Accumulate and Destroy: Inclusion as Conquest

Amira Jarmakani¹

Abstract:

This article explores how the claim that Israel can be a victim of racism relies on data collection aimed to shore up the “new antisemitism,” a discursive move meant to further Zionist aims, and argues that this data-collection-as-accumulation operates as a form of conquest. One compelling example is the way that data collection based on the IHRA definition of antisemitism (antisemitism trackers) distorts the statistically proven rise in anti-Palestinian racism by refiguring it as an increase in antisemitism, attributing much of this count to anti-genocide protests. This example ties strongly to a historical trajectory of displacing “Zionism as racism” with “antisemitism as racism,” where the latter serves as a strategic means of insisting upon a surge in a purported “new antisemitism,” culminating currently in efforts to codify the IHRA definition and rationalize it through fields like “hate studies.” By analyzing this trajectory, the article elucidates how the rubric of liberal multicultural inclusion, represented here through counting, becomes itself a mode of conquest, meant to distort critiques of Zionism into “hatred,” quantifying them as such, and, ultimately, manufacturing public consent for continuing genocide and colonization in Palestine.

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The fiftieth anniversary of the “Zionism is Racism” UN resolution arrives in the midst of truly unfathomable death and destruction wrought by the Zionist regime on Gaza and expanding into the West Bank. While some still consider the term genocide to be a matter of debate—or, even more laughably, a controversial or even discriminatory description of Israel’s excruciating campaign to annihilate Gaza—others turn to numbers in an effort to somehow communicate the scale of devastation. The official Palestinian Ministry of Health statistics, as I write this in fall 2025, has reported over 70,112 killed in Gaza and more than 14,222 “missing and presumed dead.”² Even as Zionist and other far right apologists for the genocide cast aspersions on these statistics by insinuating that the “Hamas-led” ministry of health’s numbers cannot be trusted, the well-known, yet still incomprehensible, fact is that these numbers are a vastly horrific underestimate.

In what can only be described as an accelerated genocide,³ numbers fail us in countless ways. First, as implied above, the people and organizations surviving the genocide are both materially and ideologically constrained by the Zionist regime. With most of Gaza’s health infrastructure decimated,⁴ the literal mechanisms to tally the dead are also decimated, as the hasbara machine foments atrocity denial, working overtime to undermine clear evidence of the death toll.⁵ Beyond the arresting, uncounted volume of deaths of those Palestinians directly targeted and killed in airstrikes lies an uncountable, skyrocketing number of deaths: those Palestinians who have succumbed to the genocide due to indirect causes. The October 2024 reports of the resurgence of polio in Gaza⁶—the first case in 25 years—bring into focus the fact that a military siege not only kills civilians through direct bombing, but also through starvation,⁷ disease,⁸ and other deadly conditions caused by genocidal restrictions on food, water, and shelter. In the summer of 2024, The Lancet⁹ projected that up to 186,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza alone could be attributable to the ongoing genocide. Though shocking to some, prominent epidemiologist Devi Sridhar described the Lancet projection as conservative,¹⁰ in part due to the potential for the outbreak of disease (evidenced by the re-introduction of polio that fall) and the path toward eventual mass starvation that was already underway. More recently, in the throes of a full-force starvation campaign,¹¹ coupled with mercenary executions of those seeking food, a more recent estimate has put the Palestinian death toll in Gaza at around 680,000 as of April 2025.¹² This is to say nothing about the unprecedented bloodshed¹³ and brutal settler violence continuing to deliberately displace Palestinians in the West Bank.¹⁴ Reproductive genocide—the decimation of life, of the ability to foster life, and of life-giving capacities¹⁵—further demonstrates the failure of numbers to measure the scale of loss when genocide reaches beyond the realm of numbers to destroy the future.

In the face of so much unfathomable loss, it might be tempting to understand the failure to account for genocide as simply a failure to count—both to make Palestinian lives matter and to accurately tally the number of Palestinians killed. Instead, in this essay, I explore the troubling dichotomy of counting by turning attention to its productive mode: I explore how counting, specifically through data collection, can operate as a mode of conquest. Counting here is understood through the contradictions observed between the failure to count Palestinian deaths from genocide, on the one hand, and the inflation of antisemitism statistics through actively incorporating anti-genocide protests, counting them as instances of antisemitism, on the other. Indeed, in the context of the liberal order’s stunning failure to account for accelerated, ongoing, and livestreamed genocide,¹⁶ we are simultaneously assaulted by the project of counting. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, as prominent Israeli figures’ statements of intent to annihilate Palestinians in Gaza mounted,¹⁷ so, too, did Zionist organizations’ reports of statistics alleging skyrocketing instances of antisemitism, especially on college campuses.¹⁸ 

Against the backdrop of the rise of the “new antisemitism,” concurrent with the orchestrated demise of the “Zionism is racism” resolution, I focus on how the seemingly innocuous project of data collection creates an infrastructure for a Zionist project of accumulation with the dual aim of creating consent for genocide and protecting Zionist conquest. In what follows, I chart the road to the IHRA definition as one that re-orients the charge of racism from its focus on Zionism to instead wield it in defense of Israel, now conceived as the principal victim (rather than perpetrator) of racism. I look at Kenneth Stern’s liberal defense of IHRA when used for the purpose of data collection as a project that has enabled counting as conquest, and I argue that the formation of the field of “hate studies” represents an effort to codify data-collection-as-colonialism.

The title of this essay invokes Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy¹⁹ in order to build on her observation that racial liberalism—through the logics of neo/liberal multiculturalism—can operate as a covert tool of social discourse or control that normalizes the project of conquest. While we watch the livestreamed, brutal decimation of Gaza, the Zionist project of conquest also plays out more covertly—through a seemingly official iteration of anti-racism, which actually manipulates the facile idea of inclusion toward the aim of colonialism. 

The New Antisemitism: From “Zionism Is Racism” to “Antisemitism Is Racism”

Even the authors of the “Zionism is racism” resolution likely could not have imagined where it would stand fifty years later—the resolution rescinded and maligned while the racism it named is in full, genocidal bloom. Here, I track the evisceration of UN resolution 3379 parallel to the rise of the “new antisemitism,” a phrase coined to advance the Zionist argument that anti-Jewish animus manifests contemporarily as “criticism of Zionism and of the actions and policies of Israel.”²⁰ Through its alignment with this spurious argument, the IHRA definition of antisemitism can be understood as a culmination of the “new antisemitism” discourse and, therefore, as the pinnacle example of counting as a mode of conquest. It is a definition that is foundationally about extractive accumulation—it accumulates “evidence” of antisemitism by explicitly counting anti-Zionism. Moreover, in its application (i.e., through “tracking,” “monitoring,” or “reporting” mechanisms, as I will discuss later) it marks as antisemitic the forms of anti-Zionism that seek to account for anti-Palestinian racism.²¹ In this way, Zionism incorporates what is actually evidence of anti-Palestinian racism into itself, appropriating it through a powerful form of inclusion as conquest.²²

As an expression of the idea that “Israel is the ‘collective Jew’ among the nations,”²³ the “new antisemitism” exceptionalizes the Israeli state, granting it the status of a victim of racism, a claim that relies on a selective project of counting. In other words, by naming Israel as the primary target and manifestation of antisemitism worldwide, the “new antisemitism” manipulates liberal multiculturalism and its impetus toward inclusion to obscure what is actually an imperialist state-of-exception. In this section, I look at the repeal and subsequent denigration of UN resolution 3379 alongside the rise of the “new antisemitism.” I focus primarily on the latter part of the trajectory to investigate how the Zionist deployment of the phrase “antisemitism is racism” demonstrates a reversal of the goal to name and expose racism: to reduce the structural power it wields in the larger context of settler-colonialism. By manipulating the project of monitoring antisemitism—diluting it with an avalanche of data culled through counting criticism of occupation, apartheid, and genocide as if this criticism is antisemitic—the “new antisemitism” obscures the fact that it wields liberal multicultural logic to protect a genocidal entity.

“Zionism is racism”—UN resolution 3379, which passed in 1975—condemns colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and other forms of state violence, including apartheid.²⁴ As such, the resolution therefore situates Zionism as manifested in the Israeli state within these formations, namely that of settler colonialism. The understanding of racism as a key feature of modern nation-states, as advanced by critical race theorists, Black Marxists, and Latinx decolonial scholars, describes how modes of conquest, enslavement, violent displacement, and coerced or forced movement to extract labor enabled their very existence, despite their demarcation as liberal democracies.²⁵ Israel’s apartheid policies, ongoing conquest of Palestinian land, and violent displacement of Palestinians clearly situate it within these explanations of racism as both a structure and an institution.²⁶ The exceptionalist viewpoint that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East further situates it as what Cedric Robinson calls a “racial regime,” where race is used as a justification for inequitable, hierarchical relations of power.²⁷ “Zionism is racism” names all this—structural racism as well as settler colonialism’s reliance on professing itself (i.e., what I discuss here as a logic of exceptionalism) as democratic, liberal, or progressive to enable and obscure its impetus in continuous racial violence. 

The repeal of Resolution 3379 in 1991 demonstrates a key deployment of liberal multiculturalism to decimate the claim that “Zionism is racism.” As Keith Feldman has argued, some actors working to rescind the “Zionism is racism” resolution relied on forms of racial liberalism that “resonated with the ‘color-blind’ ideologies of U.S. neoconservatism.”²⁸ These were popular conceptions of racism within a Cold War framework that emphasized a rights-based individual focus.²⁹ Widely known for his deployment of such racial liberalism in his famously racist characterizations of the Black family, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one of the key actors working to use this language of pluralism as a “tacit disavowal”³⁰ of the materialist critiques of Zionism as settler colonialism, forwarded by thinkers like Fayez Sayegh, that upheld the logic of the resolution.³¹ Precisely because the resolution succeeded in arguing that Zionism is materially racist, Moynihan’s work to undo the resolution at the level of the United Nations sought to shift the terms and premise of the debate: “‘I think we’ve got them another way. . . . The resolution doesn’t define what racism is.’”³² This strategy to change the definition of racism not only presages that of the IHRA definition, but it also demonstrates how a liberal (and individualizing) conceptual framing of racism could come to be used to defend a state formation as if it were itself a person victimized by racism. Insofar as a state (which is, according to coloniality of power theorists, the main wielder of racism) comes to be framed as the victim of racism instead, this move shows how the concept of racism is diluted, convoluted, and deployed in service of reiterating a structural racial order that is necessary for settler colonial operation. 

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, represents the culmination of a trajectory that aims to turn the “Zionism is racism” critique against itself.³³ By positing that the internationalist, anti-Zionist Left is more dangerous than far-right machinations and manifestations of antisemitism, IHRA transforms critiques of state-sanctioned violence into some form of pervasive and persisting racist animosity akin to Holocaust logics and antisemitic genocidal intent. Because the road to repealing the UN resolution is paved with the larger drive to establish the “new antisemitism” as dominant, it is a move that seeks to disarm and wrest the intellectual terms of engagement away from its critics. The shift operates as what Sean Malloy describes as a form of counterinsurgency based in “epistemic efforts to redefine antisemitism in the 1960s and 1970s.”³⁴ As Antony Lerman notes, that redefinition is based on the “bedrock” myth that “Israel is the persecuted ‘collective Jew’ among nations,”³⁵ and, as such, seeks to instantiate Israel with an exceptional status. Perhaps counterintuitively, the claim of exceptionalism is actually a standard feature of liberal empires.³⁶ In the case of settler-colonial entities like the U.S. and Israel, this exceptionalism operates simultaneously as a norm.³⁷ In the case of U.S. imperialism, exceptionalism speaks in the register of the benevolent and reluctant imperialist,³⁸ i.e., in the idea of the U.S. as a “provider and protector of world freedom.”³⁹ Through what Keith Feldman describes as the “Cold War lexicon of a shared U.S. and Israeli exceptionalism,”⁴⁰ and given that the U.S. is also indivisibly complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, we can also apply to Israel what Amy Kaplan calls the “tenacious paradigm of American exceptionalism,” a classic American claim to be unique, a shining “city on a hill,” and an exemplar of a universal “western” civilization.⁴¹ Through the ridiculous and obscene argument that invading and destroying a country is the route to saving women and bringing freedom, exceptionalism often works through registers of gender and sexuality.⁴² This melding of exceptionalism with liberal multiculturalism is showcased, for instance, in the deployment of pinkwashing narratives to sanitize Israel as an exceptionally liberal and democratic bulwark amidst a sea of SWANA backwardness.⁴³ In short, liberal multiculturalism is integral to this kind of self-exceptionalizing logic—in fact, it is the only way to conceive of Israel as democratic and to fathom the claim that “Israel is committing the first democratic genocide.”⁴⁴

The IHRA definition can be understood as the apotheosis of counting as colonialism because it both attempts to codify the idea that Israel is a victim of racism and to provide a mechanism for proving that by “monitoring” the “new antisemitism” through counting. This latest phase in the project of naming and developing the concept of the “new antisemitism,” which seeks to replace the assertion that “Zionism is racism,” even syntactically, with the formulation that “antisemitism is racism,” is exemplified by Israeli politician (and future Prime Minister) Yair Lapid in his 2019 speech at the Global Forum on Antisemitism, titled “Is Antisemitism Racism?”⁴⁵ In its very framing, the speech both situates Israel as a victim of racism and as the primary target of antisemitism: “If antisemitism is racism, those who systematically act against the Jews and the State of Israel – are racist.” Tellingly, Lapid argues that antisemitism is both a form of racism and a distinct phenomenon. In his formulation that “antisemitism is not just racism, but it is also racism,” he both names racism as a norm that also applies to Israel and simultaneously claims Israel to be exceptionally subject to a unique form of it as antisemitism. Lapid’s claim demonstrates what David Lloyd identifies as the “absolute normality of the state of exception under colonial regimes.”⁴⁶ Exceptionalism is built into the “new antisemitism,” whereby the settler-colonial regime can lay a claim to racism as a norm on the one hand (as in Lapid’s assertion: “It’s true that there is a racist basis to antisemitism, but it doesn’t involve a universal racism that has by chance targeted the members of a single people), and then set itself up as exceptionally subject to a “unique form of hatred that can only have one possible target: the Jews,” on the other.⁴⁷ Manifested through IHRA as a tool of accumulation, these sorts of exceptional claims are central to the project of counting as a form and tool of colonialism.

The central contradiction laid out in the introduction to this essay—failure to count Palestinian deaths during ongoing genocidal siege while the perpetrating state/entity can itself be centered principally as a victim of hate or racism—demonstrates an exceptionalist logic instrumentalized through the framework of liberal multiculturalism. As a key technology of exceptionalist forms of imperialism,⁴⁸ liberal multiculturalism works within the register of inclusion and excels at conquest.⁴⁹ In the landscape described above—where genocide against Palestinians is uncountable while instances of antisemitism are inflated—we can understand the imperative to count as a mode of accumulation and extraction appropriated by the violent nation-state toward colonial aims and their rationale for them.⁵⁰ 

Making the IHRA Definition Count: Inclusion as Accumulation and Extraction

According to Kenneth Stern, the IHRA definition of antisemitism is about “bean counting”—though he laments its weaponization toward repressing speech, he advocates devising and using a definition that can aid in the project of data collection. Precisely because Kenneth Stern is often cited for his defense of free speech and academic freedom, warning that the IHRA definition has been weaponized by far-right actors,⁵¹ his role in both constructing and perpetuating the IHRA definition demonstrates how a liberal multicultural approach to racism—what I have been glossing as “inclusion”—can operate to aid conquest. 

Although Stern has recently reiterated his concern about the McCarthy-like use of IHRA to repress speech,⁵² he nevertheless supports the content of the IHRA definition, including the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and he emphasizes its importance in serving the aim of data collection. Upholding the discursive purpose behind the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the IHRA definition, Stern advocates for the noble, rational, and seemingly anodyne goal of data collection. Speaking about the trajectory of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) working definition of antisemitism (2005) as precursor to the IHRA (2016), he claims that the “heart of it was a series of contemporary examples of antisemitism for the bean counters.”⁵³ About his role in drafting the IHRA definition and its purpose he says: “The purpose of the definition, of course, was not to label anyone an antisemite but rather to guide data collectors, so they’d have a better sense of what to include and exclude.”⁵⁴

In Stern’s retelling, 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,” provided the context and impetus for a turning point from the EUMC definition toward the IHRA definition of antisemitism. In response to such attacks, he describes an urgent need to document and collect data about them. Such data collection fell on the 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.”⁵⁵ 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.”⁵⁶ Belying the tautological claim about Kenneth Stern’s conception of “what we all knew was true,” Lerman notes that the EUMC had actually shelved the report that alleged “young Muslims [to be] responsible for many attacks on Jews” after questioning its findings.⁵⁷ More importantly, the stark difference between these two groups of categories—the latter naming overtly racist political groups conjoined through an ideological affinity, while the former stigmatizing an amorphous, monolithic ethnic/cultural/religious group that has long been racialized as violent and terrorist,⁵⁸ demonstrates a key logic of the “new antisemitism” as manifested in the apparatus of the IHRA definition. It perpetuates anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism by reinforcing the idea that Muslims and Arabs innately hate Jewish people, and are therefore inherently antisemitic.⁵⁹

In short, despite Stern’s lamentations about the way that the IHRA definition has been weaponized to repress speech, his insistence on upholding the definition specifically as a tool toward codifying and counting the “new antisemitism” actually aims for a foundationally epistemic form of repression of anti-Zionist critique. The reinforcement of the “new antisemitism” as a guiding framework uses the seemingly neutral aim of data collection to target the very idea that “Zionism is racism” and what that structurally means, effectively flipping the script to name Israel itself as the victim of racism. This aim was evident from the inception of the IHRA definition. Consider, for example, the fact that Zionist organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center immediately deployed the “Working Definition” of the IHRA to name BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) actions within their “Top Ten Worst Global Anti-Semitic Incidents,” or even blatantly decreed BDS to be antisemitic.⁶⁰ By privileging anti-Zionism in its counting mechanism, such Zionist deployments of the IHRA definition aim to accumulate “evidence,” supposedly of antisemitism, that can be used to destroy opposition to Zionism.⁶¹ In order to be so productive, continuously counting higher rates of worldwide antisemitism, the IHRA definition must also be extractive. The trajectory of the IHRA’s “working definition,” beginning with the 2005 EUMC iteration, also roughly parallels the BDS movement, as well as concerted efforts to squash it. Insofar as this movement (and related actions) are dedicated to recognizing anti-Palestinian racism, and the IHRA definition is designed to count them as instances of “antisemitism,” it astoundingly integrates evidence of anti-Palestinian racism into itself. 

One of the most vocal organizations to leverage data collection as a mode of conquest, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),⁶² exemplifies the imperative to count as a mode of accumulation and extraction. In the months following October 7, 2023, the organization created a series of press releases based on its “Anti-Israel Activism on U.S. Campuses”—first decrying an “unprecedented” 337% increase in antisemitic incidences in December 2023,⁶³ then lamenting the “staggering” 477% increase in antisemitism in September 2024,⁶⁴ and most recently, inflating the same statistic to claim a 628% increase in antisemitism on college campuses in 2023–24 as compared to the same period in 2022–23.⁶⁵ 

These statistics, all derived from the 2023–24 ADL “Anti-Israel Activism on U.S. Campuses” report, highlight how the accumulative shifts from 337% to 477% to 628%—most certainly designed to provoke shock—are made possible through amalgamating anti-genocide protest into the ADL’s own data collection project. The “staggering” statistic of a 477% (now inflated to 628%) increase in antisemitism is extrapolated from an “updated” report that specifically incorporates the April and May anti-genocide protests and encampments across university campuses, effectively extracting calls for Palestinian liberation from their context and redeploying them as if they are evidence of antisemitism.⁶⁶ 

Taking a look at the “major findings” for the 2023–24 academic year is instructive, to say the least. Out of a total of 2087 incidents recorded through “open source” data, 1418 (or 68%) of the incidents fall in the category of “protests/actions,” meaning they overwhelmingly include campus events like anti-genocide walkouts and student encampments, as noted above.⁶⁷ While encampments have been broadly misrepresented as violent, faculty across the country have attested to the power of the encampments as spaces of popular education and mutual aid.⁶⁸ Beyond demonizing student protests against genocide, the report also includes a category specifically for “BDS resolutions,” including 80 of these resolutions in its overall count of antisemitic incidents. A majority of examples in the potentially more troubling categories of vandalism and harassment are clearly actions protesting Israel’s genocide on Gaza. For instance, one of the incidents categorized as “vandalism” in the report is an example of affixing stickers that read “this product supports genocide” to areas of a Starbucks at Haverford.⁶⁹ One of the incidents counted as harassment is “a flier stating ‘Israel just bombed a hospital murdering over 1000 Palestinians,’” found at Tufts University.⁷⁰ Across all categories, a majority of incidents describe anti-genocide or anti-Zionist sentiments.⁷¹

Aiding the project of accumulation is the ADL’s methodology of using “open source” data, a practice that actually refers to the monitoring and surveillance conducted by the ADL and other partner Israel-advocacy organizations, including the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC),⁷² Hillel, and the AMCHA Initiative. They specify that their open-source research methods compile “much of [their] data on campus anti-Israel incidents by monitoring publicly available information posted online by anti-Israel activists themselves.”⁷³ They specifically target student groups, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Dissenters, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as singling out organizations that support these student groups, like American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Palestine Legal, and CAIR.⁷⁴

Through this spurious methodology,⁷⁵ misleadingly labeled as “open source,” which actually relies on both spying and surveillance of student groups as well as attempts to criminalize their anti-genocide actions, the ADL builds a misleading argument about the amount of antisemitism on college campuses. No doubt also because of its troubling collection methods,⁷⁶ the ADL’s annual report finds an increase in purported antisemitic events every year that it has been produced. 

The reality of these numbers is that the vast majority of the increase results from tallying protests, events, actions, and BDS resolutions that focus on Palestinian liberation, a number that understandably increased in volume in response to the genocidal attack on Gaza. In short, what the data actually demonstrates is the growing movement opposing Israeli genocide and apartheid. Armed with the idea that a state can be exceptionalized as a victim of racism, the very data cataloguing the groundswell of an anti-genocide movement gets twisted in the service of crushing this very movement. 

Moreover, data collection—in this sense of counting as a tool of settler colonialism—promises to exponentially grow. In addition to the ADL and the longtime Zionist watchdog group the AMCHA Initiative, which tracks the “new antisemitism” through its “anti-Zionist faculty barometer,”⁷⁷ there is a growing number of Zionist organizations offering incident tracker counting mechanisms. Like the College and University Monitor (established in 2018), which claims to “track, expose, and combat Zionophobia in academia,”all of the tracking and reporting organizations use the IHRA definition of antisemitism, radically inflating the claim of rising antisemitism by overtly including anti-genocide protests in its data.⁷⁸ Particularly in a context in which widespread campus repression has been justified through false claims of antisemitism,⁷⁹ such “report an incident” tracking mechanisms, like the mass-email campaigns also generated by such organizations, so lucidly appropriate the notion of liberal multicultural inclusion as a means of democratizing and prolonging genocide and conquest.

“Zionism is Racism” Reprise: The Durban Debacle and “Hate Studies”

The UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance held in Durban in 2001 can be described as “a watershed moment in the emergence of the ‘new antisemitism’ orthodoxy.”⁸⁰ It solidified a conception of Israel itself as the target of racist policies and actions, in part through the repudiation—once again—of the statement “Zionism is racism.” One of the main rationales offered by Colin Powell to explain why the U.S. backed out of the conference rests on one of the same pillars used to malign anti-Zionism: the claim that Israel alone is “singled out” for censure and abuse.⁸¹ The complaint that Israel is unfairly criticized, central also to the formulation of the IHRA definition, “betrays an attitude upholding Jewish privilege in Palestine instead of Jewish rights, and Jewish supremacy over Palestinians instead of Jewish safety.”⁸² By “perversely implying that calling out Israeli state racism is itself a form of racism,” it perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism (for instance, through al-Nakba denial).⁸³ Yet, moreover, it works to obliterate any claim to or recognition of anti-Palestinian racism, just as the claim “antisemitism is racism,” as mentioned above, works to obliterate the idea that Zionism is racism. Working through an exceptionalist logic, these arguments marshal liberal multicultural notions of race that reduce it to a project of inclusion.

In service to colonialist counting, there is perhaps no better container than the framework of “hate” to usurp the concept of racism in favor of liberal multicultural inclusion. About the Durban conference, Kenneth Stern says: “Its mission was to counter racial hatred and bias, but instead it energetically promoted hatred of only one country – Israel. There was also clear hatred of Jews.”⁸⁴ In this move, Stern both invokes the idea that a state can be conceptualized as a victim of racism, while also mobilizing an individualized conception of racism and tying it to the project of counting. Stern’s formulation of what happened at Durban highlights a semantic turn from “racism” to “hatred.” The shift is not just a change in wording, of course, but also in framework: from the idea of racism as a social and institutional structure to hate as an abstract emotion rooted in individuals. Indeed, in Stern’s own framing of the “hate studies” field, he reduces the study of racism to an individualistic, rights-based framework, gutting decades of scholarship about the impacts of imperialism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism through institutional forms of racism. For Stern, “racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, etc” are all “manifestations” of hate—they emerge from it.⁸⁵ This formulation of “hate”—especially the idea that it can serve as an umbrella term that subsumes all forms of structural oppression—attempts to deftly usurp and occupy the terrain of ethnic studies.⁸⁶ In this sense, it is exemplary of the way that the idea of inclusion can function as a form of conquest and control. The framework of “hate” here emerges as paramount to the exceptionalist claim. It recedes into a seemingly universal kind of claim—i.e., everyone has access to this framework to seek redress or name a wrong—and yet that same universalist framework is so embedded in the nation-state project that it is easily co-opted and twisted toward the claim of a state being the victim of racism.

Hate studies commenced in the early 2000s,⁸⁷ parallel to the codification of Natan Sharansky’s “3D test” (2004) and the EUMC working definition of antisemitism (2005), both of which were precursors to the IHRA definition. The tandem development of these two phenomena is not inconsequential or mere coincidence. Recalling the assertion that Durban was a “watershed moment” for the “new antisemitism” orthodoxy, it also marked a significant moment in the rise of terrorism studies born out of war-on-terror securitization logics. The events of September 11, 2001 occurred just four days after the conclusion of the Durban conference, both propelling its putative challenge to U.S. empire into the “dustbin of history”⁸⁸ and undermining its momentum as a global anti-racism movement under the shadow of the repressive war on terror.⁸⁹ Reviewing the literature that defines the field, hate studies emerges as a formation that combines “security studies” logics with the assumptions of the field of genocide studies, while positing itself within the terrain of an ethnic studies landscape. In short, hate studies takes the rubric of liberal-multicultural inclusion and codifies it into a field.

As director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, Kenneth Stern describes the need for the field by grounding it in the motivating example of antisemitism, where anti-Zionism is clearly included, and he further situates it in relation to the “new antisemitism.” Rationalizing how a state can be a victim of racism, Stern argues: “Anti-Zionism is a belief that Jews (usually alone among the peoples of the globe) do not have that right to self-determination. It takes the discrimination practiced historically against the Jews as individuals and employs it against their collective identity.”⁹⁰

Hate studies also emerges in the crucible of war-on-terror securitization, steeped in anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism of the “Why do they hate us?” rubric that inaugurated the PATRIOT ACT. This can help to contextualize the way the field frames hate as an overarching concept that can encapsulate a “continuum” of “cognate concepts,”⁹¹ with one field-defining essay locating “hate crime along a continuum of force, intimidation, and escalation relative to other phenomena like microaggressions, terrorism, and genocide,”⁹² and other studies using the hate framework ostensibly to expand our collective understanding of terrorism and genocide.⁹³ The pairing of “terrorism and genocide” in these field-forming characterizations of “hate studies” is instructive and builds on a much longer trajectory and intentional discursive moves. Founded on anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Black racism, which “fuels much of terrorism and security studies research,”⁹⁴ “terrorism studies” is anchored by racist tropes characterizing Arabs, Muslims and the “MENA” region as irrational and violent.⁹⁵ The long war-on-terror both feeds and feeds on such racist tropes, justifying securitization policies of mass surveillance that disproportionately target Arabs and Muslims, including Palestinians and other groups. From the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, to more recent examples, like when the Biden administration compared anti-genocide protestors to Charlottesville fascists,⁹⁶ we see a blueprint at work that denies white supremacist extremism while continuously criminalizing SWANA and Muslim communities as the primary inflectors of terror.⁹⁷ Hate studies benefits from this discourse that capitalizes on white supremacist extremism, and then displaces it onto the racist specter of the imagined Palestinian/Arab terrorist to foment repression, censorship, and policing of those on the Left who are critical of Israel.

Turning to genocide studies as another field named as a “model” for the “emerging field of Hate Studies,”⁹⁸ I note another discursive ploy. The study of genocide is dominated by Holocaust studies, a field marked by the premise of Zionist exceptionalism.⁹⁹ Similar to the efforts to control the definition of genocide, which face gatekeeping measures precisely as anticolonial theorists seek to democratize it,¹⁰⁰ the inauguration of hate studies operates within the rubric of accumulation. The hate studies framework depends on an exceptionalist claim about the primacy of antisemitism in fomenting all other forms of oppression, a move that ultimately clouds earnest efforts to truly understand the roots and legacies of racialized oppression that continue to materially impact Black and brown communities. It also obscures the necessary means for understanding actual antisemitism because “when antisemitism is everywhere, it is nowhere. And when every anti-Zionist is an antisemite, we no longer know how to recognize the real thing—the concept of antisemitism loses its significance.”¹⁰¹

Describing anti-Zionism as “antisemitism’s ‘political’ form,”¹⁰² Stern discusses the need for hate studies in relation to college campuses: “The problems on campus were not coming from those who felt that Jews were greasy or slimy, or who wouldn’t live next door to or wouldn’t marry a Jew. They were from those who didn’t have a problem with a Jew individually, but whose antisemitism was manifest in its collective expression, namely in the State of Israel.”¹⁰³ In the 2024 Senate Congressional hearing about “stemming the tide of hate crimes,”¹⁰⁴ he has overtly connected the threads on which I have focused in this essay, clarifying that the efforts to emphasize data collection as a means of addressing antisemitism on college campuses has long been about protecting Zionism from the charge of racism: “When I started working at AJC in 1989, three issues were of particular concern. One was antisemitism on campus. One was hate crimes, and the need for better data and reporting. And one was the antisemitic impact of the United Nation’s 1975 General Assembly Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism.”¹⁰⁵ Considering Stern’s argument (quoted above) about the need for hate studies as a necessary antidote to anti-Zionism on college campuses, as well as his argument that the IHRA definition serves the purpose of addressing the “need for better data,” the field of “hate studies” can be understood as an effort to institutionalize liberal multicultural inclusion—“bean counting”—toward protecting and enabling Israel’s genocidal activities. For death in Gaza to count, and for counting to be liberated from the machinations of conquest, we must confront and unravel the colonial logic at work when certain numbers are made to count much more than others.

Conclusion

Counting is political in the sense that, theoretically, it is actionable. It can provide a quantitative and therefore seemingly objective or non-partisan statistic that is impossible to contest. In John Tirman’s exploration of the failure to account for civilian deaths of those countries in which the United States has waged war, he makes the point that counting the numbers of those killed in warfare, especially civilians, are one of the main ways to measure the human costs of war.¹⁰⁶ Writing during the onslaught of the ongoing genocide on Gaza, it is painfully and abundantly clear that the aggressor-states (in this case and in the so-called war on terror more generally, both the U.S. and Israel) consider all civilians to be combatants, and posthumously identify them as such, as a way of attempting to justify what should only be condemned. But as U.S. General Tommy Franks’ famous proclamation that “we don’t do body counts”¹⁰⁷—an unconscionable sentiment that inspired the Iraq Body Count project¹⁰⁸—demonstrates, counting is also subject to the hegemonic constraints of political will and greatly impeded by racist ideas about who counts as human.¹⁰⁹ Although the recourse to numbers to end genocide relies on the assumption that genocide can be presented as an aberration of an otherwise functioning system,¹¹⁰ the violent history of the nation-state implies not only that genocide can be understood as its logical outcome, but also as the foundation upon which it is built.¹¹¹ In the exceptionalist statecraft of the U.S. and Israel, this logic of counting is deployed to protect a genocidal state, one that has wielded statistics to claim its own status as a victim of racism. In this deflection, the liberal multicultural project of data collection operates through the logic of exception and functions in the service of imperialist accumulation. Absorbing anti-genocide protest into its own accumulative project, it continues to rationalize its actions, gain public consent through the framework of liberal values of inclusion, and justify continuous colonization and violence.

The failure to understand all people as valuable and countable has long been a racist project. Against such methodical, killing racism,¹¹² I end by highlighting the We Are Not Numbers (WANN) project, created to account for and tell stories and poems of those living and dying in Palestine, which uplifts the “daily personal struggles and triumphs, the tears and the laughter, and the dreams and aspirations that are universally experienced but often not recognized for Palestinians.”¹¹³ Such projects vivify “being human as a praxis”¹¹⁴ by bringing life to Palestinian stories beyond “impersonal and even numbing” statistics.¹¹⁵ Exceeding the cruelty of numbers and the monopoly of counting, We Are Not Numbers, and the many other projects created to mourn Palestinian death,¹¹⁶ ground loss in the immeasurable love Palestinians have for life, land, and their people who, beyond all unreasonable measure, will always matter to them.