Creating a Cover for Genocide
Originally appeared at TomDispatch.
In July 2025, the Massachusetts legislature’s Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a bill to make it the 38th state to follow the federal government, 45 other countries (almost all of them in the global North), and more than 50 U.S. local governments in adopting a strange definition of antisemitism.
In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a group of 35 mostly European countries, drafted what it called a working definition of antisemitism. The Alliance had been founded in 1998 to promote Holocaust education and, in its own words, to “strengthen governmental cooperation to work towards a world without genocide.” All too sadly, right now, its definition is being used to do the opposite: it’s helping to criminalize opposition to genocide.
Is It Really About Antisemitism?
Most anti-racist organizations, like the NAACP, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Stop Anti-Asian and Pacific Islander Hate, do not, in fact, offer a specific definition of racism. Instead, they simply work to combat discrimination and fight for equal opportunity and basic human and civil rights.
Jews in the United States don’t, in fact, face the same kinds of systemic racism the people that formed the above organizations face. Unlike them, Jews tend to be disproportionately high income, highly educated professionals.
So, in the IHRA’s list of examples of antisemitism, not one refers to inequality or structural discrimination. Instead, they focus mostly on ideas and speech — and in particular things said about Israel. And what those examples, in fact, tend to do is turn the definition of antisemitism into a thinly veiled tool for use in prohibiting criticism of any sort of Israel.
The IHRA’s definition itself appears relatively straightforward, even if it focuses on thought and speech rather than structures of racism: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
What follows, however, is a confusing and contradictory amalgam of 11 “examples of antisemitism in public life,” six of which focus on political debate that raises questions about Zionism, Israel as an ethnostate, or Israel’s actions.
Creating legal avenues to suppress what would otherwise be protected political speech about Israel is a major reason that the IHRA and its allies have felt the need to turn their definition into law. And advocates for the legal adoption of that definition claim that it’s necessary because antisemitism is on the rise in this country. But the expansive and confusing examples of antisemitism that the definition relies on actually make it impossible to know whether such a statement is, in fact, accurate. The organizations that use the IHRA definition to track antisemitism won’t tell us whether what is on the rise is actually antisemitism or simply opposition to Israel and its increasingly unnerving actions in the Middle East.
In addition, the IHRA text is based on the assumption that all Jews, by definition, identify fully with Israel and with the nature of Israel as a Jewish state. And so, for the IHRA, challenging “the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” is in itself an example of antisemitism.
Yet the document also denounces as antisemitic the stereotyping of Jews and, in particular, “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”
Notice a contradiction? While the IHRA claims that stereotyping or caricaturing Jews, or attributing a particular version of pro-Israel politics to Jews, is antisemitic, its own definition stereotypes, caricatures, and attributes a particular politics about Israel to Jews.
Legal and Logical Contradictions: A Double Standard for Israel
After suggesting that “the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” must not be challenged, the Alliance then does step back and agree that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
However, there is no other country that is conceived as a Jewish collectivity. To demand that criticism of Israel must be “similar” to that leveled against other countries to be legitimate is just another way of saying that no such criticism can truly be legitimate.
The closest example of a country with a diverse population conceived as the collectivity of a single group might be apartheid South Africa, which of course was the target of widespread global condemnation. Another parallel today might be Hindu nationalism in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But criticism of Hindu nationalism, like that of White nationalism in South Africa, has never been proscribed or punished for being a form of discrimination. (No matter that Donald Trump deemed White South Africans an oppressed minority!)
In yet another contradiction, the document denounces “applying double standards [to Israel] by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” as constituting antisemitism. In fact, however, its definition applies a double standard to Israel by proscribing language and criticism that no institution proscribes with respect to any other country.
The United States imposes no legal prohibitions on challenging ethnonationalism in other lands. I am free to criticize India, Hungary, or any other country, democratic or otherwise, that in any way privileges one race, ethnicity, or religion over others — but I can’t criticize Israel for doing the same when it comes to Palestinians. I’m free to criticize racism, discrimination, and racist violence anywhere else on earth — but not in Israel. If any other country creates the equivalent of concentration camps or commits genocide, we can denounce it and try to stop it — but if Israel does that, I will be accused of antisemitism for telling the truth about what Israel is doing.
According to the IHRA, we can state those truths about any other country committing war crimes and genocide, but not about what Israel is doing in Gaza. Given what we are witnessing in Gaza, that is not just a double standard, it’s impunity for genocide.
Is Accusing Israel of Genocide Antisemitic?
The IHRA further adds that “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is a manifestation of antisemitism. This prohibition extends not only to direct comparisons, but to any claim that Israel is by its very nature an ethno-state, or that it is currently engaging in genocide, creating concentration camps, planning for mass expulsions, or engaging in other war crimes or crimes against humanity.
But what does it mean if a country is granted blanket impunity against any accusation of racism, war crimes, or human rights violations? The IHRA would prohibit journalists, human rights organizations, international organizations, international legal groups, and scholars from investigating, or denouncing what the country is doing, much less taking action to restrain it. Indeed, some people from these groups have been accused and sanctioned for their investigations, while others self-censor out of fear of being seen as antisemitic.
In short, the IHRA itself commits two of the acts that it claims to oppose: it creates a double standard for Israel and an impenetrable cover for committing genocide.
Major human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have concluded that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza. Close to two dozen countries — almost all from the global South — along with the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab League, and the African Union, have joined with South Africa to accuse Israel of genocidal acts before the International Court of Justice. And all of those claims have been duly condemned by Israel and its allies.
Israeli genocide historian Omer Bartov proceeded cautiously with his own judgment. In November 2023, he wrote: “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.” He believed then that genocide was indeed possible in Gaza and urged the world to mobilize to prevent it.
Despite global protest, Israel’s assault on Gaza only continued. In July 2025, Bartov wrote: “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. [Israeli Defense Forces] as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.” Ongoing denial of the genocide, he added, “will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again.”
In fact, Bartov observes, there is now an overwhelming consensus among genocide scholars (who study comparative genocide or different genocides worldwide) that what we are witnessing in Gaza is indeed a genocide. Holocaust scholars mostly hold the opposite view and many have argued, in line with the IHRA, that any such accusation against Israel could only be motivated by antisemitism. “The Holocaust has been… relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the IDF,” concludes Bartov, citing an array of publications that accuse genocide scholars of antisemitism for simply describing what Israel is doing in Gaza and quoting Israeli officials about their aims.
What About Other War Crimes — Or Any Crimes at All?
Yet another IHRA example of antisemitism refers to “blood libel,” which it doesn’t define, but which generally refers to the grim myth that Jews killed non-Jewish children to use their blood in rituals. The IHRA text cites “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis” as examples of antisemitism.
And such accusations haven’t just been made against critics of the present war in Gaza outside of Israel. When Israeli politician Yair Golan spoke out against Israeli atrocities in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately accused him of “blood libel.” When the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published an investigative report with soldiers’ testimonies about being ordered to shoot at Gazans approaching humanitarian aid sites, the paper was subject to the same accusation. When Israeli opposition politicians accused Netanyahu of prolonging the war in the service of his own political interests, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. accused them, too, of “blood libel.”
Is it antisemitic for the World Court to hear a case accusing Israel of the crime of genocide in Gaza? Benjamin Netanyahu has openly claimed so, as did the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the U.S. Combat Antisemitism Movement. Is it antisemitic for genocide scholars to study this particular case of mass killing, just because its perpetrator happens to be Israel? Is it antisemitic for Israeli journalist Dahlia Scheindlin to point out that “Israel’s plan to herd 600,000 Palestinians into a special camp at Gaza’s southern border with Egypt” is in fact a plan to create the equivalent of a concentration camp?
The impunity that such a proscription attempts to grant Israel is immense.
There’s More: It’s Legally Binding
Although the IHRA originally insisted that its definition was “non-legally binding,” it is, in fact, becoming so. The group itself and major Jewish organizations in the United States have launched political campaigns to promote their definition and turn it into law.
By mid-2025, 46 countries had adopted the definition. President Trump implemented it with an executive order in 2019, citing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin for any program that gets federal financial assistance. As a result, Title VI proscriptions can now be applied to a person who criticizes Zionism, who uses the term genocide to describe Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, or who advocates the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement or indeed any withdrawal of U.S. support for what Israel is now doing.
The Biden administration maintained Trump’s policy and the current Trump administration, and universities now pressured into following in its footsteps, have used it to fire, punish, or, in the case of the government, deport people under the guise of preventing antisemitism. In fact, Harvard University’s decision in January 2025 to become the first Ivy League university to join the trend, adopting the definition (followed by Yale in April), specifically designated “Zionists” as a protected class. Thus, the policy prohibits “antisemitic, racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Zionist, anti-Arab, Islamophobic, anti-LDS, or anti-Catholic” behaviors.
The IHRA document was not written to be turned into law, and even some of its authors have protested this use. Yet there it is in law and policy throughout the United States and Europe.
Weaponizing Antisemitism as a Shield to Enable Genocide
The IHRA’S definition goes far beyond the obvious one, that of stereotyping, prejudice against, or harm against Jews, and has little to do with preventing genocide. It is an eminently political definition that tries to prevent criticism of Israel by defining such criticism as antisemitic. Turning it into law heavily limits freedom of speech and political debate — and has nothing to do with antisemitism.
As Israel, in fact, continues to carry out mass killings of Palestinians, attempting to destroy every institution of Palestinian life and culture in Gaza, and herding them into militarized camps, this definition has been mobilized to try to silence any hint that it might be engaging in war crimes, creating concentration camps, or committing genocide.
Copyright 2025 Aviva Chomsky
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