Palestine Legal In The News on Redefining Antisemitism
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Palestine Legal and our resources were featured in three articles on a new definition of antisemitism introduced as a moderate alternative to the widely criticized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition.
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), was released last week by 200 Jewish studies and other scholars, attempting to address the harms caused by the IHRA working definition, which conflated Palestine advocacy with anti-Jewish discrimination..
The JDA dispels much of IHRA’s false equivalence between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, but as we've noted, maintains structural issues of policing Palestinians in discussing their oppression.
The Middle East Eye, The Forward, The Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss each covered our analysis of the JDA. Some of these stories have included our new resource on the #DistortedDefinition as a censorship tool:
Middle East Eye: Opposing Zionism is not hate speech, new antisemitism definition asserts
Palestine Legal, an advocacy group that supports people targeted over Palestinian rights activism, cautiously welcomed the Jerusalem Declaration on Thursday.
"The JDA dispels much of IHRA's false equivalence between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, but reinforces the structural problem of policing how Palestinians can speak about their oppression, requiring all criticism of Israel to be filtered through a lens of antisemitism," the group said on Twitter.
"Instead of politicized definitions, we need to understand and work against the common threat to all vulnerable communities, which is a resurgent white supremacy and fascism that is taking lives and working to undermine all of our freedom."
The Forward: Leading Jewish scholars say BDS, one-state solution are not antisemitic
Palestine Legal, a nonprofit that has defended Palestinian activists accused of antisemitism, said that “politicized definitions” were unproductive.
“The JDA rightly intends to ameliorate the harm that IHRA’s promoters have done in equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism to censor speech,” Dima Khalidi, the group’s director, said in a statement. “But the new definition risks reinforcing the impulse to decide for Palestinians and their allies what is acceptable to say about Israel and Palestinians’ lived experiences.”
The Electronic Intifada: Approach new definition of anti-Semitism with caution, Palestinians say
This week, Palestine Legal published an online interactive toolkit to track the evolution and implementation of the IHRA and document how Palestinian rights advocates have been impacted.
In 2020, state and federal lawmakers introduced more than 20 measures “aimed at silencing, condemning, or punishing advocacy for Palestinian rights,” the civil rights group reports. Those measures included bills condemning the BDS campaign as well as promotion of the IHRA definition.
Of the hundreds of incidents of suppression to which Palestine Legal responded in 2020, 66 percent included false accusations of anti-Semitism.
Widespread efforts to promote the IHRA definition “may have played a role in an uptick in false and politically motivated accusations of anti-Semitism against supporters of Palestinian rights,” Palestine Legal states.
Palestine Legal recently launched a new, interactive resource visualizing two decades of efforts by Israel advocates to establish a politicized redefinition of antisemitism designed to silence advocacy for Palestinian freedom.
