“Criticism of Israel or Zionism is antisemitism”

No serious rebuttal begins by denying antisemitism: it is a murderous, centuries-old hatred, and conflating Jews worldwide with the actions of a state is itself a form of it. The documented controversy is narrower — whether criticism of Israel or Zionism, as such, belongs in the definition. The most authoritative witness is the man who drafted the text at the center of the dispute. Kenneth Stern, lead drafter of what became the IHRA “working definition of antisemitism,” wrote in 2019 that it “was created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude… It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code,” and warned that right-wing groups were “weaponizing” it to chill pro-Palestinian speech, with a chilling effect on academic freedom as the real goal.

The scholarly response was the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (March 2021), signed by more than four hundred scholars — including many of the world’s leading Holocaust and Jewish-studies academics (Omer Bartov, Debórah Dwork, Peter Schäfer, Michael Wildt and others). Its guidelines state that “evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state” — including its founding principles and its conduct — is not antisemitic; that “it is not antisemitic to point out systematic racial discrimination”; that “even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid”; and that supporting Palestinian rights, advocating a single equal state, or backing BDS “are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic.”

What remains antisemitic, on any definition, is holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct, demanding that Jews denounce Israel because they are Jews, or using classic anti-Jewish tropes against Israelis. The line the documentation supports is therefore not “criticism is antisemitism” but its opposite: antisemitism is hostility to Jews as Jews, while argument about a state’s actions, ideology and founding — however sharp — is politics, and silencing it by redefinition corrodes both free debate and the fight against genuine antisemitism.

Sources

• Kenneth Stern, “I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it” — The Guardian, 13 December 2019
• The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021) — full text and signatories
• The IHRA working definition of antisemitism (2016) — International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance