There are few accusations more loaded than that of “antisemitism”, and the taint weighs heavily in Australia. The resurgence of violence towards Jews around the world has heightened the sensitivities of Australia’s Jewish community to hostile words and actions against Jews and Israel, home to the world’s largest Jewish population.
Israel is a Jewish homeland, a projection of Jewish hopes and aspirations, and a vibrant rebuttal of the Nazi genocide. So when the Israeli government is criticised over its treatment of Palestinians, many Jews receive the criticism as an attack on them.
They also feel a sense of unfairness in this criticism, claiming biases such as over-reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict compared to others, coverage oversimplified into aggressor versus victim, a lack of interest in transgressions on the Palestinian side, and the selective outrage of advocacy and human rights groups and supra-national global bodies. Where are the calls, they say, to boycott China over the Uyghurs, Myanmar over the Rohingya, Qatar over its foreign workers, Saudi Arabia over its repression of dissidents?
In short, there is a grievance that Israel has been singled out unfairly in a world full of messy injustice.
While there is truth to this, there remains the inescapable fact that Israel has held Palestinians and their land under occupation for more than 50 years, and that successive governments continue to facilitate Jewish settlements and enact laws that reduce the Arabic language and Palestinian history to second class status. Its critics rightly argue the Israeli government should be held accountable for its policies and decisions.
This tension has fuelled debate over what constitutes antisemitism. In particular, when and if criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism, how can you tell if it has or hasn’t, and how can it be negotiated in public discourse without descending into kneejerk responses and self-censorship.
The Australian government’s decision last week to commit to adoption of the working definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) brought the issue into focus again.
The IHRA definition, first formulated in 2016, has now been adopted by the governments of more than 32 countries, including the US, UK, France, Germany and Canada.
The Australian Jewish community’s leaders played an active role in the conversation to define hatred towards their community, and have broadly welcomed the government’s decision, although one advocacy group was notably critical of IHRA and has since been attacked as expressing some sort of betrayal, which underscores the ferocity of polarisation around the subject.
The IHRA definition has become controversial over the past 12 months following a wave of criticism by academics and advocates that it contains ambiguities and omissions that would allow some people to misuse it to suppress criticism of Israel.
The IHRA definition contains 11 examples of antisemitism, seven of which relate specifically to rhetoric against Israel. They include: denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour, comparing Israel’s policies to the Nazis, and “applying double standards to [Israel] by expecting of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”.
However, the critics of IHRA say it does not explicitly address the issue of whether criticism of Israel amounts to antisemitism. That omission, they contend, leaves the door open for a conflation that can suppress legitimate debate about Israel. In turn, they claim, this could have a chilling effect on free speech, public policy, academic courses, guest speakers, and more.
In response, during the past year more than 300 scholars of antisemitism, the Holocaust and Middle East have drafted an alternative definition, titled The Jerusalem Declaration (JDA), whose key point of difference with the IHRA definition is that it explicitly addresses antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the opposition to Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel.
“The JDA says anti-Zionism is not antisemitic, whereas the IHRA doesn’t refer to it and by doing so gives the impression that it is,” one of its signatories, Prof Dov Waxman, from the University of California, said in a panel discussion hosted by Plus61J Media recently (but planned long before the government’s announcement).
There is even a third definition, the Nexus Document, drafted this year, which focuses on the nexus between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.
To the outsider, this level of argument may seem at best academic, at worst a distraction from actually addressing hostility and violence towards Jews. But these distinctions over what you can and can’t say about Israel have turned campuses into battlegrounds, polarised cultural and sporting events, fractured friendships and split families.
Is the IHRA definition too broad? Does it need amending or buttressing with additional documents? It is too soon to tell whether the concerns of those who drafted the other definitions will be borne out.
But reasoned discussion about Israel, outside the heat of a military flare-up, is all too rare. These additional frames, at the very least, provide a valuable tool in navigating debate about Israeli government policy within the Jewish and broader community.
They may seem like an irrelevant irritant for proponents of the IHRA definition, now that the Australian government has followed in the footsteps of others around the world (the ALP has also committed to it).
Yet the debate is by no means over. In the US, where the Biden administration enthusiastically embraced its predecessor’s adoption of IHRA, several House Democrats have circulated a letter urging secretary of state Antony Blinken to consider “multiple definitions” of antisemitism.
“We believe that the administration should, in addition to the IHRA definition, consider these two important documents (JDA and Nexus) as resources to help guide your thinking and actions,” the letter reads, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported earlier this year.
Whether this rearguard action has any impact on shifting the goalposts remains to be seen. In the meantime, advocates on all sides agree that the first priority is to combat the problem when they see it. As Jeremy Jones from the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council said at the above-mentioned panel discussion: “We can have a conversation about better and worse ways to fight antisemitism. But the main thing is fighting it.”