Amira Jarmakani on the move from “Zionism is racism” to “antisemitism is racism”

Transcript

Amira Jarmakani on the move from “Zionism is racism” to “antisemitism is racism”

Welcome to Battling the IHRA definition, a podcast of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. I’m Emmaia Gelman, your host and director of the Institute.

This episode features Dr. Amira Jarmakani, who’s a scholar of cultural studies, and a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and the advisory board of the Institute. In this talk, Dr. Jarmakani walks us through how the Zionist campaign to enshrine the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and use it to count antisemitic incidents – is a tactical move to counter the United Nations’ powerful assertion that Zionism is racism. That UN resolution was passed in 1975. Dr. Jarmakani explains how counting incidents works to turn our attention away from racism and state violence. Instead, it substitutes a depoliticized notion of hate, and uses it to demonize those who resist state violence in the U.S., Palestine, and around the world.

The transcript of this episode is on our website, along with a video recording of Dr Jarmakani’s talk – which took place at our 2023 conference also called “Battling the IHRA Definition: Theory and Activism.” On the website you’ll also find more resources on the IHRA definition, and on how it’s being resisted. The website is criticalzionismstudies.org.

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My starting point is Kenneth Stern, who is oftentimes taught held up as having gone on record about the danger to free speech and academic freedom that adoptions of the IHRA definition at universities could pose and he’s been outspoken against that fact. However, so he’s like, often quoted in this way, however, crucially, he stands 100% behind the IHRA definition, including the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and he emphasizes the importance of the definition in serving the aim of data collection. So that’s going to be my focus, and accounts for the “Who’s Counting.” And sorry, I just saw that. So as important as the issue of censorship and free speech on campuses, of course, really is, it’s also imperative that we look at the implications of using the definition for data collection, and what’s at stake in that as well. That’s what I’ll focus on: the political project of counting. 

So in the first section, I want to think about that, or as Kenneth Stern put it during an April 2023 talk at SDSU – “bean counting,” the importance of bean counting as a political project in relation to the IHRA definition and the widespread efforts both to have created it in the first place and then also to expand the arenas for its use globally. So first, in terms of the IHRA definition itself, I’m building on the accounts of the genesis of the IHRA definition that have been offered by Antony Lerman, Neve Gordon, and Sean Malloy on this panel. As Lerman has argued, “antisemitism has been redefined as ‘new antisemitism,’ ostensibly to account for the hostility to the Jewish state and the ideology upon which it was founded. And that redefinition is based on the myth that ‘Israel is the persecuted “collective Jew” among nations’, which is the bedrock concept of the “new antisemitism”’” (258). Meanwhile, in the “Definitions for the Critical Study of Zionism” preliminary/opening panel for this conference, Neve Gordon described a syllogism upon which the idea of the “new antisemitism” is dependent. This syllogism asserts that each individual Jew is representative of a larger collective of Jewish people, who, in turn, stand in for Israel.  And then the ideas about antisemitism depend on all of those getting collapsed together. So if this redefinition of the state as subject to and victim of the “new antisemitism” is integral to the forces that propel the IHRA definition, equally important to the story of its genesis is the desire to be able to make an argument for counting anti-Zionism in virtually all of its forms as evidence of the new antisemitism. 

So taking a look at how Stern describes the turning point from the EUMC definition toward the IHRA definition, he describes this context as an escalation of “attacks against Jews in Western Europe” during the summer of 2000, after the collapse of what Stern euphemistically calls the “Israeli-Palestinian peace process.” In response to such attacks, he describes an urgent need to document and collect data about them. Such data collection fell to the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC); indeed, as Antony Lerman notes, “the creation of the EUMC in 1997 was a political act: to provide the data to formulate policies to fight racism” (126). Yet Stern argues that the EUMC fails to accurately collect data about antisemitic attacks: He specifically refers to its failure (in 2003-2004 reports) to “document what we all knew was true, that some of the attacks [on Jews] were by young Muslims and Arabs,” not just the “traditional culprits – neo-Nazis and other white supremacists” (Stern, Conflict 2020, p. 150). So I would just note here the stark difference between these two groups of categories. One describes, of course, political, racist ideological groupings, and the other describes an amorphous, monolithic, ethnic, cultural religious group that has already been racialized as violent and terrorist, and in many stereotypical cases, inherently antisemitic. But, building on that, the “working definition” of antisemitism – what was to become the IHRA – grew out of this impetus – the idea that it was imperative to “provide a basis for determining when criticism of Israel is antisemitic” (Lerman 127), so specifically to be able to “count” – and to mobilize around that count. 

Let’s take a look at one recent manifestation of the project of counting: the ADL’s report “Anti-Israel activism on US campuses for 2022-23.” Here we’re looking at section four, the “Major Findings” slide, which argues that antisemitic violence on college campuses rose in 2022-23. And there’s the quote of the tally: “665 campus anti-Israel incidents during the 2022-23 academic year: zero instances of physical assault; nine instances of vandalism; 24 instances of harassment; 303 events; 326 protests/actions; and three BDS resolutions. Many but not all incidents may be characterized as antisemitic.” So this, the counting of these is clearly really important and the fight or the fight about around the data piece is also crucial. 

So moving on to this idea: “From ‘Zionism is Racism’ to “antisemitism is racism’.” My goal here is to look at how the conceptual analytic of racism is deployed. There’ll be overlaps here with the ethnic studies panel, so I’m looking forward to that. And I won’t say any more about that. But the motivating example for this section is a March 2018 article in the Jewish Chronicle in about a “top Holocaust educator”’s recommendation to “drop the word ‘antisemitism,’” arguing that “anti-Jewish racism is better” because “even” students at the university “don’t know what antisemitism is.” And yet, if the goal is to educate, of course this article begs the question: Why this shift? What does such a shift to the term ‘racism’ do/ give access to/ mobilize? The backdrop to this question is a tactical shift from the phrase “Zionism is racism” – UN resolution 3379, which passed in 1975 and was repealed in 1991 –  to the phrase “antisemitism is racism,” which circulates contemporarily. The former statement condemns colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and other forms of state violence, including apartheid (Lerman 52), and it situates Zionism as manifested in Israel within these formations, namely that of settler colonialism. The shift toward “antisemitism is racism,” in concert with efforts to codify the IHRA definition, is simultaneously an effort to disallow the statement “Zionism is racism.” This shift – in which one kind of statement is specifically condemned – I don’t know if that means anything, that the sign just fell – begs the question: what counts as racism and/or antisemitism? Critical race theorists, including Black Marxists and Latinx decolonial scholars, have theorized modern nation-states as what Cedric Robinson calls “racial regimes,” where race is used as a justification for the relations of power. They have noted how modes of conquest, enslavement, violent displacement, and coerced or forced movement to extract labor enabled the existence of modern nation-states, despite their demarcation as liberal democracies. Israel’s apartheid policies, ongoing conquest of Palestinian land, and violent displacement of Palestinians clearly situate it within these explanations of racism as a structure and an institution. So notably, in disallowing the claim that “Zionism is racism,” then, what is at stake is a repudiation of structural and institutional understandings of racism. 

Keeping in mind the ADL graph, where campus events including anti-Zionism or referencing anti-Zionism are included in literal counts of antisemitism – and indeed, make up a massively huge number of them – the latter phrase – “antisemitism is racism” is, in the logic of the IHRA definition, propelled by the imperative of counting. Building on the opening example of this section, I want to move toward understanding the latter phrase “antisemitism is racism.” So I’m going to look quickly at Yair Lapid’s 2019 speech at the Global Forum on Antisemitism, “Is Antisemitism Racism?” which he opens by giving the statistic that “the year 2019 set a record for the number of hate crimes directed at Jews.”

And then there are – these are the three sort of statements from that speech that I just want to pull out, and I’m not going to read them, but I’ll sort of – the first two reference a kind of exceptionalism that I won’t be able to talk about in this time, but I think is relevant. And I’ll focus more on the last one: “If anti semitism is racism, those who systematically act against the Jews in the State of Israel are racist” (Lapd). And of course, there’s that conflation there. So the turn from “Zionism is Racism” to “antisemitism is racism,” where the former statement becomes repudiated, is about at least two things. One, asserting that a state can be a victim of racism. And then secondly, it’s a strategy that depends on a kind of individualizing move. And there’s a link to hate crime legislation and hate studies that I’ll want to get to that also depends on that syllogism I mentioned earlier. So I’ll be getting to that. So in short, in the shift from “Zionism is Racism” to “antisemitism is racism,” we see a shift from the idea of a state enacting racism through a racial regime to the argument of an exceptional state being the target of racism. Because the concept of race and the larger framework of racial capitalism is embedded in and grows out of the project of conquest where we could understand conquest as dispossession, plus accumulation and extraction, I want to argue that we understand the imperative to count and to think about what counts as a mode of accumulation/ extraction. Here, I am thinking, too, of co-optations of DEI/diversity frameworks, where – as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang note, “inclusion [becomes] a form of enclosure” (3) and I am also thinking of the ways that diversity frameworks are about – as Nick Mitchell writes –  “transforming difference into an asset primed for accumulation” and, as such, operate to dilute ethnic studies tenets. 

So sort of rounding out with the implications of counting, back to Kenneth Stern. And this is a comment about the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban which, as you all I’m sure know, where the statement “Zionism is Racism” was circulating in the US withdrew in response to that. Kenneth Stern says: “It’s mission was to counter [“It” being the conference] racial hatred and bias, but instead it energetically promoted hatred of only one country – Israel. There was also clear hatred of Jews” (Conflict Over the Conflict, 78). Building on the last section, charting how a state came to be conceptualized as a victim of racism, this section takes on the individualized conception of racism in relation to the project of counting. In particular, I want to highlight the semantic turn from “racism” to “hatred” – and that’s my bold, if you can tell that “hatred” is bolded there – in Stern’s formulation of what happened at Durban. The shift is not just a change in wording, of course, but also in framework – from racism as a social, institutional structure to hate, as an individual, abstract emotion. Hate – the “fucking feelings” that Dylan mentioned earlier, maybe. 

Hate Studies as a field emerges in the early 2000s, in tandem with efforts to write – and codify – what would become the IHRA definition. Kenneth Stern is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, and he describes the need for the field by grounding it in the motivating example of antisemitism, where anti-Zionism is clearly included. For Stern, “racism, sexism, anti semitism, homophobia, et cetera, are all manifestations of hate. They emerge from it.” (Stern “Need for Interdisciplinary Field of Hate Studies,” 9). And so I’m just interested in that, the way that you know it just – this kind of like: He also opens his book by talking about psychologizing ways of thinking about, like, why do we hate or he doesn’t say, “why do they hate us?”, but it’s kind of like along those same lines, you know. So there’s a lot more to say about hate studies as a field. And like the argument I’m trying to make there about individual conceptions of racism versus structural, but in the interest of time, I’ll move on. 

And so I wanted to end by mentioning the US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which was just mentioned, released by the Biden administration in May of this year. We could say a lot about it, and perhaps we will have a chance to at some point, but I end with the example because it comes full circle back to the ADL stats with which we began. The Biden administration – the Biden statement on antisemitism is likely the result of a campaign that gained momentum during the May 2021 attacks and bombing on Gaza. And I don’t know if you all remember, but the ADL published this extremely widely cited report that described an uptick in antisemitic events. And it’s a report that Mari Cohen has argued, you know, depends on counting anti-Zionism in the numbers. And we’ve just seen, like pretty concrete evidence of the ways in which that plays out. But just like the extent to which this study was cited, to sort of prove that that’s what was happening in combination with the fact that a letter was signed on by a number of what was the phrase that Emmaia used – prominent Jewish organizations, or I forgot. But there were a group of, a number of five organizations that wrote this letter in May of 2021, an open letter to President Biden about the uptick, and it is very similar to the National Strategy that just came out now, two years later. So in essence, I’m just really wanting us to think about the implications of this project of counting, and how that is really tied to the way that the IHRA definition is being used. And what it will mobilize and what it already has mobilized. So I will just end there. Thank you.