We resolve:
To initiate a campaign against the McCarthyist IHRA mis-definition of anti-Semitism in trade unions and other labour movement bodies, on the basis of the appendix below. To do this in conjunction with groups such as JNP, JVL, and left-wing anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists generally. We need to build a broad campaign against the IHRA. We mandate the calling of a public meeting.
The IHRA definition is not a definition of anti-Semitism. It is an attempt to conflate support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism with anti-Semitism and as such should be rejected with contempt.
The IHRA text is deeply racist and anti-Palestinian since it slurs any expression of Palestinian identity. Palestinians have experienced systematic racism, ethnic cleansing and genocide and yet any attempt to raise these issues and the Israeli state and Zionism’s role in this is slurred as anti-Semitism. The IHRA thus defines Palestinian people as inferior, treating them as inferior and subhuman, as having no political or civil rights. It attempts to lay the basis for a set of new Nuremburg laws around the world, as any attempt to overcome their oppression is deemed as anti-Semitic.
This mis-definition has thus provided the political and ideological basis for genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and is therefore as much of a ‘warrant for genocide’ as the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which helped provide the ideological basis of the Nazi holocaust.
Proposed Ian Donovan
A More Detailed Analysis of the IHRA
The ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism published by the ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ [the IHRA] is an exercise in sophistry, aimed at exploiting the memory of the Jewish victims of Hitler’s genocide to excuse and provide a pseudo-moral justification for the genocidal treatment of the Palestinian people.
It should not be so much subjected to an academic critique as exposed as an instrument of genocidal racists. The 38-word definition is a banal and meaningless tract which is virtually irrelevant to the cited examples. Which is perhaps why Zionists have ignored it.
The examples’ main purpose is to suggest that opposition to the Israeli state as a ‘Jewish collectivity’ is motivated by anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews. It is noticeable that the IHRA does not mention the word Zionism. It is as if it doesn’t want to engage in a debate on Israel’s origins or the reasons for its creation.
The purpose is to forbid meaningful criticism of Israeli ethnic cleansing, by forbidding criticism of the Israeli state other than the kind of criticism ‘democratic’ states are subject to.
As the history of the Nazi regime shows, their original plan was to expel Germany’s Jews, not exterminate them. Extermination was only decided upon when ethnic cleansing was no longer possible. Ethnic cleansing and today genocide is clearly condoned by the three ‘illustrations’ listed below:
- “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour”
- “Drawing comparison of contemporary Israeli policy with that of the Nazis”
- “Applying double standards of requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded by another democratic nation”.
“Democratic nations” do not use force to drive most of their indigenous people into exile or ghettos. The assertion of the right to ‘Jewish self-determination’ presupposes that Jews form a single nation. Historically this has usually been an anti-Semitic idea.
The main ‘illustration’ that bears a passing resemblance to what most people understand as traditional anti-Semitism, which is ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews as Jews’ [the OED definition] is the following one:
“Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).”
The following ‘example’ is aimed associating criticism of the Israeli state with holocaust denial.
“Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.”
The reality is that the main cause of holocaust denial today is Israel’s abuse of the holocaust to defend its treatment of the Palestinian people.
The following illustration appears innocuous:
“Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.”
It is true for example that Jews were accused of poisoning the wells of non-Jews historically. That was anti-Semitic. However, the Israeli state has carried out actions that resemble ancient blood libels. It deliberately poisoned the water supplies of Palestinians beginning with Operation Cast Thy Bread in the Nakba when the water supplies to Acre and other Palestinian cities were poisoned with dysentery bacteria. This ‘example’ is tailor-made to smear anyone pointing to such real crimes.
And this example is grotesquely hypocritical:
“Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews”
Since the Israeli state claims to act for all Jews. It is the chief inciter of this idea.
There is another category of ‘examples’ which may or may not be innocuous, depending on context. For instance:
“Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”
Some Jews are more loyal to Israel than the nations and states in which they live. That is a simple fact and Israel in fact encourages diaspora Jews to alienate themselves from their surroundings including holding an infamous poll in the United States to test whether, in a crisis of relations between Israel and the USA where American Jews’ loyalties would lie.
There is this ‘example’:
“Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”
The Zionist movement does nothing else but proclaim that all Jews owe their first loyalty to Israel. The IHRA itself describes Israel as a Jewish collectivity! If this is ‘anti-Semitic’ Israel is its main inciter.
“Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective – such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.”
While denouncing this, Israel does its best, through the Israel lobby, to give the impression that there is a world Jewish conspiracy to take over Palestinian and Arab lands. Its representatives boast about the control they allegedly exercise in Western countries, as when Netanyahu boasted that Israel controlled the United States. If this concept gains credence it is not necessarily because of any hatred of Jews, rather because such behaviour and boasts are considered accurate.
There remains one more example:
“Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.”
This example is deliberately dishonest in that it assumes that the Palestinian struggle for freedom and national liberation is dictated, not by hatred of occupation and oppression but by antagonism towards Jews as Jews. Why else would the illustration mention ‘a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion’? Surely advocating killing Jews for being Jewish is anti-Semitic by definition? Why the qualifiers? Because the example is concerned with Palestinian resistance not anti-Semitism.
These examples may superficially appear to evoke some traditional themes of medieval or late 19th/early 20th Century anti-Semitism, but they are the result of much effort to amalgamate criticism of traditional anti-Semitism (Jew hate) with criticism of the Israeli state.
