California Scholars for Academic Freedom Letter Expressing Concern About the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism

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Mar 3, 2021
California Scholars for Academic Freedom Letter Expressing Concern About the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism

California Scholars for Academic Freedom Letter Expressing Concern About the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism

By : Jadaliyya Reports
[California Scholars for Academic Freedom (CS4AF) sent the following letter to Kara McDonald, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, following remarks she made on February 1st of this year in support of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism. CS4AF vigorously contests the inclusion of any language that equates criticism of the Israeli state with antisemitism, and urges the new administration to reconsider this pernicious legacy of the Trump Administration.]

Kara McDonald

Deputy Assistant Secretary

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

Dear Ms. McDonald:

On behalf of California Scholars for Academic Freedom,f we write with concern regarding your remarks on February 1st supporting the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. It was unclear whether this is your personal viewpoint or the viewpoint of the administration, but you spoke of the IHRA definition, “with its real-world examples,” as “an invaluable tool” for fighting antisemitism.  While we would agree that strong tools must be found for opposing antisemitism and all forms of racism, we strongly disagree with the silencing of critical views of Israel that the adoption of the IHRA definition entails.  CS4AF is an organization of over 200 scholars in higher education in California that seeks to defend academic freedom. Our judgment is that the IHRA definition is harmful to academic freedom and campus speech rights and that, more specifically, it constrains legitimate support for Palestinian human rights and undermines, rather than aids, the struggle against antisemitism. 

What is most wrong about adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism is that doing so conflates Judaism with Zionism.  Judaism (a religion) is not Zionism (a political ideology), and an increasing number of Jews criticize and oppose Zionism.  The State of Israel does not, moreover, represent the Jewish people, nor does criticism of the Israeli state entail the destruction of, or any harm to, the Jewish people. To the contrary, such criticism acts as a call to realize more inclusive and substantive principles of justice in the region. 

Once any criticism of the State of Israel is taken to be an act of antisemitism, the very principles of free speech and political dissent are violated. When this happens on US campuses, the ideal of the university as a site for open debate on key issues of social concern is lost.  Open criticism of Israeli state policy has included its rationale for differential rights of citizenship, land appropriation and illegal settlements, and of its dispossession of Palestinians from their homes. These criticisms are legitimate political speech. Indeed these criticisms are a hallmark of a democratic public sphere. To quell such criticism, or indeed, to brand critics of Israeli policy or even Zionism as anti-Semites, is to treat the Israeli state as beyond criticism. To equate these criticisms with anti-Semitism is to punish those who oppose occupation and colonial rule and support human rights.  

Put succinctly: the IHRA definition of antisemitism illegitimately constrains legitimate political expression, thereby establishing an immunity from criticism for the Israeli state that no other state currently enjoys—and that none should.              

We urge you to consider that the best way to combat antisemitism is to establish doing so as integral to a general policy against racism, including xenophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Black racism, and racism against Indigenous peoples.  We also note that the most dangerous forms of antisemitism in the US now are to be found in the rise of white supremacists, and of conspiracy theorists on the right who believe in a cabal of Jewish financiers with fantastical power, stoked by Evangelicals who wish to export Jews to Israel and deny them their rights of belonging in the US. 

Finally we note that many Jewish organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, oppose Jewish supremacy and practices of the Israeli state that deny Palestinians’ rights of self-determination on their own lands.

To conduct a campaign to suppress and stigmatize those who legitimately recognize the violation of Palestinian human rights and the significance of the Palestinian struggle against ongoing colonial rule is to misuse the charge of “antisemitism.” It is most important at this particular historical moment to be scrupulous in the use of language and in making political claims.  By such campaigns, white supremacists who champion Zionism for racist reasons, including anti-Semitic reasons, are set free to express themselves, while those with historically grounded and well-reasoned criticisms of the Israeli state are stigmatized and their speech inhibited. 

As an organization committed to the defense of academic freedom, California Scholars for Academic Freedom is compelled to speak against the project of constraining legitimate political speech legitimated by the IHRA definition. The IHRA definition is an attack on speech rights with regard to both the struggle against anti-Semitism and the struggle for Palestinian freedom and equality. 

We urge you to reconsider your public statement and to join us in supporting protections for legitimate and protected speech, and in working against all forms of racism—including anti-Semitic and anti-Palestinian hate—in a principled, consistent, and robust manner. 

We urge you to reject the IHRA definition in favor of a framework supported by international law and human rights frameworks.

Sincerely,

California Scholars For Academic Freedom
 

**CALIFORNIA SCHOLARS FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM (cs4af) is a group of over 200 scholars who defend academic freedom, the right of shared governance, and the First Amendment rights of faculty and students in the academy and beyond. California Scholars for Academic Freedom investigates legislative and administrative infringements on freedom of speech and assembly, and it raises the consciousness of politicians, university regents and administrators, faculty, students and the public at large through open letters, press releases, petitions, statements, and articles. Our vigilance extends to violations of academic freedom anywhere in the United States and abroad, for we recognize that violations of academic freedom anywhere are threats to academic freedom everywhere.

* California Scholars for Academic Freedom is a group of scholars committed to academic freedom and rights to education of faculty and students not only in California and the United States but internationally as well. We recognize that violations of academic freedom anywhere are threats to academic freedom everywhere. California Scholars for Academic Freedom investigates legislative and administrative infringements on freedom of speech and assembly, and it raises the consciousness of politicians, university regents and administrators, faculty, students and the public at large through open letters, press releases, petitions, statements, and articles.

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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412