MESA Banner
Chilling speech in support of Palestinian rights: Flawed Definitions and How to Push Back
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.
Discipline
Other
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
None