AS`AD AbuKHALIL: The Anti-Semitism Trap

The Trump administration sued Harvard University on Friday for supposedly tolerating anti-semitism in a serious confusion between protesting genocide and hating Jews. Here is a look at the history of this phenomenon.

By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News

So much Zionist propaganda centers on definitions — of terms, concepts and political movements.

Early on, Zionists decided to conflate the Palestinian national movement — in all of its manifestations — with Nazism. (Elie Wiesel and Amos Oz were among the first to do so.) One surviving picture of Hajj Amin Husseini, the grand mufti of Al-Quds/Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937, seated with Adolf Hitler provided fodder for that absurd notion for over 70 years.

Using the Nazi smear as a political weapon against all forms of Palestinian nationalism (from the far left to the far right, from secular to religious-oriented movements) starting right after World War II and the establishment of a Zionist state atop an already existing Palestinian nation has had the effect of treating Palestinians as mere Nazis who survived.

In recent years, Zionists have stumbled upon a new method to try to resolve the dilemma of rising voices against Zionism and Israel in Western societies and the declared freedom of speech in the West: the smear of anti-semitism.

Thus was created with the infamous definition of anti-semitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). What could be a more effective way of shutting down debate about Israel than to invoke the memory of the horrific Holocaust itself to intimidate Israel’s critics?

The definition was so ridiculous that it required critics to balance their criticism of Israel with criticisms of other countries — i.e., actually saying that it is anti-semitic to “apply double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

If you criticize Israel, then you are obliged to produce a similar litany of complaints about all other democratic countries in order not to be labeled an anti-semite. For instance, if you don’t criticize other democracies for occupying a population (even if they aren’t occupying anyone), then it is anti-semitic to say Israel is an occupying power.

Harvard students staged a die-in for 17 minutes to honor the lives lost during 17 months of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/PflFdNIMmg

— PALESTINE ONLINE ?? (@OnlinePalEng) March 29, 2025

Where do you submit your criticism to obtain a license of exoneration? Who makes the highly political and subjective judgments that entail moral values? 

Undoubtedly, Zionist bodies and organizations — or the state of Israel itself — would be the authority deciding such matters.

When have Zionists accepted any criticism of Israel that they did not consider anti-semitic?

In the last two years, the United Nations itself and its secretary-general, various human rights organizations, legal and genocide experts, and countries like South Africa have all been labeled anti-semitic by the government of Israel.

The IHRA insists, for example, that it is anti-semitic to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” This is illogical because two separate issues are covered in that one sentence. 

You may, for example, support the right of Jewish people to self-determination while also considering the State of Israel a racist endeavor.

If I consider the Saudi state a bigoted or discriminatory endeavor, I would not be denying the right of Muslims to self-determination. That would, in any case, be odd because we would not consider it legitimate to speak of the right of Muslims — or any religious group — to self-determination.

The Knesset’s Explicit Racism

The modern Israeli state, for example, became explicit in its racism when its Knesset adopted in 2018 a Basic Law called the Nation-State Law. 

Israel doesn’t have a single written constitution like many countries. Instead, it uses a series of “Basic Laws” that act like a constitution in practice. (This is similar to Saudi Arabia, which also lacks a formal constitution for religious reasons.)

This 2018 Basic Law openly says that the right to national self-determination in the land of Israel/Palestine belongs only to the Jewish people. No one else gets that right.

Thus, the recognition of Jewish self-determination in Palestine can only be accomplished through the denial of self-determination for the native Palestinian population.

Anti-Zionism is not necessarily about denying the right of Jews to self-determination, although one — from a purely rigid secular stance — can reject the right of religious groups — all religious groups —to self-determination. 

But self-determination where?

In his book, Der Judenstaat, Theodor Herzl, considered the founder of modern political Zionism, did not make up his mind whether the future State of the Jews should be in Argentina or in Palestine.  (The title’s English translation, The Jewish State, alters Herzl’s secular intent of a state for Jews to a state that is Jewish in character.)

Of course, after 1948, Zionists unanimously agreed that Jewish self-determination can only be fulfilled in Palestine, and not in Argentina or Uganda or any other place which was discussed by early Zionists.

So according to the IHRA, the Palestinians must accept the right of Jews to self-determination on their own territory. If the Palestinians who lived ancestrally for centuries in the land of Palestine were to insist on their right to remain in their own homeland, they would be committing the sin of anti-semitism by that bizarre definition.

Logically speaking, the only way for Palestinians to be free of the charge of anti-semitism is to endorse wholesale their own uprootedness, displacement, the suppression of their rights and even their own ethnic cleansing. 

If Palestinians were to protest what befell them at the hand of Zionists, they would be accused (by Western standards) of the offense of anti-semitism (which is a punishable offense in many Western countries).

Furthermore, why would describing Israel as a racist state  be considered anti-semitic when the label of apartheid has been adopted for Israel and/or the occupied territories by Israeli and Western human rights organizations? 

To classify a state, any state, as racist is a purely political judgment and does not — and should not —reflect on the entire population of the country, unless the people of that country “democratically” vote to segregate, repress and discriminate against other people based on race, ethnicity, or religion.

In other words, if Israel were a dictatorship where Jewish people are not accorded political rights (like the plight of Arabs in the occupied territories), it would be most unfair to describe the society as racist. 

But in the case of Israel, Zionist Jews voted on the political foundations of the Zionist state from the inception of modern Israel.

Moreover, public opinion surveys indicate most Jewish citizens of Israel agree to a variety of measures to deny political and other rights for the Arabs living under Zionist rule in Israel (not to mention the occupied territories where Palestinians are denied even the token rights — inferior to Jewish rights — given to Arabs in Israel).

Shielding Nazi-Like Practices

It is also anti-semitic, according to the IHRA definition, to draw “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” 

But how dangerous is it that this outfit gave Israel a blanket permission to engage in any Nazi-like practices and get away with it, because if one were to recognize the similarities one would be considered anti-semitic? The definition does not say why Israel would enjoy such a privilege which is not accorded to any other state in the world. 

Those privileges granted to Israel by the IHRA are actually anti-semitic because they privilege Israel over all other countries. The IHRA definition also considers  “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” to be anti-semitic.  

Yet, that attitude is a feature of the Israeli state which has allowed itself, quite unfairly, to speak on behalf of world Jewry. That unjustly associates Jews worldwide with the criminal and discriminatory behavior of Israel.

Palestinian protests against Israel have nothing to do with denial of Jewish rights of self-determination. Zionism (in one definition) is the recognition of the Jewish right of self-determination only in Palestine and with complete disregard for the political rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, who have been in continued existence over the land for centuries.

Historically Zionists (intellectuals and political leaders) have invoked romantic and almost always misleading definitions of the term. 

Herzl did not really offer a definition of Zionism, especially since he did not envision a Jewish state in Palestine at first (neither Jewish nor in Palestine). He only later, in 1897, agreed to finalize Palestine as the destination for Jewish statehood as it was the only way he could draw East European Jews to attend his founding conference.

The founding conference of Zionism in the Basel program in 1897 described the aim of Zionism as “the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers.”

In the Western world, colonization was not a pejorative word and was instead intended to rally Western public opinion, which was long accustomed to colonial ventures. Max Nordau described Zionism in 1897 at the First Zionist Congress as “the return of the Jewish people to Palestine.”

But the return (which assumes a bond between Palestine and all Western Jewry) requires the expulsion of the Palestinian native population to make room for the new immigrants. Ironically, when ethnically-cleansed Palestinians today invoke “the right of return,” they are accused of wanting to destroy the state of Israel.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, offered a seemingly innocuous definition: “Zionism is the effort to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine secured by public law.” But public law here only refers to Western laws and not the laws governing the existing native population of Palestine at the time.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky (the founder of revisionist Zionism and the present-day rightist movement in Israel) produced a rather candid definition (in The Iron Wall) in 1923: “Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.”

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, should have invoked this definition if he was striving for historical accuracy and not sheer propaganda when he recently told Tucker Carlson that “Zionism is the belief that Israel has a right to exist in safety and security.”

How then do we separate the right to self-determination from the theft of Palestinian land to fulfill it?

As`ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New War on Terrorism (2002), The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004) and ran the popular The Angry Arab blog. He tweets as @asadabukhalil

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.