Naming hatred. Who stands to gain from attacking the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism?

Yesterday, the Democratic Party announced it would vote against the anti-Semitism bill, which has already been approved by the Senate and is currently under discussion in the Chamber of Deputies. The proposal, tabled by Lega MP Massimiliano Romeo, has incorporated other bills, three of which originated from the left. Those paying close attention will have linked the urgency for such a law to the rise in anti-Semitic incidents, which have tripled since 7 October and the war in Gaza, whilst Italian Jews have been forced to step up security at synagogues, schools, cultural centres and public events. No one within the broad coalition of opponents denies the existence of the phenomenon; rather, they object to the proposed law adopting the definition of antisemitism set out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organisation with offices in Sweden and Germany.

This definition is considered detrimental to criticism of Israel and even ‘harmful to democracy and the fight against racism’. The solution would be to replace it with the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), an alternative definition presented as a corrective to its ambiguities. Some figures. The IHRA definition, approved in Bucharest in 2016 after more than ten years of drafting, had been adopted or recognised at national level by 47 countries by the end of 2025: in addition to the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Argentina, but not Russia nor, understandably, the states of the Middle East and South-East Asia. In Italy, it was adopted in 2020 by the Conte II government, alongside the establishment of the National Coordination against Anti-Semitism. The JDA, published in 2021, has, on the other hand, been adopted by Anglo-American universities, anti-Zionist Jewish organisations, pro-Palestinian networks and the German party Die Linke, but by no state. Both are declared to be non-binding and intended to recognise, classify and monitor antisemitism, guiding education and public policy. What, then, should justify the choice of one definition over the other?

The IHRA text is essential, the result of a compromise between different national sensibilities, to the extent that it even avoids mentioning Zionism, despite this being central to its framework. Following a reference to the 2000 Stockholm Declaration, it defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred” and lists its manifestations against Jewish people, property, institutions and places of worship. Eleven examples follow: the first concern incitement to violence, stereotypes, conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial; the others concern Israel, where legitimate criticism is distinguished from antisemitism according to the criteria established by Nathan Sharansky (the ‘3 Ds’): delegitimisation, demonisation and double standards.

The JDA, on the other hand, presents itself as a gathering of academics, intellectuals and legal experts. Referring also to the Universal Declarations on Human Rights and against racism, it considers the IHRA to be “unclear on key points” and too open to interpretation, and proposes itself as an alternative or corrective. Its statement echoes and subtly modifies that of its rival: “Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews simply because they are Jews” or against Jewish institutions simply because they are such. Above all, it does not merely define what antisemitism is, but also establishes what resembles it without actually being it. And, despite criticisms that the IHRA focuses excessively on Israel, ten of its fifteen examples relate precisely to Israel, always paired with a politically undefined Palestine, with the stated aim of leaving open the vexed question of the region’s future.

It was above all this second objective that motivated the proposal for a new definition, just five years after the IHRA and without a resurgence of antisemitism comparable to the current one. Underlying the JDA, however, was the conviction that the institutional use of the term ‘antisemitism’ limited the expression of Palestinian national demands and criticism of Israel. One example of this was the restrictions imposed in various Western countries on the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement. In particular, the German Bundestag’s adoption in 2019 of a motion tabled by the centrist majority, which excluded the BDS movement from state funding and public facilities. Citing the IHRA, it condemned the boycott of Israeli products and services, as well as of artists, academics and sportspeople, arguing that a blanket boycott would end up collectively stigmatising Jewish Israelis and invoking the Nazi precedent of ‘Kauft nicht bei Juden’ (‘Do not buy from Jews’). An interesting point for understanding the weight that, even just a few years ago, the credentials of the fight against antisemitism carried in German political discourse is that both Die Linke and the AfD tabled motions condemning BDS, and that the far-right’s motion was even more severe than the one ultimately adopted.

A brief aside on BDS. Officially founded in 2005 in the West Bank during the Second Intifada, and hailed by a myriad of Palestinian organisations, its founder is said to have been Omar Barghouti, a distant cousin of both Marwan – the most famous prisoner in Israeli jails – and Mustafa, a former member of al-Fatah, who later led a short-lived independent party and eventually, via the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, embraced non-violence as practised by the BDS movement. In reality, the idea took shape within the Palestinian opposition to Fatah on the fringes of the 2001 Durban Conference against Racism, which was dominated by Iran. It was then that the accusation of being an apartheid state was levelled at Israel, and this ideological package was rounded off with calls for sanctions and divestment – following the example of South Africa – and for a boycott of every public manifestation of its existence, from universities to sport to the Eurovision Song Contest, as is now also demanded by those who do not formally identify with BDS. To this was added the accusation that Israel is a settler-colonial state, a notion that originated in the English-speaking academic world of postcolonial studies.

The movement spread as a transnational network in the wake of the Islamist diaspora, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, where academic boycott campaigns were already underway. Attempts to curb it have often come up against freedom of expression, as BDS presents itself, in perfect Newspeak, as a movement for ‘freedom, justice and equality’ and rejects any accusation of anti-Semitism. Its three demands – an end to the occupation of Arab lands, full equality for Israeli Arabs and the return of refugees – are, however, collectively incompatible with Israel as a state with a Jewish majority, if not with its very existence. Aggressive campaigns of boycott, divestment and sanctions, couched in the language of non-violent pressure, are geared towards this objective.

Let us go back to 2019. In response to the German motion, a network of academics from various Western and Israeli universities launched an appeal that gathered 240 signatures: alongside the inevitable Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, the list included the future editors and numerous signatories of the Jerusalem Declaration. The appeal, now on the BDS website, rejects as false the accusation of anti-Semitism levelled at the movement, and defines anti-Semitism as a form of racism and the boycott as a legitimate form of non-violent resistance. It acknowledges differences of opinion regarding the right of return and the BDS movement itself, but defends its freedom of action and funding; it also accuses Berlin of pandering to ‘the most right-wing Israeli government in history’ (Netanyahu, of course), using the fight against anti-Semitism to cover up ‘serious human rights violations’ and Israel’s desire to ‘undermine any possibility of peace’. The real threat to Israel and to European Jews, it concludes, comes from the far right and from jihadism, not from BDS. At the time, the view was widespread on the German left that the fight against anti-Semitism had become a national obsession. Emily Dische-Becker, future author of the JDS, spoke of “a widespread climate of fear and inquisition”; Aleida Assmann, also among the authors, paraphrased the Manifesto: ‘A spectre is haunting Germany: the accusation of anti-Semitism’. This accusation, imposed by reasons of state, was said to have produced a ‘fatal asymmetry’ to the detriment of BDS, anti-Zionist Jews and the Palestinian diaspora. Instead, the occupation, the settlements and even – following a peculiar line of reasoning – Germany’s shared responsibility for the Nakba as an indirect consequence of the Holocaust were cited as justifying criticism of Israel. Alon Confino, one of the founders of the JDA, finally argued – using a phrase that was to reappear in the Jerusalem Declaration – that denying Jews the right to a state was not “in and of itself” anti-Semitic.

A fact that is disconcerting in many respects, both in the appeal and subsequently in the JDA, is that almost all the authors and signatories were Jewish or Israeli, and many came from the fields of Holocaust and genocide studies. To understand this, one must look back to the transition, between the late 20th century and the new century, from the ‘Era of the Witness’ described by Annette Wieviorka to the institutionalisation of the public memory of the Holocaust, with the emergence of museums, memorials, educational programmes and academic chairs.

A decisive moment was the Stockholm Conference of 2000, which led to the establishment of the IHRA. Its principal intellectual architect was Yehuda Bauer, then one of the foremost scholars of the Shoah: he is credited with the paradigm of the Holocaust as a watershed in civilisation, an unprecedented event yet one of universal significance, from which stemmed the commitment to combating Holocaust denial, genocide, racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Bauer also contributed to the formulation of the IHRA definition, which in 2016 ushered in the current phase of governance regarding anti-Semitism – that is, its institutional definition as a tool of public policy. For decades, Bauer exercised strong normative control over Holocaust studies and a similar influence over genocide studies, promoting comparison without relinquishing the primacy of the Holocaust. Inevitably, the next generation sought to free itself from his influence. What is now a political and ideological battle was first an academic controversy – less visible but no less bitter – fuelled in part by university marketing: expanding boundaries, redrawing hierarchies, and conquering new fields of research. The target of the controversy was what Dirk Moses termed the ‘German catechism’, derived from Bauer: the Holocaust as a watershed in civilisation and an unprecedented event; anti-Semitism distinguished from other forms of racism; and anti-Zionism equated with anti-Semitism. Indeed, as early as the 1990s, scholars of Native American history had been challenging a hierarchy of horror centred on the Shoah; shortly after the first Intifada, the Palestinian question also entered the field of genocide studies, eventually forming a school of thought now represented by Omer Bartov, a signatory of the JDA.

The debate centred on the very concept of memory, which had by then become an independent field of study. The almost exclusive focus on the Holocaust was challenged by strategic categories such as ‘politics of memory’ and ‘culture of guilt’, which Valentina Pisanty – herself a signatory of the JDA – helped to redefine within the Italian debate. This opposition, which had developed primarily within Israeli, German and Anglo-American academic circles, ultimately resulted in the Jerusalem Declaration, initiated by scholars of the Holocaust and genocide and soon expanded to include scholars from other fields, drawn by the opportunity to take a stand in a highly polarised debate on the past and present of Judaism and Israel.

In 2020, during the lockdown, around 25 scholars began drafting the Declaration under the auspices of the progressive Van Leer Institute; it was initially signed by 210 academics and subsequently by over 400. The draft remains unpublished, but the convening of the group reveals its intellectual framework: the symmetrical moralism of the New Left is accompanied by a reversal of historical roles, whereby Jews, now ‘only occasionally persecuted’, can be both ‘victims and perpetrators’. The IHRA is accused of unilaterally protecting Israel and even, falsely, of seeking to deny the Palestinians a state. The fight against antisemitism, on the other hand, is framed within the universal discourse of emancipation, in order to remove it from alleged uses of ‘domination or dispossession’. The JDA, in fact, regards antisemitism as a form of racism – contrary to the distinct nature claimed by Bauer – and replaces the IHRA’s ‘certain perception of Jews’ with concrete behaviours directed at Jews ‘as Jews’. Its true purpose, however, emerges in the subsequent examples: five instances of anti-Semitic behaviour and five that are not deemed to be so, all subject to the ‘on the face of it’ clause (or, as one critic quipped, ‘or perhaps not’).

Point 14 indirectly defends BDS: boycott, divestment and sanctions are described as normal, non-violent means of protest and, when applied to Israel, are not anti-Semitic ‘in and of themselves’. This is the response to the 2019 Bundestag motion, as confirmed by Micha Brumlik, one of the signatories: “It is now clearer that BDS, which the German Bundestag declared to be anti-Semitic in its entirety, is not anti-Semitic.” The context also takes on a different function. In the IHRA, it serves as a safeguard in the application of defined criteria; in the JDA, however, it helps to determine whether a particular behaviour is antisemitic. Even Palestinian hate speech, if a reaction to what has been suffered at the hands of Israel, can be justified as “emotion”, overturning the “certain perception” that, in the IHRA, indicated antisemitism.

The greatest divergence lies in the areas of Zionism and national self-determination. According to the IUHRA, it is antisemitic to deny the Jewish people this right, for example by defining Zionism as a form of racism, as was done in UN Resolution 3379 of 1975, which was revoked in 1991. For the JDA, however, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are ‘categorically different’: one may challenge the foundations of the State of Israel, describe it as racist, colonial or an apartheid state, and propose any alternative system ‘between the river and the sea’ – a slogan chanted at pro-Hamas demonstrations over the last three years. The JDA replaces the Jewish right to self-determination with the right of Jews to ‘exist and prosper’ on an equal footing, whilst explicitly recognising the political and national rights of the Palestinians. The rejection of Zionism therefore remains, prima facie, permissible. Aleida Assmann would later candidly explain the reason for this: the category of anti-Semitism applied to anti-Zionism was created to target “the radical left and Islamic voices that deny the State of Israel’s right to exist”.

The Jerusalem Declaration therefore appears less concerned with defining antisemitism than with limiting the application of the IHRA – denounced by Assmann as a tool of a ‘foreign political interest’ aimed at protecting Netanyahu at all costs – and with correcting the alleged asymmetry in Palestinian rights. What is disconcerting, however, is the abstract nature of the holders of these rights: there is no mention of Palestinian divisions, terrorism, Hamas’s ideology or its rejection of the very international agreements invoked by the Declaration. The Palestinians are portrayed solely as a moral counterpoint to the abuses of an Israeli state described as racist, colonialist and practising apartheid. Even the BDS movement is reduced to a legitimate form of protest, ignoring its role as an instrument of hybrid warfare employed by a political front seeking the destruction of Israel.

Even after 7 October 2023, the authors at the JDA had still not acknowledged that radical anti-Zionism can lead to anti-Semitism. Confino and Goldberg continued to denounce the ‘moral panic’ that allegedly confuses criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism in order to conceal ‘the occupation, apartheid and domination over the Palestinians’. The real “psycho-discursive mechanism of inversion and projection” would therefore be that of the IHRA, aggressively promoted by Israel and its allies to cover up abuses against the Palestinians. JDA slogans now dominate universities, festivals and ‘for Gaza’ demonstrations, where the presence, language and objectives of the BDS movement are accepted unquestioningly, as if the movement naturally represented the Palestinian people. Having also escaped attempts in Italy to condemn it and exclude it from public funding, the BDS movement is running successful campaigns, such as the one against Teva medicines, and marching as part of a united front – as seen in Rome on 9 September – comprising Young Democrats, the radical left, trade unions and Islamist organisations.

The IHRA, however, remains the main point of reference for Western states in the fight against antisemitism, supported by a large part of the Jewish world. In May 2023, 162 communities and organisations wrote to the UN stating that it was important for the “vast majority of Jewish individuals, organisations and communities”, whilst alternative definitions had almost no practical application. The resurgence, following 7 October, of the demonisation of Israel and attacks on diaspora communities has put that argument to a dramatic test, whilst confirming the IHRA’s ability to recognise contemporary forms of antisemitism and to provide institutions with tools to combat them.