Again on resigning from the AUT

Over at Engage today, David Seymour has a post opposing the call for Jewish members of the AUT to resign. David doesn't name anybody in particular who has issued that call, but as I am someone who did - even though I have also made it plain that I understand, respect and indeed agree with many of the reasons of those who choose to stay and attempt to get the boycott decision reversed from within - and as some of David's arguments are weak, or in one case worse than weak, I want to comment on them. David writes:

[1] First, the claim that the boycott makes the AUT an antisemitic institution is akin to the argument that the illegal occupation of Palestine, along with the racist policies adopted there, makes of Israel an 'apartheid' state. [2] Correspondingly, as with the AUT's boycott, the proposed resignations ensure that those making the call eschew all responsibility for the resolution of these complex and difficult matters. The consequence of this neglect is that those channels of communication and democratic procedures that permit dialogue and discussion, as well as a change of policy, are left in abeyance - like those between Israeli and Palestinian academics - thereby unraveling years of difficult, determined and principled work.

[3] It is also to be remembered that it is in the very nature of antisemitism to reduce the social and political world to a conflict between 'the Jews' and 'non-Jews' (whatever these terms may mean). Read in this way, the call for resignation of 'Jewish' academics replicates the antisemitism that, despite all good intentions by those involved, inheres within the AUT boycott. It reduces both the Israel/Palestine conflict and the manner it is addressed in our union to a conflict between Jews and non-Jews at the expense of rational discourse. And, in a final irony, if the call for resignation were to be successful it would make of the AUT the only judenrein Union in Britain; thereby offering antisemitism a premature and unnecessary victory.

[4] Finally, it is also important to fight against antisemitism in ways that do not accept and perpetuate its terms of reference. [Numbers in square brackets have been added by me. I have also corrected a repeated typo on 'antisemitism'.]

As to [1], there may be some who have claimed that the AUT is an anti-Semitic institution, but I haven't, and nor is it necessary to think that it is anti-Semitic in order to feel that you want, as a Jew, to resign from it. That the organization is presently committed by its recent decision to an anti-Semitic policy (which is all that I, for my part, have said) is sufficient cause - or so I think anyway. I would also put on record that my own experience within the AUT is not - remotely - such as to suggest that the organization has been an anti-Semitic one, and I not only hope, I also confidently believe, that it will soon demonstrate this by reversing the boycott decision.

As to [2], the claim that 'those making the call [for Jews to resign] eschew all responsibility for the resolution of these complex and difficult matters' is simply and self-evidently false. It assumes that the only way to influence what happens within an organization is by staying inside it. But that isn't so. What now happens in the AUT will depend on many things: this includes the efforts currently being made by some of its members, but it also includes the reactions of people outside it, and the responses of those who have been members but are now leaving in dismay or disgust. Speaking personally, I am not well-disposed, just at this moment and given how I've been spending my time, towards the charge of 'eschew[ing] all responsibility'.

As to [3] and [4] - the replicating anti-Semitism or perpetuating its terms of reference stuff, and at the expense of rational discourse - this is, frankly, wretched for anyone seeking to write in a careful way on a sensitive topic. If there has been a flight from rational discourse by any of those resigning or calling for resignation, then say and show where. And say and show, on the other thing, where there was an implication by anyone that the issue of the boycott boiled down to a battle between Jews and non-Jews - as if someone (so far unnamed) might have assumed that the boycott decision will have been repugnant to Jews only, something which has already been seen to be widely false; as if there haven't been appeals to everyone in the AUT to help overturn this shameful decision. The qualification about good intentions notwithstanding, this replicating charge would have been better left out.