January 23, 4:00 PM EST - Online
Against Definitions: Antisemitism definitions as tools of Zionist repression
The Coalition to End Zionist Repression invites you to an international round-table, Against Definitions: Antisemitism definitions as tools of Zionist repression on January 23 2025 (4PM ET / 9PM GMT) organised by Coalition members, Barry Trachtenberg and Alana Lentin.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Association Working Definition of Antisemitism (IHRA-WD) has underpinned a proliferation of legalistic, rather than always strictly legal, institutional initiatives to embed a definition that presents ‘Israel-related antisemitism’ as the predominant threat posed to a ‘collective Jew’ inextricable from the Zionist state, whose religion has been blasphemously commandeered by Zionism.
As noted by the Palestinian scholar, Muhannad Ayash, seven out of eleven examples of antisemitism provided by the working definition relate to criticisms of Israel and are used ‘to police and censor the Palestinian critique of Israel.’ Nevertheless, the definition has been passed into law or been given quasi-legal status in many jurisdictions across the West. It is being used to repress, censor and punish Palestinians and their supporters in universities, schools, and public and private institutions.
It is clear then that the purpose of the IHRA-WD is not illuminate the history and present of antisemitism, but to curtail antiracism, anticolonialism and the fight for Palestinian freedom. It can be understood in terms of what the Palestinian scholar Anna Younes terms the War on Anti-Semitism.
Alternative definitions, most prominently the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), have been proposed. However, Palestinian critics such as Muhannad Ayyash and
Samer Abdelnour have pointed out the JDA’s Orientalism, expressed in the ‘silencing
and erasure of Palestine and Palestinians,’ and its ultimate failure to sever criticisms of Israel from antisemitism.
In the context of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, extending to the West Bank, and its 76 year history of settler colonial racial rule, the use of antisemitism to extend genocidal fascism is alarming. It appears clear that given this context, antisemitism definitions untethered from decolonial understandings of racisms as co-constitutive have a counterinsurgent purpose.
To discuss this, we are putting together an international panel of thinkers and activists for an online event. To register your interest in attending please fill out this form.
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