Video excerpt, transcript, and key quotes from the talk by Sean Malloy at the ICSZ “Battling the ‘IHRA Definition'” conference in October 2023.
This is a struggle that began in Palestine, it will end in Palestine that is liberated from the river to the sea.
Abstract: The paper offers a prehistory of the IHRA, illustrating the way in which a combination of domestic and international challenges to Zionism in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to a concerted effort to redefine antisemitism in a way that prioritized the defense of Israel while identifying the political Left as the primary antagonist and source of antisemitism. Often referred to in the 1970s as “new antisemitism,” this revised formulation was largely in response to successful multiracial and ethnic grassroots organizing efforts for Palestinian solidarity in the United States and Western Europe. The core concepts of the “new antisemitism” as developed in the 1970s and 1980s – including the focus on Israel as “the world’s Jew” and highlighting the danger posed by Leftist anti-Zionism as equal to or greater than that of traditional Right-wing antisemitic groups such as the Ku Klux Klan – have been central to ongoing efforts to suppress Palestinian activism in the United States and around the world as well as to the 21st century to institutionalize this formulation in the IHRA.
It is not a coincidence that Zionist groups have attacked Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, because at its best, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, provides an intellectual and activist foundation that draws on the roots of that [anti-colonial] activism from the 60s and 70s.
What this particular definition [IHRA] does is it identifies this new redefined antisemitism as emanating from an internationalist left, rather than from a nationalist right.
Read the transcript.