When teachers forced Damien Egan, a Jewish MP, to cancel a school visit, they added that it was outrageous to call them antisemites. When the Bristol branch of the National Education Union gloated that this was “a win for safeguarding [and] solidarity”, as if Jews are some kind of disease, it also insisted that it was not racist. It’s the same story whenever activists target Jews and Jewish businesses. We are merely “anti-Zionists”, they say.
Should we take them seriously? Or is the distinction between an antisemite and an anti-Zionist a distinction without a difference?
These questions are not just theoretical. Islamists are murdering Jews in the UK. Fighting antisemitism is a matter of life and death. A failure to confront it also leaves Muslims and white leftists prey to the conspiracy theories of tyrannical regimes and movements.
I happily accept that most people who call themselves “anti-Zionists” simply abhor the mass killings of civilians in Gaza. I share the concerns over Netanyahu and his crew and their attacks on freedom of the press and the independence of the judiciary at home.
It’s their prerogative to call themselves “anti-Zionists” but that is not what the label means – as the men who egg them on know all too well.
When Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and their British hangers-on say they support anti-Zionism they mean they support the destruction of Israel “from the river to the sea”.
I suppose it is just about possible to demand the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state – if such a thing could be done without killing or expelling Israeli Jews – and yet not be prejudiced against Jews. But you would need to work very hard to show your abhorrence of antisemitism.
Obviously, the Iranian regime and Islamists make no effort to conceal their prejudices. But supposedly “progressive” activists and politicians say that they are different. They beat their chests and the insist the accusation of Jew hatred is a “weaponised” slur designed to besmirch the good name of Israel’s critics.
You can tell if they are serious by looking at their anti-racism policies. Organisations cannot pretend to oppose antisemitism unless they define it. Without a definition they cannot discipline members for racist conduct.
If you cannot define it, you cannot oppose it.
Ominously, many want to shut down any attempt to limit Jew hate. They want a world without boundaries, where anything goes, and anti-Jewish racism can never be called by its real name.
Their first target is the widely used International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been circulating in various forms since the early 2000s. The global left denounces it because it says that the definition has been used to “wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic”.
Within a day of becoming mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani showed his political priorities by withdrawing the city’s endorsement of the definition.
The precise form of words the IHRA drafters used is that it is antisemitic “to deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.
You can argue about that. As I said above, people who want to abolish the world’s only Jewish state need to bend over backwards to prove that they don’t just hate Jews.
Good-hearted left-wing Jewish academics took the complaint seriously, and went out of their way to accommodate Palestinian and leftist concerns.
They produced the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism in 2021. It emphasised that it was not antisemitic “to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants between the river and the sea, whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state [or] federal state”.
All true opponents of racism need to do was oppose anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and race hatred.
A bare minimum you might say. But even this stripped down, permissive, definition of antisemitism is too much for many on the left to bear.
I hoped that the election of the Jewish Zack Polanski to the leadership of the Green Party would mark a break with the antisemitism that so disfigured the Corbyn movement,
Not if a faction among Green Party members has its way, it won’t.
A motion before the Green Party spring conference calls for the party “to reject the IHRA and JDA [Jerusalem Declaration] definitions which have been weaponised to silence legitimate criticism of the state of Israel”.
When the conference starts in March, we will see whether Polanski has the political courage to fight back, or whether he’s just another empty sloganeer.
Turn to the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, and it is the same story,
It too will not even accept the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism because it is “being used to reinforce the illegitimate policing of speech about Palestine and advocacy for Palestinian rights.”
You search its website in vain for examples of the Jerusalem Declaration silencing legitimate debate – and of course there are none. You search for any definition of antisemitism that would be acceptable to pro-Palestinian activists – and of course there isn’t one.
They have no formal means of condemning The Protocols of the Elders Zion, Mein Kampf or the Hamas Charter.
More pertinently from a modern left-wing point of view, they have no means of condemning Nick Fuentes and the antisemites flourishing in Donald Trump’s America.
The Maga movement is loathed by leftists. But at least some on the left would rather give the far right a free pass than accept the smallest restraint on the loathing of Jews.
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