Why Jews alone should not define antisemitism
JVL Introduction
In his weekly podcast, Peter Beinart welcomes the fact that the Biden administration’s new strategy for combatting antisemitism did not adopt the IHRA definition, a definition “that equates anti-Zionism—opposition to a Jewish state—with antisemitism.”
He goes further and skewers as logically incoherent the claim, propounded by leading Jewish organisations in the States and elsewhere, that Jews alone should have the right to determine what constitutes antisemitism.
But if this new strategy document is better than it might have been in mentioning many kinds of discrimination – against Black Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs as well as against Jews – it singularly fails to mention discrimination against Palestinians.
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Thanks to Peter Beinart for permission to repost.
This article was originally published by the Beinart Notebook on Tue 30 May 2023. Read the original here.
Why Jews alone should not define antisemitism
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I’d add the purely practical points that any faith or racial group is only one small part of the whole human family and most of the “locals” won’t belong to that grouping. If the human rights of that minority faith and racial group are to be protected by their neighbours then those neighbours’ views of what injustice IS count.
Amongst other bad outcomes, Israeli injustice to the Palestinians triggers antisemitism here in the UK that would otherwise never surface.