Encampment Protest at the University of California, San Diego, May 1, 2024. Photo by author.

Is it antisemitic to protest the State of Israel for its military occupation of Palestinian territory and its policies toward Palestinians that deny them basic political rights, including the right of self-determination? Is it discriminatory toward Jews to critique the ideology of Zionism that justifies an exclusionary Jewish ethno-state in Palestine? For those defending freedom of expression and the right to assembly, the answer to these questions is a resounding “no,” but sadly university leaders across the country have admitted to an exception to these principles when it comes to Israel and Palestinians that has compromised the university as a space of free and open discussion of issues of public concern.

For the past 25 years, Israel’s promoters have sought to deflect criticism of Israel and Zionism as anti-Jewish animus. By the early 2000s, as Palestinians launched a Second Intifada against their Israeli military occupiers, a global critique of Israeli brutality in repressing Palestinians emerged as part of a discourse of resistance directed against Israel and Zionism. This discourse defined the State of Israel as a colonialist venture upheld by a racist ideology. The World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in 2001 was a turning point in this critique and proved to be a forerunner to the charges of Apartheid levelled against Israel by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Confronted with this critique, promoters of Israel and Zionism argued that the specter of a “new antisemitism” was haunting the globe, but to support this claim, the meaning of antisemitism had to be expanded beyond its historically accepted definition as animus directed at Jews.

One individual centrally involved in promoting this idea was Kenneth Marcus, an official in the Department of Education in the early 2000s. Marcus was alarmed by anti-Israel protests on college campuses and successfully lobbied lawmakers to add protections to Jewish students under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.[1] What was needed to make this campaign about new antisemitism effective, however, was an institutional change in the meaning of antisemitism such that protests against Israel and Zionism, nominally protected forms of speech and assembly, became racist violations against the civil rights of Jews. To the rescue came the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Focused primarily on Holocaust education, the IHRA took up the cause of redefining antisemitism in 2005 and by 2016 adopted a “working definition” of the age-old concept. Although its definition emphasized antisemitism as hatred and prejudice toward........

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