just insists on characterizing it as a reaction, understandable in the circumstances, to Joyce's bad behaviour towards Maya.
So, the general issue which I said at the beginning I would get to is this. How can David be so confident, in view both of Bob's previous history of abusive conduct towards female colleagues and of the testimony of others than Joyce herself to the fact that such conduct has now recurred, that there is nothing for him to look into? He puts it all down as a response on Bob's part to the way Joyce acted towards Maya. But, even allowing that this may be partly so, how can David be so unshiftably confident that that is the whole story? It baffles me.
OK, small-scale analogies for large and complex social realities are always going to be messy. They will fail to match up to their intended object in certain ways. This parable - for such (in case you haven't already got there) is what it is - is imperfect in many ways. I'm aware of that. But here is the point it was designed to get at. Joyce is the Jewish people (including that component of the Jewish people that is Israel). Bob stands loosely for the phenomenon of what some of us perceive as the recent growth of anti-Semitism - in Europe in particular, but also in the world more generally. I've argued before on this blog the would-be aphorism, 'Just because you're a critic of Israel, it doesn't mean you're not anti-Semitic'; and I do myself believe it to be pertinent today. But, in logic, the riposte is available which the aphorism is based on reversing: 'Just because you're a critic of Israel, it doesn't mean you are anti-Semitic'. The parable is offered as posing this question: how can the Chomskys and others who are just so certain that it's all down to understandable responses to the wrongs done by or on behalf of Israel to the Palestinians sustain such a certainty, when (a) you're talking about a 2000-year-old hatred which has led to much persecution and suffering, including one of the outstanding barbarisms of the twentieth, or indeed any, century; and (b) there is now evidence clear as daylight that things have been getting worse again?
I think their standpoint is not one that can, or should, be taken seriously by reasonable and conscientious people; just as I don't think any reasonable and conscientious person could take David's response seriously in the above story in the light of all the story's 'facts'. However messy the fit might be, I believe it's tight enough in the respects that matter here.