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ABSTRACT
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted, in part, as a response to the horrific antisemitism leading to the extermination of millions of Jews in World War II. Yet, today, organisations that utilise human rights instruments to criticise Israel’s laws, policies and practices are themselves being cast as antisemitic. How has the contemporary human rights regime come to be charged with antisemitism? The ostensible answer is that the meaning of antisemitism has expanded to include anti-Zionism and harsh criticism of Israel. While scholars have debated the validity of this expansion, this paper interrogates three types of abstractions: those deployed by traditional antisemites, those emanating from human rights, and those mobilised by the new antisemitism doctrine. An analysis of these abstractions helps clarify the new hostility between antisemitism and human rights. Whereas Zionism aims to protect Jews by asserting a right to Jewish difference within the context of a nation-state, human rights aim to protect Jews by promoting an egalitarian distribution of rights among the population. The crux of the matter is that the solution human rights offer to antisemitism also threatens the Zionist project, since it challenges the racialized mode of governance that this political ideology has implemented.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Nazi antisemitism and the ‘final solution’ was one of several forces that lead to creation of this historic document. For studies that trace the Universal Declaration to antisemitism see Fagan, Andrew. Human rights: confronting myths and misunderstandings (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009); Freeman, Mark and van Ert, Gibran. International human rights law (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2004); Ife, Jim. Human rights from below: achieving rights through community development (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and memory in the global age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). For studies critical of this approach see Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Duranti, Marco. ‘The Holocaust, the legacy of 1789 and the birth of international human rights law: revisiting the foundation myth,’ Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 159-86.
2 Al Haq, Law in the Service of Man, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. ‘Joint Parallel Report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on Israel’s Seventeenth to Nineteenth Periodic Reports,’ 100th Session, Geneva, November 10. 2019; Amnesty International. Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity (London: Amnesty International, 2022); B’Tselem. A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid, (Jerusalem: B’Tselem, 2021); Falk, Richard and Virginia Q. Tilley. Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid, Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (New York: United Nations, 2017); Human Rights Watch. A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution (New York: HRW April 2021).
3 NGO Monitor. ‘From the ‘River to the Sea’: B’Tselem’s Demonization Crosses the Line,’ January 19, 2021. Online at https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/from-the-river-to-the-sea-btselems-demonization-crosses-the-line.
4 The American Jewish Committee. ‘5 Things You Should Know About Human Rights Watch’s Report on Israel,’ April 28, 2021. Online at https://www.ajc.org/news/5-things-you-should-know-about-human-rights-watchs-report-on-israel.
5 The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. ‘ISGAP Fellows Reject Antisemitic Tropes in Amnesty Report,’ April 23, 2022, Online at https://isgap.org/post/2022/04/isgap-rejects-amnestys-report-on-israel/.
6 Gordon, Neve. ‘Between Human Rights and Civil Society: The Case of Israel’s Apartheid Enablers.’ Law & Social Inquiry (2023): 1-27.
7 For a few examples of those siding with the expansion of the definition of antisemitism see Cotler, Irwin. ‘Defining the new antisemitism,’ National Post, November 9, 2010a, online at https://nationalpost.com/full-comment/irwin-cotler-defining-the-newantisemitism; Porat, Dina. ‘On several definitions of antisemitism,’ Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism, December 23, 2010. https://antisemitism.org.il/en/50971/; Rosenfeld, Alvin Hirsch. ‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2006); Sacks, Jonathan. ‘The hatred that won’t die,’ The Guardian, February 28, 2002 online at www.theguardian.com/world/2002/feb/28/comment. For those criticizing the expansion see Feldman, David. ‘The meanings of antisemitism,’ February 13, 2017. Birkbeck University podcast, https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2017/02/david-feldman-the-meanings-of-antisemitism/; Gould, Rebecca Ruth. Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom. Verso Books, 2023; Klug, Brian. ‘The collective Jew: Israel and the new antisemitism.’ Patterns of prejudice 37, no. 2: (2003) 117-38; Lerman, Antony. Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? Redefinition and the Myth of the ‘Collective Jew’, (London: Pluto, 2022); Romeyn, Esther. ‘(Anti)‘new antisemitism’as a transnational field of racial governance.’ Patterns of Prejudice 54, no. 1–2 (2020): 199-214.
8 Winstanley, Asa. Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (London: Verso Books, 2023).
9 J.J. Goldberg, ‘A Defining Moment in America: Sanders, Trump and The Failure of Jewish Advocacy’, Jewish Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2016): 20-7.
10 For exceptions see Irwin Cotler. ‘Global antisemitism: Assault on human rights.’ The Yale Papers – Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective (2010b): 347-62 and Lerman Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? chapter 10.
11 Robert Wistrich. Antisemitism: The longest hatred. (New York, Schocken, 1994).
12 Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A theological account. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2008).
13 Anti-Defamation League. ‘Antisemitism,’ posted April 2, 2017, online at https://www.adl.org/antisemitism.
14 Wistrich, Antisemitism: The longest hatred; Klug, ‘The collective Jew: Israel and the new antisemitism.’
15 Wistrich, Antisemitism: The longest hatred.
16 Etienne Balibar. ‘The nation form: history and ideology’. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) (1990): 329-61. 347.
17 As Niza Yanay shows, the hatred towards the Jew, and hatred in general, is always also informed by an affective attachment. Niza Yanay, The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse: The Psychic Power of Discourse (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
18 Albert Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized (New York: Routledge, 2013).
19 Frantz Fanon. Black skin, white masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
20 JeanPaul Sartre. Anti-Semite and Jew, Translated by George J. Becker, (New York: Schocken Books, 1946).
21 David Theo Goldberg, Racist culture: Philosophy and the politics of meaning (Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), 151.
22 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Christopher Browning. Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992); Omer Bartov, ‘Ordinary Monsters.’ (Book Review.) The New Republic 214, no. 18 (April 29, 1996): 32-8; Jeffrey W. Murray, ‘Constructing the ordinary: The dialectical development of Nazi ideology,’ Communication Quarterly, 46, no. 1 (1998): 41-59.
23 Murray, ‘Constructing the ordinary.’
24 Ramon Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing post-colonial studies and paradigms of political-economy: Transmodernity, decolonial thinking and global coloniality.’ Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 (2011): 1-38.
25 Ramon Grosfoguel, ‘What is racism?’, Journal of World-Systems Research 22, no. 1 (2016): 9-15.
26 Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (London: Hachette UK, 2017); Walter Laqueur, A history of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the establishment of the State of Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 2009).
27 Lerman Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?
28 Theodore Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Edited by Raphael Patai Translated by Harry Zohn, (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), 84. Online at https://archive.org/stream/TheCompleteDiariesOfTheodorHerzl_201606/TheCompleteDiariesOfTheodorHerzlEngVolume1_OCR_djvu.txt.
29 Cited in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings. Edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, (New York: Schocken Books, 2009), 360.
30 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973).
31 Tom Segev, One Palestine, complete: Jews and Arabs under the British mandate (New York: Macmillan, 2000).
32 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘Galut Betoch Ribonut: Lebikoret Shlilat Hagalut Batarbut Hayisraelit.’ ‘Exile Within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of The ‘Negation of Exile’,’ Teurya Vi-Bikoret (1993): 23-56.
33 Bashir Bashir, and Amos Goldberg, eds. The Holocaust and the Nakba: A new grammar of trauma and history (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
34 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic conduct: The rise of heterosexuality and the invention of the Jewish man. (California: University of California Press, 1997).
35 Oz Almog, The Sabra: The creation of the new Jew. (University of California Press, 2000).
36 These are the kinds of affective ties that Arendt rejected when Gershom Scholem blamed her for having ‘no love to the Jewish people’ See Arendt The Jewish Writings. For how the Zionist movement helped produce animosity between Jews and Palestinians see Hillel Cohen, Army of shadows: Palestinian collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (California: University of California Press, 2008).
37 Ronit Lentin, Traces of racial exception: Racializing Israeli settler colonialism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018); Nadim N. Rouhana, and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury. ‘Settler-colonial citizenship: Conceptualizing the relationship between Israel and its Palestinian citizens.’ Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 205-25; Lana Tatour, Citizenship as domination: Settler colonialism and the making of Palestinian citizenship in Israel. 2019 Available at SSRN 3533490.
38 Shira Robinson, Citizen strangers: Palestinians and the birth of Israel’s liberal settler state. (California: Stanford University Press, 2013); Sa’di, Ahmad. Thorough Surveillance: The Genesis of Israeli Policies of Population Management, Surveillance & Political Control towards the Palestinians. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).
39 Hassan Jabareen, ‘How the Law of Return creates one legal order in Palestine.’ in The Condition of Democracy, eds. Jürgen Mackert, Hannah Wolf, Bryan S. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2021), 157-84.
40 Jabareen Hassan and Suhad Bishara. ‘The Jewish Nation State Law’, Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 2 (2019): 43-57; Mazen Masri, ‘How Liberal Zionists Sowed the Seeds of Israel’s Nation State Law,’ Critical Legal Thinking – Law and the Political (4 October 2018) online at https://criticallegalthinking.com/2018/10/04/how-liberal-zionists-sowed-the-seeds-of-israels-nation-state-law/; Zreik, Raef. ‘The Israeli right’s new vision of Jewish political supremacy,’ +972 Magazine. October 27, 2020, online at https://www.972mag.com/israeli-right-jewish-supremacy-segregation/.
41 Étienne Balibar, ‘The Construction of Racism.’ CAIRN, (Info International Edition, 2005), viii. Online at https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_AMX_038_0011%2D%2Dthe-construction-of-racism.htm.
42 United Nations, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, UN General Assembly 302, no. 2 (1948): 14-25.
43 Balibar, ‘The Construction of Racism,’ iv.
44 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.
45 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 299.
46 Ibid. 297.
47 I owe this distinction to Raef Zreik who commented on an earlier version of this paper.
48 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 298.
49 Ibid. 269.
50 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).
51 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 18.
52 Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 351.
53 Sa’di, Thorough Surveillance; Masri, ‘How Liberal Zionists Sowed the Seeds of Israel’s Nation State Law.’
54 Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008).
55 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2002).
56 Neve Gordon, Jacinda Swanson, and Joseph A. Buttigieg. ‘Is the struggle for human rights a struggle for emancipation?’, Rethinking Marxism 12, no. 3 (2000): 1-22.
57 Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
58 Jessica Whyte, The morals of the market: Human rights and the rise of neoliberalism (London: Verso Books, 2019).
59 Costas Douzinas, The end of human rights: Critical thought at the turn of the century (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000).
60 Colin Samson, The colonialism of human rights: Ongoing hypocrisies of western liberalism (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2020).
61 Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
62 Goldberg, Racist Culture.
63 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (New York: Routledge, 2001).
64 Butler, Gender Trouble; Judith Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the question of postmodernism’ in Feminists Theorize the Political, (New York: Routledge, 2013), 21-39.
65 Neve Gordon, ‘Human rights as a contingent foundation: The case of physicians for human rights’. Journal of Human Rights 5, no. 2 (2006): 163-84.
66 In Racist Culture, Goldberg makes a similar critique against liberalism more generally, showing how the liberal commitment to homogeneity (which informs contemporary human rights) ‘has served to make possible, discursively, to legitimate ideologically, and to rationalize politico-economically, prevailing sets of racially ordered conditions and racists exclusions.’
67 IHRA. ‘Information on endorsement and adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.’ No date. online at https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism/adoption-endorsement.
68 IHRA. ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism.’ 2016. online at https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism.
69 Gordon, Neve and Mark LeVine. ‘Was Einstein an Anti-Semite?’ Inside Higher Education March 26, 2021 online at https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/03/26/problems-increasingly-dominant-definition-anti-semitism-opinion.
70 IHRA. ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism.’
71 Gordon and LeVine. ‘Was Einstein an Anti-Semite?’
72 Esther Romeyn, ‘(Anti)‘new antisemitism’as a transnational field of racial governance’, Patterns of Prejudice 54, no. 1–2 (2020): 199-214.
73 Abba Eban, ‘Zionism and the UN,’ New York Times, November 3, 1975. available at www.nytimes.com/1975/11/03/archives/zionism-and-the-un.html.
74 A year earlier, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published a book entitled The New Anti-Semitism (Forster and Epstein 1974).
75 Lerman, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?
76 Irwin Cotler, ‘Making the world ‘Judenstaatrein’’ Jerusalem Post, February 22, 2009, online at https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/making-the-world-judenstaatrein.
77 Balibar, ‘The nation form: history and ideology,’ 329.
78 Cotler cited in Sheen, David. ‘Canadian MP Cotler: Calling Israel an Apartheid State Can Be Legitimate Free Speech,’ Ha’aretz, July 1, 2011, online at https://www.haaretz.com/2011-07-01/ty-article/canadian-mp-cotler-calling-israel-an-apartheid-state-can-be-legitimate-free-speech/0000017f-db39-d856-a37f-fff977f00000.
79 Lerman, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? 299. Moreover, the identification of every individual Jew with a collective and the collective with Israel runs the risk of fostering antisemitism since it attributes the state’s rights-abusive policies to each individual Jew. A Jew in the United States who has no interest whatsoever in Israel and knows nothing about Israel’s policies towards Palestinians can be accused of racism towards Palestinians because the new antisemitism definition produces a direct link between this individual Jew, the State of Israel, and its policies.
80 Pew Research Center. ‘U.S. Jews’ connections with and attitudes toward Israel,’ 2021a. online at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-connections-with-and-attitudes-toward-israel.
81 Central Bureau of Statistics. ‘Israel in Figures Selected Data from the Statistical Abstract of Israel,’ 2021. online at https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/publications/DocLib/isr_in_n/sr_in_n21e.pdf.
82 Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism.
83 Ha’aretz. ‘Richard Spencer Tells Israelis They ‘Should Respect’ Him: ‘I’m a White Zionist’,’ August 16, 2011. online at https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-08-16/ty-article/richard-spencer-to-israelis-im-a-white-zionist-respect-me/0000017f-e2ed-d75c-a7ff-feed950d0000.
84 Judith Butler, Parting ways: Jewishness and the critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2012), 19.
85 Pew Research Center ‘Jewish identity and belief,’ 2021b. online at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-identity-and-belief.
86 Balibar, ‘The nation form: history and ideology,’ 346.
87 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 49.
88 Lerman, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? 94.
89 Romeyn, ‘(Anti)‘new antisemitism’as a transnational field of racial governance,’ 201.
90 Butler, Parting ways.
91 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘From race to culture: the New Right’s view of European identity,’ Telos, 98–9, (1993): 99–125, 105. In the wake of the new millennium, Taguieff began justifying a ‘right to difference’ in the case of Jews, claiming that they have been victims of ruthless attacks from Palestinians and pro-Palestinians who frame their assaults using a universalizing language of anti-racism under which lies a form of fervent antisemitism. Taguieff, however, fails to address the forms of racial dominance imposed in Israel/Palestine and thus detaches the Palestinian critique from the facts on the ground. See Jonathan Judaken, ‘So What’s New?: Rethinking the New Antisemitism in a Global Age.’ In Naming Race, Naming Racisms, ed. Judaken, Jonathan (New York: Routledge, 2013), 205-34.
92 Irwin Cotler, ‘Jewish NGOs and religious human rights: a case study’, in Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective Religious Perspectives, eds. J. Witte and J. D. Van der Vyver (Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996) 235–94, 289.
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Notes on contributors
Neve Gordon
Neve Gordon is a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London. His first book, Israel's Occupation, provided a structural history of Israel's mechanisms of control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. His second book, The Human Right to Dominate was written with Nicola Perugini and examines how human rights, which are generally conceived as tools for advancing emancipation, can also be used to enhance subjugation and dispossession. Most recently, he wrote with Perugini the first book on the legal and political history of human shielding. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire follows the marginal and controversial figure of the human shield over a period of 150 years in order to interrogate the laws of war and how the ethics of humane violence is produced.