Video, transcript, and key quotes from the talk by Amira Jarmakani, San Diego State University, at the ICSZ “Battling the ‘IHRA Definition'” conference in October 2023.
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.”
Abstract: One of the architects of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Kenneth Stern, describes the impetus to create this definition as embedded in a project of “bean counting.” While he has famously said that the IHRA definition of antisemitism should not be weaponized to curtail speech, he still maintains that it is useful for the purpose of data collection – in other words, to be able to measure – incidents of antisemitism. Indeed, given that Stern’s “primary motivation” for drafting the definition was to “provide a basis for determining when criticism of Israel is antisemitic” (Lerman 127), the project of “counting” is explicitly tied to the goal of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. This paper explores the project of counting in relation to a larger neoliberal project ownership and accumulation evident in DEI inclusion frameworks. Exemplified in the efforts to codify the IHRA definition of antisemitism and in the Biden administration’s recently released “US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” (among others), the project to literally count anti-Zionism as antisemitism co-opts, dilutes, and ultimately weaponizes the concepts of critical race theory in truly problematic ways.
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.
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.
Read the transcript.