In an opinion piece for The Guardian, a group of “Palestinian university students from campuses across Australia” has warned that adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism in higher education establishments in the country will “pose a dangerous threat to academic freedom.”
The writers, who claim they must remain anonymous because of a supposed “threat to [their] academic positions and future careers,” is seemingly a response to the announcement last month by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison that his government will formally endorse this widely-adopted working definition of hatred against Jewish people.
In the article, the student authors — that is, assuming The Guardian editors did a modicum of due diligence — write:
Fundamentally, the IHRA definition will not protect Jews from antisemitism, but will censure legitimate critique of Israel. The IHRA definition and its guiding examples conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, which not only silences Palestinians but falsely conflates Judaism with Zionism. There is already discrimination against Palestinian students and scholarship on Palestine on university campuses in North America, the UK and Europe.”
So, where is this supposed discrimination of Palestinian students taking place?
A hyperlink provided within the piece directs readers to the website palestinelegal.org, which has collated purported accounts of censorship of pro-Palestinian actors on campuses.
It is illuminating to consider one such incident that, from the linking to it by The Guardian article’s writers, we can assume is indicative of the alleged censorship of at higher education establishments:
At a large public university, two professors received complaints after their program signed onto a student-led Palestine solidarity statement that used the word ‘genocide.’ The complaints, from pro-Israel colleagues in their department, included false accusations of antisemitism.”
Unfortunately, there is no way of probing the veracity of this apparent occurrence because Palestine Legal has offered no details on when and where it happened other than that it occurred at a “large public university.”
Even so, the incident in question pertains to a staff-led complaint about two academics that supported a statement accusing Israel of perpetrating genocide.
Aside from the fact that it is demonstrably false that Israel has engaged in mass killings, not least because official Palestinian population statistics prove otherwise, Palestine Legal offers no evidence that the professors were even reprimanded.
Indeed, throughout the entire piece, the authors are unable to cite a single example of pro-Palestinian views being stifled or “legitimate critique of Israel” being suppressed on college campuses.
Read More: Antisemitism Masked as Anti-Israel Bias at Berkeley, America’s ‘Most Prestigious College’
The article then highlights the case of David Miller, whose employment at the University of Bristol was terminated last month following an investigation:
University of Bristol sociology professor, David Miller, was recently accused of antisemitism over comments about Israel and fired. Despite legal counsel that found his words ‘did not constitute unlawful speech,’ the university found that they did not meet its standards.”
As HonestReporting previously pointed out, though, Miller was not baselessly accused of antisemitism because he criticized Israel. Rather, the fired academic described as “political pawns” students who had disagreed with his assessment that the Jewish state is a “violent, racist, foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing.”
Miller’s suggestion that Jewish students have “dual loyalty” is unquestionably antisemitic. Dating back thousands of years, this canard charges Jews of subverting their home countries in order to advance a secretive Jewish agenda or, more recently, Israel’s.
The trope was also a staple of Nazi propaganda in which Jews were accused of “stabbing the nation in the back” with acts of sabotage that led to Germany losing the First World War.
Furthermore, in the years before he was fired, Miller made numerous statements that criticized Israel and did not face censure by the University of Bristol leadership.
The Guardian piece continues:
The IHRA definition has been widely disputed since its inception, including by over 40 Jewish groups who rightly fear that conflating real antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel will lead not only to further injustice for the Palestinian people, but also to a global rise in genuine antisemitism.”
Let us be clear: the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism by numerous governments and public bodies around the world has been because of rising bigotry directed towards Jews and is not being used to muzzle critics of Israel.
The IHRA even makes clear that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
Indeed, King’s College London became one of the first UK universities to adopt the IHRA definition back in 2018.
At the time, a spokesman for the institution said the decision was necessary after disruptions at a number of student-led events, including a talk by Israel’s former deputy prime minister Dan Meridor at which placard-waving protestors called him a war criminal and labeled Israel a terrorist state.
On another occasion in 2016, police were called after demonstrators smashed a window, threw chairs and called two Jewish students “Nazis” during a talk by the former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, Ami Ayalon, which was organized by KCL’s Israel Society.
Yet, it appears King’s College’s endorsement of the IHRA’s antisemitism definition has not had the effect of hindering expressions of anti-Israel sentiment on the campus.
Last year, for example, student group KCL Action Palestine held an event – incidentally, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day – in which Omar Barghouti was invited to speak.
Barghouti, who has been very clear in his opposition to a “Jewish state in any part of [British Mandatory] Palestine,” used his address to advocate for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which encourages international actions that seek to eventually dismantle Israel.
Looking at a number of incidents at higher education establishments in the United States, it is quite obvious that it is not pro-Palestinian discourse that is being stifled, but rather Jewish and Zionism-supporting students who are being victimized.
In late 2019 and amid a rising tide of BDS activism on US campuses, former president Donald Trump signed an executive order that made clear the protections under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act 1964 applied to “institutions that traffic in antisemitic hate,” thereby effectively classifying Judaism as a protected characteristic like race or nationality.
The order allows the Education Department to withhold funding from colleges or education programs where such discrimination is deemed to have occurred and it suggests that when enforcing the provisions of Title VI, the IHRA definition of antisemitism should be considered.
Despite this, antisemitism and anti-Israel bigotry — generally under the guise of pro-Palestinian activism — has, seemingly, continued unabated at American colleges.
Just last month, HonestReporting detailed the case of a Ph.D. student within the University of North Carolina’s History Department who teaches a class to undergraduates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and called Israel supporters “Zionist dirtbags” on Twitter. In other remarks, Kylie Broderick described Zionism as an “oppressive ideology” that is supported by its “patron, the US imperialist death cult”; retweeted a comment that labeled all of Israel “occupied Palestinian territory”; and professed her support for the BDS movement.
This is but one example HonestReporting has highlighted in a series of articles examining the scourge of antisemitism on college campuses in the United States (see here, here and here)
Furthermore, a recent survey of Jewish students in the US revealed half of them had at one point or another hidden their Jewish identity at university, while 65 percent said they had felt unsafe on campus.
In addition, a report from Inside Higher Education in September showed “harassment and attacks on Jewish students [are] at an all-time high.”
Therefore, The Guardian op-ed writers’ submission that the IHRA definition of antisemitism “silences Palestinians” rings hollow, unless their definition of academic freedom and rigorous intellectual debate is being allowed to claim, among other things, that the mere existence of the world’s only Jewish state is a “racist endeavor.”
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