The following article has been published in the ABC Religion & Ethics by ECAJ Co-CEO, Peter Wertheim.

Pro­ponents of boycotts, divest­ment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel typically react with indig­na­tion when their views are denounced as antisemitic.

They tell us it’s not racist to criticise the policies of any gov­ern­ment, or to speak up for human rights; that some Jews (albeit a tiny minority) support BDS, so BDS can’t be antisemitic; that it cannot be racist to state a fact, and it’s a fact, so they tell us, that Israel is an apartheid State.

BDS sup­port­ers are not only wrong about the facts, the law and history.  Under­pin­ning their thinking is a false dichotomy: their belief that cri­ti­cisms of Israel and antisemitism are mutually exclusive.

Yet whether they acknow­ledge it or not, the inter­na­tion­ally-recog­nised Working Defin­i­tion of Antisemitism adopted by the Inter­na­tion­al Holocaust Remem­brance Alliance (IHRA), emphat­ic­ally affirms that they are not mutually exclusive.

Made up of 33 demo­crat­ic countries, including Australia, the IHRA in 2019 received support for its defin­i­tion of antisemitism from Ahmed Shaheed, UN Special Rap­por­teur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, who encour­aged countries “to adopt it for use in education, awareness-raising and for mon­it­or­ing and respond­ing to mani­fest­a­tions of antisemitism”.

The IHRA defin­i­tion says that when criticism of Israel:

• is couched in terms which employ or appeal to negative ste­reo­types of Jewish people generally;
• or denies the Jewish people their right to self-determ­in­a­tion;
• or applies double standards by requiring of Israel standards of behaviour not expected or demanded of any other demo­crat­ic nation;
• or holds Jews col­lect­ively respons­ible for actions of the state of Israel,

then the line has been crossed.  It’s antisemitism.

When law-abiding Aus­trali­an Jews who support Israel are accused of being more loyal to Israel than Australia, it’s antisemitism.

When classical ste­reo­types are deployed about Jews as a people having inor­din­ate control over the media, economy, gov­ern­ment or other societal insti­tu­tions as a means of sup­port­ing Israel, it’s antisemitism.

According to the author­it­at­ive Gen 17 study, 88% of Aus­trali­an Jews feel a sense of respons­ib­il­ity to ensure that the State of Israel continues to exist in peace and security.  When BDS sup­port­ers denigrate us as “the Jewish lobby”, “the Zionist lobby” or “the pro-Israel lobby”, a sinister influence rather than Aus­trali­ans legit­im­ately exer­cising the right of all citizens to promote our views, that’s antisemitism.

According to the IHRA defin­i­tion, claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour, for example by smearing Israel as an “apartheid State”, is a way of denying the legit­im­acy of a Jewish State and thus denying Jewish people their right to national self-determ­in­a­tion.  Israel’s detract­ors wouldn’t deny that right to any other people, least of all the Palestini­ans.  It’s a double standard, and therefore antisemitism.

Contrary to the dogma of BDS sup­port­ers, the apartheid smear is not a “fact” at all.  It’s a political and legal opinion, rejected by most eminent inter­na­tion­al lawyers, including many who are generally critical of Israel.  All of Israel’s citizens, Jews, Arabs and others, have equal voting, civil and religious rights.   The BDS-ers’ skewed concept of apartheid could be applied to almost every country in the world, including Australia.  Yet they only seek to boycott Israel. Another double standard. Another example of antisemitism.

During the Gaza war in 2014, the Jewish community, and many other Aus­trali­ans, were shocked by a cartoon which appeared in a daily newspaper. It portrayed a classical negative ste­reo­type of a Jew, with a prominent hooked nose, wearing a Jewish religious head-covering and, in case readers missed those two give-aways, a con­spicu­ous Jewish Star of David placed on the back of the armchair in which he was seated. The figure was shown operating a remote detonator to blow up civilians in Gaza, with no more thought than a person operating the remote control of a tele­vi­sion set.  Antisemitism?  Of course it was.

Yes, it is also a fallacy to suggest that every criticism of Israel is antisemitic. The IHRA defin­i­tion itself states that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”. The serious charge of antisemitism should never falsely be made in order to stifle political debate.  However, as the IHRA defin­i­tion demon­strates, it is equally fal­la­cious to assert that there are no forms of criticism of Israel which are antisemitic.

Little wonder that habitual polemi­cists against Israel either rarely mention the IHRA defin­i­tion, or try to dismiss it.  That was the tack initially taken by UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn until the political stench sur­round­ing his promotion of anti-Israel forms of antisemitism within his own party became too much. UK Labour finally accepted the IHRA defin­i­tion in its entirety.

Many critics of Israel in Australia have yet to undergo a similar evolution.  They are still under the illusion that their sub­ject­ive opinions about Israel and antisemitism are incon­tro­vert­ible sci­entif­ic truths.

The choice is clear: the inter­na­tion­ally accepted Working Defin­i­tion of Antisemitism of the IHRA; or a self-serving false dichotomy advocated by pro­ponents of BDS.  The way antisemitism is under­stood by the vast majority of Jewish people – the people who are the targets of antisemitism and are the best qualified by history and exper­i­ence to recognise it when they see it – aligns with the IHRA defin­i­tion.

That is why the ration­al­isa­tions of BDS sup­port­ers fail to persuade most Aus­trali­an Jews. To para­phrase former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, we will not be lectured to about antisemitism by those people.

Peter Wertheim AM is co-CEO of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry.