Indiana University Holds Important Conference on “Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Dynamics of Delegitimization”

The following piece was written in collaboration with Emma Dillon and Juan Pablo Rivera Garza:

In April, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism (ISCA) organized an important International Scholars Conference at Indiana University, on the topic of “Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Dynamics of Delegitimization.” The conference sought to explore what informs contemporary anti-Zionism as well as to clarify the ties such thinking may have with anti-Semitism and broader ideological, political, and cultural currents of thought. The conference brought together some 70 scholars from 15 countries over the course of several days for intense deliberation and discussion about some of the most pressing issues today. LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus chaired a session of the conference, and LDB is proud to have close ties with many of the distinguished speakers and participants at this great event. Videos from the conference have recently become available for viewing online.

Professor Alvin Rosenfeld of Indiana University, Director of ISCA and member of LDB’s Academic Advisory Board, organized the conference. Professor Irwin Cotler, of McGill University, the Honorary Chair of LDB’s Academic Advisory board, delivered the keynote address on Sunday evening. Dr. Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias and Anne Herzberg, members of LDB’s Law Student Chapter Speakers Bureau, spoke, respectively, on the subjects of “Anti-Zionism, Anti-Israelism, and the UN Universal Periodic Review” and “The Role of International Legal and Justice Discourse in Promoting the New Antisemitism.” Doron Ben-Atar, professor of history at Fordham University, moderated session VII where Cary Nelson of the University of Illinois and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin of UC Santa Cruz spoke on “Anti-Zionism and the Humanities” and “Measuring Campus Antisemitism: Ties between Anti-Zionist Expression and Anti-Jewish Hostility.” Rossman-Benjamin is also a member of LDB’s academic advisory board. Additionally, LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus contributed a chapter to Nelson’s latest book, “The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.”

On Sunday, April 3, Amy Elman, a professor of political science and the William Weber Chair of Social Science at Kalamazoo College, chaired the first Session of the day. The session began with a talk by David Matas, an international human rights lawyer and honorary counsel to B’nai Brith Canada, who spoke about distinguishing criticism from anti-Semitism.

Next, Elman introduced Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias, who is currently a senior researcher at the Poznań Human Rights Centre, Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of the Sciences. Gliszczynska-Grabias is a Polish national with policy and legal expertise in the field of anti-discrimination law, constitutional law, freedom of speech vs. hate speech, transitional justice, and memory laws. In her lecture, “Anti-Zionism, Anti-Israelism, and the UN Universal Periodic Review,” she discussed various examples of anti-Semitic attitudes by state delegations to the UN. She also discussed the negative singling out of Israel as the only country targeted in a permanent item on the Human Rights Council’s agenda. This leads Israel to be the subject of condemnation at every regular Human Rights Council session, as Gliszczynska explains, irrespective of human rights violations elsewhere in the world. She focused in depth on how the Universal Periodic Review displayed disproportionality and unfairness in evaluation, with a hostile attitude toward Israel and a lack of consideration for the problem of anti-Semitism. Gliszczynska explained that the Universal Periodic Review was first implemented to serve as a both periodical comprehensive and critical assessment of the observance of human rights in UN member states, as well as to create a forum for dialogue between states, the council, and NGOs. She went on to highlight how Israel remains one of the top states that have received the highest numbers of recommendations to the UPR—ranking amongst Cuba, China, and North Korea. Gliszczynska suggested that such a level of bias, injustice, and hatred faced by Israel on the international arena creates the impression that Israel is the worst human rights violator in the world. Consequently, this further fuels the campaign which paints Israel as such an evil state, and reinforces the notion that it should be pushed outside the scope of the international community and should not exist at all.

Anne Herzberg and Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor ended the first session with their lecture, “The Role of International Legal and Justice Discourse in Promoting the New Anti-Semitism.” Herzberg serves as the legal advisor for NGO, Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute, and Steinberg, a professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University, is president of NGO Monitor. Steinberg began the lecture with a discussion on how an assault on Jewish life, Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish state is now cast in the language of human rights. He talked about how the language of human rights is constantly repeated with extra hostility toward Israel, and using double standards against Israel. Herzberg then delved into a discussion on the three ways in which the rhetoric of legal frameworks is used to demonize Israel, undermine or cancel Jewish self-determination rights, and serve as the new form of anti-Semitism. They concluded with a demand that organizations in any framework that use the language of international law to do so in a consistent and professional way and that progress can be made by highlighting inconsistencies and the use of the language in political ways as well as how organizations justify (or fail to justify) how they single out Israel.

Later that evening, Irwin Cotler, gave an enlightening keynote address on “Global Antisemitism, Demonization, and the Laundering of Delegitimization under Universal Public Values.” Cotler is professor emeritus of law at McGill University in Montreal, where he is also director of its Human Rights Program. In addition, he is chair of InterAmicus, an international human rights advocacy center. A longtime member of the Canadian Parliament, he was minister of justice and attorney general of Canada and headed the Canadian delegation to the Stockholm International Forum on the Prevention of Genocide.

In his informative address, Cotler discussed how we are witnessing a “new global, escalating, sophisticated, virulent, and even lethal anti-Semitism”. While it is grounded in classical anti-Semitism, Cotler stated that this new anti-Semitism has its own distinguishable characteristics that require a “new vocabulary” to define it. He also stated, quoting Sweden Per Ahlmark, that this new anti-Semitism targets the “collective Jew”, such as Israel, and incites a chain reaction that results in attacks on individual Jews and Jewish institutions. Cotler then goes on to describe the five metrics in which this new anti-Semitism can be understood: Genocidal anti-Semitism, Demonological anti-Semitism, Political anti-Semitism, Anti-Jewish Terror, and the Laundering, or masking, of anti-Semitism under universal public values. The first four metrics, as he explained, are the most overt, while the last one is the most dangerous as it is more subversive.

Genocidal anti-Semitism, as Cotler defined it, calls for the death of Jews and Israel, and makes them target for extermination. Demonological anti-Semitism is the “globalizing indictment of Israel and the Jewish people as the embodiment of all evil today,” such as Israel being deemed a “colonialist” or “Nazi” state. Cotler noted that not only are Israel and Jews made the only nation and people that are “standing targets of genocidal anti-Semitism,” but that they are also the only ones who are systematically accused of being genocidal themselves. The next metric he described is Political anti-Semitism, which is the denial for fundamental rights to the Jewish people. Such rights include the denial of Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, and the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. Cotler then defines Anti-Jewish Terror as being the “justification,” “glorification, and even rewarding” of incitement of state-sanctioned violence against the Jewish people by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. The final metric he discussed, one he calls the “most sophisticated,” is the Laundering of anti-Semitism, which works to sanitize attacks against the Jewish state, and make Israel a target for condemnation in order to delegitimize it. Cotler explained that this metric can be seen in five different arenas: protection from the UN, under international law, in the culture of human rights, the struggle against racism, and under indigenous peoples’ framework. In closing, Cotler asserted that we should “identify and name the evil” and step out of the “docket of being the defendant” and instead be the “the plaintiff, the rights’ claimant.” In addition, he insists that we should also focus on protecting other vulnerable minorities in the Middle East who also targets of state-sanctioned violence, and encourage the international community to not ignore their plight for human rights in favor of singling out Israel.

At Monday’s Session VII, Cary Nelson gave a presentation on “Anti-Zionism and the Humanities.” Nelson is a professor of English at University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign, who has witnessed first hand the growing acceptance of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the academic mainstream. In particular, Professor Nelson described in his lecture how the humanities have been exposed to these viewpoints by both students and a worrying number of academics. Although Professor Nelson is an active English lecturer at University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign, he has become heavily invested in the issue of anti-BDS. He has published two books that strike back at the BDS movement; The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel and Dreams Deferred: A Concise Guide to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict & the Movement to Boycott Israel. These writings and his activism have lent great support to the anti-BDS movement in Universities across the country, where two out of ten academics have tolerated or even condoned BDS activity.

Following Nelson’s presentation, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a Brandeis Center Advisory board member and UC Santa Cruz professor, explored in her lecture, “Measuring Campus Anti-Semitism: Ties between Anti-Zionist Expression and Anti-Jewish Hostility” the connection between the rising BDS movement and anti-Zionism on college campuses to growing anti-Jewish incidents. Through her organization, AMCHA Initiative, Professor Rossman-Benjamin conducted a study that analyzed the prevalence of BDS movements, anti-Zionist organizations and academics, in Universities with the highest prevalence of Jewish students. As she illustrated in her lecture, the connection between anti-Zionist activities of any kind at these Universities with incidents of anti-Jewish harassment of students is staggering. Her findings are critical in understanding the threat anti-Zionist movements on college campuses pose for the average Jewish student, regardless of their opinion on the State of Israel. In her address, Professor Rossman-Benjamin explained the criteria for anti-Semitic activity on college campuses as; anti-Semitic speech that are based on the 8 tropes of anti-Semitic language by state department, Direct threats and violations of Jewish students, and BDS activity. Through careful study of these factors, Professor Rossman-Benjamin came to the conclusion that BDS movements in campuses are direct contributors to anti-Semitic actions within Universities. According to her metric, the connection between the two has only a 1 in 1000 chance of not being connected.

LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus chaired Session XIV of the conference. Shimon Samuels’ lecture, “The New Supersessionism: ID Theft of the Jewish Narrative”, kicked off the session. Samuels is the director for International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, responsible for issues of contemporary racism and anti-Semitism in Europe, Latin America, and international organizations. In his lecture, Samuels discussed the evolution of the campaign for identity theft of the Jewish religious narrative, which he witnessed firsthand at the Durban Conference and then again at the Anti-Globalization World Social Forum. He argued that an attack on heritage is war by any means, emphasizing that denial of a heritage is tantamount to its deletion from history and geography and that it is much more dangerous than anti-Semitic terrorism or other manifestations of violence, as it endangers posterity and condemns Jews to isolation. He concluded his lecture arguing that a concerted campaign against this ID theft and to set the record straight is the kind of pushback required, and that apathy will be disastrous.

The next speaker was Richard Landes, a senior fellow at the Center for International Communication at Bar Ilan University and trained medievalist, who spoke about “The Global Progressive Left, Anti-Zionism, and Secular Supersessionism.” The lecture was a psychological discussion, with a focus on the phenomenon of malicious envy and hard zero sum thinking. Landes defined the “supersessionist” as one who looks down at rivals, expresses status anxiety that needs visible proof of superiority in order to reassure itself, and requires identity formation through aggrandizing the new self by diminishing the other. He discussed how this malevolent envy and preoccupation the Jewish notion of “chosen-ness” manifests itself in lethal journalism against Israel and the global progressive new replacement theology of “Nazion.” Landes concluded that we must pay attention to the phenomenon of secular supersessionism, as it informs a great deal of the hostility to Israel, especially on the left.

The comprehensive and thought-provoking four-day conference explored various facets of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, as well as their impact globally and domestically through historical, ideological, political, psychological, and cultural dimensions. This conference provided a great opportunity for its participants to explore and debate the connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, in addition to providing a fantastic, informative forum to increase awareness and educate about the pervasive issue of anti-Semitism worldwide.

 

To watch more videos and presentations from this remarkable conference, click here.

 

To read the event’s full program, click here.