Abstract
This presentation will situate recent efforts to redefine antisemitism within a
broader context of how false accusations of antisemitism have been deployed to
smear advocates for Palestinian rights. With the goal of silencing political debate
and criticism of Israel, opponents of the movement for Palestinian freedom have
attempted to brand all support for Palestinian rights as anti-Jewish. Roughly half
of the incidents of suppression Palestine Legal responds to each year include
false accusations of antisemitism, totaling 895 incidents from 2014 to 2020.
To add legitimacy to this tactic, Israel lobby groups and their allies have pushed
for the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a distorted definition that
encompasses virtually all criticism of Israel, through policy changes and
legislation. More recently, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) was
developed as a corrective to some of IHRA’s harms, rejecting the false
equivalence between antisemitism and anti-Zionism found in IHRA. Nonetheless,
the JDA reinforces the acceptability of policing how Palestinians can speak about
their oppression and continues to require criticism of Israel to be filtered through
the lens of antisemitism. In this way, both IHRA and the JDA impose boundaries
on the Palestinian narrative and the ability of Palestinians to tell their own story.
This presentation will address tactics and strategies for pushing back against
these efforts to silence speech in support of Palestinian rights.
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