Not only are we talking basic lack of proportionality here, but I have even read claims that not one single person on the payroll is an Arab. I am unaware of any refutations or denials, although I am willing to be corrected on the point.

Supporters counter merely that the IPO is ‘open to’ Arab musicians. That might well be true, in the same sense that Eton is ‘open to’ council estate kids, or that the British National Party is ‘open to’ black recruits. Even Rangers sign Catholics these days.

But in the circumstances, it hardly seems enough. At the very least, a de facto policy of racial segregation stands as a rebuke to the orchestra as an institution.

While I am critical of those who refer to Israel as an ‘apartheid state’, the IPO can fairly be branded an apartheid orchestra. Saying that, a South African colleague informs me that the Cape Town Symphony was accepting blacks by the 1980s.

I do not normally endorse those who disrupt artistic performances for whatever end. But I do have a question for those who have been quick to condemn the actions of Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists at the Proms last night; if the Hallé for some reason was refusing to recruit from the Jewish community of Manchester, wouldn’t they be tempted to adopt a similar tactics? And wouldn’t they be right to do so?

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It has since then been widely bandied about by participants in Middle East politics, with both camps employing it in the negative as a designation for the other side. So who does, and who does not, make the cut?

Last night’s release of the Palestine Papers will only deepen the debate. Yes, their authenticity is contested, but let us work on the assumption that they are genuine, and that their main thrust is as described by the Guardian and al Jazeera.

Israel’s liberal supporters in Britain are generally proponents of what is known, in another cliché, as ‘the two state solution’. This is the idea that a just settlement of the conflicting claims of Israel and the Palestinians can come about on the basis of some equitable division of the contested territory. I am not one of those who believes that this is possible.

The further general assumption here is that Tel Aviv is negotiating towards this end in good faith, but is repeatedly thwarted by Palestinian obstinacy. Again, such a stance is difficult to uphold in the light of incidents ranging from the Gaza incursion to the Mavi Marmara incident and the assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhouh.

But all these actions of the state of Israel had their defenders, who generally insisted that they represent only necessary force in the face of Palestinian aggression.

That is just what makes the Palestine Papers so damaging to Netanyahu’s apologists. The documents suggest that the Israeli government has no desire to reach accommodation with the Palestinian Authority, let along Hamas, on anything other than monstrously one-sided terms.

Not only do they add weight to the proposition that Israel is not serious about a two state solution, but even create the impression of it not wanting to see any solution whatsoever, preferring instead to maintain the murderous status quo.

They will make it harder than ever for those of us on the left who are in solidarity with the Palestinians, while anxious not to align to anti-semitism from whatever quarter, to argue against calls for academic and consumer boycotts.

Unfortunately, the engrained obstructionism at any price currently instantiated by the Netanyahu administration yet again is proving an absolute roadblock to the roadmap.

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We all know what happened next. Some 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed during the three-week military assault in December 2008 and January 2009.

In addition, 13 Israelis also died during campaign, which was intended to stop Hamas rocket attacks against Israel. But the one-hundred-to- one disproportionality in the death tolls is ample evidence of the brutality of the exercise.

The revelation that Mubarak and Abbas were onside all along strikes me as rather more substantial than many of the non-stories have dominated world headlines for the last two days.

Sure, the overtures were rejected. But that Tel Aviv felt able to have these kinds of conversations says much about the real alignments in Middle East politics.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports:

In a June 2009 meeting between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and a U.S. congressional delegation, Barak claimed that the Israeli government “had consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas.”

“Not surprisingly,” Barak said in the meeting, Israel “received negative answers from both.”

Let us sum up what we can conclude from the episode. Fatah and Hamas have effectively been at war since 2006, and the bitterness is of such a degree that Israel thought it worth a shot that Fatah would offer tacit endorsement for what it was about to undertake.

Egypt’s regime is sometimes moved to rhetorical support for Palestinian nationalism. Yet it is just as much responsible for maintaining the blockade on Gaza as Israel. Funnily enough, this is something most Palestine solidarity campaigners choose for one reason or another not to highlight.

Even at the height of Operation Cast Lead, the Egyptians only sent medicine and medical supplies through the Rafah border, with all other humanitarian goods going through the Israeli crossing at Kerem Shalom.

Hamas is not the kind of movement for which anyone sane would want to cheerlead. But on account of the degree of support it enjoys among those who live in Gaza, it is indispensible to any just settlement of the Palestinian question.

Such a process is not facilitated by Israel’s murderous armed incursions into the Gaza Strip. Clearly Hamas will now be asking itself exactly who its friends in the region are. Its isolation, it seems, is pretty much absolute.

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Michael Oren even adds: ‘Israel acted in accord with international law. Any state has the right to protect itself, certainly from a terrorist threat such as Hamas, including on the open seas.’

As I have made clear in the two posts below, this murderous and despicable assault evidences precious little humanity or responsibility. Legality, then, can only be a secondary consideration. But for what it’s worth, let’s consider the point in further detail.

From what specialist lawyers tell me, there is an arguable basis for the action, although as with any legal opinion, other interpretations are possible. However, widespread comparisons to piracy are certainly wide of the mark, as navies by definition cannot commit this crime.

Media interviews have seen Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev cite what he called the San Marino Memorandum in justification. There is no such document.

What everyone assumes he is talking about is the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea. You can read it here.

Compiled in 1994, the San Remo Manual represents a contemporary restatement of international law applicable to armed conflicts at sea. It was written under the auspices of the International Institute of Humanitarian Law, which is a respected and long-established non-governmental organisation. But the document does not have the force of law itself.

Section 67 (a) provides: ‘Merchant vessels flying the flag of neutral states may not be attacked unless they are believed on reasonable grounds to be carrying contraband or breaching a blockade, and after prior warning they intentionally and clearly refuse to stop, or intentionally and clearly resist visit, search or capture.’

The conduct of Mavi Marmaris was such that the clause could be read as giving Israel’s move prima facie legitimacy. However, alternative interpretations are possible.

For instance, look at S.42(a), which further states: ‘It is forbidden to employ methods or means of warfare which are of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.’

In any case, the stipulations of the San Remo Manual may not be decisive. As I understand matters, it can only be invoked in the case of armed conflict between states, and Israel refuses to recognise either Palestine as a whole or Gaza separately as a state. The attack will only be legal if the blockade itself is legal.

Piracy is defined by article 101 of part VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This states that piracy consists of ‘any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft’.

As naval ships are not private ships, nothing that they do constitutes piracy in the narrow legal meaning of the term, in any circumstances. But just because Israel has the right to do something, that does not mean that it should go ahead and do it.

As Israeli statesman Abba Eban once famously quipped. the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But Netanyahu’s mistake is precisely that he never misses an opportunity to conflate legitimate use of force with a brutal display of strength.

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Instead, it seems willfully to rejoice in exceeding those bounds, confusing deliberate resort to repression with display of strength as it props up its self image as the toughest kid on the Middle East block.

Whatever the death toll that arises from this morning’s attack on  a convoy of vessels bound for Gaza, the loss of life seems entirely without justification on the basis of the facts as they are known so far. That the bloodshed has state sanction only serves to render it morally more despicable.

What we have is another illustration of the doctrine of disproportionate response, seen otherwise in the Gaza incursions of 2008-09 or the assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhouh in Dubai earlier this year.

Israel’s frankest defenders freely acknowledge that this policy is not in the country’s long-term best interests. It is disastrous for its standing among liberal opinion in the west, and only reinforces the hatred and hostility to which it is subject across the Middle East and wider Muslim world.

The approach of the Israeli government conclusively shows that it has no desire to reach accommodation with Hamas on any reasonable basis. It’s apologists will pause here to ask whether it should come to an accommodation with Hamas; pragmatism alone suggests the answer to the question can only be yes if Tel Aviv is serious about achieving any workable settlement to the Israel/Palestine problem.

Gratuitous misuse of violence as the foundation of Israeli statecraft inflames the suspicion that the Israeli political class has no intention of securing a two state solution, or indeed any solution whatsoever, and in reality prefers a murderous status quo.

Nor do the routine pro forma condemnations that will inevitably issue from the mealy mouths of the quartet provide reassurance that the international community is genuine in its purported desire for a deal.

I’m neither under any illusions about the repugnant anti-semitism of Hamas, nor unaware of Israel’s contribution to its genesis. But I do know that the engrained obstructionism at any price currently instantiated by the Netanyahu administration acts as an absolute roadblock to the roadmap.

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It is difficult to interpret such intractable obstinacy as anything other than deliberate provocation, and not just in respect of the timing. As Netanyahu is well aware, substantial withdrawal is the sine qua non for the two-state policy increasingly pressed on his government by the rest of the world.

Yet his evident determination to scupper this outcome is so deep that he is willing quite literally to try and build his way out of his impasse. Not only can he not be allowed to succeed; he cannot succeed, even within his own terms.

Netanyahu’s hardline position puts him directly at odds with majority opinion in his own country. Most Israelis do not regard preservation of settlements in Palestinian territory as a fundamental objective of the state, and do not believe that the interests of settlers take priority over those of the population in general.

Still the administration pushes on with colonisation, either oblivious to – or more likely perfectly conscious of – the consequences. But in either eventuality, it is equally culpable. Yet in the long run, the economic, demographic, diplomatic and political realities that will ultimately culminate in the establishment of a Palestinian state render the practice unsustainable.

The argument is sometimes advanced that any Israeli government calling for the abandonment of even a single settlement would run the risk of civil war. It is indeed the case that some isolated communities are home to potentially terrorist elements inspired by the ideas of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

But these groups lack sufficient wider support to mobilise mass backing for any resistance to an order to withdraw. There is also the precedent of Yamit, an Israeli-built town in northeast Sinai, which was evacuated in 1982 under the terms of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty.

Ultimately the settlements are an obstacle in the way of a settlement, and that is why the construction work – tellingly, employing mostly Palestinian labour – is being stepped up. But they are not enough of an obstacle to do anything more than delay the inevitable cave in to reality.

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For those that are interested, I spent an hour and a half with Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust in a local cafe on Thursday morning, during which he probed me on my memories of student politics a quarter of a century ago. I though his questions were fair, and I hope he got something from my responses.

Dave tells me that he is writing up his research for a chapter in an academic book on anti-semitism, whichI think he said is due for publication later this year. I look forward to reading it, even though I reserve the right not to agree with his probably conclusions.

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Rich informed me that the CST is currently researching the campaign conducted 25 years ago - with the involvement of at least some Socialist Worker Student Society branches – to get campus Jewish societies disbanded, on the grounds that they were ‘racist’. Such a stance is in obvious contrast to SWSS’s overtly friendly attitude towards comparable Islamist-dominated Muslim student groupings over the last period.

He added, quite correctly, that I had spoken in support of a resolution to scrap the JSoc at a meeting of City of London Polytechnic students’ union in 1985. Yep, that long-haired skinny Trot kid on the platform was me. What’s more, Rich requested a meeting to talk about this episode.

Now, I am aware that the CST is held in some suspicion by many on the Jewish left, who dismiss it on grounds of its self-appointed nature. I am also bewildered that anybody has kept records of such minutiae, decades after the event.

But throughout my journalistic career, I have often written articles contrasting the actions of present-day politicians with what they said and did as college radicals. Therefore logical consistency dictates that the I should apply the standards I apply to others to myself.

So I will be getting together with Rich at some point in the week ahead. I have his assurance that the object of the exercise is not to paint me as some kind of swivel-eyed anti-semite.

In brief, I was in 1985 a member of both the Socialist Workers’ Party and City Poly SWSS, and as such, had no qualms about arguing for SWP politics. Nor can I claim to have been an ingenue; I was a young man of 24, overly booked up on Marxist theory, and well aware of what I was doing. But I was too far down the food chain to know whether hostility towards the JSoc flowed from a national or a purely local inititive.

My attitude had very much been shaped by the war in Lebanon three years earlier, especially the Sabra and Shatila massacre. So I saw things in black and white.

Zionism, I then believed, was a form of racism. Self-evidently, no student union should permit a racist student group to function under its auspices. Ipso facto, City Poly JSoc had to go.

This is not a position I now hold. I am, of course, still critical of the state of Israel from a leftwing socialist perspective, and remain convinced that a democratic secular state is the only basis on which lasting peace is possible in the Middle East.

But I have had the benefit of the intervening years to think things through. In particular, I have read Theodor Herzl’s ‘The Jewish State’, the founding manifesto of Zionism. Clearly it is a nationalist work, and I excoriate nationalism in 2010 as I did in 1985. However – and crucially, in this context – ‘The Jewish State’ is equally clearly not a book premised on racism or Jewish supremacism.

Although it would be wrong to call Zionism a racist doctrine per se,  that adjective may fairly be applied to some components of the current political leadership of Israel, who define themselves primarily as Zionists. On top of that, the establishment of the state of Israel represents, in historic terms, an injustice against the Palestinian people.

Just to complicate this picture, the borderline between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism is sometimes illegitimately crossed by sections of the far left. But by the same token, supporters of Israel frequently conflate the terms for base polemical advantage. While I now consider my support for the JSoc ban a gross mistake, I remain on balance an anti-Zionist.

In short, I guess I am not expecting a meeting of minds when I do get together with Mr Rich. I naturally hope we can have a reasoned exchange of views. But some differences, as they say, are too important to split.

UPDATE: I have slightly amended the original text of the post in the light of comments below from johng, who insists that the SWP did not co-ordinate a national attack against JSocs. He is evidently better placed to comment on this than I am. But the line taken by City Poly SWSS is beyond dispute.

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Decisions by the National Union of Journalists and the University and College Union to boycott Israel have generated media coverage worldwide. Unison will shortly vote on the issue too.

David Cameron is in no doubt who the prime movers are, according to the Jerusalem Post. Speaking at a recent Conservative Friends of Israel meeting, the Tory leader declared himself ‘a Zionist’ and went on:

“Israel is a democratic country and these Trotskyists are treating Israel as some sort of pariah state,” Cameron said. “[They] may be a bunch of lunatics, but what they are doing is profoundly wrong and profoundly damaging,” he added.

Not all Trotskyists agree with the SWP-defined far left orthodoxy, of course. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty have long singled themselves out in this respect. And there’s an interesting article on the Socialist Party website, arguing that the boycott call is tactically wrong-headed.

Nevertheless, if I had been a delegate to the NUJ conference – which I have been on around half a dozen occasions in 19 years of membership – I’m not sure how I would have voted.

In general, my ethical position is that labour movement organisations, or any vertebrate self-respecting liberal come to that, should put whatever moral pressure they can on repressive regimes. And Israel is certainly that. Justification for backing the motion, then?

But it is scarcely uniquely repressive. It is not qualitatively worse than Saudi Arabia, Burma, Sudan or Zimbabwe, to mention some obvious examples. Certain of these countries are hailed in some quarters of the British left as anti-imperialist. For the sake of consistency alone, support for a boycott of one should entail support for a boycott of all of them.

Just by way of trying to think this one through, I’ve asked myself a few questions. First, does Zionism really ‘equal racism’ or even apartheid? No. I have read Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. None of the content struck me as an apologetic for racial supremacy.

Second, is Israel ‘a client state of US imperialism’? Again, there is no doubt that it pursues a policy of alliance with the US as a tactical expedient, precisely because it regards this as the best means of ensuring its survival. But it is not the only US ally in the Middle East. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are favoured by Washington too..

Third, is Israel ‘a settler state’? There are arguments that post-1948 Israel can be so described. But the intended parallel with South Africa falls down, not least because there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine for thousands of years.

Finally, what should socialists say? Throughout the long period that I considered myself a Trotskyist, I had a ready-made answer to that one off pat: socialist revolution in the Middle East would be led by the Arab working class, which would liberate Palestine and bring about a socialist republic with full rights for Jews and all national minorities. I even used to get up in meetings and argue that kind of stuff.

But it’s not much of a perspective to cling to at a time when the domination of ruling classes best described as theocratic, kleptocratic or both seems unshakeable throughout the Middle East, while Palestine itself descends into de facto civil war, and even Hamas fears losing its grip on the streets to forces even further on the Islamist scale.

Can anybody offer a guide for the perplexed?

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