The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is an intergovernmental organization that aims “to strengthen, advance, and promote Holocaust education, research, and remembrance.” In 2016, it adopted a controversial definition of antisemitism, which is the product of a growing “new antisemitism movement” that seeks to redefine antisemitism to encompass legitimate political criticism of the Israeli state.

Antisemitism, like other forms of racism, is real and must be addressed as a matter of urgency. How we address antisemitism and racism matters. The IHRA is not an antiracism framework, but rather one that conflates anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Since its introduction, this IHRA definition has been used against academics and students to censor speech on Palestine and Israel (see examples below) rather than to protect the safety of Jewish staff and students.

The IHRA defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The contentious aspect of the IHRA definition is not this brief 38-word definition, but its accompanying eleven illustrative examples of what antisemitism is. Seven of the eleven examples refer explicitly to Israel, labelling legitimate critique of Israel as antisemitism.

For instance, one of the IHRA’s “[c]ontemporary examples of antisemitism in public life” is “[d]enying 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 comes at a time when Israel has been defined as an Apartheid state by a number of UN Special Rapporteurs and a host of human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Al-Haq, B’Tselem, and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic.

Defenders of Israel have already relied on the IHRA definition to declare that the organizations that have characterized Israel in this way, notably Amnesty International are antisemitic.

Other IHRA examples include “applying double standards [to Israel] by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” The belief that Israel must be protected from claims that it is a racist endeavor is at odds with the treatment of other states, including Australia. Many scholars have argued that the Australian state, founded in invasion and dispossession, is a colonial and “racist endeavour.”

Using the IHRA logic, one can ask whether these criticisms can be silenced or be deemed as hate speech? If the answer is ‘no’ then why should criticism of another state, along these lines, be subject to political censorship and be delegitimised as racism?

The IHRA definition itself promotes problematic double standards, requiring a degree of precision to speak critically about Israeli state policies that significantly exceeds the standards we hold with respect to other states, including settler colonial states like Australia. Protecting Israel from charges of systemic racism would effectively establish an “Israel Exceptionalism” clause.

As the international human rights NGO Human Rights Watch has noted, the result is to suggest “that it is antisemitic to evaluate Israel as anything but a democracy, even when assessing its actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, where it has for more than half a century governed millions of Palestinians who have no say on the most consequential issues affecting their lives and who are deprived of their basic civil rights.

Penalizing those who claim that Israeli policies and practices are racist goes against the principle of academic freedom, and denies scholars the right to critique the Israeli state without fear of sanction.

If adopted, the IHRA definition will place Australian academics, especially those focusing on human rights, antiracism, and settler colonialism, at great risk of being falsely accused of being antisemitic. This in turn could result in intimidation, censorship, job precarity, and costly legal fees to staff and universities.

Pro-Israel groups like the “Canary Mission” and “Campus Watch” already produce dossiers on academics and students who actively support Palestinian rights, and contribute to chilling speech and research critical of the Israeli state. Racialized faculty and students are especially vulnerable to such blacklisting and intimidation and deserve the protection of their university administrations.

Advocates of the IHRA definition like to present it as a consensus, but this is far from being the case. The IHRA definition has been opposed and criticized by tens of Jewish groups, leading international, Jewish and Israeli scholars in Holocaust and Jewish Studies, scholars of Middle East Studies, academic associations, UN special rapporteurs, legal and rights organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union and <<Human Rights Watch>>, and Palestinian and Arab academics and students.

Even Kenneth S. Stern, the original draftee of the IHRA definition, warned against universities adopting it on the grounds that it would “restrict academic freedom and punish political speech.”

Opposition to the IHRA definition by universities is strong in Australia too. The National Tertiary Education Union, the National Union of Students, and the University of Sydney Student Representative Council have all passed motions opposing the IHRA definition.

Several open letters that reject this framework have been published, including a letter by five Jewish groups, representing the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, Independent Australian Jewish Voices, Jews Against the Occupation, Loud Jew Collective, and Tzedek Collective. Another letter signed by over 100 Australian academics has also been sent to Vice Chancellors warning against the negative impact of the IHRA definition on academic freedom.

Writing anonymously to the Guardian due to threats to their academic positions and future careers, Palestinian Australian university students called on Australian universities to “defend the rights of students and scholars to critically discuss Israel and Palestine”, and to protect students against intimidation, harassment, and discrimination based on their identity and political beliefs on Palestine.

Leading scholars in antisemitism have spoken out against the IHRA definition and the risks it poses to academic freedom. Dr. David Feldman, the Director of The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (University of London, U.K.), further points out that “the overall effect will place the onus on Israel’s critics to demonstrate they are not antisemitic.”

Likewise, Alon Confino, Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies and professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, warned that if the UN adopts the IHRA definition, “the damage will be exponentially bigger to human rights, but also the UN itself”. In a recent public letter, leading Jewish academics at Israeli, European, UK, and US universities, have also called the definition “vague and divisive.”

The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Prof. E. Tendayi Achiume and UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, both warned that the definition is not deployed within the frames of international law and human rights and instead used to protect the Israel from criticism, adding that "no one should be above scrutiny.” The exceptionalism with which Israel is treated led Palestinian and Arab academics to warn that the “fight against antisemitism should not be turned into a stratagem to delegitimise the fight against the oppression of the Palestinians, the denial of their rights and the continued occupation of their land.”

The two most important associations on Middle East Studies, The Middle East Studies Association and The British Middle East Society for Middle East Studies have expressed strong opposition to the IHRA stating that the “IHRA definition broaden the definition of antisemitism – properly understood as hostility toward, hatred of, and/or discrimination against Jews – to encompass legitimate criticism of and opposition to Israel, its policies, and/or Zionism as Israel’s official state ideology, thereby posing a threat to free speech and academic freedom.”

The European International Studies Association, Jewish Faculty Network in Canada, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers have also expressed similar concerns.

While the IHRA document presents itself as “non-legally binding”, in practice it has already been used as a quasi-legal definition in universities across the UK and North America. Examples include using the IHRA definition in hiring processes, in decisions to cancel events organised by scholars and students, to abrogate free speech on campuses, and to create a hostile environment where scholars and public intellectuals self-censor to avoid harassment and burdensome legal action (“the chilling effect”).

The institutionalisation of the IHRA definition has exacerbated censorship and has had an impact on university hiring and faculty relations. In early 2023, the Dean of Harvard Kennedy School withdrew a fellowship offer to Kenneth Roth, the long-term former director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a respected leading figure in the human rights community, because of his criticisms of Israel (HRW was among the many NGOs that have determined that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid). Zionist groups such as B’nai B’rith used the IHRA definition to discredit Roth and label him as antisemitic and to pressure Harvard not to offer him the fellowship. Following public pressure and significant reputational damage, Harvard reinstated its fellowship offer to Roth.

In Canada, the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto reportedly rescinded the hiring of Valentina Azarova as director of the International Human Rights Program because of pressure from donors, who were concerned with her criticism of human rights abuses by Israel. In response, The Canadian Association of University Teachers imposed a censure on the University of Toronto, a measure that amount to boycott. Censure is a serious sanction that is rarely invoked in which academic staff are asked to not accept appointments, speaking engagements or distinctions or honours at the University of Toronto, until satisfactory changes are made.

Academics working and teaching on Palestine are subject to a political- motivated smear campaigns compromising their academic careers. In the UK, Palestinian scholar Dr Shahd Abu Salama was repeatedly investigated and suspended by her employer, Sheffield Hallam University following complaints based on the IHRA definition. Despite her being exonerated from any wrongdoing, Shahd’s contract was not renewed despite years of employment, and she lost her job.

More recently, in the US, award-wining Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology, Lara Sheehi, is under investigation by her employer, George Washington University, after students complained that they felt unsafe following a talk given by a guest speaker in her course, which had characterized certain practices of the Israeli state as racist.

Since its adoption by some universities, the IHRA has impacted the ability of scholars and students to freely speak and has created an environment of censorship and intimidation, in which conversations on Palestine and Israel are being subject to censure or cancelled. Associate Professor Somdeep Sen, for example, was asked by the University of Glasgow to provide a copy of his powerpoint presentation and talking points ahead of an event about his book Decolonizing Palestine, which was published by Cornel University Press. This request came after the adoption of the IHRA definition and following complaints from the university’s Jewish Society.

At the University of Edinburgh, some Zionist groups used the IHRA definition to pressure the university to cancel a public talk by the renowned Palestinian Professor, Salman Abu Sitta (who presented his research on the right of Palestinian refugees to return at UNSW in 2019), to commemorate the centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine. The talk took place as scheduled following the intervention of academic associations and the numerous academic bodies that sponsored this event. It is worth noting that the Anti-Defamation Commission tried to prevent and condemned University of South Australia’s decision to invite Abu Sitta to give its Edward Said Annual Lecture in 2019.

Foundational and influential academic texts by some of the world’s leading scholars contain statements that are critical of Israel and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. These could be subject to censorship if labelled as antisemitic according to the IHRA definition. Such texts include the work of Jewish scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler, as well as the Palestinian post-colonial scholar Edward Said, Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, Black feminist author Angela Davis, settler colonialism scholar Patrick Wolfe, and prominent Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe. Scholars working in fields of research that use the work of these and many other respected writers could be faced with intimidation, abuse, and legal harassment if they were to present this research in a classroom or in the dissemination of their research.

These examples are not merely hypothetical. Mbembe’s scheduled keynote talk in Germany in March 2020 was cancelled after he was labelled an “anti-Semite” for his criticism of Israel and his alleged support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). In an ironic twist, this internationally esteemed scholar from Cameroon, whose research examines anti- Black racism and the legacy of colonization, was accused of racism by a state that previously colonized Cameroon in what was clearly a racist endeavour.

There is evidence to justify the fear that the adoption of the IHRA definition will lead to the targeting and censorship of a long list of prominent Jewish, Arab, Black, Indigenous, and other racialized scholars because they are critical of the Israeli state.

The IHRA definition is not a useful or effective antiracist measure against antisemitism. Antony Lerman, former head of the Jewish Congress’s Institute of Jewish Affairs, expressed his concern that the definition focuses more on Israel than on the “virulent forms of antisemitism now on the rise.” In Australia, we cannot speak of antisemitism while avoid focusing on the continued and growing influence of the far-right.

As critics have pointed, the IHRA definition is not only vague but also not grounded in contemporary anti-racism scholarship or practice. It treats antisemitism as if it occurs in isolation from other forms of racism and disconnects the struggle against antisemitism from the struggle against other forms of racism.

Universities have a duty to ensure all students are protected from racism and that academic freedom is maintained for everyone. Therefore, instead of adopting a separate definition of antisemitism and a definition that undermines these core universal principles, we urge universities to uphold and strengthen their existing policies in antiracism and discrimination of all kinds – in tandem with the Racial Discrimination Act and the Equal Opportunity acts that exist in most states and territories - and to ensure that they protect all staff and students without exceptions.

Being confronted by opposing political views is not the same as putting students at risk or making them unsafe. Silencing critique would pose a real danger to the crucial role universities play in facilitating challenging, yet vital, discourse.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism is highly contested, not only among scholars and academics working on antisemitism, race and racism, and anti colonialism, but also in the Jewish community. Its implications on questions of antiracism, academic freedom, teaching and learning, and staff and student well-being are serious.