What’s really behind the IHRA redefinition of antisemitism?

by David L. Mandel

Andrew Lachman’s “The IHRA Definition Has Space to Criticize Israel” gets it wrong off the bat (published in the March 4, 2021 issue of The Jewish Journal). He writes that the group’s highly controversial redefinition of antisemitism “was adopted by President Obama’s State Department in 2010.” In fact, it was 2016 before the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (not “Association”) joined the business of redefining antisemitism to immunize Israel from serious human rights criticism.

The point is not mere “Gotcha” trivia. It goes to the heart of the matter, in which Israel’s self-appointed intellectual bodyguards had to scramble after the first body to adopt a similar manifesto, in 2005, dropped it like a hot potato when its original lobbyists started misusing the strangely named “working definition.”

To say that the document “has space to criticize Israel” is a syllogism that ignores its origins and belies its weaponization. Of course, no “definition” on its own can prevent people of any viewpoint from expressing their opinions; “criticism of Israel” ranges across the entire political spectrum. But the words “non-binding” that appear in its title have not prevented the bullies from trying, in many instances and in many countries, to enforce the redefinition in civil and even criminal law.

A history of this sordid document can be found in a long piece by Anthony Lerman in Open Democracy, written in the throes of right-wing bullying of the UK Labour Party, for which the IHRA redefinition proved a useful club.

In short, a group representing mostly the American Jewish Committee, a significant player in the Israel lobby, prevailed upon the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), a relatively obscure agency with no enforcement power, to adopt a definition ostensibly meant to help it identify anti-Jewish bigotry along with other racist or sexist phenomena in Europe. EUMC was replaced in 2007 by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), which removed the document from its website in 2013, saying it “had never been viewed as a valid definition.”

By then, however, pro-Israel forces were widely and falsely touting the EUMC “working definition” as if it were EU policy. Correspondingly, it came under growing challenge for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, an attempt to concretize a decades-old trend to label growing opposition to post-1967 Israeli policy as “new antisemitism,” with the state replacing the traditional target, Jewish people.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department posted the redefinition on its website, albeit labeled a “fact sheet,” not a policy statement, though adherents regularly described it as such. But with few other governments, parties or institutions adopting it, clearly it needed a new home.

Enter IHRA.

Lerman quotes sources who witnessed its adoption (with minor changes) by the non-governmental outfit, suddenly self-appointed as the world’s arbiter of antisemitism. It had pivoted from a mostly research and education institute to one that is “not so international, not so exclusively focused on Holocaust remembrance and not at all above responding positively to political pressure. … AJC and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Los Angeles worked assiduously behind the scenes to get [it] institutionalised, with the express idea of using it as a vehicle to revive international promotion of the EUMC working definition.”

Attention is often rightly focused on seven of the document’s 11 “contemporary examples” that relate to Israel. Lachman mentions several and concedes that at least one, the alleged application of a double standard to Israel’s human rights violations, could be “subject to abuse and politicization.” But he fails to note the most egregious of all, “Claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” By that standard, the venerable Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, is antisemitic for concluding recently that “Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it: it is one regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid.”

Moreover, the Progressive Israel Network, a liberal pro-Israel coalition Lachman mentions, takes a much harder line than he lets on against virtually any use of the document: “We fear its adoption in law or policy at the state, federal and university level and in corporate governance has the potential to undermine core freedoms, and in some cases already has,” the network’s Jan. 12 letter to Biden warns.

Even Kenneth Stern, who drafted the original EUMC definition and examples, has written and testified to Congress that it was never intended to be a sweeping, all-purpose hate speech code and that its use as such by right-wing Jewish groups “is an attack on academic freedom and free speech.”

Finally, Lachman and others call the opening, 38-word definition in the document non-controversial. It may not constitute the threat to free speech the examples do, but upon closer reading, it is at best, sloppy and convoluted. Lerman calls it a “linguistic mess”:

If antisemitism is a “certain perception,” what is that perception? … This antisemitism “may be expressed as hatred towards Jews,” which means it also may not. So … how else might it be expressed? … “Rhetorical” seems to imply that it’s just for effect, for show, to make an impression. Surely it’s an inappropriate word. Then to say that antisemitism is “directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals,” you might as well just say “everyone,” but that doesn’t seem to tell us anything of any use at all.

A much more coherent definition has been suggested by Independent Jewish Voices, a Canadian group working to keep IHRA’s from being adopted there:

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.

Or we could simply go short and sweet with Merriam-Webster: Antisemitism is “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” It’s nothing if not clear.

So why is IHRA’s mess of a definition, accompanied by such tendentious examples, being put forth with such vigor by Lachman and the Israel lobby?

It’s not hard to perceive a clear political goal: part of the campaign to discredit, stigmatize and suppress significant criticism of Israel. And ironically, Lerman concludes, the campaign is actually dangerous for Jews at a time when real antisemitism is on the rise:

To warrant the charge [of antisemitism under IHRA], it is sufficient for someone to hold any view ranging from criticism of the policies of the current Israeli government to denial that Israel has the right to exist, without having to subscribe to any of the beliefs historians have traditionally regarded as constituting an anti-Semitic worldview. This is a fundamental redefinition of the term “anti-Semitism” for political purposes, one consequence of which is that if almost everything is antisemitic, then nothing is. The word is rendered useless.

— —

This was written as a rebuttal to an opinion column by Andrew Lachman that appeared in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal on March 4, 2021. The publication did not respond either to inquiries about submitting a rebuttal or to the submission itself.

David L. Mandel is a writer and attorney in Sacramento, a U.S.-Israeli dual citizen and longtime advocate for Palestinian human rights, currently, among other spaces, with Jewish Voice for Peace, and as an elected member of the Sacramento and California Democratic Party central committees.