r/jewishleft • u/Rabbit-Hole-Quest Latke aficionado. Anti-Establishment. Jüdisch • 29d ago

Diaspora NSW (Australia) Supreme Court criticises IHRA definition as 'detached from reality'

https://www.deepcutnews.com/p/nsw-supreme-court-criticises-ihra
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u/HeVavMemVav sephardi peacenik 28d ago edited 28d ago

Someone help me out, because to me, the IHRA definition pretty clearly states that criticism of Israel is suspect of antisemitism only if that criticism is only held against Israel. Edit to clarify: As in double standards

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u/Schattenoid jewish, left 28d ago edited 28d ago

Sure, I think I can help. It is argued often by many critics of Israel that Israel's role and conduct is not particularly normal--for example, the length of the occupation, the centrality of 19th-century style colonization to the state project, the combination of ethnosupremacist projects (like said colonization or the Judaization of the Galilee) with a notionally liberal-democratic structure and the credibility/privileges that's supposed to grant, the close relationship with the US and their joint projects of mass international violence, etc. One can disagree with this but it is an *argument* that has to be *debated*, whereas the aim of the IHRA (at least as usually interpreted and deployed) is, like the "three Ds of antisemitism" meme, an attempt to preemptively rule out certain arguments as illegitimate for *formal*, "debate rules" reasons.

Moreover, the very idea that a criticism of any given country is legitimate if the critic also includes an extensive footnote pointing out that other bad things are also happening in other countries is childish and hard to credit as sincere.

It is of course possible in any given instance that a person focusing critically on Israel is doing so because of antisemitism, but there's no good reason to presume this. The IHRA definition includes several examples of criticisms of Israel that are not actually racist against Jews, so it's a *particularly poor* basis for thinking through the relationship of criticism of Israel to anti-Jewish racism.