Over
the past few years, a document that has come to be called the
‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)
Working
definition
of antisemitism’ has insinuated itself into many institutions.
Lobby groups have exerted themselves to have universities, states,
parties, unions, and countries adopt it and have enjoyed considerable
success. In
December 2019, US president Donald
Trump, for example, signed an executive order adopting it. And
just this
past October,
Prime
Minister Scott Morrison announced
that Australia, too, would jump on the bandwagon.
Based
on a misreading
of the 1999 Macpherson report in the 1993 murder of a Black teenager
in London,
Jewish communal organisations
claim
that they
alone are entitled to determine what is and is not antisemitic. They
have univocally embraced the IHRA ‘definition’, which they regard
as ‘the
gold standard’, and hasten to declare anyone declining to adopt
it antisemitic. When
the British Labour Party did
adopt
the
IHRA
‘definition’,
omitting some of the more controversial
examples, even that was evidence of antisemitism. When
Jeremy
Corbyn promptly
came to heel, however, his
compliance
alleviated none
of the
confected allegations of a crisis of antisemitism in the party or
accusations against Corbyn, himself.
Contrary
to the IHRA’s
own
Handbook
for the practical use of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism
(‘the Handbook’), which avers that the ‘“EUMC
Working Definition”...is in many ways similar to the IHRA Working
Definition’ (p.
21)
and the common
perception that the ‘working definition’ is
a recent development, ‘first
formulated in 2016’, the
IHRA
cribbed it verbatim, with one sentence moved, from a document drafted
at the behest of the European
Monitoring Centre
on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC)
in 2004-05,
and never adopted, for reasons that
should become obvious.
Defining
concepts for data collection
In
an article in the Guardian
in December 2019, Kenneth
Stern, lead
author of the original
EUMC
‘working
definition of antisemitism’ claims
‘It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code’ but was
drafted rather ‘so that European data collectors could know what to
include and exclude. That way antisemitism could be monitored better
over time and across borders.’
The
function of a definition of a concept for statistical purposes is not
just to describe it, which is all the Handbook claims, but to
demarcate its boundaries unequivocally. A real definition for data
collection purposes must be unambiguous. In particular, categories
must be mutually exclusive, and marginal or pathological cases dealt
with explicitly.
The
two sentences of the ‘definition’ itself are too
studiously vague to include or exclude anything rigorously.
As
former British judge Stephen
Sedley pointed out, it ‘fails the first test of any definition:
it is indefinite’. It
doesn’t even achieve the
descriptive adequacy it aspires to,
as
the IHRA implicitly acknowledge when they deploy a non-exhaustive
collection of ‘examples’ and a 48-page handbook to explain what
it’s supposed to mean.
The
full ‘definition’ reads,
“Antisemitism
is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred
toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism
are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their
property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious
facilities.”
A
striking feature of this
formulation is that it is
silent on discrimination and violence, although
it does countenance ‘physical manifestations’.
It
is not contentious to assert that non Jews may experience
antisemitism, but it is only antisemitism if they are mistaken for
Jews, which is where perception really becomes relevant in this
context. When
it comes to the attitudes that concern the IHRA, the ‘definition’
does
express an important insight, although it’s not clear that it’s
deliberate. What makes an attitude racist is not the nature of the
particular ‘perception’, but its application to an
undifferentiated, essentialised population.
As
many have noticed, one of the features of the IHRA document is that
the
status of the 11 controversial
examples, seven
of which pertain specifically to criticisms of Israel rather than of
Jews,
is obscure. Are
they intrinsic to the ‘definition’, or just ancillary? Are they
meant to clarify how the ‘certain perception’ is expressed, but
only ‘taking into account the overall context’, mind you, or do
they serve as indicators only when informed by hatred?
From
the tenor of much
of the discussion of the ‘definition’, and
all of its application, it’s clear that the
examples are
the definition. Since
the text of the ‘definition’
itself
provides
no
guide
whatsoever
to
identifying instances of antisemitism, this is understandable. The
IHRA’s Handbook
doesn’t even attempt to deploy the text
of the definition
in
illustrating antisemitism, but goes straight to the examples.
The
‘definition proper’, the examples, and the rest
But
there is more to the document presenting the ‘definition’ than
the two sentences of the ‘definition’
per se and the eleven examples whose
stated function is potentially to ‘serve as illustrations’ ‘to
guide IHRA in its work’. Leaving aside the introductory matter
about its adoption, there are two paragraphs introducing the
‘examples’ whose status is even more obscure.
‘Manifestations’,
it states, ‘might include the targeting of the state of Israel,
conceived as a Jewish collectivity.’ Antisemites do defend Israel
based on the erroneous conception that it is ‘a Jewish
collectivity’. ‘However’, the IHRA go on to clarify, ‘criticism
of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be
regarded as antisemitic’. But Israel, as the self proclaimed State
of the Jewish People, and explicitly not of its citizens, is
unlike any other country, as I will discuss shortly.
In
the following two sentences,
Antisemitism
frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is
often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is
expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs
sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.
there
is a curious alternation between anthropomorphising antisemitism,
attributing to it the agency to charge Jews and to employ
stereotypes, and reducing it to the passive vehicle ‘used to blame
Jews’ and ‘expressed in speech’, etc.
It
is alarming that the first acknowledgement that antisemitism even
exists in ‘action’
outside the realms of speech
and ‘perception’ – that there are potentially
concrete actions that might
be of concern – is as an
aside wedged
among various media of expression.
The
second paragraph introducing the examples enumerates a variety of
social contexts where the examples could occur, oddly excluding some
of the more obvious loci, including sport, the military, politics,
and law enforcement.
Contemporary
examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the
workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the
overall context, include, but are not limited to:
It
goes on to hedge the utility of the examples. Antisemitic utterances
– the only entities of concern to the IHRA - ‘could...include’
the eleven examples, but presumably might not, and there are others,
because there is explicitly no limit on the number of unmentioned
forms of antisemitic expression. This is apparent when superficially
innocuous and unexceptionable observations, like ‘Campaign
contributions can influence legislators’, are excoriated as
unambiguous antisemitic dog whistles.
Antony
Lerman, who
has been articulating cogent observations of the ‘Working
definition’ since it first appeared, has
pointed out the
glaring omission of
‘“support
for the existence of the state of Israel”, since there have always
been antisemitic advocates of Zionism’.
It
is doubtless prudent to take
the overall context into account, as
that could theoretically avoid attributing antisemitic motives where
it is otherwise clear than none exists. But
it is not sufficient simply to make that assertion. If the definition
were really intended to serve as a guide for data collection, it
would specify
contexts. In
practice, however, those
applying the ‘Working definition’ and those advocating its
application systematically
ignore context and always
regard enunciating any of the views that ‘could’ be antisemitic
as conclusive evidence. The actual function of the ‘context’
hedge is to exonerate the
likes of Ronald
S. Lauder,
President of the World Jewish Congress, who
remarked in 2016, ‘We
have influence; we have great power, we have tremendous resources…’
in
apparent contravention of the second example, ‘Making mendacious,
dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as
such or the power of Jews as collective...’.
Turning
to some of the examples themselves, a
general criticism is that all eleven examples deal explicitly with
forms
of expression, some of which are genuinely atrocious. The
fourth example, for instance, reads
Denying
the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of
the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist
Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the
Holocaust).
Of
course Holocaust denial is abominable, and stupid, and may even
sometimes be motivated by antisemitic sentiments, but
those
who are serious about the right to freedom of expression would want
such forms of atrocious speech protected.
The
very first example is
indicative of the IHRA approach,
Calling
for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name
of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
Alarmingly,
actual
killing or harming Jews isn’t
the concern.
It’s only antisemitism in the IHRA
view to call for, aid, or justify such harms, and then only when done
with the specified motivations, although
the Handbook,
departing from the text, creditably recognises that it is also
‘antisemitic
to inflict bodily harm on Jews’ (p.
11).
Another
purportedly antisemitic form of utterance comprises,
Denying
the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by
claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist
endeavor.
It
is all very well to demand the right of self determination for Jews
in Palestine, even if it does beg the question of whether the Jewish
people are a people of the kind that enjoys the right to
self-determination. But that right is not exclusive of other human
rights. To deploy the right of self determination to establish an
ethnically exclusive state that deprives the indigenous population of
their rights, including, significantly, the right to self
determination itself, is an exercise in the crudest cynicism.
Beyond
this, it is obscure how a claim that Israel is racist denies the
right to self-determination. In any case, it
is surely
plausible to argue that
it
was ‘a racist endeavor’ to establish the Jewish majority it
required through the permanent expulsion of at least 750,000
indigenous people simply because they were of the wrong ethnicity.
Surely
it is understandable to perceive the application of
one
set of laws to Jewish settlers and another to the Palestinian
inhabitants of the surrounding area as an expression not just of
racist attitudes, but of systematic,
institutionalised racism. As
Human
Rights Watch and
the
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem
reported
in 2021,
Israeli policies both in the West Bank and in ‘Israel proper’
comfortably meet the definition of the crime of apartheid.
The
Anti-Defamation
League itself, a US Zionist organisation, does not resile from
describing ‘The Great Replacement’ – the fear that non-white
people are gradually replacing Whites – as racist. So
is it really outlandish to describe ‘The
demographic
threat’
- the Israeli fear that Arabs will eventually outnumber Jews – in
the same terms?
By
citing this as an example, the IHRA demonstrates
its true aim
is to
muzzle expression of factual
statements about Israel.
The
IHRA also deplores,
Applying
double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected
or demanded of any other democratic nation.
In
2018,
the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, enacted a new Basic
Law, which is a surrogate for a constitution, enunciating that,
‘The
State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People, in which it
realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to
self-determination. The exercise of the right to national
self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish
People.’
In
2019, Benjamin Netanyahu clarified
that this
means
‘Israel
is not
a state of all its citizens...’
[my
emphasis] This raises several questions: If it is not the state of
all its citizens, is it correct to characterise Israel as a
‘democratic nation’ at all? If so, is it antisemitic to require
a behavior that
is expected
of democratic nations – to represent all their citizens? If Israel
is the state of the Jewish people, don’t the elementary principles
of democracy require it to enfranchise every Jew of voting age?
The
last example is,
Holding
Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
When
social justice organisations decide to support Palestinian freedom by
embracing their call to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel,
those who support The Jewish State may feel
uneasy, offended, even threatened. Such feelings can only arise when
they strongly identify with the Jewish state and feel personally
responsible for its actions and safety. If
Jewish
‘progressives’ pack up their principles and flee antiracist
movements
on that basis, aren’t
they ‘holding
Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’?
When
the Executive Council of Australian Jewry claims ‘To
represent and speak officially on behalf of Australian Jewry’ and
‘To
support and strengthen the connection of Australian Jewry with the
State of Israel’, are
they doing anything different? When in 2015, Benjamin
Netanyahu said, ‘I
went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a
representative of the entire Jewish people’, wasn’t
he holding
us all responsible for his actions? Indeed, when the IHRA identifies
it as ‘a certain perception of Jews’ to make the unexceptionable
observation that Zionism
is racist, aren’t they, themselves holding all Jews responsible?
But of course, ‘taking into account the overall context’ provides
the Zionist antisemites with a get out of jail free card.
As
Joel
Beinin put it in 2016,
Paradoxically,
those who insist that there is no distinction between anti-Zionism
and anti-Semitism actually promote anti-Semitism. If there is no
distinction between Zionism and Jewishness, and the prime minister of
Israel claims to speak as “a representative of the entire Jewish
people,” then ignorant or malicious people have a free pass to
consider all Jews responsible for Israel’s crimes against the
Palestinian people.
Finally,
three additional paragraphs follow the examples per
se.
The first two mention the relation between ‘antisemitic acts’ and
criminal law, ominously
inviting
application of the ‘definition’ in identifying crimes and meting
out penalties.
The
very last paragraph defines
antisemitic
discrimination as
‘the denial to Jews of opportunities or services available to
others’.
Because
instances of
discrimination against Jews in employment, housing, education, etc.
are
perishingly
rare, it’s
not surprising that the IHRA relegates it to an afterthought.
The
Anti-Defamation League (ADL),
which
‘supports
the use of the IHRA Definition',
explicitly excludes ‘Instances of discrimination’ from its Annual
audit (p.
30).
One
of the reasons so many allegations
of
‘antisemitic incidents’ are
reported on
university campuses is that discrimination against Jews in either
admission or employment has been virtually unheard of for a very long
time.
Many
of the ‘antisemitic incidents’ that
outfits
like the ADL do include take the form of pro Palestinian activists
articulating such unexceptionable views as ‘Zionism is
unquestionably a racist, sectarian, exclusionary, Jewish-supremacist
political ideology’. A
couple of the 2020 incidents were graffiti reading ‘Free Palestine’
(p. 28). Such
collections restrict reports
of incidents
potentially causing concrete harm to Jews to
assaults.
In 2020, the ADL reported a total of 31 such incidents in the US, or
roughly one assault per 183,000
Jews. Only
five of the assaults involved a weapon, and there were no fatalities
or reported injuries. Similarly, the Executive Council of Australian
Jewry’s 2020 Report
on Antisemitism in Australia,
which
also explicitly excludes
cases
of discrimination (p. 8), reports
eight incidents of assault, or one per 15,350 Jews, none involving
weapons (other than eggs), with no reported
fatalities
or injuries.
All
things considered, it’s
hard to construe Kenneth
Stern’s protestations as
anything other than disingenuous. The two sentences of the
‘definition’ per se
are utterly otiose and the eleven examples and ancillary text can
only
function as brakes on freedom of expression. If
Stern imagined that he had produced a reliable method for identifying
instances of antisemitism, he was ignorant of the relevant principles
of definition. If he truly believed that his ‘working definition’
would not be ‘weaponised’ to chill academic and other expression,
he was wilfully, culpably naive.
Responses
to the IHRA ‘definition’
The
widespread and growing adoption and ‘weaponisation’ of the IHRA
‘Working
definition of antisemitism’
has understandably provoked alternative
attempts
at definition.
The
Jerusalem Declaration (JDA),
published in March 2021, is the work of over 200 ‘scholars working
in Antisemitism Studies and related fields, including Jewish,
Holocaust, Israel, Palestine, and Middle East Studies’. It
explicitly aims to replace the IHRA definition and is admirably
succinct.
Antisemitism
is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as
Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).
There
is much to like about the JDA’s attempt and accompanying
guidelines, particularly that it gives
pride of place to discrimination. Tom
Suarez’s
cogent critique described the text of the definition itself as
‘concise, coherent, unabridged’, while the Palestinian
BDS National Committee
called it ‘a coherent and accurate definition of antisemitism’.
In reality, the JDA shares some of the drawbacks of the IHRA.
Significantly,
none of the scholars appears to claim expertise in defining concepts
for the stated purposes, which goes some way towards explaining
these. One of the issues that confronts those tackling antisemitism
is the lexical, conceptual, and historical confusion between Judaism,
the religion, and Jewish ethnicity. That the ethnicity ultimately
derives from participation in the religious community, if not in the
here and now, then in a prior generation, amplifies this. The
religious oppression Jews have experienced in the Christian world
goes back much further than contemporary racism. Although Wilhelm
Marr coined the term antisemitism
in 1879 specifically to differentiate the ‘scientific’ racist
form of anti Jewish discrimination from traditional religious
discrimination, few recognise the distinction anymore. Evidencing the
confusion is that most violent attacks on Jews select identifiably
religious targets - either synagogues or the most visibly observant
Hasidim.
The
undated Nexus
Document offers
this definition,
Antisemitism
consists of anti-Jewish beliefs, attitudes, actions or systemic
conditions. It includes negative beliefs and feelings about Jews,
hostile behavior directed against Jews (because they are Jews), and
conditions that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede
their ability to participate as equals in political, religious,
cultural, economic, or social life.
As
an embodiment of collective Jewish organization and action, Israel
can be a target of antisemitism and antisemitic behavior. Thus, it is
important for Jews and their allies to understand what is and what is
not antisemitic in relation to Israel.
While
wordier than it needs to be, this again recognises the centrality of
discrimination.
Independent
Jewish Voices – Canada proposes,
Antisemitism
is racism, hostility, prejudice, vilification, discrimination or
violence, including hate crimes, directed against Jews, as
individuals, groups or as a collective – because they are Jews. Its
expression includes attributing to Jews, as a group, characteristics
or behaviours that are perceived as dangerous, harmful, frightening
or threatening to non-Jews.
Locating
antisemitism in the context of racism is particularly welcome, as is
the recognition of the centrality of violence and discrimination.
Stephen
Sedley begins his
article on the IHRA with the
terse, ‘anti-Semitism
is hostility towards Jews as Jews’.
While
these definitions are not as meticulously cryptic as the IHRA
‘working definition’, they share the descriptive approach and
consequently fail to delineate the concept with enough specificity to
identify incidents without recourse to prolix ancillary explanation.
Definition
issues
The
first problem with these definitions is conflating concrete
manifestations of antisemitism with prejudice and hostility. If the
objective is to facilitate identification of incidents, this is a
liability. One of the reasons all the definitions fail to accomplish
this is that they are trying to define the wrong concept. As
mentioned, antisemitism is complex and elusive. What they need
to be able to identify reliably is actually an antisemitic
incident. Attempting to define antisemitism exclusively or
partially in terms of mental constructs like perception and emotion
obscures the concrete harms that are fundamental to understanding any
form of racism.
One
thing that the IHRA manages, albeit clumsily and without the required
precision, and that these four omit, is to acknowledge that non Jews
can also be the victims of antisemitism when they are mistaken for
Jews, although the JDA does acknowledge it in an FAQ.
Like
the IHRA, these definitions
decline either to define Jew
or to reference such a definition, although an FAQ accompanying the
JDA does attempt to specify
the scope of the term.
In
my analysis, like the JDA’s and
IJV-C’s,
antisemitism is a form of racism. Since races are social constructs
identified by their oppressors, it is the racists who are best placed
to offer definitions. Accordingly, it is instructive to consult the
Nazis’ notorious Nuremberg
Laws
of 1935, which define a Jew in terms of descent from ‘grandparents
who were, racially, full Jews’, who ‘belonged
to the Jewish religious community’.
Third,
all the definitions insist that antisemitism
only exists where attitudes are negative or hostile. The definitions
that acknowledge discrimination are only concerned with
discrimination against
Jews.
The
Jerusalem Declaration points out in the first of its 15 guidelines,
‘It is racist to
essentialize (treat a character trait as inherent)’ and
I concur, whether or not the trait is negative. It is no less racist
to attribute characteristics regarded as positive to a racially
defined population, than those regarded as negative. It is just as
offensive and dangerous to believe all Jews are intelligent, or have
a good sense of humour, than it is to believe all Jews greedy or
insidious. Apart from anything else, it is demeaning. ‘It’s not
to her
credit that she’s
so funny. It’s just because she’s
a Jew!’ But more importantly, once an
identified population is essentialised, it is but a small step to
treating them differently from others. It’s
not the adjective that makes an attitude racist, but the quantifier.
It
is no coincidence that a proud antisemite like the notorious
alt-right white supremacist, Richard
Spencer could
opine in 2016,
Jews
are a coherent people with a history and a culture and a future. It’s
because you had a sense of yourselves. I respect that about you. I
want my people to have that same sense of themselves.
Similarly,
it is obviously antisemitic to refuse to employ anyone perceived to
be a Jew, or to rent them a flat, or to admit them to university. But
it is just as racist to refuse to employ, or rent to, or admit
anybody but
a Jew. In
the context of an affirmative action program aiming to redress
historical negative discrimination, we might be prepared to tolerate
this kind of racism, but it would still be essentially racist.
Zionism
is fundamentally racist
Finally,
and most importantly, the three definitions that respond directly to
the IHRA and aim to replace it are explicitly defensive about
criticisms of Israel and Zionism.
The
JDA seeks to clarify when criticism of (or hostility to) Israel or
Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism and when it does not. A
feature of the JDA in this connection is that (unlike the IHRA
Definition) it also specifies what is not, on the face of it,
antisemitic.
IJV-C
wants to make it clear
...that
the State of Israel is a political entity like any other state. Its
policies, actions and history can be judged and criticized, even
harshly. Such criticism is not, by itself, antisemitic.
And
the Nexus Document states,
As
a general rule, criticism of Zionism and Israel, opposition to
Israel’s policies, or nonviolent political action directed at the
State of Israel and/or its policies should not, as such, be
deemed antisemitic.
Even
contentious, strident, or harsh criticism of Israel for its policies
and actions, including those that led to the creation of Israel, is
not per se illegitimate or antisemitic.
Opposition
to Zionism and/or Israel does not necessarily reflect specific
anti-Jewish animus nor purposefully lead to antisemitic behaviors and
conditions. [my emphasis]
The
JDA in particular criticises the IHRA for ‘undue emphasis on one
arena’ by devoting 7 of the eleven examples to Israel, while 11 of
its 15 guidelines, an even higher proportion, relate to Israel. In
fact, the concern that negative portrayals of Israel ‘can be a
coded way of racializing and stigmatizing Jews’ and the care to
stipulate that criticisms are not antisemitic ‘in and of
themselves’, ends up identifying Jews with Israel in exactly the
same way as the IHRA, violating the guideline against ‘Holding Jews
collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct’ and thereby
manifesting an antisemitic trope.
Protestations
like these place principled objections to racism on the back foot. As
mentioned in relation to the IHRA example, the state of Israel
discriminates
against non Jews in the West Bank by literally applying a separate
legal code, in addition to
extrajudicial executions, home demolitions, other forms of collective
punishment, and a wide variety of other ways. Israel also
systematically discriminates against non Jewish citizens in housing,
employment, schooling, and
health
care, among
other things.
Israeli
and international
human rights organisations and experts
have conclusively demonstrated how Israel commits
the crime of apartheid, as defined in the Rome
Statute and the Apartheid
Convention. So
it is not contentious to describe Israel as racist, as an ethnocracy,
or as an apartheid state. It is simply a straightforward statement of
fact and there is no reason to be defensive about it.
Nor
is it a question of the extreme right wing colouration of recent
Israeli governments. No Israeli government since 1948 has addressed
any of this discrimination. Nor is it that the Jewish state has
departed from its founding principles. Zionism has been a racist
ideology from its inception.
It
is true, as some Zionists will aver, that there have been strands of
Zionist thought that imagined a more inclusive polity, but they were
never hegemonic, and more importantly, are utterly
defunct. Indeed, anyone espousing
such radical views as those of Judah
Magnes supporting a binational state with equal rights would
nowadays face
branding
as
an antisemite.
The
idea of ‘transfer’, or what is now known euphemistically as
‘ethnic cleansing’, is fundamental to Zionism. Theodore Herzl,
himself, wrote in 1895,
We
shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by
procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying
it any employment in our country.
Liberals
who are appalled at the thought of an exclusivist Christian, Hindu,
Buddhist, or white state, much less an Islamic state, somehow find
the Jewish state not just acceptable, but laudable. It’s
no surprise that white supremacist Richard
Spencer in 2016 reduced Rabbi Matt Rosenberg, promoting
‘a
message of radical inclusion and love’,
to a state of mute aporia simply by asking, ‘Do
you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel?’.
In
this connection, it is worth noting parenthetically that A. I.
Berndt, editor of the Zionist paper Jüdische
Rundschau,
welcomed
the
Nuremberg
Laws, writing,
Germany...is
meeting the demands of the International Zionist Congress when it
declares the Jews now living in Germany to be a national minority.
Once the Jews have been stamped a national minority it is again
possible to establish normal relations between the German Nation and
Jewry... (No.
75, September 17, 1935)
Liberal
Zionists who advocate partition
– ‘The
Two State Solution’ - on the basis that both Israeli Jews and
Palestinians are entitled to exercise the right to self-determination
are doing nothing more than endorsing establishment of one or more
Palestinian bantustans, and indeed, are parroting the very argument
adduced in apartheid South Africa in establishing the original
bantustans. Their motivation is transparently racist – the
only reason to divide the area of Mandatory Palestine is to sustain a
Jewish ethnocracy with a Jewish majority on the principle of hafrada,
Hebrew for ‘segregation’, or as they call it in Afrikaans,
apartheid.
As Ehud
Barak put it in 1998, ‘Us here. Them there...Leave them behind
the borders that will be agreed upon, and build Israel.’
To
accept a
Jewish
state implies embrace of an
undemocratic ethnoreligiously exclusive state based
on the racist conceit that Jews and non Jews are inherently
incompatible and can never join forces to combat racism. Moses Hess,
for example, wrote of the Germans’ ‘inborn racial antagonism to
the Jews’ (Rome & Jerusalem, 1862). In
his seminal 1896 work, Der
Judenstadt,
Theodor
Herzl, ‘the father of Zionism’,
asserted
that Jews carry ‘the seeds of Anti-Semitism’ ‘in
the course of their migrations…’ where
‘...our presence produces persecution’.
Tolerating
Israel in particular also entails endorsing settler colonialism, as
well as ethnic cleansing and terrorism as nation building strategies,
and permanent exile of absentees and expropriation of their property.
It
goes without saying that these principles are directly antithetical
to the kind that support class solidarity, or even bourgeois
liberalism. The alternative is to claim to reject these principles
except in the case of Israel and brand oneself a hypocrite.
That
is why there has never been a possibility of a just partition of
Palestine – it requires acceptance of abominable principles or
gross hypocrisy.
Most
of the Christian Zionists and neo Nazis who really are hostile
to Jews support Zionism and admire Israel. But even if antisemitic
animus ever motivated criticism of Israel, it would do no actual harm
beyond offending Zionists who, at least implicitly, do
‘hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions’.
‘Characterizing Israel as being part of a sinister world
conspiracy’, in the words of the Nexus Document, may actually
evidence such animus, but most of the examples definitions offer do
not help identify antisemitic motivation without further
interrogation of the alleged antisemite’s thinking.
When
the Anti-Defamation League shrieks about ‘a
105% increase’
in assaults, to 39, numbers too small to indicate a trend, and
magnifies offensive graffiti and unflattering tweets to the status of
violence, while ignoring
actual discrimination,
if it exists, they trivialise
antisemitism.
When they condemn criticism of Israel and Zionism as antisemitic,
they risk elevating antisemitism to a virtue. And when those who
define antisemitism
bend over backwards to allow interpretation of antizionist expression
as antisemitic, they contribute to enabling such dilutions. Indeed,
the whole point of these attempts to define antisemitism
is precisely to distinguish it from more virulent forms of racism and
amplify its significance. While the JDA creditably avers that ‘the
fight against it [antisemitism] is inseparable from the overall fight
against all forms of racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender
discrimination’, it is alarming that they have declined to cut to
the chase and define a
racist incident,
which is the real issue.
For
those who reject racism on principle, opposition to ethnocracy and
apartheid is not optional. It is counterproductive to offer apologies
or justifications for adopting a position based on human solidarity,
and definitions of antisemitism have to reflect that, if we need them
at all. It is those who are prepared to tolerate ethnocracy, whether
in general, or just in the case of Israel, who have much to answer
for. They are the ones who need to explain why they accept settler
colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism. They need to support
their assumption that gentiles are hardwired for antisemitism. They
need to justify trivialising antisemitism and show how their kneejerk
reaction to criticism of Israel is not ‘holding
Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct’.
And they need to understand that those who can do so are unwelcome in
antiracist movements.
