This is Palestine is a podcast by IMEU

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From Pompeo’s attack on BDS to the battle for free speech on college campuses, anti-Semitism is being weaponized to silence criticism of Israel and stifle advocacy for Palestinian rights. Omar Baddar speaks with Diana Buttu, Lara Friedman, and Roua Daas about this crisis of free expression and political speech.

Listen to The Weaponization of Anti-Semitism

Analysis by FMEP’s Lara Friedman, published at the American Prospect on November 12, 2020

Weaponizing Anti-Semitism, State Department Delegitimizes Human Rights Groups

Authoritarian regimes and illiberal forces will exploit the new U.S. policy.

Amidst the hullabaloo around last week’s U.S. elections, most people probably forgot the recent shocking news that the U.S. Department of State plans to label three leading global human rights groups—Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam—“anti-Semitic.” They shouldn’t have. A new report today suggests that the plans will not only move forward, but will be geared to have even broader impact than originally suggested. With the victory of President-elect Biden, some might now be tempted to dismiss all of this as a desperate, partisan gambit that, if implemented, will be easily undone by a new Biden administration. In reality, the labeling of humanitarian and civil society groups as “anti-Semitic” looms as an inexorable outcome, now or in the future, of an ongoing and escalating campaign, embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, which has weaponized combating anti-Semitism to quash criticism of Israel, attack progressive political actors and movements, and delegitimize civil society organizations.

At the core of this campaign is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) “working definition of antisemitism,” which, in a memo explaining the targeting of Amnesty and friends, the State Department contends the groups are violating. The IHRA was established in 1998 to “strengthen, advance and promote Holocaust education, research and remembrance.” Over time, it increasingly focused on anti-Semitism, and today positions itself as the international body with responsibility for fighting—and authoritatively defining—anti-Semitism. Herein lies the controversy.

There appears to be bipartisan support around making the IHRA definition the official U.S. tool for rooting out alleged anti-Semitism.

Traditionally, “anti-Semitism” means hostility and prejudice toward Jews because they are Jews—a scourge that has imperiled Jews throughout history, and is a source of resurgent threats to Jews today. The IHRA definition, in contrast, is explicitly politicized, refocusing the term to encompass not only hatred of Jews, but also hostility toward and criticism of the modern state of Israel. For example, it labels as anti-Semitic “applying double standards” to Israel or requiring of Israel “behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” While it notes that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic,” in practice this “double standard” language has paved the way for attacking virtually all criticism of Israel as prima facie anti-Semitic, based on the simplistic argument that focusing criticism on Israel, when other nations are guilty of similarly bad behavior, can only reflect animus against Jews.

According to this logic, it is anti-Semitic to challenge Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands—unless one is equally challenging occupation anywhere. Likewise, boycotting or calling to boycott Israel or settlements to protest violations of Palestinian rights is considered anti-Semitic—unless one is similarly boycotting every country guilty of violating the rights of any people, anywhere.

The IHRA definition also stipulates that it is anti-Semitic to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”—notwithstanding the fact that other peoples, including Palestinians, are denied self-determination, and other nations have their existence challenged, including, for example, by Israelis who argue that the state of Jordan should be replaced with Palestine. Yet, this line has become the basis for indicting anyone who identifies as anti-Zionist, or who supports boycotts of Israel or settlements, as anti-Semitic, irrespective of their reasoning and absent evidence that their views are grounded in hostility toward not Israel, but Jews.

In December 2019, President Donald Trump was applauded by members of both parties for his Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism, in which he gave the IHRA definition and its Israel-focused examples the weight of U.S. law. Since then, that order has been the basis for a flood of complaints and investigations targeting U.S. campuses, based on allegations related to criticism of Zionism and Israel. Separately, there have been efforts to incorporate the IHRA definition and its examples into laws dealing with hate crimes and discrimination in U.S. states. There is also an ongoing campaign pressing Facebook and other social media platforms to adopt and enforce the IHRA definition and its examples, with the key backers making clear that their target is not anti-Semitism as it is traditionally defined, but anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.

In September 2020, the State Department promised a “whole-of-government” approach to the issue of fighting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement; the department’s targeting of human rights groups, based on tying the IHRA definition to BDS to allege anti-Semitism, makes clear what this approach, if implemented before Trump leaves office, will be about. The threat, however, is not just from the Trump administration. The call to use the IHRA definition in a “whole-of-government” approach to fight anti-Semitism was articulated previously by Democratic congressman Ted Deutch of Florida, in a 2019 op-ed entitled “The US Should Adopt the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism.” While Deutch condemned the State Department’s plans to label human rights groups anti-Semitic, he has not retracted his support for implementing the definition in general.

The IHRA definition is explicitly politicized, refocusing the term to encompass not only hatred of Jews, but also hostility toward and criticism of the modern state of Israel.

In short, there appears to be bipartisan support around making the IHRA definition, already adopted by an ever-growing list of countries, the official U.S. tool for rooting out alleged anti-Semitism. Should this come to pass, the full spectrum of organizations that challenge Israeli policies—or that advocate, support, or defend boycotts of Israel or settlements—will find themselves in the U.S. government’s crosshairs.

The State Department’s targeting of humanitarian and civil society groups must be understood in this context. It is not an isolated outrage, as it is being treated by some longtime backers of the IHRA definition who appear shocked to see the definition used this way, like the Anti-Defamation League. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence, intended or not, of the effort to enforce the IHRA’s politicized definition of anti-Semitism, and the dangerous implications of this effort cannot be overstated. It will be a short leap from sticking the “anti-Semitism” label on a group like Amnesty International—which does not accept U.S. funding in any case—to sticking it on virtually all groups that engage on Israel-Palestine, including many that rely on U.S. funding for their work across the globe. Other angles of attack will doubtless come into play, like seeking to strip nonprofit organizations of their tax-exempt status (a first shot at which is already under way). Across the globe, authoritarian regimes and illiberal forces will exploit the new U.S. policy as a pretext to escalate their own attacks on civil society groups.

Delegitimizing the world’s leading human rights organizations with false accusations of anti-Semitism is a feature, not a bug, of a larger effort to weaponize the fight against anti-Semitism for political ends. Even with Biden moving into the White House in January 2021, absent a determined effort to roll back or amend the IHRA definition, or to adopt a different interpretation of its examples, the targeting of vital human rights and humanitarian aid organizations, in the United States and around the world, will be just the start.

Analysis by FMEP’s Lara Friedman, published at Jewish Currents on August 19, 2020

Israel-Advocacy Groups Urge Facebook to Label Criticism of Israel as Hate Speech

ON AUGUST 7th, amid broad efforts to get Facebook to clamp down on extremist activity and hate speech, more than 120 organizations sent a letter to the social media giant, urging it to “fully adopt” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism as the “cornerstone of Facebook’s hate speech policy regarding antisemitism.” This definition, which was adopted by the IHRA in 2016 and has been promoted to governments worldwide, includes several examples of what it describes as “contemporary” antisemitism—including “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel—that can be interpreted to define much criticism of Israel, Israeli policies, or Zionism as antisemitism.

This letter represents the latest front in the battle to use the IHRA definition to officially exclude criticism of Israel from the bounds of acceptable discourse. It was spearheaded by pro-Israel attack dog StopAntisemitism.org, which is funded by hardline pro-Israel philanthropists Adam and Gila Milstein. The group is perhaps best known for publicly labeling critics of Israel, including some Jews, as antisemites. So far, the list of signatories to the Facebook letter is a “who’s who” of right-wing groups dedicated to defending Israel from criticism, many of which are also funded by or associated with the Milsteins; in The Jerusalem Post, a former Israeli Knesset member who is associated with one of the signatories credited the Milsteins’ foundation with initiating the campaign. Their effort enjoys the public backing of the Israeli government: Israel’s new Minister of Strategic Affairs, Orit Farkash-Hacohen, told the Post, “I welcome the initiative and call on more bodies and organizations to join the clear demand for change.”

Yet, as attorney Kenneth Stern—an expert on antisemitism who was the lead drafter on the text that became the IHRA definition—has repeatedly expressed, this definition and its examples were never intended to be used as a formalized, enforceable definition of antisemitism, and turning them into one has raised serious free speech concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union described early efforts to codify the IHRA into law as “part of a disturbing surge of government-led attempts to suppress the speech of people on only one side of the Israel-Palestine debate . . . on college campuses, in state contracts, and even in bills to change the federal law.” If social media networks like Facebook adopt the Israel-related examples in the IHRA definition and allow these to guide their hate speech policies, it will likely lead to similar efforts to suppress free speech, this time in the online sphere.

So far, Facebook has responded to the letter by changing its policy regarding hate speech in ways it says take the IHRA definition into account, but it has resisted adopting the IHRA definition in its entirety. On August 11th, Facebook announced that it had updated its hate speech policy “to more specifically account for certain kinds of implicit hate speech, such as . . . stereotypes about Jewish people controlling the world.” In a response sent to to the letter’s signatories, Monika Bickert—Facebook’s vice president of content policy—noted that the company had used the IHRA definition “in informing [its] own approach and definitions,” that its new policy “draws on the spirit—and the text—of the IHRA,” and that under Facebook’s policy, “Jews and Israelis are treated as ‘protected characteristics.’” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operations officer, also wrote to Adam Milstein personally, assuring him that the IHRA definition has been “invaluable” to Facebook.

Though Israel was not mentioned in Facebook’s response to the letter, the company has previously expressed reluctance to adopt the parts of the definition that relate to Israel. In a May 7th webinar hosted by the American Jewish Committee, senior Facebook official Peter Stern said that Facebook had “mapped” the IHRA definition onto its own policies and found it to be “valuable,” but added that “the areas where we would depart to some degree from that definition . . . comes in relation to statements about, particularly, nations.” He added, “We don’t allow people to make certain types of hateful statements against individuals. If the focus turns to a country, an institution, a philosophy, then we allow people to express themselves more freely, because we think that’s an important part of political dialogue . . . and that there’s an important legitimate component to that. So we allow people to criticize the state of Israel, as well as the United States and other countries.” The August 7th letter called out Stern’s comments, claiming that he “admitted that Facebook does not embrace the full adoption of the IHRA working definition because the definition recognizes that modern manifestations of antisemitism relate to Israel.“

The campaign to pressure Facebook to adopt the full IHRA definition has been a long time in the making. In December 2019—less than a week after President Trump signed an executive order embracing the IHRA definition—StopAntisemitism.org joined forces with another hardline Israel advocacy group, Zachor Legal Institute, to issue a report entitled “The New Anti-Semites.” (Zachor, also a signatory of the August 7th letter, is the same group that recently called on the Department of Justice “to fully investigate the ties among Black Lives Matter, their BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] partners and foreign terror groups that are promoting violence and unrest in the United States.”) That report, which is cited in the letter to Facebook, argues that most criticism and pressure related to Israel or its policies—but especially the BDS movement and the tactics it endorses—is antisemitic. It offers specific recommendations for vanquishing this antisemitism, including enshrining the IHRA definition into law and expanding the application of the IHRA definition to social media, as well as to “online platforms such as financial service providers and internet site hosts of social media platforms.”

Six months later, on June 4th, Zachor began its efforts to turn this recommendation into a reality, announcing that it had sent letters to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter “updating them about antisemitic postings that are present on their popular social media platforms.” The sole posting cited in Zachor’s letter to Facebook is a Nakba commemoration post from a page called “Palestine Writes,” sharing a video from the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network that mentions “confronting the racist ideology of Zionism.” All of the examples Zachor cited in these letters relate to Palestinian criticism of Israel; none mention anything about Judaism or Jews. Using the IHRA definition as its basis, Zachor argued that the posts violated the social media platforms’ “own hate speech regulations” and demanded their removal.

Diaspora Israel-advocacy groups’ strategy of targeting criticism of Israel on social media is mirrored by similar efforts within the Israeli government. In July, Farkash-Hacohen, the Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs, published an op-ed in Newsweek urging social media companies to adopt the IHRA definition. The following week, The Jerusalem Post reported that under the new Israeli government, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs was “shifting” its focus from fighting BDS to challenging “delegitimization of Israel more broadly,” and that it has “plans to increase its focus on social media,” where it hopes to—in the words of the ministry’s director general, Ronen Manelis—“balance the antisemitic and anti-Israel discourse.” According to the Post, Jewish Agency chairman Isaac Herzog “said he has sought to have the companies adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism” and that he had “met with Facebook executives . . . to discuss the matter.”

The efforts targeting social media are yet another reminder that concerns about the free speech implications of the IHRA definition are not hypothetical. Earlier this year, legislators in several states sought to codify the IHRA definition, including its Israel-related examples, into hate crimes legislation and anti-discrimination laws. Trump’s 2019 executive order adopting the IHRA definition into US policy has, as predicted, spawned a growing list of attacks targeting Israel-related speech on college campuses, as well as an effort targeting a US foundation for its support for a group that criticizes Israel. The IHRA-based conflation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel was also the foundation of a recent report by the Milstein-supported AMCHA initiative purporting to document rising antisemitism on college campuses. While admitting there has been a significant decrease “in the number of incidents of anti-Jewish harassment identified as expressing classic antisemitism,” the report highlighted a “significant increase in the number of Israel-related incidents,” as defined under the IHRA definition. Notably, under the criteria established by AMCHA report, merely challenging the legitimacy of the IHRA definition was treated as an indicator of antisemitism.

The Israel advocacy network’s push on social media comes at a time when Facebook and other social networks are under significant pressure regarding how they deal with controversial content. Conservatives claim to be victims of a politically motivated crackdown on right-wing voices. Progressives decry the proliferation of extremist hate speech and call on social media platforms to remove and ban misinformation and hate speech. In this context, the demand that social media adopt and enforce the full IHRA definition represents a cynical strategy to co-opt progressive concerns about antisemitism in order to promote a hardline, reactionary political agenda that seeks to quash constitutionally protected free speech critical of Israel.

One prominent progressive effort to push Facebook comes from the “Stop Hate for Profit” coalition. Made up of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as well as the NAACP, Color of Change, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), and several other groups, the coalition formed in June to demand that Facebook, among other things, “find and remove” groups focused on antisemitism. The coalition doesn’t offer its own definition of antisemitism, but its sole Jewish member, the ADL, has long championed the IHRA definition—a position that aligns neatly with the ADL’s evolution into an organization that prioritizes defending Israel from criticism over defending free speech.

Facebook’s updates to its hate speech policy haven’t satisfied its IHRA-focused critics, whose goal isn’t to get Facebook to deplatform antisemitism, but to get Facebook to deplatform criticism of Israel. In a response to Sandberg’s letter to him, Milstein made it clear that the campaign to pressure the social network to accept the IHRA definition will continue: “We look forward to working with @Facebook to ensure #antisemitism is eradicated from the platform and the #IHRA working definition of antisemitism is fully adopted by your organization.” Whether Facebook will buckle under the pressure will depend in large part on whether the public—Jewish and non-Jewish—finally recognizes that concerns about antisemitism are being exploited to serve a narrow political and ideological agenda, putting at risk free speech on Israel/Palestine and, by extension, political speech writ large.

Op-ed by Lara Friedman, originally published by Jewish Currents on February 20, 2020.

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A NEW WEAPON has been unveiled in the battle to quash activism and criticism targeting Israel. Pending bipartisan bills, introduced in Arizona’s House and Senate, as well as in Iowa’s House, seek to codify the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into the states’ hate crimes law and civil rights laws, respectively. Parts of that definition conflate antisemitism with both criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism; as a result, the implications of this new legislation for free speech are alarming.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism was thrust into the spotlight on December 11th, 2019, when Donald Trump issued his controversial executive order on antisemitism—an order focused narrowly on policing academia in the United States. In that respect, Trump’s executive order is like other initiatives that have previously sought to codify the IHRA definition into law and policy—including a long-pending bill in Congress called the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” (which the executive order rendered moot) and legislation, passed and pending, in numerous states.

Kenneth Stern, the lead author of the IHRA definition, has long made clear that the language was never intended to be used this way, and that doing so raises serious free speech concerns. Such concerns have proved well-founded, with Trump’s executive order opening the door for a flood of complaints tied to alleged antisemitic incidents. All of the alleged offenses relate to violations of the IHRA’s Israel-related provisions, which fall outside the scope of what has traditionally been defined as antisemitism—that is, hostility toward Jews simply because they are Jewish. Universities that have already come under attack in the two months since the issuance of the executive order include Georgetown, Columbia (two separate claims), UCLA, Duke and the University of North Carolina, and Georgia Tech, as well as Middle East Studies National Resource Centers (NRCs) nationwide.

What is happening in Arizona and Iowa is different, and represents an even more alarming shift in tactics. Rather than targeting free speech on campuses, the Arizona bills seek to inscribe the IHRA formula into the DNA of the state’s laws dealing with hate crimes. By lumping criticism of Israel into the same shameful category as “prejudice based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender or disability” in a statute related to crime statistics—a list that is used in Arizona’s sentencing statute as the basis for determining which groups, in effect, enjoy protected status—the bills would establish as a matter of law that criticism of Israel must be considered an “aggravating factor” when handing down sentences for criminal convictions. This means that past criticism of Israel could open the door for harsher, “aggravated sentences” for protesters  charged with a crime.

Criminal charges are becoming a go-to weapon of state and local authorities across the nation when it comes to suppressing political protests and other forms of constitutionally protected free speech. One of the most prominent recent examples of this criminalization of protest was the mass indictment of 214 Americans for protesting Trump’s inauguration in 2017—with many of them subjected to a legal ordeal lasting more than a year. In 2019, Arizona had several notable cases of its own. University of Arizona students were hit with criminal charges for protesting a Border Patrol event on campus. Authorities slapped protesters with felony riot charges for demonstrating outside a local prison. And Phoenix police arrested people participating in an immigration rally, charging them with misdemeanors and felonies. In this context, it is not a stretch to imagine criminal charges against protesters in Arizona, on- or off-campus, for opposing Israeli military actions in Gaza or for supporting Palestinians’ human rights. The bill currently moving through Arizona’s legislature would ensure that such charges—and potential sentences—would be more severe, with the protesters’ views on Israel enabling courts to classify their alleged offenses, in effect, as hate crimes.

In Iowa, the new tactic takes a different form. The pending legislation would amend the state’s civil rights laws to require that authorities use the IHRA definition in determining whether an alleged violation of state rules or policies regarding “discriminatory acts . . . was motivated by discriminatory anti-Semitic intent.” The objective behind the legislation is hinted at heavily in the bill’s explanatory language, which describes campus antisemitism as “systemic, broad, and deep,” and says that “State officials and institutions, including educational institutions, have a responsibility to protect citizens from acts of hate and bigotry motivated by discriminatory animus, including anti-Semitism, and must be given the tools to do so.”

The situation in European countries that have adopted the IHRA as a national policy provide a glimpse into what these bills could mean on the ground: in the United Kingdom, a charity event for Palestinian children is canceled, and pro-Palestinian campus activism barred; in Germany, a public lecture is blocked, the director of a Jewish museum is hounded into resigning, and the bank account of a Jewish organization that supports boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel is closed; and in France, the mere act of calling for boycott of Israel is criminalized.

Another concern is that the pending legislation portends more of the same across other states. This prediction is shaped by the experience of the past five years, during which legislation to quash boycotts of Israel (and, in most cases, its settlements in the West Bank) has spread with remarkable efficiency from one state legislature to another. The success of this strategy speaks for itself: as of this writing, such laws have been enacted or are pending across the US.

This prediction is informed, too, by the example of two previous efforts to promote the IHRA definition in state legislatures. Specifically, in 2018, Rep. Alan Clemmons, a South Carolina legislator who has long been a standard bearer for the far-right agenda on Israel and a leader in the conservative, “model-bill factory” known as ALEC, introduced legislation to codify the IHRA definition into law as part of a provision ostensibly targeting antisemitism in state colleges. His bill passed in South Carolina, and in 2019, Florida followed suit.

Clemmons’s effort enjoyed the backing of a lobbying group funded by the right-wing Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the Israel Allies Foundation (IAF), and in particular the help of IAF’s US Director Joe Sabag. Sabag has publicly identified himself as the “the primary legal expert who helped develop” the legislation passed in both South Carolina and Florida. An email—which was sent by the state representative behind the Florida law, Randy Fine, to at least five legislators from other states—notes that Sabag “was instrumental in providing outside support as I pushed the bill and I would recommend anyone considering such an effort to talk to him.” Sabag’s reply-all to that email highlights the goal of spreading such bills across the country: “My legal team has now taken Randy’s bill and refined it into a model that can be brought elsewhere. I urge you to please contact me or Rep. Alan Clemmons and take advantage of our policy support if you are considering filing a bill.” Notably, in that same message, Fine makes clear that the real point of his legislation is to target pro-Palestinian activism: “Students for Justice in Palestine is now treated the same way as the Ku Klux Klan – as they should be.”

Sabag and Adelson are not the only ones backing these bills. There exists today a veritable cottage industry of organizations dedicated to promoting the IHRA definition as a legally-mandated litmus test, designed to delegitimize if not criminalize criticism and activism on Israel, and especially boycotts. Most prominent among them is Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which in September 2019 published a report documenting how “leading BDS activists or organizations disseminated content that meet [sic] the internationally accepted definition of antisemitism” under the IHRA definition. Another major player in this effort is the right-wing powerhouse NGO Monitor, which has urged governments and the United Nations to adopt the IHRA definition as a step toward cutting off funding for and cooperation with all or most Palestinian and pro-Palestinian groups.

Within the US, promoters of the IHRA definition include the Anti-Defamation League, which has dismissed concerns that the definition could be used to target free speech critical of Israel. Another player is the Lawfare Project, which in November 2019 argued that upholding the Court of Justice of the European Union’s decision to require labeling of settlement products would “fly in the face” of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Perhaps most prominently today, there is the Zachor Legal Institute, which has argued for years for using US anti-boycott provisions, antitrust laws, racketeering laws, and anti-terrorism statutes against BDS.

In January 2020, Zachor produced a report entitled “The New Anti-Semites.” Published by StopAntisemitism.Org—an organization born during the Trump era that campaigns against members of Congress and others who criticize Israel—the 120-page report uses the IHRA definition as the foundation of its analysis and of its condemnation of pro-Palestinian activists as antisemites. The report recommends that in order to better target the “new anti-Semites”—by which it means critics of Israel and its policies—the IHRA definition should be “reinforced” by means of “effective laws and policies, and the consistent enforcement of these laws and policies, in order to ensure the limitation of this destructive phenomenon.” The bills now moving through the state legislatures in Arizona and Iowa are examples of laws that, under the pretext of fighting antisemitism, are designed to do precisely that.

Op-ed by FMEP’s Lara Friedman, originally published at Responsible Statecraft, Dec. 12, 2019

What does an antisemitism spewing, Nazi dog-whistling President give his favorite Jewish and Christian zealots for the holidays, after already giving them Jerusalem, settlements, the Golan Heights, the murder of the two-state solution, and the delegitimization of Palestinian national claims, identity, and aspirations?

An Israel exception to the First Amendment, of course.

That’s what Trump’s Executive Order on Combating Antisemitism is, no matter how the White House and credulous, lazy, or dishonest pundits try to sell it.

To be sure, the shifting public debate around the executive order might have confused some people. When it became clear that there were errors in the original report on the order’s exact text, the speed with which some journalists and pundits pivoted from concern about potential governmental over-reach to self-satisfied mocking of those who had sounded the alarm was breathtaking. Even more telling was the readiness of “experts” and supposedly unbiased reporters to adopt a condescending and factually inaccurate message that boiled down to: “this was all a case of leftist hysteria and anti-Trump alarmism, over an order that turns out to be completely non-controversial.”

This effort to shift the debate is an act of misdirection. Don’t fall for it.

Trump’s executive order — celebrated by adherents of what can be shorthanded as the “all-meaningful-criticism-of-Israel-is-illegitimate” crowd — is non-controversial only if you prioritize quashing criticism of Israel over free speech. It is non-controversial only if, in the service of that goal, you support U.S. law conflating Jews, whatever their nationality and wherever they may be, with Israel (a conflation that suggests the New York Times’ original scoop about the order wasn’t as far off as people want to think). It is non-controversial only if, in the service of that goal, you are happy politicizing and cheapening the very notion of antisemitism, at a time when actual, lethal antisemitism is surging in the United States and stalking Jewish communities across the globe.

At the heart of Trump’s executive order is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. This definition includes a set of illustrative examples provided as guidelines setting limits on what is to be considered legitimate criticism of Israel, unlike anything that exists for any other country or issue. Notably, these IHRA examples are explicitly referenced in Trump’s executive order, which states that they are to be a resource, “to the extent that any examples might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent.”

According to these guidelines, criticism of Israel is ipso facto antisemitism if it focuses solely on Israel, rather than targeting other countries with similar critiques. Likewise, criticism of Israel that questions Israel’s right to exist is considered, again, ipso facto antisemitism.

What will that mean in practice? We will soon find out, but as a guess: A Palestinian talking about her lived experience under occupation? Almost certainly antisemitism. A Palestinian refugee talking about what it means to want to return to his ancestral homeland or challenging the Israeli narrative of Israeli manifest destiny in a land-without-a-people-for-a-people-without-a-land? Antisemitism! Student activists trying to organize support for Palestinian human and civil rights? Antisemitism! Likewise, experts and academics on Israel-Palestine like me, or like my colleagues in Israeli human rights groups, talking about their areas of expertise? Say it with me now: Antisemitism.

Given that numerous groups are already waging lawfare against critics of Israel on U.S. campuses, this is by no means hypothetical. Indeed, mere hours after Trump signed his order, a Republican congressman, working in close cooperation with one of the groups that has for years been attacking Israel-related free speech on U.S. campuses, sent a letter demanding that the Department of Education investigate and halt funding to a major U.S. university for activities critical of Israel that now must deemed antisemitism.

The goal of this effort, and that ones that will certainly follow, is clear: to punish campuses that protect free speech on Israel-Palestine, and to have a chilling effect on academic institutions across the board, ensuring that campus administrators and donors choose to preemptively quash criticism and activism related to Israel rather than risk reputational harm, legal jeopardy, and potential loss of funding.

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While Trump’s executive order may have come as a holiday gift for his closest friends and most fanatical supporters, the road that led to it was paved by almost all mainstream U.S. Jewish organizations, including, shamefully the Anti-Defamation League; by hardline Jewish and Evangelical Christian “Israel-right-or-wring” organizations; by elected progressive members of Congress like Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and Senators like former Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Casey (D-Pa.); and by the efforts of the state of Israel and its surrogates.

These forces — out of ideological zeal, moral cowardice, political opportunism, or deliberate ignorance — have worked ceaselessly to legitimize and promote the view that criticism and non-violent activism targeting Israel is an insidious new kind of antisemitism that, like the old kind, must be rooted out and vanquished.

In this context, the fact that Trump — who appears to be systematically ticking off every item on the “in our wildest dreams” wishlist of the pro-Israel far-right — used an executive order to codify a free speech exception for Israel is wholly unsurprising. Likewise, the actual text of the order was entirely predictable, given that it’s merely the latest iteration of legislation that was first introduced in Congress in 2016, known as the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (ASAA).

Given its title, it would be natural to assume this measure was designed to address the sharp rise in antisemitism taking place in the Trump era — linked to Trump supporters (and officials) who either are, or have a clear soft spot for, white supremacists, Nazis, and their fellow travelers.

That assumption, sadly, would be mistaken. The ASAA, from Day 1 through enactment via Trump’s executive order, has nothing to do with raising awareness about or combating actual antisemitism. It is and was always about exploiting concerns about antisemitism as a pretext for policing, delegitimizing, and quashing criticism of Israel, with the IHRA definition as the chosen weapon.

This is the point the American Civil Liberties Union made, when it described the ASAA as, “part of a disturbing surge of government-led attempts to suppress the speech of people on only one side of the Israel-Palestine debate. The trend manifests on college campuses, in state contracts, and even in bills to change federal criminal law but the impact is the same: Those who seek to protest, boycott, or otherwise criticize the Israeli government are being silenced.”

What of the claim that the IHRA definition is needed to stop antisemitic attacks on Jewish students? The ACLU also noted: “anti-Semitic harassment is already illegal under federal law. The new bill does not change that fact, but its overbreadth makes it likely that it will instead silence criticism of Israel that is protected by the First Amendment.”

This is also the point made, repeatedly, by Kenneth Stern, who in his former role as the American Jewish Committee’s top official working to counter antisemitism was the lead drafter of the text that became the IHRA’s definition: in 2015, in a piece in the Jewish Journal noting that the “definition that was never intended to regulate speech on a college campus”; in 2016, in the New York Times, arguing that turning IHRA definition into policy or law would be dangerous, counterproductive to fight against antisemitism, and unconstitutional; in 2017, in an an 18-page letter to the House Judiciary Committee, arguing that if this definition is enshrined in law, “outside groups will try and suppress – rather than answer – political speech they don’t like”; and in 2018, when he warned that legislating the IHRA definition of antisemitism could “exacerbate student conflict, damage academic freedom, chill speech and harm the academy more broadly…[and] put students with a variety of critical views about Israel in jeopardy.”

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Not coincidentally, the effort to legislate a free speech-quashing definition of antisemitism took hold in the Netanyahu era, as the peace process was killed off by Israeli policies and actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians openly aiming at preventing a two-state solution. As Israeli policies became ever-more difficult to defend, and as support of the Palestinians (and most importantly, support for boycotts of Israel and settlements) gained legitimacy and steam, this effort has gained greater traction.

Now, in the Trump era, it serves the dual goals of delegitimizing protest and activism, while distracting from the real antisemitism surging in this country, including antisemitism coming straight from the president himself.

And coincidentally or not, just days before Trump’s executive order was announced, Deutch (D-Fla.) — who has applauded foreign countries that adopted the IHRA definition — published an op-ed in the Times of Israel making the case not just for the passage of the ASAA, but for the U.S. to adopt policy across the entirety of the U.S. government.

Would this mean that U.S. museums be attacked for hosting events or exhibits deemed too critical of Israel? Would participants in cultural events and festivals, or events at synagogues and Jewish community centers (most of which receive public funds for security) be forced to sign a commitment that they reject boycotts of Israel, and that they promise not to criticize Israel? Would discussion of the occupation, human rights, civil rights, children’s rights, rule of law, and more be exiled from all public venues? We may soon find out.

It is a near certainty that Trump’s executive order will ultimately be challenged in U.S. courts; given current political trends and the state of the courts, it is by no means certain how those case will play out. In the meantime, serious people should be readying themselves for the very real possibility that Deutch — or Trump himself — will forge ahead to make the IHRA definition applicable to the entire government and to all who receive federal funding. And don’t fall for efforts at misdirection: the implications of such an expansion, just like the implications of the order on its own, are chilling.