Jews should not be defined as Zionists

Joseph Massad

Ultra-orthodox Jewish anti-Zionism protesters join a demonstration in London in support of Palestinians in Gaza on 7 April 2018 (AFP)

During the last year, and with the rising tide of the global movement opposing Israeli racist and colonial policies towards Palestinians, Israel and its western allies have sought to criminalise all opposition to Israeli colonialism as nothing but "antisemitism".

Jews have fought since the 19th century against antisemitism, which targeted them as a group, and have refused to accept the antisemitic claims that they are a race

This month alone, the US and British governments have taken measures in that direction, while France, Germany, and the EU have done so over the last year. They have based their criminalisation of opposition to Israeli racism and colonialism on the new definition of antisemitism that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted in 2016, which includes in its definition opposition to Israeli policies. 

Jews have fought since the 19th century against antisemitism, which targeted them as a group, and have refused to accept the antisemitic claims that they are a race. The new IHRA definition might be construed as an attempt to make all Jews worldwide responsible for Israeli and Zionist colonial crimes against the Palestinian people, and in so doing, to make it impossible for anyone to oppose these crimes under threat of being charged with antisemitism.

That so many Jews and gentiles today across the world, especially within the BDS movement and movements such as Jewish Voice for Peace, insist that Jews should not be defined as Zionists, let alone as colonists, has effectively challenged the new antisemitic strategy of implicating all Jews in Israel’s colonial policies. The recent legal measures across Europe and the US to implicate all Jews in Israeli crimes are the clearest evidence of the failure of the IHRA strategy to be effective on its own without legal repression.