In an opinion piece for The Guardian, a group of “Palestinian university students from campuses across Australia” have warned that adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism in higher education institutions will “pose a dangerous threat to academic freedom.”

The writers, who claim they must remain anonymous because of a supposed “threat to [their] academic positions and future careers,” have seemingly crafted a response to the announcement last month by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison that his government will formally endorse this widely-adopted working definition of hatred against Jewish people.

In the article, the authors write:

Fundamentally, the IHRA definition will not protect Jews from antisemitism, but will censure legitimate critique of Israel. The IHRA definition and its guiding examples conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, which not only silences Palestinians but falsely conflates Judaism with Zionism. There is already discrimination against Palestinian students and scholarship on Palestine on university campuses in North America, the UK and Europe.

So, where is this supposed discrimination of Palestinian students taking place?

A hyperlink provided within the piece directs readers to the website palestinelegal.org, which has collated purported accounts of censorship of pro-Palestinian actors on campuses.

It is illuminating to consider one such incident, which we can assume is indicative of the alleged censorship at higher education establishments:

At a large public university, two professors received complaints after their program signed onto a student-led Palestine solidarity statement that used the word ‘genocide.’ The complaints, from pro-Israel colleagues in their department, included false accusations of antisemitism.

Unfortunately, there is no way of probing the veracity of this apparent occurrence, because Palestine Legal has offered no details on when and where it happened, other than that it occurred at a “large public university.”

Even so, the incident in question pertains to a staff-led complaint about two academics that supported a statement accusing Israel of perpetrating genocide.

Aside from the fact that it is demonstrably false that Israel has engaged in mass killings, not least because official Palestinian population statistics prove otherwise, Palestine Legal offers no evidence that the professors were even reprimanded.

Indeed, throughout the entire Guardian piece, the authors are unable to cite a single example of pro-Palestinian views being stifled — or “legitimate critique of Israel” being suppressed — on college campuses.

The article then highlights the case of David Miller, whose employment at the University of Bristol was terminated recently following an investigation:

University of Bristol sociology professor David Miller was recently accused of antisemitism over comments about Israel and fired. Despite legal counsel that found his words ‘did not constitute unlawful speech,’ the university found that they did not meet its standards.

As HonestReporting previously pointed out, though, Miller was not baselessly accused of antisemitism because he criticized Israel. Rather, the fired academic used the term “political pawns” to describe students who had disagreed with his assessment that the Jewish state is a “violent, racist, foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing.”

Miller’s suggestion that Jewish students have “dual loyalty” is unquestionably antisemitic. Dating back thousands of years, this canard charges Jews of subverting their home countries in order to advance a secretive Jewish agenda or, more recently, Israel’s.

The trope was also a staple of Nazi propaganda, in which Jews were accused of “stabbing the nation in the back” with acts of sabotage that led to Germany losing the First World War.

Furthermore, in the years before he was fired, Miller made numerous statements that criticized Israel, and did not face censure by the University of Bristol leadership.

The Guardian piece continues:

The IHRA definition has been widely disputed since its inception, including by over 40 Jewish groups who rightly fear that conflating real antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel will lead not only to further injustice for the Palestinian people, but also to a global rise in genuine antisemitism.

Let us be clear: the adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism by numerous governments and public bodies around the world has been because of rising bigotry directed towards Jews. It is not being used to muzzle critics of Israel.

The IHRA even makes clear that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

Indeed, King’s College London (KCL) became one of the first UK universities to adopt the IHRA definition back in 2018. At the time, a spokesman for the institution said the decision was necessary after disruptions at a number of student-led events, including a talk by Israel’s former deputy prime minister, Dan Meridor, at which placard-waving protestors called him a war criminal and labeled Israel a terrorist state.

On another occasion, in 2016, police were called after demonstrators smashed a window, threw chairs, and called two Jewish students “Nazis” during a talk by the former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, Ami Ayalon, which was organized by KCL’s Israel Society.

Yet, it appears that King’s College’s endorsement of the IHRA’s antisemitism definition has not had the effect of hindering expressions of anti-Israel sentiment on campus.

Last year, for example, student group KCL Action Palestine held an event — incidentally, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day — in which Omar Barghouti was invited to speak.

Barghouti, who has been very clear in his opposition to a “Jewish state in any part of [British Mandatory] Palestine,” used his address to advocate for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which encourages international actions to eventually dismantle Israel.

Looking at incidents at higher education establishments in the United States, it is quite obvious that it is not pro-Palestinian discourse that is being stifled, but rather Jewish and Zionism-supporting students who are being victimized.

Take the case of a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina, who teaches a class to undergraduates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That student has denied Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and called Israel’s supporters “Zionist dirtbags” on Twitter. In other remarks, Kylie Broderick described Zionism as an “oppressive ideology” that is supported by its “patron, the US imperialist death cult”; retweeted a comment that labeled all of Israel as “occupied Palestinian territory”; and professed her support for the BDS movement.

This is but one example HonestReporting has highlighted in a series of articles examining the scourge of antisemitism on college campuses in the United States (see here, here, and here).

Furthermore, a recent survey of Jewish students in the US revealed half of them had at one point or another hidden their Jewish identity at school, while large numbers said they had felt unsafe on campus.

In addition, a report from Inside Higher Education in September showed “harassment and attacks on Jewish students [are] at an all-time high.”

Therefore, the Guardian op-ed writers’ claim that the IHRA definition of antisemitism “silences Palestinians” rings hollow, unless their definition of academic freedom and rigorous intellectual debate is being allowed to claim, among other things, that the mere existence of the world’s only Jewish state is a “racist endeavor.”

The author is a writer-researcher for HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism — where a version of this article first appeared.

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