The chorus of criticism of Israel’s indiscriminate bombings and denial of food, water, and other humanitarian aid to 2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza has only grown louder as the Palestinian death toll has skyrocketed beyond an estimated 22,000, nearly half of whom are children.
Too often, however, supporters of continued military action by Israel respond not by debating the merits of a cease-fire but through McCarthyistic campaigns to silence human rights advocacy in public and on college campuses. Among the most effective strategies of censorship is a politically motivated expansion of what constitutes antisemitism to conflate it with criticism of Israel’s policies and practices.
The weaponization of the IHRA definition has not gone uncontested. In April, more than 100 organizations asked the United Nations to reject the definition because it “has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus [to] chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism.”
As an expert for the American Jewish Committee wrote, the contemporary examples attached to the IHRA definition may be used as “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite.” Similarly, Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, warns that “right-wing Jews are weaponizing it” to effectively impose speech codes on college campuses, as we have recently witnessed at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania.
— Read the full article, co-authored with Professor Jonathan Hafetz, in The Nation here.
