Against IHRA and Zionist Repression in Academia and Beyond​. With Lana Tatour, Barry Trachtenberg, Meira Gold, and Noa Greenberg.

Transcript

Against IHRA and Zionist Repression in Academia and Beyond​

YULIA: Hello everyone and welcome to Battling the IHRA Definition, a podcast by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. I’m Yulia Gilich, your host and a moderator of today’s conversation, which marks two things. One, after a short hiatus, we relaunching our podcast, so look out for new original episodes And two, the Institute is proud to announce that we are joining the new Coalition to End Zionist Repression as part of the Campus and Academia Alliance. This coalition is convening scholars, activists, and academic organizations to defend Palestinian rights, academic freedom, political dissent, and the right to reject Zionism in research, teaching, and campus life. And Battling the IHRA Definition is one of the campaigns that we are working on within the Campus and Academia Alliance and the broader coalition. And you can learn more about the Coalition to End Zionist Repression and its upcoming public events at http://bit.ly/campus-alliance and we will add this link in the episode notes. 

Now I will give very short remarks before introducing our guests and giving the floor to them. It is September 2024. We are 11 months into the ongoing genocide that Israel perpetrates on Palestinians in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank. Also in the past 11 months, we have seen scholars, students, and activists organizing in solidarity with Palestine be brutally repressed, especially across North America, Europe, and Australia. And IHRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, has been a key tool of this repression, whether its use is acknowledged or more quietly adopted.

So today our guests will speak on the different arenas, institutions, and regions where IHRA has been used to smear critics of Israel and Zionism as antisemitic, to criminalize protests, defund educational initiatives, fire workers, evict and expel students, institutionalize anti-Palestinian racism, and ultimately excuse genocide.

I want to thank all of our speakers for participating in this conversation, for sharing their experience and expertise, and strategizing together on how to resist IHRA and Zionist repression on college campuses and beyond. So first we will hear from Barry Trachtenberg, historian of modern European and American Jewry, who holds the Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Our second speaker is Lana Tatour, a Lecturer in Development at the University of New South Wales Sydney, who is working on settler colonialism, indigeneity, race, citizenship, human rights, and the Middle East with a focus on Palestine. Lana had recently published an article titled “Censoring Palestine: Human Rights, Academic Freedom and the IHRA” that we’re going to link in the episode notes.

Next, we will hear from Meira Gold, historian of science, empire & archaeology and an organizer with New York University’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. 

And our fourth speaker is Noa Greenberg, an undergraduate student at CUNY, the City University of New York, and a member of CUNY for Palestine.

We will post more detailed biographies of all of our speakers in the episode notes and our website. Thank you all for participating in this conversation. So I will ask each of you to speak for a few minutes on how IHRA operates in your context, and then I hope to have a conversation with all of you where we can discuss how to resist IHRA and Zionist repression. So I’m going to give the floor to our first speaker, Barry Trachtenberg.

BARRY: Thank you, Yulia. It’s a real pleasure to be part of this conversation and to be in conversation with you all. So the context I’d like to talk a little bit about as a way to start this conversation is the United States and focus on the United States in part because at, at this particular moment, it’s where so many of the most egregious acts of the IHRA played out and it seems to be setting a tone for other parts of the world, which may be a conversation that we can have later. The IRA definition really came into force in the early 2000s. As many of you know, it began as a definition through a European Monitoring Group that was looking for a way to study what was feared to be a rise of antisemitism in Europe, and then the definition came to be adopted by the IHRA. But it appeared on the United States scene at a very interesting moment, and it was at a time in which the American Jewish community was beginning a process of reconsideration of its ties to Israel and its association with Zionism. But already in the early 2000s we began to see more and more organizations forming of usually younger Jews who were really questioning their relationship and what they were being raised to believe around what they should have in terms of loyalty towards Israel. You know, the repression of Palestinians within Israeli society, you know, after the second intifada began making enormous headlines around the world and the extreme brutality of the Israeli response really began forcing this reconsideration among a younger generation of Jews.

And this momentum, I think, has really carried for the last quarter century or so. And so what that has meant is that the Jewish political landscape is changing, you know, in more recent years, we’ve seen groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, if not now now Judaism on Its Own Terms and others within the Jewish community really organizing well and pushing back against this idea that there is a complete consensus among American Jews in terms of their support for Israel.

And we realize that there’s a lot more nuance and variety. And so this has, I think, forced major Jewish organizations, sort of the legacy Zionist groups, like you know, AIPAC, the Anti Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, and others to go on the defensive. And I think what is happening is that since they are increasingly losing the ground in the political debate, they are now trying to change the rules around what is permissible to say, right.

So they’re really trying to change the rules of the game because they’re losing the game, right? And so what’s happening is that since the early 2000s, really beginning during the Obama presidency, what we began to see was that elements of the United States government began taking on the IHRA definition as a guiding principle. We saw it with the State Department. We then saw it with the Department of Education, other branches of the U. S. government began to take on this definition. And in response to that, American Jewish youth, and then also many scholars who work on questions of antisemitism, Jewish history, as you know, who are within the realm of Jewish studies, which is my field, but also of course, many others outside of it, began to push back against this.

And of course that, that IHRA definition along with being incredibly poorly worded and kind of incomprehensible to some extent, includes a set of definitions which would be entirely inadmissible in any other context, right? So, you know, it basically excludes the possibility of Palestinians speaking about their experiences living under Israeli rule, and for advocates for Palestinian equality and human rights from talking about the experiences of Palestinians. It makes enormous assumptions that equate the Jewish community with the state of Israel. And this is something, of course, there’s never been consensus within the Jewish community over. But it really insists that, you know, the state of Israel speaks for all Jews, and therefore to criticize the state of Israel is a criticism of Jewish people writ large. So the problems of the definition are, you know, have been very, very well documented. You know, we could, we could talk about them, but it’s the inconsistency, the incoherency of the definitions that has left a lot of spaces, I think, for people to criticize it and attack it.

So in the last several years, in the United States, there have been. efforts to try to derail this momentum. So, for example, starting in 2020, an international group of scholars started to come together for a series of meetings, and that led to what we now know of as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which was a deliberate attempt to really push back against the IHRA definition and stop that momentum. That definition has its limits. There’s the Nexus definition, which was another initiative by a group of mostly U.S. scholars to try to accomplish similar things. These two definitions, interestingly, gained a lot of support among academics. Certainly a lot of criticisms as well. I had a role in the Jerusalem Declaration, although I still have an ambivalent kind of association with it in some ways. But what we see is that in spite of this very broad array of experts coming out against the IHRA definition and trying to offer others in its place, the momentum of the IHRA has continued because it has become a very, very strong weapon for major Jewish organizations to use in order to try to curtail this debate. And so what we see is that, you know, especially during the Trump presidency, not only was the State Department, Department of Education, really weaponizing this definition against critics of Israel, but we saw that it was the basis of congressional legislation, the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which has come up nearly every year in Congress.

It passes in the House of Representatives, gets stalled in the Senate. It was the basis of a presidential order – executive order under Trump, which was not rescinded by the Biden administration. And so we see that there’s this momentum in the language of IHRA, whether they call it that or not, is still moving forward.

But the efforts to push back against it have not been entirely without some successes, and I think it’s important to note that. So two places that stand out, you know, during the second year, I think, of the Biden administration, the antisemitism czar Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust historian, announced a you know, there was a blue ribbon task force on antisemitism, and they announced a policy position, which did not which did not wholly embrace the IHRA definition. And this was a huge win. It acknowledged the presence of the Nexus definition and acknowledged that there are other definitions out there, which was a nod to the Jerusalem Declaration, and so there was some recognition that there was complexity to the question, and this was much to the fury of groups like the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC and others who very much wanted the IHRA definition to become, you know, the law of the land.

Similarly META, you know, which runs Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so many other of our social media spaces, has also decided not to embrace the IHRA definition wholeheartedly. This is not to say that META has become this wonderful, easy platform for Palestinian advocates to post their content on. We all know that’s not the case, but they have made an explicit decision to not use the IHRA definition. I was a part of a number of conversations with representatives from META and this working group that Jewish Voice for Peace had put together, and they told us, you know, directly that they did not believe in the IHRA definition.

So I think, you know, we’ve had some victories and we still have a lot of challenges, you know, towards us. I will say just as kind of a last remark that, you know, since October 7th, of course, there has been an increased push to adopt the IHRA definition by many states around the United States, by many, many universities who turned to it because it seems like it’s an easy, ready-made definition that satisfies the, what seems to be the demands of Jewish community. 

And I think it’s really important to say that never, and I can say this pretty confidently, but never, certainly in my knowledge or understanding, has the IHRA definition ever been actually used to stop antisemitism. That it only exists to suppress Palestinians from speaking about their experiences under Israeli rule. It is not used to go after white supremacists. It does not attack Christian nationalists, you know, so has done nothing for those who, you know, would come against Jews, like, those who shot up the Tree of Life synagogue, those who are marching in Charlottesville, you know, those kinds of antisemites who represent the real tangible threat to American Jews are not touched by the IHRA definition whatsoever. They are not the focus of it. They’re not the point of it. And so the point that I’ll make is especially since October 7th, the intense focus on trying to suppress those speaking out against the genocide has given a free hand to white supremacists because there’s no attention being paid to their activities. And instead, the IHRA definition has become this tool which has, you know, maybe by design, maybe by accident, allowed antisemitism to flourish in many, many spaces in the American political landscape, while at the same time prohibiting Palestinians from talking about the genocide that they’re currently facing. So I’ll leave it at that. Thank you. 

YULIA: Thank you so much, Barry. Lana? 

LANA: Thank you. And thank you for the invitation to be part of the webinar and all the important work that the Institute is doing. Wonderful to be part of this conversation. I want to start by acknowledging that I’m joining you from Bidjigal land in, I’m based in Sydney, Australia, and I want to acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded and that it always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

With this, I want to, so much to pick up from where kind of Barry left us in his really comprehensive overview. And I think in one thing he is absolutely right to point that we have had successes with the IHRA. And when we look at the number of, certainly in higher education, at the number of universities who have adopted the IHRA we see that in Canada, universities haven’t adopted the IHRA. In Australia, we managed to get the vast majority of universities not to adopt the IHRA. Actually, only a very small amount of, I think, four or five universities have adopted it. Even in the United States, the number of universities who have officially adopted the IHRA is quite small. So in this regard, you know, the UK is an exception in terms of higher education and that was because the minister of education there has threatened to withhold funding from universities if they don’t adopt the IHRA, and that led to the majority of universities to adopt it. 

So, I think there is an understanding that the IHRA is a problematic definition. Universities are not rushing to adopt it. Cultural institutions are not rushing to adopt it. And as we heard, even META hasn’t rushed to adopt it. However, I think the success of the IHRA is that you don’t need to adopt the IHRA in order to have the censorship that the IHRA and the intimidation and the harassment that the IHRA has sought to do.

So what happened is that the IHRA doesn’t only impact those institutions who have adopted it, it actually impacts the sector of higher education, cultural institutions at a much larger level and globally, and we see that. So even though in relative terms we have, you know, won many battles on the IHRA front, it is important also to recognize how the IHRA is becoming the kind of standard as to what constitutes antisemitism and that still within our universities complaints that are made against students and against staff and the conversation generally is very much being shaped by the IHRA. So also in universities that haven’t adopted it, they’re not invoking the university in the IHRA in explicit terms. But we do find that labeling of almost every activity that is related to Palestine as potentially antisemitic. So I think the IHRA has succeeded in creating that environment. 

So I’m going to speak a bit about the kind of the landscape in Australia. I think it’s becoming similar to the United States. Obviously, the context is smaller but I think we’re following the footsteps of much of the developments that have happened in the US and it’s in very concentrated kind of concerted space. 

So, as I mentioned before October 7th, we’ve actually managed to get most universities not to adopt the IHRA. So, the IHRA, in principle, is not an issue in Australia. Of course, it’s shaping the landscape, though. And then October 7th happened and that was an opportunity for Zionist groups to push again the IHRA, claiming that antisemitism is on the rise on campuses. Obviously, what they label as antisemitism, it’s basically a pro-Palestine, anti-genocide activity on campus, whether by staff or by students.

So everything become antisemitism. Just say the word Palestine. Just bring a Palestinian on campus. Be Palestinian. Be pro-Palestinian. That’s antisemitism. And of course, that is with what happened, similar to what happened in the US and in the UK, the mobilization and weaponization of the discourse of safety. And in Australia, the discourse of cultural safety really occupied also a very particular place because it has emerged within the context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. So it emerged that term within that context, this framework, and it is now being weaponized actually to, you know, to suppress speech on Palestine, to suppress speech against settler colonialism, against genocide, against ethnic cleansing, against apartheid.

So we’ve seen that weaponization and really does take these kind of specific forms in the Australian context. So given that Zionist organizations kind of lost the official battle on the IHRA, they turned to the political path and that political path started with, we had encampments also in Australia, 17 universities. The longest encampment was at the Australian National University in Canberra. And of course, the whole moral panic that was instigated around the encampments. It is true that in Australia, we did instigate you know, the images that we saw in the US and in some universities in the UK and Europe where universities [police] were brought to campus to suppress protests, but it was bad enough here as well with suspensions with hostile environment with surveillance by universities and more. And obviously also attacks, physical attacks on a number of encampments. 

So in the midst of the encampments, the ANU vice-chancellor, the equivalent of president in the United States been invited to testify in Senate. And, of course, it always looks the same. It is a performance, a spectacle of, you know, McCarthyism that we’ve seen. Also, people from the Australian Research Council, the main body awarding grants, have been invited to that particular session and were interrogated over providing a very prestigious grant to Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah, who’s a Palestinian scholar who was awarded one of the most prestigious grants here, Future Fellow Grant. And that was part of a larger campaign, by the way, to get her fired and to get the grant withdrawn from her. 

Then we saw the next step, which is the establishment of a senate commission on antisemitism in campuses. The deadline for the submissions was about, I think, 10 days ago. Hundreds of submissions have been made. I think the website has now over 500 submissions. And they’re still uploading submissions to the, to the Senate commission. That’s a really kind of a rare, a rare number, an exceptional number. If you read the submissions, they’re very clear. Everything is antisemitism. Palestinian flag on campus – antisemitism. I feel unsafe. The lecturers spoke on ceasefire on, you know, in the lecture or on Gaza – unsafe. And so on and so forth. It’s really kind of ridiculous. Events with special rapporteurs, on food, on Palestine labeled as antisemitism. And so the thing to note about this Senate commission is that it’s protected. You can’t sue for defamation. So what it has become is an opportunity to slander particular people, you know, particular lectures, universities, et cetera, but being with complete impunity from defamation cases. 

Now, there is this Senate commission, and this Senate commission has the authority to establish a judicial inquiry. And this is where we are heading. And I just want to say this is all happening under a labor government. Right? This is all happening under a labor government. So this Senate commission will likely establish a judicial committee, which is what the submissions are repeatedly asking for. And this is what the Zionist organizations, the McCarthyism that we’ve seen so far will be, you know, will be intensified. It will be full blown McCarthyism with the inquiry having the authority to subpoena documents, emails, you know, people to testify in front of the inquiry. So it is going to be a circus, an absolute circus, but this Judicial Committee will make recommendations. Now, this is also in addition to a special envoy that the Prime Minister has appointed on antisemitism, who has been also focusing on universities. So they are working across all these political fronts, including with the support of the attorney general who is very concerned about the rise of antisemitism in Australian campuses, right? And he is a Zionist Jew. 

So what we have now is actually our universities haven’t adopted the IHRA. And now they’re gonna be facing this immense political pressure. It’s not that our universities have been doing great, some of them have been doing well, some of them less well, some more censorship, some less censorship. I have to say my university has been surprising, has been maintaining academic freedom, you know, we didn’t have any cancellation of events. Students were able to protest and are able to protest on campus, but we’re still facing a constant wave of complaints that by and large, the university is dismissing, but this is exactly the environment. So every event rings alarm bells for deans, for the V. C., for administration, for leadership. I just want to end with one more thing. 

Our approach in combating the IHRA here has been focusing on intersectional anti-racism. So we are not looking for alternative definitions of antisemitism, but actually making anti-racist policies on campus robust that protects from all form of racisms without exceptionalizing any form of racism. Now, often what happens is when they say antisemitism, they also bring in Islamophobia. And we’re very clear, we don’t want a definition of Islamophobia. And we don’t want a definition of antisemitism. We think that the Legal framework in Australia is decent enough. We think universities can do more on this front, but true anti-racism is intersectional, and actually exceptionalizing antisemitism doesn’t help protecting from antisemitism. It intensifies it. That was our main argument and remains our main argument. And I have to say that some of the universities who have, you know, announced that they’re not adopting the IHRA have said we don’t see a need for a specific definition for antisemitism. We have university-wide anti-racism policy. So it’s not about that the definition is not good enough or whether we need a different definition. Actually, what registered is we don’t need a definition. 

YULIA: Thank you so much, Lana. Meira, the floor is yours. 

MEIRA: Thank you. And thank you, Yulia, also for inviting me to speak today and I think after hearing these, those brilliant overviews from both Barry and Lana about sort of how the history of IHRA and how it’s playing out in these different contexts now is a good time to maybe go into a couple of case studies.

So I’m going to talk about New York University. And I should say, first of all, that New York University, NYU, is a private university, and that is important because you know, the way that IHRA has been implemented here is playing out differently than it is at public universities, in part because you know, there are less direct threats about withholding funds from the Department of Education, although that is still very much a threat. So I just want to preface what I’ll talk about with that. 

NYU, like many universities across the US, we were seeing almost immediately after October 7th, just increasing repressive tactics to silence activists and protests and any kind of really free speech on Palestine, and it is very much the sort of, as PalLegal calls it “the Palestine exception to free speech.” It’s really playing out as they discuss at NYU in every way. 

And this has included, you know, suspensions of students, firing of multiple faculty, restrictions on campus spaces and these kind of gradually kind of updating student conduct policies. And in some way this culminated with the first round of mass arrests that we had in April. We didn’t even make it to 24 hours in our first student encampment. NYU called in the NYPD to arrest students, alumni, and faculty as well, myself included. And they set the first dangerous precedent in that by being, to my knowledge, the first university to arrest faculty. And their PR team was, you know, quick to spin what happened. And they kind of doubled down on that after the arrests as well by forcing students to kind of complete these reeducation assignments which really forbid them from justifying their actions and force them to, you know, admit what they did was wrong and immoral. 

So this has been the landscape and in early November when we saw this starting to happen, a smaller group of faculty started the NYU Faculty for Justice in Palestine that became the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, which I am a member. And now there is a national coalition, National Faculty for Justice in Palestine. There’s over a hundred branches now. And we established ourselves really to first and foremost to protect students, especially in Students for Justice in Palestine here, who were being victimized the most by these new oppressive tactics. 

And quickly after we formed that group, also in the fall, NYU, like several other universities, was hit with a lawsuit claiming that the university is not doing enough to protect Jewish students. And this is sort of been lingering in the background throughout the year. What are they going to do about this lawsuit? How are they going to handle it? And it’s, of course, part of the wider trend of using lawfare in order to get universities to change their policies. And when it comes to IHRA, NYU said they were legally obligated to adopt IHRA after Trump’s executive order. And they adopted it, but they were actually fairly clear about not adopting the examples, which, of course, make the, closest sort of conflation between Judaism and Zionism and antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

And what we’ve seen throughout the year is this like slowly dissolving any sort of distinction between IHRA as a whole or IHRA as a definition that can be treated or taken up separately from its examples and to sort of you know, just taking it and implementing it in its entirety.

And recently in the summer, NYU changed its position on this lawsuit and went from initially saying that, you know, this lawsuit was specious to instead having this closed door settlement where they, agreed to, you know, pay a certain fee to the students, but they also agreed to, among other things, change their student conduct policy and to hire a new Title VI coordinator to oversee its implementation. And nowhere in this new policy do they specifically mention any changes to IHRA, but they have essentially adopted it in the process. And we haven’t seen the details of the settlement. We’ve asked for details of the settlement. They have refused to show it to us. But this is sort of the way that they’ve done this behind closed doors I think is something perhaps that we’re seeing more. 

The policy itself, they consulted no faculty at NYU to update this policy and no experts. We had no task force like they appointed at a few other universities as they’re trying to change definitions of antisemitism and in some cases also of Islamophobia. And I’ll just read this part of it quickly. So this is the part that has caught everyone’s attention and kind of been labeled the most problematic, where it says, quote:

“Using code words, like “Zionist,” does not eliminate the possibility that your speech violates the NDAH Policy.  For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity.  Speech and conduct that would violate the NDAH if targeting Jewish or Israeli people can also violate the NDAH if directed toward Zionists.  For example, excluding Zionists from an open event, calling for the death of Zionists, applying a “no Zionist” litmus test for participation in any NYU activity, using or disseminating tropes, stereotypes, and conspiracies about Zionists (e.g., “Zionists control the media”), demanding a person who is or is perceived to be Jewish or Israeli to state a position on Israel or Zionism, minimizing or denying the Holocaust, or invoking Holocaust imagery or symbols to harass or discriminate.”

Now, principally what this new passage does is not just you know, set up Zionist, as it says very clearly, as this code word for any kind of antisemitic hate speech. But it makes Zionist for the first time at any university a protected identity. In terms of the title VI of the Civil Rights Act. And you know, there’s so many problems with new policy, obviously it’s just being used to kind of be able to continue to double down on the censorship and repression that we’ve already seen, where they can now kind of point to this new policy. It makes it especially difficult to criticize Zionism, even in a classroom, without violating this student conduct policy. And, you know, the conflation of Judaism and Zionism, of course, is not new, but it really privileges Jewish Zionist identity over any other kind of Jewish identity you know. It essentially erases even the possibility that there are anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty and staff, or even just non Zionist Jewish community members here. And it basically negates Palestinian identity in its entirety. You can’t really talk or learn about Palestinian liberation without potentially violating this student conduct policy. 

And in the context of how it’s set up, it really frames antisemitism, specifically this kind of antisemitism, as an antisemitism as anti-Zionism, as the most prevalent and also the worst kind of discrimination that we’re seeing on our campuses. And you know, anti-Palestinian racism in particular has been, I’d say, much more prevalent the way that the university has been targeting pro-Palestinian speech. It sets a really dangerous precedent in other universities to kind of weaponize Title VI this way. They’re not just weaponizing antisemitism, they’re actually weaponizing, you know, the Civil Rights Act. 

And it also sets the stage for, you know, making any kind of ethno-nationalism count as protected identity. Is Christian Zionism, Christian white nationalism, you know, for example, protected identity? Because in this new policy, that category would have more protected rights. And we think it’s, you know, it’s really legitimizing far right and ethno-nationalist ideologies by kind of hiding under the guise of protecting students from racial discrimination. So, this has been criticized now by us, by FSJP, by the AAUP, the American Association for University, Pal”egal called it draconian just yesterday. Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, rated NYU as number 249 out of 251 of universities in the US, rating it on a scale of academic freedom of speech and censorship. We only beat Columbia and Harvard who are at the bottom of that list and got rankings of zero. 

What we think is happening here is basically they’re circumventing all of this backlash that they are well aware of against IHRA. There has been so much criticism of IHRA, especially from academics. And they can kind of go around that now because they never actually said that they implemented it in its entirety. Instead, what they did is just change the student conduct policy (and it’s not just for students, it’s for anyone at the university) behind closed doors. And we know for pretty much certain that certain, you know, pro-Israel advocacy groups were very much involved in that closed door settlement, especially the Academic Engagement Network.

So this is where we are right now. The university, despite all this backlash and criticism, have just kind of doubled down, and they’ve said, we didn’t actually make any substantial changes to our policy, when of course they have, and it’s going to have enormous repercussions, and I suspect will, be a precedent for potentially other universities to follow suit.

YULIA: Thank you so much, Meira. Noa. 

NOA: Thank you so much for inviting me here and thank you all for your incredible analysis and you know, all of that. And definitely hear you, NYU. I remember the first time the encampment was brought down within 24 hours and it was quite shocking. 

I’m going to briefly historicize the fight against IHRA at CUNY, but first I’m going to describe what CUNY is. The City University of New York, also known as CUNY, is the largest urban public university in the United States that encompasses 25 different campuses. It has also a majority Black and brown student/worker base. Some of the most known colleges affiliated with CUNY are Brooklyn College, Hunter College, Baruch College, and so on. 

In terms of the climate around discussions on Palestine, CUNY in particular has been in the crosshairs of zionist organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, also known as the ADL, and the Academic Engagement Network, and so on for a while due to such a strong pro-Palestine movement led by its students and workers at CUNY. And as a result of the pressure from these organizations, in addition to CUNY’s deepening partnerships with other Zionist organizations, the CUNY administration has acted as a direct arm of the repression against its own community. 

In specific regard to IHRA at CUNY, the fight against IHRA really heated up in 2021, when there was an effort led by Zionist students, one being a former IOF soldier, and also one who went on to become an employee of Hillel, to push IHRA through the United Students Senate. The USS, the United Students Senate, is essentially composed of multiple student delegates mostly, if not entirely, from their respective student councils, from across the CUNY system to represent the interests of the students on their campus.

Pro-Palestine groups from CUNY Law, such as the Students for Justice in Palestine, also known as SJP, and the Jewish Law Students Association, joined efforts to defeat IHRA by starting a campaign called “#IHRAOutOfCUNY.” This united a broad base of organizations inside and outside of the walls of the university, in addition to the student and worker base at CUNY. Zionist organizations ramped up these attacks on these student organizers, particularly Palestinian ones leading to doxxing and violent threats on their lives.

These attacks had revealed the racist nature behind the push for IHRA. And that led students and workers to become more disillusioned, not just with IHRA but Zionism entirely. This, combined with an active educational campaign around Palestine that continued breaking down institutional barriers to historically accurate information on Palestine, led to a resounding defeat of IHRA CUNY-wide at the United Students Senate, which resulted in a big victory for the pro-Palestine movement at CUNY.

Unfortunately, a year later, the CUNY Chancellor Felix Rodriguez announced a partnership with Hillel International becoming an affiliate of their campus climate initiative in order to, quote “…improve experiences of Jewish students on campus.” To speak briefly on Hillel, Hillel International acts as a direct agent in the repression of pro-Palestine solidarity groups on campus and is a bastion of anti-Palestinian racism that has now affected campus policy. This decision was far from apolitical and far from a genuine interest in representing Jewish students on campus. It was a direct slap in the face to the successful joint-organizing of Palestinian and Jewish students.

To summarize the statement that was released in regards to this partnership, CUNY had received $750,000 in campus climate support grants to expand diversity and equity and inclusion training, DEI training, under the guidance of IHRA. It was unclear if they had specifically adopted it as policy, but it just generally said that it would be referred to. In addition, they expanded their partnerships with other Zionist organizations to include organizations such as the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, which is run by Robert Kraft. And basically, he started this organization to specifically target BDS organizing. That information is not on the website, but if you do enough digging you will find out that that was essentially what it was for.

CUNY, of course, claims that these partnerships are all to combat all forms of bigotry, but it is clearly about quelling pro-Palestine organizing under the guise of combating antisemitism and so-called protecting the safety of Jewish students, as the administration further emboldens colonial genocidal violence.

Since the genocide escalated on October 7th, the already hostile environment at CUNY quickly intensified. The groups leading the pro-Palestinian, pro-Palestine movement at CUNY, Students for Justice in Palestine, of which I think now we have over 10, maybe 12 chapters, I’m not sure, were met immediately with requests for meetings with the administration to try and stop any protesting before it began. And of course, soon after, pro-Palestine protest has erupted all around CUNY but unfortunately also present at these marches and rallies were multiple news outlets, Zionist agitators looking to to dox and assault students, and campus security, who obviously often and always work in collaboration with the NYPD.

And of course, both the administration and campus security and the NYPD did nothing to protect these students. I think one of the most notable things that happened at the start of the protest was when councilwoman Ina Vernikov appeared at a student-led rally in Brooklyn College and revealed that she was carrying a pistol on her hip. After her arrest, charges were dropped and nothing further was done by Brooklyn College. As protesting against the genocide continued throughout the year, the administration ramped up bureaucratic burdens attempting to sever the ties between SJPs and the larger student population and silence them from speaking out in solidarity with Palestine.

Multiple Palestine-related events around CUNY were canceled, including ones that specifically featured CUNY Law alumni Fatima Mohammed and Nerdeen Kiswani, both also notable members of Within Our Lifetime, who have specifically faced egregious amounts of repression, being one of the first, if not the first pro-Palestine org to be completely banned from META, even on their personal accounts.

CUNY campuses such as CUNY Law and Hunter, were also met by doxxing trucks installed by Accuracy in Media that circled the campuses for nearly two weeks, if not more. SJP leaders around CUNY, who are also mainly hijabi women, were met with also additional Islamophobic and misogynistic violence, especially by the NYPD.

This, of course, does not go into one of the most egregious acts of violence against pro-Palestine solidarity organizing at CUNY, which was on April 30th, which was the police raid against the CUNY wide Gaza Solidarity Encampment at CCNY, the City College of New York. That was also the same night that Columbia got raided.

Going back to IHRA, the Hochul administration called for an investigation at CUNY through a private law firm known as, and if I butcher the name, I apologize,  Latham and Watkins, run by former Chief Judge of New York State, Jonathan Lippman. Due to false accusations of antisemitism, it is unclear how much they will be using IHRA, but we can assume that there is a high likelihood of de facto usage. And we can also say that the firm itself does not favor pro-Palestine student organizing across campuses. On November 1st, the law firm specifically threatened several law schools that it would stop hiring if protests in solidarity with Palestine continued. Obviously, there’s a lot more that has happened at CUNY for sure. But that is basically the majority of what has happened so far. 

YULIA: Thank you so much, Noa. Thank you to all four of you for the breadth and the depth of your analysis. We covered a lot of ground and there is still so much to talk about. So I have a few questions that I want to pose to you. And I want to start with how IHRA is used explicitly as a tool of anti-Palestinian racism.

LANA: I think that the end goal here as well is basically classifying Zionism as a protected identity. Right. And I think this is one of the biggest threats that we are facing. And obviously it is not an identity. It is a political ideology and the conflation is deliberate. You know, Edward Said wrote decades ago “Zionism from the standpoint of its victims,” right? I mean, there is no Palestinian position or resistance without anti-Zionism. This is the project that is responsible for our oppression, for the dispossession of our land, for genocide, for settler colonialism, for, you know, racism against Palestinian. Being Palestinian is being anti-Zionist. And similarly, I think being a person committed to anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism requires a position against Zionism. 

But I think what is so dangerous about the IHRA is that it portrays itself as an anti-racist tools, and it uses the language of anti-racism when actually it is, as Neve Gordon says, a counterinsurgency tool. This is where it becomes so dangerous because it is a far-right tool that manages to disguise itself in anti-racist terms. And then our goal becomes how do we kind of unpack or make it clear that this is not about anti-racism and that it is not about fighting antisemitism. And Barry has, you know, spoke about that. It doesn’t protect from white supremacy and so on. And so that it’s in fact an anti-Palestinian tool. And this is primarily what it is. Everything about the IHRA and the way it is being used has been in relation to Palestine. Censoring how we can speak about Palestine, what we can say about Palestine, and it is about the labeling of everything that has to do with Palestine as antisemitic and Palestinians and their allies, including Jewish allies, become antisemitic just for holding a pro-Palestine, anti-colonial position. And I mean, when we talk about anti-Palestinian racism, part of the problem is that it’s not recognized. And I’m not talking in terms of definition. We are simply not seen as subjects. who face racism. It’s more than that. We’re racialized as those who are producing the worst type of racism – antisemitism, right? Because it holds that kind of exceptionalist position. So what we are facing as Palestinians is really this, you know, position where we’re facing so much racism, but we are labeled as the producers of racism.

And, you know, also concerning is the ways in which there is no self hating Jews anymore. It’s now you’re not Jewish enough. So we’re, you know, we’re going through into the next stage where the Jewishness of anti-Zionist Jews is being questioned because they don’t associate with Zionism, which is antisemitic position in itself.

YULIA: Thanks so much, Lana. It actually, I think is a great segue into another question that I have which is something that emerged in all of your talks, and that’s the rhetoric of safety and how that rhetoric is weaponized to wield actual material violence on Palestinians, on anti-Zionists. So how do we push back on the safety discourse? 

BARRY: I’d like to weigh in on this if I could. This has been an issue that’s come up a lot, you know, across the United States and on my own university campus. At my university, we have a, you know, it’s a small campus. You know, elite university with a, a, a pretty modest size Jewish student population. We have a Jewish Studies program. The four people have served as directors over the years, as it happens, none of us are Zionists. It’s actually kind of this amazing gift and blessing. You know we have different positions. We disagree on different aspects of this but none are sort of rah rah, sort of pro-Israel.

And the university administration just has no idea what to do with us, you know, because we don’t sort of fit the mold. And so after October 7th, when people began to mobilize, it was largely faculty within Jewish studies who began organizing teach-outs, who began talking about the question of genocide. And almost immediately the Hillel on campus… And we also have an Israel fellow, which is a paid agent of the Israeli government who works on our campus to spread pro-Israel propaganda and do organizing along with a Chabad, which is an ultra Orthodox Jewish organization that tries to mainstream ultra-Orthodoxy, all came out very, very strongly against us and began to mobilize.

Their parents began to mobilize, donors to make the claims that the Jewish studies faculty were making the campus unsafe for Jewish students. And after the congressional hearings in which, you know, the leaders of many elite universities were forced to step down, after testifying to Congress, we, the four of us, actually reached out to our university leadership and said, we invite you to have a conversation with us to talk about ways to avoid the pitfalls of talking about antisemitism.

Our provost met with us. But our president never even acknowledged the invitation and when we decided to go meet with the provost, basically she tried to turn the whole conversation around to talk about how we really should be doing more programming for our students that was balanced, that was open, that would make our students feel more comfortable. And we had to go back to very basics and talk about what our job is as scholars, which is to critically interrogate our subjects and not simply be boosters of it. 

Then when we had the encampments on our campus, which was very short lived and involved a relatively small number of students, you know, a couple dozen at most, it all became around the, again, the rhetoric of safety, that this is making our Jewish students unsafe, ignoring the fact that a significant number of students involved in the encampment identify as Jewish. And the university again used the rhetoric of safety, also in the name of protecting the students at the encampment as well, to call in an armed police force that was many times the number of students who in documents that we found later said were prepared to use deadly force against them. 

And so what we see over and over again is this idea that Jewish safety is somehow bound up with the state of Israel. But it’s not only on, on college campuses and, and I’ll just say kind of one last point. This is something that we hear constantly, you know, so President Biden himself said that Jews are not safe anywhere without the state of Israel, which you think is an enormous slap to the country that he is supposedly the leader of. But this idea that only by having the state of Israel can Jews be safe anywhere, as if, you know, we all need a backup plan in the world, like who gets to have a backup plan? Who gets to have a second country that you can go to if things get difficult. Right? I mean, it’s a ludicrous notion that again only applies, you know, to the Jewish people in the Jewish experience. And all of this, I will say, all of this rhetoric, and I agree absolutely with Lana’s point that we don’t need definitions, that definitions in this way are harmful when they’re, when they’re codified, because what it does is it re-exceptionalizes what it means to be Jewish. And it is the idea of Jewish exceptionality, that Jews don’t fit in the societies in which we inhabit, that we’re not a religion like other religions, we’re not a race like other races, that we’re not a nation like other nations. This idea of Jewish incommensurability with the world is at the very root of antisemitism.

And the truth is we don’t have definitions about what anti-Black racism is. We don’t have definitions about what anti-trans hostility is. We don’t have these definitions because we don’t need these definitions. We don’t need to codify all of these, right? But by insisting that Jews require a definition in order to be safe makes the situation for Jews far more dangerous, and it once again becomes this tool to prevent Palestinians from organizing politically to stop their oppression. I’ll stop there. 

MEIRA: I just want to add to that. As educators, what a disservice we are doing to not have the conversation about the difference between feeling unsafe versus feeling uncomfortable or feeling offended. And the gaslighting, also, of talking about Jewish safety, which is, you know, essentially framed as just about feelings, juxtaposed with just the daily onslaught of horrors that we are seeing in Gaza and the West Bank. 

And I think like some of the most you know, really productive conversations that I had you know, being Jewish this past year at NYU and, you know, talking to other Jewish students, some of whom, you know, were anti-Zionist and called themselves that, many of them didn’t really want any kind of label, but they disagreed with what was happening in every single regard, including occupied Palestine and, you know, on our university campus. And some that were actually, you know, in Hillel and very much still absorbed in their sort of Zionist indoctrination. And just to be able to have conversations in my office where, you know, they just said there’s nowhere to talk about this. There’s nowhere to unlearn Zionism because we’ve made it so much about, you know, Jewish safety. And so we need to, I think, be able to actually deal with this cognitive dissonance. It’s a topic that, you know, it’s not just in our universities and our classrooms, although we should, we have to be able to talk about it there. But you know, as someone who was also brought up in that world, it’s, you know, we’re seeing it in so many of our community spaces. I’m having the same arguments with family and friends, you know, not just at universities. And it seems like much of the time when we’re arguing about Zionism, but we’re really arguing about racism and sort of this inability to actually contextualize sort of the longer history of Zionism. 

YULIA: I really appreciate that. The last question that I want to pose to all of you is gonna bring us back to IHRA and how to resist it. From all of your talks, one of the things that emerged is that IHRA doesn’t need to be officially adopted or to be on the books to function as a tool of repression? And if it’s not official policy, if it’s not on the books, how do we fight against it?

MEIRA: Can I add a follow up question to that that I might direct to especially Lana and Barry. Because I had the same sort of thought, Lana, as you were talking about the difference in strategy of actually, we don’t want a definition of antisemitism or Islamophobia here versus my understanding of, for example, the Jerusalem Declaration is that, you know, it was introduced not to replace, but to kind of use it to interpret IHRA, maybe with the assumption that the universities that had already adopted it, for example, might not do away with it. I’d love to kind of be able to say that yeah, we should just get rid of any of these definitions. But are we too far gone for that? 

BARRY: I’ll say in terms of the Jerusalem declaration, I think the different people who came together for that represented different interests. There were some who saw that definitions were important and really wanted to correct what they saw were the flaws in the IHRA definition. There are others who said, we don’t need definitions. And this is why it’s actually called the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, where it’s not sort of purporting to be a definition.

And there were others of us, and I include myself in this group who ultimately decide to sort of stick with it, even though we didn’t fully agree with it. Because we thought it would be a useful tactic to try to muddy the waters and to try to disrupt the notion that there is a consensus around this and actually bring forward a definition or an understanding, maybe a better way to put it, of antisemitism that was much more complicated, that was nuanced, that was grounded in scholarly research.

So because what we recognized was that institutions and especially institutions of higher learning were looking for definitions and they were and are turning towards the IHRA. So we hoped that by having an alternative, it would at least help to prompt a series of conversations that otherwise wouldn’t happen. And that the Jerusalem declaration in 2019, I think, this is probably true for some of the Nexus folks as well. One is just to provide other tools that could be used as part of those conversations. And I think that’s valuable, but I think what we’re seeing is the limits of the definitions, you know, and I think that is something for us to focus on and whether or not the IHRA is used in name or in spirit, I think we have to recognize the problem isn’t the IHRA definition. And I appreciate, and I’m very much a part of these efforts to undermine the IHRA, to push back against it, to point out its many, many harms, but we have to recognize that IHRA itself is not the problem. The problem is that there’s this much larger apparatus that is trying to set the terms of the conversations around Palestine, around Israel, around Zionism, and to prevent a free and full debate by equating Judaism and Jewish beliefs with a political entity, which is Israel, which is abhorrent and dangerous. As we’ve seen, it’s horrifically deadly to Palestinians. And of course, as someone who comes, you know, from a Jewish background, from the Jewish people, Jewish history, you know, it’s horrifically dangerous to us as well because it just narrows so completely what it means to be Jewish and denies all of the many possibilities that have existed historically and in the present and that will exist in the future for how to be Jewish in this world. Because there have to be ways to be Jewish that aren’t predicated on the destruction of other people.

LANA: Can I add to this very quickly? Look, I think Barry’s right. I mean, we have now enough experience to understand that the problem is not this definition or that definition, right? And yet we do constantly face this invocation of the Jerusalem Declaration as some kind of an alternative. We know that some universities have adopted the IHRA without adopting the examples or adopted the IHRA without the examples and the Jerusalem Declaration. That didn’t solve the problem on campuses, on these campuses. So I think we need to move on from that. 

And I think actually the strongest argument that we have is we don’t need definitions. We need robust anti-racism and we need to expose the, you know, the work that is being done, whether the IHRA is there or not. And I do want to say one thing. The Jerusalem declaration is really problematic because even though the impetus is to defend academic freedom on Palestine by expanding the kind of space, at the end of the day, it does not work. It follows similar logic of regulating permissible speech on Palestine. And it does it in very clear terms. I mean, look at the definition. It also has million examples that have to do with Palestine. I’ll give you one example. So the Jerusalem Declaration states, “denying the right of Jews in the state of Israel to exist and flourish collectively and individually as Jews in accordance with the principle of equality.” That’s an example of antisemitism, right? But note how in the state of Israel, it’s not just denying the rights of Jews. So, colonization, Palestinian liberation, if you’re coming from, you know, an anarchist position as well, that’s bound to be antisemitism. Slogans like Free Palestine, From the river to the sea could fit under this definition as antisemitic. Dismantling the state of Israel, talking about new political formations can all amount to antisemitism. So we have here again, Palestine exceptionalism happening. All this even though the impetus is positive and you know, so many good people are signed on this definition.

NOA: Can I add one thing? We’ve also, specifically NotInOurName CUNY and CUNY for Palestine, have also, like, adopted the idea that, like, a definition is not the way to go. Mainly for me, personally, like, the first realization for that is that no matter who is going to be interpreting whatever definition, the majority understanding of antisemitism is unfortunately trapped in that Zionist, you know, hegemony. And so any definition that becomes officially adopted will have detrimental impacts on pro-Palestine solidarity organizing and just Palestinian students, like, just existing on college campuses. And I think that in order to break down the, like, I guess the veil of what IHRA is, to really grapple with the fact that Zionism has taken a hold of the Jewish community, like, speaking as a Jewish student, as a Jewish community member, and, you know, the whole nine yards and that – more resources need to be directed into anti-Zionist Jewish student organizing, more resources need to be put into creating alternative institutional spaces for Judaism to really grow and expand and grow beyond the bounds of Zionism.

Like, speaking for Hillel, I was a member of Hillel and, you know, I’m very familiar with the kind of programs that they have and how. Israel really is their main priority, but to non-Jews, or even, like, the majority of Jewish students, think that Hillel is the center of Jewish student organizing, Jewish student existence, Hillel is a religious institution. But then, at the same time, Hillel is providing trips for students to go, for Jewish students to go to IOF military bases, wear IOF uniforms, be IOF soldiers. They’re not a religious institution. They’re Israel first, Judaism second. And I think that understanding Zionism more broadly as a way to decontextualize and redefine Judaism within the interests of, you know, white colonialism and white colonial power is like the way to go. Even historically, I think it was Theodor Herzl’s in Mauschel, in that text, he says, like, the anti-Zionist Jew is a wretched appearance and that we should pity him. And at that time when that was written, the Jewish community was mostly anti-Zionist or non Zionist because Zionism was a foreign concept to the Jewish community. And again, like, some of the first Zionists were Protestants and Evangelicals, they were not Jews. And so what it really is going to take is an entire reforming and reimagining of what Jewish community looks like, what the fight against antisemitism looks like, and how really Zionism and living within, you know, the belly of the beast has really suffocated what could be in opposition to what is right now.

MEIRA: Hashtag #DropHillel.

YULIA: I really want to thank you all for participating in today’s conversation and for the work you do on your campuses and beyond. And I hope this conversation is a beginning and a continuation of understanding IHRA as one of the tools of Zionist repression and our organizing against the IHRA definition as a tool to fight for Palestinian liberation, as a tool of anti-racist struggle, as a tool of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle, that it’s not, as all of you highlighted, just about the definition. So thank you all so much. 

Listeners, you can see the transcript of this conversation and more resources on how to resist IHRA on our website, criticalzionismstudies.org. Until next time. Solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.