The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism: a critical view

A new 1,385 word effort to define antisemitism, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (henceforth JDA), has been published along with over 200 signatories. I’ve no doubt that many of the signatories, some people for whom I have unreserved respect, would use the document justly. But the document is written principally for everyone else, not for its signatories, and by that measurement, in my view, it fails.

Its authors explain that they composed the document in response to the shambles created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition that pro-Israel interests have pushed on institutions and governments, including the US State Department, and that governments have in turn forced on universities under the threat of funding cuts or other coercion.

In a JDA video interview, UMass Amherst professor Alon Confino explained that experts in various fields got together “with a sense of urgency and responsibilites” in response to “the current state” of the discussion on antisemitism, which is filled with “disunity, confusion, conflict, [and] even anger”. But the JDA does not necessarily claim to replace IHRA: As stated in the JDA Preamble, the document can be used “as a tool for interpreting” IHRA.

But no matter its authors’ best intentions, the JDA can, and thus will, be wielded in IHRA-esque fashion to muzzle honest debate, and — the very purpose of IHRA in the first place — to enable the Israeli state to continue its crimes by smearing critics. My fear is that we, collectively, who have been brutalized by the purveyors of IHRA, will rush to embrace JDA as its antidote; and when the document is used against us, it will be too late, as we’d already agreed to its irredeemably malleable parameters.

This failure was unnecessary. In stark contrast to IHRA, the JDA does in fact include a concise, coherent, unabridged definition of antisemitism:

Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).

This is not only an excellent definition of anti-Jewish bigotry; it is a complete template for any racism. Simply replace antisemitism and Jews with any other victim of racism.

But before one gets to this definition, it has already been compromised by the Preamble that precedes it, and then irreparably garbled by the Guidelines that follow it.

“Antisemitism is rising as we’re having this conversation,” moderator Stacy Burdett commented in the JDA video interview. “We can’t forget how complex antisemitism is; it’s a shape-shifter, it keeps changing…”.

It is precisely this endless mysticism over what-antisemitism-is that the JDA should have disavowed and put to rest.

One should ask, rather, why the definition of antisemitism is treated as forever elusive — a “shape-shifter” — or, more to the point, why racism against Jews, unlike any racism against any other group, requires its own dedicated definition at all. One wonders, indeed, why this quest is not denounced as Jewish “separateness” or “exceptionalism”, hallmarks of anti-Jewish bigotry.

Like IHRA, the JDA artificially entangles the question of anti-Jewish racism in context of a non-sequitur: the Israeli state and Palestine. And like IHRA, the JDA illogically puts the onus on anti-Zionism, an anti-racist movement, to demonstrate that it is not antisemitic, rather than holding Zionism, an ethnic-nationalist ideology, to account.

And like IHRA, JDA dictates how people are, and are not, permitted to discuss what the Declaration defines as the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” — conflict itself a pejorative word in that it denies the reality of a massive military occupier trapping an indigenous population with no means of defense.

Whereas IHRA exploits the word “Holocaust” in its title, the JDA is less egregious, using the word “Jerusalem”. Why Jerusalem, half of which Israel has militarily occupied since 1967, and the other half since 1948, in defiance of the agreements upon which the state was founded? The JDA’s explanation — that it was first convened in Jerusalem — only underscores the point.

Most problematic are the JDA’s “Guidelines”, which are the equivalent of the IHRA’s notorious “Examples”. Out of the JDA’s fifteen “Guidelines”, fully eleven involve Israel. They are divided into three categories: General; Israel and Palestine (said to be antisemitic); and Israel and Palestine (said not to be necessarily antisemitic).

One issue is called “hostility to Israel”. What does this have to do with a definition of antisemitism? The very juxtaposition presumes some intrinsic link between Jews, as Jews, and the apartheid state in the Middle East.

According to the JDA, “hostility” to this state might be “antisemitic animus” or “reaction to a human rights violation”. Yet true anti-Jewish bigots, the presumed subject of the definition, are far more likely to be pro-Israel and wholly supportive of its “human rights violations”; but nowhere does JDA put the onus on supporters of Israel to demonstrate that their support is not the result of antisemitism.

A third possible reason for “hostility to Israel” addresses the hostility specifically from the Palestinian vantage-point: Hostility to Israel “…could be the emotion that a Palestinian person feels on account of their experience at the hands of the State.” This, the sole appearance of the word “emotion” in the entire document, is applied exclusively to the direct victims of Israeli crimes, the very people who have the most fact-based, lived-experience for entirely rational “hostility” to the state. The effect is to deny Palestinians the dignity to simply demand to be free of their shackles.

If the word “emotion” is to be applied anywhere, it is to the squaring of the various cognitive disconnects inherent in the Israeli and Zionist narratives.

Another guideline addresses antisemitism hiding in “coded speech”: “Antisemitism can be direct or indirect, explicit or coded”, and “identifying coded speech is a matter of context and judgement”. Here again, Israel is invoked: “Grossly exaggerating its [Israel’s] actual influence can be a coded way of racializing and stigmatizing Jews.” Never mind who decides what is “grossly exaggerating”: The question of how much influence the Israeli state exerts beyond its still-undefined borders is irrelevant. All that matters is whether that alleged influence is said to be synonymous with “the Jews”.

JDA states that “evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state” is not, “on the face of it”, antisemitic. Glossing over the ripe-for-innuendo “on face of it”, why “evidence-based”? Whether the criticism is by some undefined criteria “evidence-based” is irrelevant. All that matters is whether the criticism — or the accolades — stem from prejudice against Jews as Jews. Every other nation on earth is criticized both fairly and unfairly, but only regarding the Israeli state, which self-assigned itself its professed Jewish identity, is it stigmatized as constituting racism against an ethnicity.  

Ironically, this also lets true antisemites off the hook. Historically, many of the people extolling the idea of an Israeli state have done so precisely because they hate Jews: whether because they want Israel as a vast ghetto to keep Jews away from their shores (a major factor in the pre-state period), and/or because it is the first step toward Jews being damned to hell at the end of the world (a major factor among Zionist Christians today), and/or because they exploit classic anti-Jewish tropes to their political advantage (such as Donald Trump and his ilk).

The document’s final example among “examples that on the face of it, are antisemitic” reads thus:

Denying the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews, in accordance with the principle of equality.

This reads as a self-evident truth. Who could possibly object? But when you try to figure out what it means, it proves to be the most internally convoluted part of the entire JDA.^[1]

First, it implicitly means that in order not to be antisemitic, we are required to accept the existence of that state, whatever that state might mean, and link Jewish identity to it. The phrase “…with the principle of equality” does nothing to mitigate this, but instead forces us into a logistical infinite loop of Israel’s own making.

Israel created itself by importing Jews, Jews and Jews alone, as settlers to create an ethnically “pure” state replacing the indigenous people. And so “the principle of equality” would mean that millions of displaced Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, in the camps in surrounding countries, and beyond, now suddenly “equal” after seventy-three years, would return to their own homes on their own land … but find them occupied by (as JDA puts it) “Jews in the State of Israel”.

This is an ethnic conundrum of Israel’s making, and Israel’s alone. The ethnically cleansed Palestinians did not decide to pick one exclusive ethnicity to commandeer their homes and lives.

What, then, does the “right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish … with the principle of equality” actually mean when the entire fact-on-the-ground has been racially engineered by that very state?

Indeed, even to begin to pretend any “principle of equality”, Israel would have to undo the entire litany of its seventy-three year defiance of the UN and international law. The “principle of equality” would see Israel stop at the UNGA 181 Partition, if the state would exist at all. The “principle of equality” would return millions of Palestinian businesses, orchards, assets, factories, and industries stolen by the Israeli state and its settlers to their owners — and, to be sure, without that wholesale theft of a ready-made country, the new state would likely have been stillborn in 1948.^[2]

In the final analysis, the core point is this: Can this JDA document, as written, be used to falsely smear people as antisemitic? And, conversely, to excuse, and even glorify, actual anti-Jewish bigotry? The answer, in my view, is clearly “yes” on both counts.

Eleven words in the JDA document — “antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews” — could have distilled the clarity that should have been obvious all along, had they not been surrounded by the other one thousand three hundred and seventy four.

But from the standpoint of Israeli interests, the JDA has already been a success, because the to-do has yet again kept us off-the-scent as the state continues business-as-usual, unfettered. The Palestinians, who have nothing to do with antisemitism but whose collective fate is forever the victim of our self-obsessed fascination over it, are again the losers.

The way forward is to stop this self-perpetuating distraction over what is a very simple and constant one-sentence definition, and get on with the fight against racism no matter the identity of its victims.

NOTES :
1. The JDA site’s penultimate FAQ tries, but fails, to address this. From the FAQ:
“[Q] Guideline 10 says it is antisemitic to deny the right of Jews in the State of Israel ‘to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews’. Isn’t this contradicted by guidelines 12 and 13? [A] There is no contradiction. The rights mentioned in guideline 10 attach to Jewish inhabitants of the state, whatever its constitution or name. Guidelines 12 and 13 clarify that it is not antisemitic, on the face of it, to propose a different set of political or constitutional arrangements.” Guideline 12 includes this statement, “It is 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, federal state, or in whatever form.”
2. For an economic analysis, see John Ruedy, “Dynamics of Land Alienation,” in Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim (ed.), Transformation of Palestine [Northwestern University Press, 1987], esp 134-136.