Misdirecting the fight against antisemitism

JVL Introduction

The main purpose of surveys into antisemitism should be to provide reliable information to guide fighting it in society.

Instead the latest Antisemitism Barometer report from the Campaign Against Antisemitism charity seems once more designed to exaggerate the prevalence of antisemitism, and its association with widespread criticism of Israel.

Reassuring  falls in the proportion of those endorsing anti-Jewish statements are wrongly dismissed.

In addition to generating unnecessary anxiety in many British Jews, this will seriously misdirect those trying to protect them from the very real threats they face, in particular causing a significant distraction from the growing risk of violence from the far right.

In this article Dr Alan Maddison explores how the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s flawed methodology has led to such a damaging distortion of the evidence.

Misdirecting the fight against antisemitism

Dr Alan Maddison for JVL

Preface

In January 2015 the Institute for Jewish Policy Research published a critique of the work of a new organisation, the Campaign Against Antisemitism. (1)

It said

“Antisemitism is a serious topic, and the claims that it is rising need to be taken seriously. Government officials need accurate data about it to inform policy. Legal authorities need accurate data about it to assess levels of discrimination. The police and security services need accurate data about it to minimise the chances of harassment, assault or murder. Jewish community leaders need accurate data about it to provide sound advice to community members. And British Jews in general need accurate data to make sound judgments about their future and the future of their families.”

The information in the latest annual ‘Antisemitism Barometer’ report for 2021 (2), from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, appears to continue to be anything but accurate and reliable.

It risks instead seriously ‘misguiding’ leaders in politics, religion, journalism, education or justice in their attempts to tackle the very real threats British Jews are facing.

Introduction

The latest annual ‘Antisemitism Barometer’ report for 2021 (2), from the Campaign Against Antisemitism charity (CAA), shows another significant fall in those endorsing anti-Jewish statements.

Good news to convey, you might imagine! But far from it. The CAA authors simply dismiss this finding, claiming instead that ‘antisemitism’ has become ‘normalised’ and ‘entrenched’. We consider this a very strange interpretation of the evidence and show below that it is wrong, and based on a flawed methodology (3).

To reach their conclusions, the CAA makes assumptions about the relationship between endorsements of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel statements with the prevalence of antisemitism itself. As we will show, these assumptions are in conflict with the interpretations of Daniel Staetsky, of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, who published his original landmark survey Antisemitism in contemporary Great Britain in 2017 (4).

1. The report wrongly dismisses the significant falls in those endorsing ‘anti-Jewish’ statements

In the first pages of CAA’s latest Antisemitism Barometer report they tabulate responses to six statements about Jews and a further 6 about Israel.

The interpretation of the results was given in the CAA’s Antisemitism Barometer Executive Summary as follows:

The terminology is grossly misleading. Statement endorsements reflect widespread antisemitic attitudes, not a dislike or hatred of Jews found in only a small minority, and the term ‘Zionist’ never appeared in any of the statements.

In addition, this boxed conclusion leads us to believe that changes in responses to anti-Jewish and anti-Israel statements were equally reflecting antisemitism, and so changes in opposite directions could cancel each other out.

In fact the actual data, together with Staetsky’s findings, show these CAA assumptions and conclusions to be invalid.

(a) Changes in endorsements of anti-Jewish statements

In Figure 1 we have an illustration of the changes in the proportions of respondents agreeing with each of 3 negative statements and disagreeing with each of 3 positive statements about Jews.

These endorsements, indicative of anti-Jewish attitudes, fell by around half over the seven-year period, to their lowest levels ever recorded. The wording of these statements was sometimes modified, but the downward trend was also maintained when no changes were made.

Between 2020 and 2021, the proportions of responders remained stable for only one statement, and for the other 5 showed a significant fall.

On average the fall in those endorsing anti-Jewish statements over the previous 12 months was 21%, with a range of change from 0% to -50%.

If we exclude two statements in which the wording was modified the average fell by 24%.

(b) Changes in endorsements of anti-Israel statements

In Figure 2 we see the same data for the more recently introduced anti-Israel statements.

A fall for each anti-Israel statement in 2020 was followed in 2021 by a rise in the proportions of respondents endorsing 3 of the 6 statements, for two statements this proportion remained stable, and for one there was a decline.

On average the net increase in those endorsing anti-Israel statements over the last 12 months was 4% , with a range -6.3% to +16.7%.

Was ‘cancelling out’ these opposite trends justified?

There was a more consistent pattern for anti-Jewish statement endorsement declines than the boxed description implies, and they were clearly of a different order (net -21%) than the increases for anti-Israel statements (net +4%). So the apparent ‘cancelling out’ by CAA was not justified.

But there is another important point.

The fact that the changes for anti-Jewish and anti-Israel statement endorsements go in opposite directions in 2021 suggests that they were not measuring the same thing.

Staetsky found that more than half of those endorsing at least one anti-Israel statement had expressed no associated anti-Jewish sentiments.

So the small increases in anti-Israel attitudes in the CAA report of 2021 might well relate to the violent conflicts between Israel and Palestine in May of that year, with most injuries and deaths inflicted on Palestinians. The reports on Israel’s apartheid status from human-rights groups B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch early in 2021 may also have had an impact (5, 6).

It is perfectly understandable that these could generate increases in anti-Israel sentiments based on human-rights concerns, independent of any anti-Jewish sentiment. Indeed, the wonder might be that the increase in anti-Israel attitudes in this period was as low as it was.

The opposite net trends illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 probably relate to changes in distinct opinions about Jews and about Israel respectively. This together with the previously mentioned difference in the magnitude of changes, indicate that the CAA’s attempted ‘cancelling out’ is not valid.

2. A claimed ‘troubling normalisation of antisemitism’ is unjustified

In the analysis of their survey data the CAA authors claime:,

These claims are based on the CAA’s flawed ‘Generalised Antisemitism Scale’ methodology (2), in which they combined endorsements of both sets of six anti-Jewish and anti-Israel statements into one set of 12.

The CAA authors wrongly assume equivalence between endorsements of each set of six statements and association with antisemitic views. This is in conflict with the findings of Staetsky mentioned earlier, because fewer than half of the endorsements of anti-Israel statements were associated with anti-Jewish views.

We are not told how many endorsements ‘of at least one statement’ were about Jews and how many about Israel. But from Figures 1 and 2 we know that anti-Israel statements were endorsed by about twice as many people as were anti-Jewish statements and so they will dominate.

The 43% figure is inflated because it includes those endorsing anti-Israel statements with no expressed antisemitic views.

The small fall (45% to 43%) in those endorsing at least one of the combined statements probably relates to a marked fall in antisemitic views (Fig 1) being masked by a disproportionately weighted small increase in anti-Israel attitudes (Fig 2), largely free from any anti-Jewish sentiments.

So the CAA claim of a ‘troubling normalisation of antisemitism’ is quite unjustified.

 3. The claimed ‘entrenched antisemitic views’ are also more about Israel than Jews

The CAA claim concerning those respondents endorsing four or more of the 12 combined sets of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel statements are given below.

It is regrettable that for these 10% we again don’t know how many endorsements related to anti-Jewish statements, as this could have provided a guide to the important prevalence of antisemitism defined as a dislike for Jews as Jews.

Remarkably, for theCAA’s ’Antisemitism Barometer’ report, antisemitism defined as a dislike or even hatred for Jews as Jews is never measured or estimated.

In his more detailed analysis (3), Staetsky reported that 30% of respondents endorsed at least one of eight anti-Jewish statements. But of these around four out of five respondents had also endorsed at least one positive statement about Jews.

Staetsky therefore considered the majority of these 30% were simply adopting negative stereotypes from society without any dislike of Jews.

He attributed a probable antisemitism animosity to only 3.6% of respondents who endorsed at least 5 of his 8 anti-Jewish statements.

In fact, data from Staetsky’s survey can provide a useful guide. He reported the distribution of those with the strongest views as:

• 9% endorsed at least 6 of 9 anti-Israel statements were considered strong critics of Israel
• 3.6% endorsed at least 5 of 8 ‘anti-Jewish’ statements were considered likely to be antisemites in terms of disliking Jews as Jews
• 2% demonstrated an overlap of both categories

The above distribution covered 10.6% of respondents in Staetsky’s survey, those with the highest mixed endorsements, so this was close to the CAA’s ‘more than one in ten’.

It seems reasonable to use this to guide us on the CAA distribution pattern as estimated in Figure 3:

We see that around only one third (15%+19%) of the respondents for CAA’s ‘entrenched antisemitic views’ group would reflect antisemitism in terms of animosity towards Jews.

A majority of 85% (66% +19%) would be strong critics of Israel.

The largest single group within what is only around 10% of the total sample, would be the 66% considered to be strong critics of Israel but with no associated hatred or dislike for Jews.

So the CAA claim for ‘entrenched antisemitic views’ is clearly not justified. The 10% endorsing 4 or more of 12 statements in 2021 will probably be largely made up of those with anti-Israel views not associated with animosity towards Jews.

Antisemitic animosity probably accounts for an estimated 3%, but crucially we are not informed by the CAA of this and how it may have changed since 2020

Importantly, the authors also fail to report that the proportion of responders endorsing at least four of 12 statements fell from around 20% in 2019 (7) and 12% in 2020 (8 ). Even if such significant declines may have been affected by changes in some of the statements, these changes really should have been raised and commented upon in this report.

The boxed CAA claim of ‘entrenched antisemitic views’ is totally misleading. It ignores the significant declines above, and fails to distinguish the minority with antisemitism from the majority who are critics of Israel free from such prejudice. In the preparation of the report the evidence that people could be “critical of Israel” but not “antisemitic” is completely ignored by the authors. The next section would suggest this unwarranted conflation was deliberate.

4. CAA assumptions imply that anti-Israel attitudes free from antisemitism do not exist

In the CAA’s Press Release (9) for the Antisemitism Barometer report we read:

The CAA has renamed the greatly contested IHRA working definition of antisemitism (10) as the ‘International Definition of Antisemitism’ which gives it an undeserved status.

But even the authors of that definition (11) carefully stated that its illustrative examples were examples of what might be, “taking into account the overall context”, antisemitic.

When the CAA associate the term antisemitism with the IHRA’s working definition, they appear to be wrongly claiming that all the cited 24% of British adults actually hate Jews!

There has been much similar abuse of the IHRA working definition, specifically to allow unjustified censorship in the mainstream media, the Labour Party and on university campuses but it is surprising in what purports to be rigorous academic research (12).

The CAA fails to acknowledge that for the IHRA list of examples, such as ‘comparing Israelis to Nazis’, even if offensive, any links to antisemitism cannot simply be read off, but need to be seen as conditional, contextual and not absolute.

In other words such a Nazi comparison may be based on genuine – if exaggerated – outrage at the cruel occupation and state terrorism inflicted on Palestinians, and not by a ‘hatred of Jews’.

Can we estimate how many respondents who agreed strongly or somewhat with this statement were driven by any ‘hatred of Jews’?

An analysis of Staetsky data can help answer this (13, 14). One IHRA example concerns referring to Israel as a ‘racist endeavour’, and from the Staetsky 2017 survey data it was found that 21% of respondents agreed with the statement ‘Israel is an apartheid state’.

As we see in Figure 4 below, over half of these 21% did not endorse a single one of the 8 anti-Jewish statements proposed, and fewer than one in ten of these 21% (those endorsing 5 or more statements) were considered to dislike Jews let alone hate them.

Whilst some may more freely express their anti-Jewish prejudice by criticising Israel, there is no evidence that this represents a significant new group of previously unidentified antisemites as the CAA’s text implies. Based on Staetsky’s data any such potential group could involve a maximum of 2.5% of the population.

So for the CAA’s 24% who compared Israel’s acts to those of the Nazis, it is reasonable to consider, based on available evidence, that fewer than one in ten may have had any dislike, let alone hatred, for Jews.

The CAA boxed statement is clearly misleading and can exaggerate more than tenfold the association between comparing Israel to Nazis and actual hatred of Jews.

5. Overall Conclusions

The purpose of such surveys as the CAA’s Antisemitism Barometers should be to provide reliable information to guide on how best to fight antisemitism, defined as a dislike or hatred of Jews as Jews.

It is worrying to discover this is never measured nor even estimated in these surveys. Instead it is confused with more widespread prejudice, which, according to Staetsky, is largely free from such animosity.

The CAA data suggesting welcome falls in anti-Jewish attitudes is either not presented clearly in this report or is wrongly dismissed. Significant declines in those with the strongest views (Section 3), including the small minority who dislike Jews, are not reported or commented upon.

The CAA’s direct conflation between anti-Israel and antisemitic attitudes is in conflict with the more rigorous interpretations of Staetsky and even with the IHRA guidelines (despite other reservations we might have about this definition).

This report seems more designed to protect Israel from legitimate criticism than protect British Jews from manifestations of antisemitism. Importantly it will misdirect attention from the growing threats of violence from the far right.

The authors seem unconcerned that it will undoubtedly generate misplaced anxiety in many British Jews, and create societal disharmony by facilitating the repeated stigmatisation of innocent critics of Israel with false allegations of Jew hatred.

British citizens, whether Jewish or not, expect and deserve better than this, especially from an organisation with charity status.

References

1. Researching Antisemitism, Institute for Jewish Policy Research, January 2012.
2. Antisemitism Barometer 2021, Campaign Against Antisemitism, March 2022
3. Brief response to an ‘antisemitism’ hoax, Jamie Stern-Weiner and Alan Maddison, Jewish Voice for Labour, December 2019
4. Antisemitism in contemporary Great Britain, L Daniel Staetsky, Institute for Jewish Policy Research, September 2017
5. A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid, B’Tselem, January 2021
6. A Threshold Crossed. Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, Human Rights Watch, April 2021
7. Antisemitism Barometer 2019, Campaign Against Antisemitism, December 2019
8. Antisemitism Barometer 2020, Campaign Against Antisemitism, March 2021
9. CAA publishes latest Antisemitism Barometer, showing detrimental impact of antisemitism surge, with British Jews also pointing fingers at criminal justice system, Labour Party, Green Party Universities and social media, Campaign Against Antisemitism, March 2022
10. Labour should ditch the IHRA working definition of antisemitism altogether, Antony Lerman, Open Democracy, September 2018
11. About the IHRA non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, 2016
12. The IHRA document: a scholarly critique of its effects, Rebecca Ruth Gould interview with the Morning Star, Jewish Voice for Labour, September 2018
13. The apartheid contention and calls for a boycott, David Graham and Jonathan Boyd, Institute for Jewish Policy Research, January 2019
14. The New-Antisemitism: proof at last? Jamie Stern-Weiner and Alan Maddison, Jewish Voice for Labour, February 2019