How a British university helped me to establish anti-Zionism is not racism

I have just won an employment tribunal against the UK’s Bristol University which sacked me from my post as Professor of Political Sociology in October 2021 after a thirty-month campaign by the Zionist movement to have me removed.

Among the relief and jubilation of the verdict issued by the tribunal, there is a sense of wonder. I knew that Bristol had not properly investigated the complaints against me or properly weighed what to do as a result and this view was handsomely confirmed in admission after admission by the two Bristol officials who had investigated and fired me and who gave evidence at the tribunal in October. It was Bristol’s own witnesses who holed their case beneath the waterline.

But even more dramatic damage was done to the Bristol case by the overall legal strategy adopted by Bristol and by the incredible evidence of the most senior witness to give evidence on behalf of the university. It was she who decisively sunk Bristol beneath the waves. Let me explain.

Bristol University investigated me three times. Each investigation found no evidence of anti-Semitism in anything I had said or written. The latter two investigations were carried out by an external QC. The University, has, to this day, refused to say in public that I was found, on each and every occasion, not to have said or written anything anti-Semitic. In the statement they issued when I was sacked they admitted only that the investigation “found that Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech”.

This belligerent and dishonest approach carried over into their legal strategy in court. As soon as the case commenced lawyers for Bristol indicated they wished to change their case. They had previously accepted that my views were worthy of respect, but the new case, hurriedly put together in an email on the first morning of the Tribunal, was that my anti-Zionist beliefs as declared in my witness statement lapsed “into unevidenced conspiracy." Furthermore, they stated that my belief that Zionism was racist and that it therefore should be opposed was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” This is the legal language used in the Equality Act 2010 which defines “protected philosophical beliefs”.

This was a reckless strategy because it claimed that my anti-racist ideas were “akin to Nazism”, which is the legal test for ideas not worthy of respect. This was always going to be a misguided approach, but in practice it was turned into a weapon by my legal team enabling them to force the most senior witness into apparently contradictory testimony.

Professor Judith Squires was and still is the second most senior officer at Bristol University, she is a political theorist by specialism having written a number of books on gender equality and also having written on the French theorist of power relations Michel Foucault. She is more sympathetic to him than I am. It should also be noted that Squires has taken something of a lead at the University in positioning the university as an anti-racist institution. In October 2020 Squires gave a lecture posted by the university on its YouTube channel titled “Towards a Decolonised University”. In the talk, Squires states that “it’s the responsibility of all of us to help eradicate racism”. When she gave evidence Professor Squires maintained that my ideas were not worthy of respect in a democratic society but she also ended up confirming that she thought that the ideology of Zionism was racist, so her testimony looked as if it was contradictory.

The apparent commitment to ending racism, notwithstanding, it was plain from my case that there were certain types of racism – Zionism – which were not to be eradicated. Indeed it was precisely in my declaration that Zionism was not just racist but should be opposed that I committed my worst sin in their eyes.

In other words, the kinds of racism faced by Palestinian, Arab or Muslim students with a significant input from Zionism are still not taken as seriously by institutions like Bristol. I had said this at the time and this was said to be problematic because it undermined cohesion on campus. To put it in another way, anti-racist argument was transferred in the language or anti-racism into a threat to good campus relations.

This view was reinforced for me by the apparent difference in treatment for a Professor from the Law department. Professor Greer was accused by the Islamic Society of Islamophobia around the same time as the allegations against me. He then denounced the Islamic society in much more explicit terms than I had discussed the Zionist student group. Bristol did not give him any warning and certainly did not fire him, and indication, so my lawyers argued in court, that we had been treated differently.

The truth is that British universities just like the wider society in which they are embedded have not come to terms with the deep Islamophobia that affects our public institutions and has real consequences in terms of hate crime, harassment by the police and the security apparatus and economic disadvantage. Muslims are, according to demographic data, the most economically disadvantaged religious or ethnic groups in the UK in terms of median net wealth or in terms of hourly wages. But instead of taking measures to ameliorate these issues there is a tendency to pretend that the major threats faced in terms of racism and victimhood in the society are faced by Jews. This leads to an over sensitivity to the “new antisemitism” and a reluctance to challenge the racism of Zionism. In reality, to quote Norman Finkelstein: ‘British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated, and professionally successful.’

The lack of a willingness to question Zionism and the acceptance of the case for the “new antisemitism” means that the instinctive institutional response in many places is to doubt that anti-Zionism is anti-racist.

This is why my tribunal victory is so important. It sets out for the first time by any court in the UK the determination that anti-Zionist views are not racist and that they are “worthy of respect”. This is a tremendous victory not just for the protections it will afford to people in employment. It will also be available in argumentation against the so-called “new antisemitism”, a concept publicly stated by the Zionist regime as early as 1972 in a speech in the US by Foreign Minister Abba Eban. The regime has worked on this concept for more than fifty years and has tried to institutionalise it as a “working definition” of antisemitism – first in the European Union Monitoring Center which adopted the Working Definition of Antisemitism in January 2005, recognised as a draft in progress, after a fierce lobbying campaign by the Zionists.

The draft was heavily criticised by legal experts for moving towards a criminalisation of pro-Palestine speech or activism. In 2007 the EUMC was succeeded by a new organisation, the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA). The FRA clarified in 2013 that the definition credited to its predecessor had never been its own and that the EUMC did not have the standing to approve such definitions. So the Zionists determined in 2015 that they would need to find a new institutional home for the definition and by 2016 they had succeeded in lodging it with a Zionist-led grouping called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. From here it has been deployed against all comers.

Now the decision in my tribunal case puts all of that lobbying effort in question and begins to stake out new territory which will allow push back against the IHRA working definition.

Perhaps most significantly the tribunal judgement is already giving new confidence to pro-Palestine campaigners which are becoming less concerned about attacks under the label “antisemitism” and more ready to use the term Zionism properly and regularly. The IHRA has been influential in dissuading many pro-Palestine campaigners from using the term “Zionism”, “Zionist entity” or “Zionist movement”.

Siren voices on the left have declared that we should use the term sparingly or not at all. We should instead just criticise the government of Israel and its policies, or describe the human rights abuses or use the term Apartheid. They also say we should avoid calling the fundamental legitimacy of the Zionist colony into question. Sometimes this is because they oppose the end of the Zionist colony and sometimes for tactical reasons. In either case, all of this should, and now can, stop. We should be clear that Zionism is fundamentally racist, colonial and genocidal and we should use phrases such as Zionist entity, and Zionist movement deliberately to undermine the legitimacy of the colony and also to make it clear that it is the whole Zionist movement that needs to be dismantled, not just that part of it which currently occupies Palestine.