The question of how to best combat anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial has preoccupied Western scholars and politicians since at least the 1980s. The framing of Palestinians as anti-Semites because of their resistance against their displacement and expulsion is as old as Zionist settler colonialism. But in response to growing grassroots- and student support for the Palestinian call for boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning Israel (BDS), Israeli officials and other leading right-wing Zionists resuscitated a defunct 2005 EU ‘non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism’ and turned it into a document of intimidation and criminalization of Palestinian advocacy. Although Islamophobia and New Anti-semitism scholars have since warned about the vagueness of the definition and the pro- Israeli examples given in its annex, this new definition was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) which has set the global agenda as close to 30 countries and countless municipalities and universities have adopted this definition.
On the one hand, the Canadian Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs declared in 2018 (one year prior to Canada’s insertion of the definition in its Anti-Racism Strategy): “We are launching a national campaign to have government and police adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism [...] because it explicitly confirms that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” On the other hand, the Canadian NGO Independent Jewish Voices has claimed that lobby groups have “used the charge of antisemitism to attack a variety of groups supportive of Palestinian human rights, including (among others) the World Conference Against Racism, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, the Green Party of Canada, the Canadian Federation of Students, the British Labour Party, and the 2016 World Social Forum.”
The four years of the Trump Administration have undermined American democracy and Palestinian self-determination at the macro- and micro-levels. While 30 states today have legislation targeting advocacy for Palestinian rights, two have passed bills redefining Anti- semitism on the basis of IHRA. In the host city of this year’s MESA meeting, Montreal, there have been intense campaigns at the municipal and borough levels to adopt the partisan IHRA definition of Anti-semitism leading faculty associations and civil society organizations to adopt NoIHRA resolutions. In Germany cultural institutions and artists, academics and writers have published open letters protesting the German state’s persecution of people who support BDS following the cancellation of Prof. A. Mbembe’s award ceremony on account of his analogies between Israel and European colonialism. At University College London, England, an Academic Board recommendation was passed to replace the IHRA definition with something more “fit for purpose in the university setting.” Last week, international Holocaust scholars, German and Jewish historians have offered a substantial alternative definition in their Jerusalem Declaration which, in turn has received nuanced and constructive criticism from the BDS movement in Palestine. We also commend the MESA Board for issuing a powerful statement rejecting the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism just yesterday. Our special session is conceived as building a long-term infrastructure of engagement with this pressing issue.
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Dr. Dyala Hamzah
After a century of a compounded erasure – from rights, from narratives, from maps,
Palestinians’ claim to self-determination does not only continue to be fought on the
grounds militarily, economically, socially and politically, though incremental genocide,
occupation and apartheid by Israel. It is also being disputed on moral grounds, thanks to
a campaign by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance based on a definition
of antisemitism that equates the righting of Israel’s wrongs with being anti-Semitic.
From obliteration to obfuscation, the way in which Palestinian voices have managed to
get heard have varied of course from context to context. Every time though, activist,
community and political engagement with Palestine in Western public spheres have
tested the censoring power of press conglomerates as well as the self-censoring of
diverse well-meaning social actors. How have these two forces been playing out in
Québec, a Province-Country with a past and present separatist agenda, sitting in the
midst of a North-American federal polity that happens to be one of the World’s most
obdurate ally of Israel? One of two provinces in Canada to have decreed the adoption of
the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, Québec is also the seat of a provincial parliament
in which a Palestinian Canadian member of Québec’s Parliament is able to raise her fist
and declare ‘Long Live Palestine, Independent and Free’ (ta’ish Filastin al-hurra al-
mustaqilla). The paper takes a retrospective look at how diverse Québec actors, from
NGOs to community organizations to Trade Unions to Faculty associations and political
parties have expressed or been hindered in expressing solidarity with Palestine, since
the liberal government of Justin Trudeau assumed power in 2015. Within the broader
Canadian context, it assesses the extent to which the muting of Palestinian rights has
been affecting consequential action even within the Solidarity movement. It focuses on
supporters of the noIHRA campaign, initiated by Independent Jewish Voices and
transposed to Academia by the Alliance Against Antisemitism, Racism, Colonialism and
Censorship in Canada (ARC). It explores the consequences of epistemic violence and
ignorance on activism as well the possibilities of resistance to it in Québec/Canada.
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Meera Shah
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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Dr. Sarah Anne Minkin
The battles over definitions of antisemitism are taking place in many arenas:
among scholars debating the history and nature of Jew-hatred; in traditional and
social media; in classrooms, dorm rooms, and dinner tables across many
countries; and, perhaps most consequentially, as universities and governments
at the state and national levels make policy about what qualifies as hate speech,
where the IHRA definition dominates.
These battles over definitions manifest in multiple ways. While antisemitism – the
hatred of Jews as Jews – is a real phenomenon with a long history, advocacy for
Palestinian rights and expressions of Palestinian identity are often labeled as
antisemitism by defenders of the state of Israel. The IHRA examples provide a
basis for declaring anti-Zionism as antisemitic. Additionally, some voices are
more scrutinized than others: on campuses, in the media, and in Congress, it is
Muslim, Arab, and/or African American critics of Israel, and especially
Palestinians, who are more likely to face accusations of antisemitism from their
peers and opponents.
These debates demonstrate the clash between what is considered political and
what is considered non-political identity, and by whom. Conventional
understandings hold that what is “political” is oriented towards wielding power
and access to resources while what is “identity” includes values, heritage, and
culture outside of political struggles. Many Jewish leaders insist that Jewish and
Zionist identities are indivisible, and dominant Jewish organizations, including
those that work on campuses, claim that their work is about identity and values
and non-political, despite their overt engagement with and advocacy for the state
of Israel. These claims flatten Jewish identity and undermine Jewish critics of
Israel. And for Palestinians, expressions of identity are inextricably linked with
advocacy for the right to exist and are consistently read as political - and can be,
and often are, condemned as antisemitism under the IHRA. This presentation will
look at competing definitions of antisemitism and their relationships to collective
identity, political advocacy, and power.
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Dr. Seth Anziska
In the midst of an ongoing debate over the adoption of group specific definitions of racism and
prejudice in UK universities, scholars of Palestine, Israel, and related fields find themselves
implicated in a politicized discourse about contemporary antisemitism that has narrowed the
space for robust and open discussion over history and lived reality in the Middle East. Drawing
on recent experience at UCL, where the Academic Board has studied the IHRA definition and
voted to replace it with an alternative more fit for purpose in a university setting, as well as the
drafting and release of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), I will explore the
challenges and opportunities for cross-communal solidarity and mutual understanding of the
lived experience of discrimination that have emerged from a protracted battle over definitions.
At the same time, I will explore what has been lost in this argument: how have the contours of
contemporary definitions been shaped by a problematic linkage between antisemitism and the
struggle for Palestinian rights? What might this imply about the uncoupling of national ideology
and Jewish identity in the 21 st century? How might Palestine serve as both a rupture and means
of repair?
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Anna-Esther Younes
After a century of a compounded erasure – from rights, from narratives, from maps,
Palestinians’ claim to self-determination does not only continue to be fought on the
grounds militarily, economically, socially and politically, though incremental genocide,
occupation and apartheid by Israel. It is also being disputed on moral grounds, thanks to
a campaign by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance based on a definition
of antisemitism that equates the righting of Israel’s wrongs with being anti-Semitic.
From obliteration to obfuscation, the way in which Palestinian voices have managed to
get heard have varied of course from context to context. Every time though, activist,
community and political engagement with Palestine in Western public spheres have
tested the censoring power of press conglomerates as well as the self-censoring of
diverse well-meaning social actors. How have these two forces been playing out in
Québec, a Province-Country with a past and present separatist agenda, sitting in the
midst of a North-American federal polity that happens to be one of the World’s most
obdurate ally of Israel? One of two provinces in Canada to have decreed the adoption of
the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, Québec is also the seat of a provincial parliament
in which a Palestinian Canadian member of Québec’s Parliament is able to raise her fist
and declare ‘Long Live Palestine, Independent and Free’ (ta’ish Filastin al-hurra al-
mustaqilla). The paper takes a retrospective look at how diverse Québec actors, from
NGOs to community organizations to Trade Unions to Faculty associations and political
parties have expressed or been hindered in expressing solidarity with Palestine, since
the liberal government of Justin Trudeau assumed power in 2015. Within the broader
Canadian context, it assesses the extent to which the muting of Palestinian rights has
been affecting consequential action even within the Solidarity movement. It focuses on
supporters of the noIHRA campaign, initiated by Independent Jewish Voices and
transposed to Academia by the Alliance Against Antisemitism, Racism, Colonialism and
Censorship in Canada (ARC). It explores the consequences of epistemic violence and
ignorance on activism as well the possibilities of resistance to it in Québec/Canada.
