Screenshot of Farid Esack, Head of Religious Studies, University of Johannesburg. Israel Apartheid Week 2017 speaker.YouTube.Recently petitions and letters have been circulating protesting at the British Government’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. They argue that the IHRA definition of antisemitism dangerously conflates political speech critical of Israel, or in support of Palestinian rights in the Occupied Territories, with antisemitism. The letters and petitions respond in part to campaigns against annual Israel Apartheid Week seminars in the UK, which have cited the IHRA definition in their initiatives to shut down such events. The protests against the government’s position on the IHRA definition are broadly correct in their assertions about the danger’s of the government’s actions. But there are some aspects of the situation that warrant slightly different emphases than most of the letters and petitions have made.
One problem with the IHRA definition is less the definition itself than a disclaimer line in the document that, in the abstract, anticipates the objection that its intention is simply to shut down political speech connected to Israel: “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
But what does “criticism” mean? What are the criteria for “similarity”? One can imagine a comparison between criticisms of the United States, Britain and Israel. It would be impossible to understand the history of the United States without acknowledging the centrality of slavery, the dispossession of Native Americans, and racism that governed the attitudes of White Americans toward both. Modern Britain would be incomprehensible if one tried to erase colonialism, underpinned by violence and its own forms of racism, from the narrative. The experience of American slavery and British colonialism respectively, while by no means isolated or somehow “incomparable” to other histories, is nonetheless particular to each country. By the same token Israeli history is incomplete without discussing the role of settler colonialism in the founding of the state, and subsequently the dispossession of Palestinians’ rights through occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
