The Nation
May 23, 2024
Members of UCLA’s Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism describe the deep roots of the violence against those who support Palestinian rights.
Pundits and politicians have been transfixed by what is supposedly a crisis of antisemitism on university campuses. This crisis is the carefully engineered climax of a long-standing project to conflate criticism of the Israeli state with racism against Jewish people; its aim is to discredit critics of Israel and, if possible, banish them from campuses across the United States. That’s no exaggeration: This could easily happen with House Resolution 894, which just passed the US House of Representatives by a wide margin, and would impose the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of the term antisemitism—a definition that has been disavowed even by one of its authors.
Among other problems, the forcible adoption of the IHRA definition would make it much more difficult to combat genuine antisemitism, because actual expressions of prejudice would be impossible to disaggregate from, say, protests against Israeli apartheid—which constitute “antisemitism” in the data compiled by the Anti-Discrimination League (ADL), which, not coincidentally, has been reporting a “spike” in antisemitism since October. Zionist groups have used the examples attached to the IHRA definition to render criticism of Israel as hate speech. If the IHRA definition becomes law, university students and faculty in US would likely be able to condemn every country—including their own—except for one.