Antisemitism and Zionism: The Internal Operations of the IHRA Definition

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on the cultural and political work the IHRA definition of antisemitism carries out to explain why it has been adopted by hundreds of actors. I offer three key reasons to explain its effectiveness: First, it operates on an affective level, interpolating people who identify as Jews to also identify with Israel and Zionism; Second, it ties the right to Jewish difference with a Jewish State and Jewish sovereignty; Third, the definition provides a defence of a regime I call ‘democratic apartheid’. The analysis reveals that the IHRA definition of antisemitism serves as a counterinsurgency tool aimed at shielding Israel from resistance to its oppressive form of racial governance and, following its recent war on Gaza, from accusations of genocidal violence.

Keywords:

• Antisemitism
• collective Jew
• democratic apartheid
• IHRA definition
• Jewish difference
• Zionism

In certain respects, the working definition of antisemitism published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is a great success story. Within just a few years of its appearance in 2016, 45 governments have endorsed it, including the US and 25 out of 27 EU states (The Combat Antisemitism Movement and The Center For The Study Of Contemporary European Jewry At Tel Aviv University 2024; IHRA no date). In the United States, 34 states have adopted it via legislation or executive actions, and eight out of ten provinces have followed suit in Canada. In the UK, 271 regional, local, and municipal governments have adopted the definition, as have 123 in the United States, 55 in Argentina, 20 in Canada, 13 in Italy, nine in Germany, eight in France, five in Australia, three each in Spain and Venezuela, and two each in Brazil and Poland (The Combat Antisemitism Movement and The Center For The Study Of Contemporary European Jewry At Tel Aviv University 2024). In total, 514 non-federal government entities (including regional, provincial, state, county, and municipal bodies) have adopted the definition. Another key category of adoptions has been institutions of higher education, with 345 overall. In the UK alone, three-fourths of all universities have taken it on board.¹ In addition, a diverse array of international institutions and organizations, NGOs, athletic clubs and corporations are currently using it as a framework for identifying incidents of antisemitism (Klein 2023), while hundreds of civil society organisations are using it in their training and educational programs, as well as in their policymaking initiatives (Office of Students 2022). Through the end of December 2023, a total of 1216 entities have adopted or endorsed the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism (The Combat Antisemitism Movement and The Center For The Study Of Contemporary European Jewry At Tel Aviv University 2024).

This is quite a feat, particularly given that Holocaust and genocide scholars, Middle East experts, and prominent lawyers have voiced sharp criticism of the definition’s attempt to expand antisemitism beyond its traditional meaning (Gordon 2018; Gould 2023; Klug 2013; Lerman 2022; Romeyn 2020; Tomlinson no date). Historically, antisemitism has been understood as abhorrent conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media, finance, and governments, blood libel accusations, Holocaust denial tirades, and dehumanizing caricatures of Jews (Lerman 2022). Yet, in the IHRA, antisemitism also includes any form of anti-Zionism, as well as harsh criticism of Israel. Much has been written about the equivalence that the IHRA definition draws between the hatred of Jews and an animus toward Zionism (a political ideology) and Israel’s policies, with political commentators and scholars weighing in about the definition’s validity and the kind of political ramifications the expansion of antisemitism’s meaning has on freedom of expression, academic freedom, and Palestinian rights.²

Even some of its most ardent proponents have been surprised by the enormous impact the IHRA definition has had on the political realm. In the UK, this definition of antisemitism was used to unseat former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn (Winstanley 2023), while in the US a similar but less successful campaign was waged against Bernie Sanders during the 2016 electoral campaign (Goldberg 2016). The definition has concurrently produced a chilling effect on Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists, students, and staff, and should be understood as a counterinsurgency tool developed to shield Israel from resistance to its oppressive form of racial governance, its ongoing denial of Palestinian liberation, and, following its recent war on Gaza, from accusations of genocidal violence.

Sir Stephen Sedley and Sir Anthony Hooper, two retired Lord Justices of Appeal, put it succinctly: ‘the legally entrenched right to free expression is being undermined by [the IHRA definition]. Its promotion by public bodies is leading to the curtailment of debate’ (Letters to the Guardian 2021). A 2023 report published by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), which analyses 40 cases where UK university staff and/or students were accused of antisemitism on the basis of the IHRA definition between 2017 and 2022, found that in all instances, except for two ongoing cases, the accusations of antisemitism had been dismissed. The final two have yet to be substantiated. The two organisations have thus concluded that the impact of the IHRA definition on academic freedom and freedom of speech in UK higher education institutions corroborates the Lord Justices’ claim, demonstrating that the IHRA definition has been used as a weapon to stifle free speech in relation to the teaching, research and public discussion of Israeli government policies, the formation of the Israeli state, and the nature of Zionism as an ideology and movement (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and the European Legal Support Centre 2023).

The 2023 report, in effect, provides clear evidence that the IHRA definition’s impact goes well beyond curtailing debate. Chronicling how the definition ‘erases the experiences of the Palestinian people, hides from public view documented evidence of the crimes committed against them and thereby prevents universities, staff and students from contributing to informed public debate on the matter’, the report demonstrates how false accusations of antisemitism have also caused severe mental stress to staff and students and served ‘to unfairly damage the reputation and careers of [those] who speak about the violations of Palestinian human rights and crimes committed by Israel’ (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and the European Legal Support Centre 2023, 8). Even its main drafter, Kenneth Stern, now admits the definition is not fit for purpose in university settings, claiming that ‘rightwing Jewish groups took the ‘working definition’… and decided to weaponize it… complain[ing] about speakers, assigned texts and protests they said violated the definition’ (Stern 2019). He even added that it is often used to ‘protect pro-Israel students from hearing unpleasant things too’ (Stern 2017).

All of which begs the question: why is a definition that raises so many concerns being adopted by so many actors, and particularly by universities where critical thinking and engaged debate around controversial issues are meant to be actively encouraged? Obviously, for the definition to be broadly embraced a considerable amount of lobbying has had to take place by pro-Israeli groups, and an analysis of the relations between these lobbying groups and the entities that have adopted the definition is surely an important endeavour (Aked, 2023). However, in this paper I focus on the definition itself and the kind of cultural and political work it carries out, offering, as it were, three and interrelated key reasons as to why it has been so effective: namely, (1) the affective work the definition carries out amongst Jews; (2) its claim to a right to Jewish difference; and (3) its defence of ‘democratic apartheid’, a notion upon which I elaborate further in the final sections. The three reinforce each other, but whereas the first two operate primarily on people who identify as Jewish, the third has a much broader appeal since it helps to provide legitimacy to the exclusionary ideology of mainly right-wing politicians and publics across the globe.³

Cultivating Affective Resonance

Esther Romeyn traces the expansion of antisemitism’s definition back to Israel’s former Foreign Minister Abba Eban (1966–1974) who, in a speech to the American Jewish Congress in 1973, insisted that ‘the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all’ (Romeyn 2020). Two years later, and not long after the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism, Eban (1975) explained his view in a New York Times opinion article. ‘Classical anti-Semitism’, he wrote, ‘denies the equal rights of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people to its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination’. Even though the notion of a ‘new antisemitism’ has existed for five decades (Forster and Epstein 1974), in Whatever Happened to Antisemitism Antony Lerman (2022) observes that the political value ascribed to it was relatively low until the turn of the twenty first century. Its currency, however, began to increase as part of a new historical conjuncture informed by the demise of the Oslo ‘peace process’ and the eruption of the second Intifada in September 2000, the 2001 anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, where NGOs accused Israel of being a racist endeavour, as well as the inauguration of the Global War on Terror following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Two decades later, the new antisemitism has become the new orthodoxy. As Lerman points out, one of the people who helped revive the idea behind Eban’s equation was Irwin Cotler, who served as a professor of human rights at McGill University and then as Canada’s Attorney General and Justice Minister (2003–2006) (Lerman 2022). ‘The new antisemitism’, Cotler (2009) explained in a 2009 article, ‘involves the discrimination against the right of the Jewish people to live as an equal member of the family of nations—the denial of and assault upon the Jewish people’s right even to live—with Israel as the ‘collective Jew among the nations’. Cotler adopts the Zionist idea that only a sovereign Jewish state can protect Jews from antisemitism. In order to justify this supposition—which is very different from the proponents of human rights who believe antisemitism can be challenged through the equal allocation of rights to Jews no matter in what country they are living in (Gordon 2023)—he emphasizes the notion of a ‘collective Jew’ and then draws an equation between this collective and Israel.⁴ In other words, Cotler draws an artificial line from the individual to the nation and then to the nation-state, corroborating Etienne Balibar’s (1990) claim that the nation has always been ‘presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes [national] entities the continuity of a subject’. As Cotler put it, ‘We had moved from the discrimination against Jews as individuals, to the discrimination against Jews as a people, to Israel as the targeted collective ‘Jew among the nations’’ (Cited in Sheen 2011).

Within the existing reality in Israel/Palestine, Cotler’s framework is informed by a racial paradox. Following many Zionist leaders, he perceives the Jewish sovereign state as the primary actor responsible for protecting Jews from forms of racial governance, like the ones that existed in Europe and East Europe until the mid-twentieth century. Yet, the IHRA definition of antisemitism aims to protect Jewish sovereignty and the form of racial governance that it has established to subjugate and dispossess Palestinians. The antisemitism accusation that is based on the IHRA definition is thus both a mechanism to protect Jews from racism, and simultaneously an instrument used to protect the persistence of racial domination of Israeli Jews over Palestinians.

And indeed, examples provided by the IHRA definition construe the individual Jew not only as part of a collective, but also as someone who is inextricably tied to Israel. At the same time, it reconfigures the antisemite, not only by identifying antisemitism with people who hate Jews, but also with those who criticize Israel or the Zionist project. The definition is therefore informed by a series of abstractions that can be formulated as a syllogism: each individual Jew is part of the ‘collective Jew’, the ‘collective Jew’ is equivalent to Israel; therefore, all individual Jews are equivalent to Israel. Elsewhere I have shown how these abstractions have, in effect, ascribed a particular kind of Jewish identity to individual Jews and how they engender a normative regime, whereby all Jews everywhere are presumed to be aligned with a national collective and by extension with a nation-state (Gordon 2023; see also Anderson 2006). Moreover, the kind of regime that it construes works to transform Jewishness into a familial tie or a form of racial kinship that actively encourages Jews to desire to belong to the Jewish collective and, more importantly, for the effectiveness of the IHRA definition, to the Jewish State (Ahmed 2000). Sovereignty both within Israel and within the IHRA definition is not linked to equal citizenships but rather to ethnicity and race, and—as I argue below—it is used to reimagine democracy as a regime that can coincide with apartheid.

At the same time, the abstractions linking each individual Jew to a collective and the collective to Israel help to facilitate an affective attachment between the Jewish individual and the Jewish State. To be clear, the emotional attachment to Israel is socially constituted while the cultivation and encouragement of shared emotions among Jews help, in turn, to bind the Jewish social body together. Sara Ahmed (2013, 13) provides an example of a similar emotional alignment that is produced through the utterance: ‘the nation mourns’. The claim is not only that the utterance transforms the nation into a subject that ‘has feelings’, but also that the utterance ‘generates the nation as the object of ‘our feeling’ (together, as a social body, we mourn on behalf of the nation). The crucial point is that feelings towards the nation are not natural and do not simply exist within individuals. Rather they become real through numerous discursive operations and speech acts—like the utterance ‘the nation mourns’—while the material effects and thus ‘reality’ that the operations generate help shape different kinds of actions, alignments, and orientations (Ibid). In our case, however, the individual’s alignment with the nation and its members operates along ethnic or racial lines rather than along citizenship. In doing so, it reinforces a form of ethnic/racial alignment, which then materialises in basic laws, policies, and practices as a form of Jewish supremacy (B’Tselem 2021).

Several examples provided by the IHRA definition epitomise the processes Ahmed describes. They produce a particular emotional orientation towards and alignment with Israel, which involves apprehending those who criticise Israel and Zionism as fearsome because they ostensibly deny the right not only of Israel to exist, but also—due to how these alignments function—the right of the Jewish collective and each individual Jew to exist. One example states that antisemitism is embodied in: ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, i.e. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’ (IHRA 2016). By claiming that the self-determination (namely, a basic human right) of the Jewish collective and each individual Jew is denied when someone utters the phrase ‘Israel is a racist endeavour’, the IHRA’s illustrative example not only silences critique of Israel—including efforts to transform Israel into a state where, for instance, the rights allocated to citizens do not depend on ethnic or racial belonging—but also helps produce both a sense of belonging and a bond among Jews. This affect is manufactured by conflating the threat to Jewish sovereignty with the Jewish collective’s and each Jewish individual’s very right to exist (more on this in the section on Jewish Difference). Given the ‘sociality of emotions’ whereby emotions are produced through a series of social relations and discursive operations, one could say that the definition structures an affective attachment toward Israel and repulsion toward those who are cast as a threat to the Jewish State’s existence (Ahmed 2013). In sum, several examples transform Israel into an avatar of Jewish identity.

The impact of these processes is significant. The production of an affective bond between individual Jews, the ‘collective Jew’ and Israel incites Jewish students, for example, to experience the utterance ‘Israel is an apartheid regime’—a claim made by Amnesty International (2022), Human Rights Watch (2021) and leading Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations like Al Haq et al (2019) and B’Tselem (2021)—as if it were directed against them personally and, consequently, that they are victims of antisemitic hate speech. As Joan Scott’s (1991) insights suggest, the students understand their ‘experience’ as if their own subjectivity is external to the web of power relations and ideological construction. They believe that their political beliefs and ideological positions follow from their personal experiences and fail to recognise that the political field takes part in the very production of their experience and indeed their subjecthood.

Similarly, Ahmed (2013, 11) warns us that ‘feelings’ become ‘fetishes’ ‘through an erasure of the history of their production and circulation’, as if feelings are some kind of natural sensation that exists within the subject. In other words, Jewish individuals often fail to recognise how the operations of Israeli hasbara (Hebrew for propaganda) and the mobilisation of Jewish suffering and victimhood help to contour their own identity, desires, and interests. Consequently, they experience their sense of Jewishness as if it is somehow natural, ahistorical, and apolitical. This natural and apolitical status renders the experience as axiomatic, in the sense of being both self-evident and unquestionable—as if it stems from the very core and essence of the self—and thus as something that serves as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. More concretely, the IHRA definition plays an active role in the production of experience by manufacturing and encouraging an affective attachment between individual Jews and Israel. And yet the affective ‘stickiness’ (Ahmed 2013) the IHRA illustrative examples generate towards Israel is presented as if the bond with Israel emanates naturally—and thus unmediated—from within the individual and the ‘fact’ of their Jewishness, while the sociality of emotions, experience and indeed of Jewish subjecthood is erased. This erasure carried out by the IHRA definition, as well as other forms of Israeli hasbara, enable the link between the individual Jew and the Jewish State to appear as if it were natural, which, in turn, is vital for generating a sense among Jews that the utterance ‘Israel is an apartheid regime’ is a personal affront and threat to their own Jewishness and thus to their very selves.

The Right to Jewish Difference

The production of an affective attachment to Israel works hand-in-hand with the right to Jewish difference. If in the past Jewish difference was established through an affinity to a religion and certain cultural edicts and practices, Zionism establishes Jewish difference by producing an additional affinity between each individual Jew and the Jewish State. The attachment to Israel cultivates, in turn, a particular affective orientation amongst Jewish individuals and Jewish communities across the globe, where an affinity with and towards the Jewish State binds them together.

The IHRA definition follows the Zionist ideology and links the right to Jewish difference to the Jewish State and presents this affinity as central to all and any Jewish identity. So, if the right to difference generally describes the right to preserve cultural, ethnic, and racial group identities, as well as to preserve a group’s particular traditions, Zionism and the IHRA present the preservation of the Jewish State as the most fundamental component required for ensuring the right to Jewish difference. Indeed, one of the reasons the IHRA definition is appealing lies in how it actively affirms a Jewish difference that is intricately tied to the Jewish state and sovereignty, while rejecting a notion of Jewish otherness which associates Jewishness with outsider status or with nefarious attributes.

Ironically, the logic here, as Tony Lerman (2022) explains, emerged from ideas circulated by the French New-Right in the 1970s and 1980s which maintained that ‘to be anti-racist is to believe that every race, ethnic group or culture must preserve its difference at all costs’. ‘It must’, according to Pierre-Andre Taguieff’s (1993, 105) analysis, ‘cultivate, develop, and defend that difference against all attacks and above all not [to] attempt to abolish it’.⁵ Taguieff (2001, 18) goes on to explain that the reformulation of identity (and thus race and ‘racism’) as difference materializes with a correlative and rhetorical shift that replaces the classical antiracist stance, which challenges inequality and hierarchy with an exclusive affirmation of ‘differences’. This brand of antiracist struggle highlights the fear of inter-ethnic crossing and cultural metissage and center-stages the unconditional preservation of the community and its institutions with all of their particular characteristics. Mixing is framed as an effort to destroy collective identities and as a concrete threat to racialized nationalism. Thus, all efforts to undo difference, challenge, or transgress identarian borders should not be tolerated.

The French New-Right contrasted their approach with human rights, which purportedly aim to constitute a universal and inclusive subject who counteracts racialized, sexist, and other forms of hierarchical governance that differentiate people biologically, politically, culturally, or geographically and thus lead to discrimination and oppression. According to the French New-Right, the inclusivity and universality of human rights is part of the problem, since human rights operate by disavowing difference.⁶ Consequently, the New-Right casts universal human rights as racist because they disavow difference, as totalitarian because they try to reduce all social and spiritual reality to a liberal model, and as imperialist because they strive to impose the liberal worldview on others. The universal is thus reduced to a ‘homogenizing, unifying, standardizing machine’ by the French New-Right, and is ‘denounced as an imposture consisting of raising a particularism to a universal’ (Taguieff 2001, 26).

To be sure, the proponents of the French New-Right were not the first or only critics of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Several decades before the emergence of this political ideology and in anticipation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) published a statement cautioning against the damage a human rights framework can wreak on the culture and practices of indigenous communities and highlighted the importance of protecting difference. As opposed to the French New-Right, however, the AAA did not conflate difference with nationalism and state sovereignty, and the AAA’s Executive Board's (1947) statement on human rights was not intended as a tool to protect the nation state.

The French New-Right’s understanding of the right to difference helps explain the hostility by an array of civil society groups that have adopted the IHRA definition toward the five apartheid reports published by Amnesty International (2022), Human Rights Watch (2021), Al Haq et al 2019; B’Tselem 2021). These reports have documented that in Israel the distribution of rights is structured to ensure that one racial group dominates another and have recommended instead a redistribution of rights in an egalitarian and thus non-discriminatory way. Following the publication of each report, a series of antisemitism accusations were directed against the human rights organizations. NGO Monitor (2021) blamed the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem of using ‘anti-Semitic tropes’. Similarly, the American Jewish Committee (2021) noted that Human Rights Watch’s ‘arguments […] sometimes border on antisemitism’, while the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (2022) strongly rejected Amnesty International’s report, stating that it had been informed by ‘biased antisemitic tropes’. The antisemitism accusation waged against both the authors of the reports and the organizations that published them emerges because their recommendations ostensibly threaten the right to Jewish difference (Gordon 2023).

One of the definition’s examples notes, for instance, that ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ is antisemitic (IHRA 2016). Surely Israel has not erected gas chambers to kill Palestinians and any claim that it has is mendacious, but does this automatically mean that not a single Israeli policy can be legitimately compared to policies adopted by the Nazis? Does this mean, in other words, that no similarities can be drawn between the policies of the Nazi regime in the mid-1930s, for instance, and current Israeli policies? Obviously, drawing such comparisons should not only be legitimate, but also necessary if we are to use history as an educational tool (Bashir and Goldberg 2018; Bartov 2023). The prohibition of any comparison serves to assert difference since comparative analyses tend to highlight commonalities and could potentially undermine certain elements of Jewish difference as well as the prevalent trope that presents Jews as the everlasting victims. What this example aims to do, then, is both to extend the notion of protected characteristics from individuals and a group to a State, while asserting the State’s a-priori and thus unquestionable moral superiority. Jews, whether they live in or outside of Israel—as about half the Jewish population currently does—are meant to understand that to secure their own protected characteristics they must secure the State. This, in turn, produces an emotional bond with the State.

So, traditional antisemitism links vilifying abstractions to subjects to establish Jewish otherness, and then uses the maligning abstractions as a tool of statecraft to enhance and justify a form of racial governance—constituting Jews as distinct from the ‘homo nationalis’, from the community and individuals who have been constructed as part of the nation. The IHRA definition also aims to identify and prohibit the use of such abstractions, yet it produces its own series of abstractions by accentuating and celebrating Jewish difference, striving to constitute all Jews everywhere as different and therefore deserving their own ‘homo nationalis’. The innovation is not so much in the claim to Jewish difference, but in the extension of this claim to the State and the idea that criticism of the State amounts to an attack on individual Jews. Thus, whereas traditional antisemitism has been used as an instrument to justify the introduction of draconian laws and policies aimed at subjugating and even annihilating Jews, the new antisemitism accusation has been mobilized to protect a form of racial governance that subjugates and dispossess Palestinians. The first form of antisemitism justifies the domination of Jews; the second uses the accusation of antisemitism to justify Jewish domination of another people.

Indeed, the accentuation of Jewish difference and its link to the State are tied to the erasure of Palestinian difference. Consider the well-known Jewish Israeli mantra that ‘Arabs have 22 states, and Jews are not allowed to have one’. This iteration stresses the right of Jews to protect their difference through a nation-state, namely, a Jewish State. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as much in 2019 when he averred that ‘The Arab citizens have 22 nation states around them and they do not need another. We define Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, the nation-state of the Jewish people, with equal rights for all’, thus revealing how the assertion of Jewish difference and the right to this difference is tied to the erasure of Palestinian difference, a people who, as per the phrase above, are reduced to the generic Arab that denies their right to statehood and sovereignty and are deceptively presented as if they enjoy equal rights (cited in Wootliff 2019).

To be sure, the logic the definition advances—you need to protect the State so the State will protect ‘you’—is not entirely new or even unique to Zionism. Both political and practical strains of Zionism held the belief that antisemitism could only be challenged through the establishment of a nation-state, which, it is important to note, was part of the existing zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century (Avineri 2017). The allocation of equal rights to Jews within a European setting was not perceived to be a viable solution to antisemitism. This not only related to how Jews had experienced the discriminatory way in which rights had been distributed in different European countries, but also how they had seen that any assertion of rights is often powerless in the face of nationalist racist violence. Hence, due to Jewish experience in Europe, the Zionist movement advocated the establishment of a new nation-state rather than the enhancement of equal rights within existing nation-states, as the only tenable response to antisemitic forms of racial governance (Gordon 2023). In the words of the Zionist leader and Israel’s first president Haim Weizmann: ‘the upbuilding of Palestine is our answer to antisemitism’ (cited in Arendt 2009, 360).

The IHRA definition is, therefore, the Zionist definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition extends the antisemitic experience to animus towards Zionism and harsh criticism of Israel. In doing so, it builds on, produces, and exacerbates Jewish fears, while moving beyond the original Zionist idea: namely, from the notion that only a Jewish State can protect Jews from antisemitism to the idea that the State itself needs to be protected from ‘antisemitism’. The subtext of several illustrative examples is clear. Israel needs to be defended because only a Jewish State can provide assurance to all Jews everywhere that if they were ever to be stripped of their rights in the country in which they live, they would still have Israel as a fall back. Therefore, it is in their self-interest to protect the Jewish State. It intimates that Jews deserve to be equal among nations in the sense of having a right to self-determination, but that membership within the family of nations should not jeopardize the protection of a Jewish State that privileges Jewish heritage, culture, traditions, and religion, as well as its Jewish citizens. This, in turn, produces an attachment between Jews and Israel, and thus with its colonial project which inevitably entails the dispossession of Palestinians and the egregious violation of their rights. Whereas traditional antisemitism others Jews in order to assert their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy, the IHRA definition highlights Jewish difference, extends it to the State, and produces an attachment between individual Jews and the Jewish State to assert Jewish privilege and supremacy in Israel and shield the State’s domination of Palestinians from moral condemnation and pro-Palestinian resistance. It is an Israeli counterinsurgency tool used primarily outside of Israel, in Europe and North America.

Defending Democratic Apartheid

The first two affect-producing operations incite Jews to identify with Israel and Jewish sovereignty, but the IHRA definition is attractive to broader audiences and particularly to certain political leaders in countries such as India, Hungary, the US, and Poland because it also ‘promotes a notion of democracy that is compatible with an apartheid regime. ‘Democratic apartheid’ is a regime in which the notion of ‘the people’ does not include all the inhabitants (Gordon 2010). Those who are defined as ‘the people’ enjoy basic democratic rights, such as formal equality and freedom. Those citizens and inhabitants who are excluded from ‘the people’ can instead be categorised as ‘non-people’ and are subjected to a series of laws, policies, and/or practices that discriminate against them and that ensure their domination. The justifications and types of exclusions, as well as the repertoires of violence, that are mobilised to maintain the subjugation of the ‘non-people’ are dynamic and often change over time. Their ultimate manifestation is elimination.

The preservation of difference—cast as a basic right not only of individuals and groups but also of States—operates by framing those who differ from the dominant group or ‘the people’ as a threat. Within this imaginary, egalitarian projects that cut across difference and aim to expand the notion of ‘the people’ to render it more inclusive are often framed as extremely dangerous. Indeed, the elementary idea that Israel must offer equal citizenship to Palestinians has been cast as the destruction of the State and stigmatized as racist and a form of cultural and physical annihilation because demands for equal citizenship that disregard race, ethnicity, religion, etc. do not respect Jewish difference and will ultimately lead to ‘the people’s’ destruction.

This ‘annihilatory anxiety’, to use Lara Sheehi’s (2024) phrase, is integral to the Zionist imagination—which constitutes ‘the people’ not only as made up solely of Jews but also Jews as the eternal victim—and has always been a fundamental component of Israel’s ethos’. Former Supreme Court Justice, Gabriel Bach (1984), for example, expressed Israel’s anxiety of inter-ethnic and cultural crossings when asked to disqualify the Progressive List for Peace, a left-wing joint party of Palestinian and Jewish citizens, which sought to advance equal Jewish and Palestinian citizenship in Israel and by so doing to expand the notion of ‘the people’ and to allocate rights based on citizenship rather than ethnicity or race. According to the former Supreme Court Justice, the Progressive List for Peace endangered the ‘integrity and the existence of the State of Israel, and the maintenance of its uniqueness as a Jewish State in accordance with the basic essence of the State as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Law of Return’. This effort to protect ‘the people’ as an exclusionary category that does not include all citizens and/or inhabitants is extremely attractive to many Islamophobic leaders and political movements, ranging from Le Pen in France to Modi in India. It provides them with a model of how ‘democracies’ can introduce mechanisms that prevent unwanted citizens from accessing rights and still be considered democratic.

The IHRA (2016) definition maintains that it is antisemitic to apply ‘double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’. This example encapsulates Israel’s claim not to democracy, but to Jewish democracy since the antisemitic accusation can apply only if the entity is perceived to be Jewish. Put differently, one would not say that it is antisemitic to apply ‘double standards by requiring of France a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’. By branding it antisemitic to require Israel to behave in a way not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, the IHRA definition asserts the state’s Jewish character without mentioning it. In this way, it affirms Israel’s difference, which entails restricting ‘the people’ to Jews and bestowing on them rights and privileges that it does not bestow on other groups (see for example Lentin 2018; Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2015; Tatour 2019). Yet, the example demands that Israel be treated like all other democracies and in this way shields Israel from claims that it is an apartheid regime and/or a settler colonial state, casting any charge that Israel is not democratic as antisemitic.

This IHRA example poses as if it is defending democracy, when in fact it is defending a democratic apartheid. Many far-right politicians, not least from Hungary, France, and India, but also from the US, Poland and the UK find the IHRA definition, which defends a kind of democracy which limits the notion of ‘the people’ to certain groups and affirms racial and ethnic inequality, both appealing and useful. The definition provides a road map for a dramatically new conception of democracy, one founded on the protection and privileging of difference rather than on the liberal notion of formal equality protected by the rule of law. After all, the protection of difference often entails the allocation of more rights to a certain group, but now these unequal social relations can be cast as democratic and shielded on the pretence that any criticism of this model is racist. Human rights and other universalist antiracism strategies are accordingly ‘stigmatized as cultural mass murder’ and characterised as ‘the true racism, the only racism’, while the protection of difference through exclusionary and eliminatory schemes is cast as democratic (Taguieff 2001, 27). The ingenuity of this IHRA example is that, while it pretends to defend democracy—a regime that is coded as good within the liberal imagination—it is actually defending a form of ‘democratic apartheid’.

Conclusion

The identification that the IHRA definition produces between the individual Jew and Israel is key for understanding the initial affective attachment amongst world Jewry towards the State. Yet, the orientation of this attachment is reinforced through the claim to Jewish difference and the need to protect the State, which is cast as the guardian of Jewish difference. And since emotions are not only generated but generative, it is not only that the affective attachment towards Israel is reinforced through the accentuation of Jewish difference, but the claim to Jewish difference is also reinforced by the attachment. Moreover, the extension of the right to difference from the individual and group to the State not only rationalises, legitimises, and thus shields the privileges allocated to a specific group—in our case Jewish citizens who make up ‘the people’—but also gives rise to the notion of ‘democratic apartheid’. As I have shown, this dramatically broadens the definition’s appeal since the extension of the right to difference from the individual to the State allows the State to frame its defence of the privileges it allocates to a certain group (‘the people’) as a defence of democracy. By so doing, the State modifies the accepted meaning of democracy, dropping, as it were, the fundamental democratic requirement to ensure formal equality of all citizens before the law. The definition that was ostensibly formulated to defend Jews across the globe from forms of racial governance, not only ends up legitimising and shielding a form of racial governance that is presented as democracy, but also becomes a weapon used to strike down pro-Palestinian activism. In this sense, it is a counterinsurgency tool.

Obviously, the kind of affective and political work the IHRA definition carries out differs according to one’s position within a variety of social structures as well as one’s disposition towards the question of Palestine. The eminent legal scholar Robert Cover (1986) once wrote that ‘the function of ideology is much more significant in justifying an order to those who principally benefit from it and who must defend it than it is in hiding the nature of the order from those who are its victims’. Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists, as well as students and staff who study and research Israel and Palestine, immediately claimed that the IHRA definition operates as a gag order and as an instrument that aims to hurt Israel’s critics. They recognized the definition’s effort to reframe well-documented descriptions of Palestinian history as antisemitic and to prohibit any critical analysis of the Israeli regime. They immediately identified the harm and violence that this definition potentially inflicts on any form of Palestinian solidarity. By sharp contrast, many Jews have been swept into the definition’s ideology and have adopted it as their own.

Not surprisingly, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, E. Tendayi Achiume (2022), has warned against the use of the definition ‘owing to its susceptibility to being politically instrumentalised and the harm done to human rights resulting from such instrumentalization’. This is, unfortunately, already a reality. As reports like the one published by BRISMES and ELSC (2023) have already shown, the IHRA definition has been used in the US, UK and across Europe to delegitimise points of view critical of Israel and/or in support of Palestinian rights, in violation of academic freedom and freedom of speech. There is widespread agreement among scholars and legal experts that the definition is particularly harmful in university settings where critical thought and free debate are paramount.

However, one cannot separate how the IHRA definition operates inside the academia from the outside world. Wherever it is mobilised, it is used both to protect Israel as it carries out crimes against humanity, and as a weapon to strike those who dare call-out Israel’s racism and the kinds of violence that it deploys to fend off resistance. One might say that the definition has transformed into a Golem of sorts, a mystical giant and powerful creature created from clay by a famous Rabbi to defend Jews from manifestations of antisemitism. And like the Golem who over time became extremely violent, destructive, and uncontrollable, the IHRA definition of antisemitism has become unwieldly, and is now being used as a shield not to protect Jews, but to enable Israel to exert genocidal violence against the Palestinians and attack those who dare criticise the violence. Eventually, the Rabbi who made the Golem was forced to destroy his creation, understanding that the Golem had become dangerous to the very community it was created to protect.⁷ An analysis of the affective work this definition carries out—which is as problematic as it is powerful—is, perhaps, a first step toward facilitating disenchantment with its operations and a divestment from the forms of identification it encourages and the violence that it shields.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In October 2020, the then Secretary of State for Education threatened UK university leaders with punitive financial consequences if their institutions did not adopt the IHRA definition, resulting in 119 universities (almost 75% of UK universities) adopting the definition as a basis for their campus policies (Adams 2020).

2 For a few examples of those siding with the expansion of the definition of antisemitism see (Cotler 2010; Porat 2010; Rosenfeld 2006; Sacks 2002).

3 Some parts of this article rely on passages from (Gordon 2023).

4 For the difference between the Zionist and human rights ways of addressing antisemitism see (Gordon 2023).

5 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 also Judaken (2013).

6 This is not precise since the major conventions also insist that ‘all people have a right to self-determination’, a right people can achieve by establishing a state and asserting a certain type of difference that is associated with national or some other form of belonging.

7 On the notion that Israel has become a Golem see Lustick (2024).