Israel’s Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli's plans for a major “International Conference on Combatting Antisemitism” went up in flames a week before takeoff. Crowd-pulling names withdrew upon the announcement of his guest list. The UK’s Chief Rabbi Mirvis; its antisemitism adviser Lord John Mann; German antisemitism tsar, Felix Klein; French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy; and ADL chief, Jonathan Greenblatt, all recoiled at the “far right” politicians Chikli had invited. As if that was the real problem. The queasy bailouts were not the only ones who fingered the wrong snag. The Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief followed suit. The organisers, he said, were correct to include “far right politicians” provided they did so “without compromising moral clarity.” Clarity was right, the moral sort was wrong. One visualises the elephant in the conference room waving its trunk madly to remind delegates of their raison d'être. Antisemitism, dudes! You were invited to help map ways of combating it. What does that confetti concept mean to you? Chikli invited the highest and the brightest to fight antisemitism without making sure they were on the same page. Who despatches fighters into war not knowing whether they will recognise the foe when they see it? As the above Editor-in-Chief said, although in the wrong context, “The Jewish world is far from unified in its approach to combating antisemitism.” How could it not be when the word means different things to different people? Definition is the be-all and end-all for dealing with real antisemitism. And this is where things go horribly wrong. Parts of the Jewish world – and the non-Jewish, come to that – object vehemently to the officially adopted IHRA definition for identifying antisemitism. Chikli may have had no idea that ADL staff had mutinied over their CEO adopting it. Anti-Zionists to a fault, they were incensed at being defined as antisemites. Bluntly Greenblatt told disaffected members to like it or quit. Yet Greenblatt is ambivalent himself. At one time he effectively accused Elon Musk of being antisemitic for comparing George Soros to a comic book character named Magneto in Marvel’s X-Men series. On top of which the world’s richest man said that Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization, that Soros hates humanity.” On a later occasion Greenblatt pronounced Musk innocent of making what many claimed was a ‘ Heil Hitler’ salute. For the second time his progressive staff hung the boss out to dry. I’m not the only one calling the ADL muddled about antisemitism. Wikipedia editors voted to “deem the ADL unreliable on the topic of antisemitism, its core focus.” So what’s it to be? Is Elon Musk , a most ardent supporter of Israel, antisemitic? Who better to ask than Professor Deborah Lipstadt, at the time President Biden’s ‘Antisemitism tsar’. Alluding to ‘classic tropes,’ the woman who took on a Holocaust denier and won, passed down a guilty verdict on Musk the Zionist. Foolish is as foolish does. Staying with Wikipedia, how does it define antisemitism? Antisemites, Wiki tells us, tick three boxes: 1) hostile to Jewish people; 2) prejudiced towards them; 3) discriminate against them. So far so good – no one quarrels with the obvious. But bring Israel into the equation and everyone quarrels. The bugbear is that in our glib world, the Jewish people and the Jewish state do not have a common destiny and fate for many people. Exploiting the deceit, hostile actors unhook Jew-hating from Israel-hating. The identity split is what allows cocksure Stefanie Dox the Director of Jewish Voice for Peace to declare a fatwa on the Jewish state. In point of fact the expedient split between Zionists and Jews explains everything. Israel advocates – Chikli included – have taken a beating on the propaganda front precisely because they could not pierce this iron dome. So long as Jewish anti-Zionists are able to monetise and martyr their “speaking out in solidarity with a free Palestine” so long will antisemites hide behind those dandy human shields. We can apply IHRA that ‘anti-Zionism=anti-Semitism’ until the cows come home; Jew-hatred can adapt quicker than a chameleon. No, the cornerstone IHRA yardstick has not exactly covered itself in glory. Take this blooper. “Examples which, “depending on the context could be antisemitic.” “Context”. “Could be”. Recall the Ivy League Presidents grilled by a House Committee? Those were the escape words they trotted out. To be fair, colleges face the prickly problem of what makes a protest antisemitic. Lara Friedman from the Foundation for Middle East Peace (yet another pro-Hamas group with Peace in its name) regards the IHRA definition that US lawmakers are using to crack down on campus antisemitism as, a “conflation of criticism of Israel/Zionism with antisemitism,” to censor speech “that doesn’t align with unconditional support for Israel.” As if to mine this battlefield, Meta is looking to ban derogatory usages of ‘Zionist’ as in, “Zionist rats”. What about “Zionist criminals”? Meta reckons not so derogatory, as when people accuse the IDF or Netanyahu of ‘war crimes’. In sum, the definition in use contains something for everyone not to like. One clause lays down that antisemitism consists of, “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism, e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus and other blood libels to characterize Israel or Israelis.” It was now the turn of Tucker Carlson to be grossly offended. If that is what antisemitism is, he said bitingly, the New Testament could be banned. Probably on Chikli’s guest list were people who put their faith in the ‘3D definition’. Indeed Natan Sharansky, the famed refusenik the one who created it, was a delegate. Problem is that all manner of enemies of the Left get Delegitimized, Demonized and Double standard treatment. Ask Donald Trump. So, what’s the verdict? Is a conference to combat antisemitism a pie in the sky idea? For certain a bullet list of what antisemites do and say hasn’t a hope in hell of silencing bigots. As inventive as they are invincible, they get more slippery and aggressive the more detailed the code for tackling them. Hence the reason Jews beat a hasty retreat when the vaunted U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism was born dead. “In light of the strategy’s failures many in Jewish leadership are afraid to confront antisemitism head-on. ” The Biden administration tried to both fight anti-Semitism (to placate Jewish Democrats) and to let it rip (to placate far left Democrats). So doing he neutered the “gold standard” HRA definition by adopting a second code, ‘Nexus .’ The latter rendered the former about as useful as a bucket with a hole in the bottom. And so antisemites got to keep their right to deny Jews their right to the Holy Land. They also kept a right to “paying disproportionate attention to Israel and applying double standards to it.” According to the Nexus code, doing so may not be treated as antisemitic. All of this helps to explain the bravado of Ivy League schools to desist from combating antisemitism on campus. To the contrary, they looked upon pro-Hamas mobs as (to coin a phrase) “very fine people”. Defining antisemitism is about as useful as defining a baby. It is what it is, and the manual for the Passover ceremony , compiled 2,000 years ago, tells us what it is in sixteen everyday words: “In every generation there are those who rise up against us and seek to destroy us.” It took a non-Jewish, in fact a French playwright who knew the Passover manual as little as he knew kneidlach to grasp this immortal credo. In a thin but seminal book, ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ Jean-Paul Sartre grasped the bedrock of the most destructive hate that humanity has ever known. “The anti-Semite has murderous instincts but has found a means of sating them. His thunderous diatribes at the ‘Yids’ are really capital executions.. He is a murderer who represses and censures his tendency to murder without being able to hold it back, yet dares to kill only in effigy.” So in terms of human instinct your Columbia professor and your campus mob are no different to Hamas murdering its way through the Gaza envelope. The first are closet Jew killers, the second enact their killer instinct. The bottom line is that celebrating the death of Israelis is an outpouring of it. So too is denying Israelis the right to defend their lives. Ditto for supporting Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran or Islamic Jihad. As to failing to condemn the Palestinian Authority’s pay for slay policy, it amounts to devolving the killer instinct to a respectable proxy. When setting out to combat the beast take along this identikit and you’ll not snare harmless critics of Israel in your bagful of bigots. Steve Apfel i s a combat veteran in the war against antisemitism. Since 2002 he has singlehandedly exposed and defeated many anti-Israel influencers. They included the media, academia, government, the UN Human Rights Council and NGOs. He has authored treatises and articles on anti-Zionism by the hundred. His first book, ‘Hadrian’s Echo: the whys and wherefores of Israel’s critics’ was endorsed by experts. A second book, ‘Hitlers at Heart,’ awaits the verdict of publishers. Follow Steve at https://steveapfel.substack.com/
