Stern’s Dissembling over the
IHRA is a Result of the Contradiction Between Being a Zionist and a Diaspora
Jew
Thousands of words have been spent
analysing the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism [WDA], nearly all of them scathing
and scornful. Yet still the WDA has been widely accepted by governments, civil
society and establishment bodies. Why? Because it has become a hegemonic
narrative, immune to reason but serving the interests of the ruling elites in capitalist
society.
Kenneth Stern is an unlikely
hero. He is the person who drafted the WDA and yet he has also spoken
out strongly against its use as a weapon to silence debate on Palestine and
Zionism in academia. How can we reconcile this contradiction?
I want to suggest that Stern
is a classic case of cognitive
dissonance, someone who holds two different philosophies or beliefs at the
same time. Stern is, on the one hand, a Zionist who thinks nothing of smearing
and vilifying his opponents as ‘anti-Semitic’. On the other hand he is a diaspora
Jew for whom academic freedom is a value he holds in high regard.
In my Open Letter to Stern (below)
I put a number of questions to him about his role in creating the WDA and the
problematic nature of the definition.
It is impossible to
understand why Stern thought there was a need for a new definition of anti-Semitism
unless conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism was his main objective. Nothing
Stern has said makes sense otherwise. Stern himself cast
doubt on the whole exercise:
IHRA’s zealous supporters often
say that to combat antisemitism, one has to define it. In my view, that simply
isn’t true. Definitions are useful for data collectors, but it’s not as if
people didn’t fight antisemitism before the definition was created over 16
years ago.
My dad fought Oswald
Moseley’s fascists at the Battle of Cable Street in London’s East End 85
years ago despite being told to stay at home by the Board of Deputies and the
Zionists. He and thousands of others, Jewish and non-Jewish, didn’t need a
definition of anti-Semitism to in order to fight it.
The American Jew who was run by Israel as a spy
Stern’s
commitment to freedom of speech on campus conflicted with his support for Zionism,
a Jewish supremacist ideology. Stern embodies the conflict between the interests
of diaspora Jewry and a Zionism which seeks to alienate Jews from their place
in society.
Despite
the WDA illustration holding that ‘Accusing
Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel... than to the interests of their
own nations’ is anti-Semitic, it is Zionism itself which demands that Jews’
first loyalty should be to Israel. That is why ‘traitor’ is an epithet flung at
anti-Zionist Jews by Zionists.
BDS according to Stern is anti-Semitic
This
contradiction exploded into the open in 2013 when Israel’s Ministries of
Foreign Affairs and Absorption conducted
a survey which asked American Jews where their loyalties would lie if there
was a crisis between the two countries.
When
Stern and Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of University
Professors penned
an open letter criticising what they termed a ‘perversion of the definition’, claiming
that it ‘was not drafted to label anyone
an antisemite or to limit campus speech’, they met a fierce backlash by
those who believed that that was exactly why it was created!
‘American
Jewish Committee Executive Director David Harris apologised for the open letter from Stern,
calling the letter “ill-advised.” after an angry
reaction from Stern’s fellow Zionists.
After
Stern gave testimony
to Congress in November 2017 stating that ‘The definition was not drafted, and was
never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus’, following
this up with a Guardian article
that accused rightwing Jews of ‘weaponizing
it’, Andrew
Baker, Deidre Berger and Michael Whine hit
back
declaring in an open
letter of January 2021 that far from being the principal author
of the WDA, Stern was just one amongst many.
On
10 February 2021 Stern replied
to his critics asking
What would you
do if, out of the blue and more than sixteen years after the fact, three former
colleagues posted an
open letter
falsely accusing you of making up a significant professional accomplishment –
in my case being the lead drafter of the “working definition of antisemitism?”
Given
the use to which it has been put, one wonders how Stern can call the WDA a ‘significant
professional accomplishment’. I had personal
experience of this Zionist campaign when suing the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism
for libel. Gideon Falter, their Chair, in paragraph 29 of his witness
statement, wrote that:
‘The Claimant states that one of the numerous
drafters of the predecessor to the IHRA Definition, ... condemned CAA’s actions
... I do not know who the supposed drafter of the EUMCXR Definition is.’
Falter was lying. He was more than aware
of who Stern was as his solicitors had previously demanded from us a copy of
Stern’s Congressional testimony! Stern had described as ‘egregious’ the CAA’s attempt to have a Jewish Professor, Rachel
Gould, dismissed by Bristol University for having written ‘Beyond
Anti-Semitism’.
The fact that the person who drafted the
WDA definition has condemned the way it is being used is, of course, welcome. However
that doesn’t excuse Stern’s role in creating it in the first place.
At best Stern is guilty of naivety. At
worst he is guilty of duplicity. It was Stern who created a definition that labelled
anti-Zionists as anti-Semites and which redefined anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism.
It beggars belief that Stern was unaware of what he was doing.
Tony Greenstein
OPEN LETTER TO KENNETH STERN
Although Stern excepts these Orthodox Jews from the 'antisemitism' smear, it is clear that they are associating with 'antisemites'!
Tuesday
21 September 2021
Dear Kenneth Stern,
Like many people I welcome the fact that
you have criticised the way in which the IHRA Working Definition of
Anti-Semitism [WDA] has been used to chill debate on Zionism and Palestine.
However I find it difficult to accept your assertion
that ‘the working definition of
antisemitism’ [WDA] was never
intended to silence speech’ when that seems to have been its primary
objective.
Your explanation
as to why the WDA was created is implausible, begging more questions than
answers. According to your testimony
to Congress
‘The definition was drafted to make it easier for data collectors to know what
to put in their reports and what to reject. It focused their attention away
from the question of whether the actor hated Jews, and focused them on whether
the actor selected Jews to be victims.’
Eric Pickles, former Tory Minister and Conservative Friends of Israel Chair - Britain's racist delegate to the IHRA
I have a number
of comments to make:
1. The definition doesn’t focus attention away from motive and
whether anti-Semites hate Jews. On the contrary it defines anti-Semitism as ‘a certain perception of
Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.’ (my emphasis)
2.
You said that the reason for the
creation of the WDA was that the European Union Monitoring Committee [EUMC]
‘didn’t know how to deal with the problem of a
Jew being attacked on the streets of Paris or anywhere else as a stand-in for
an Israeli.’
and that it was ‘neither necessary nor helpful’ to ask whether the perpetrators ‘really
hate Jews’. That is exactly what the WDA does by defining anti-Semitism in terms of a
‘certain perception’, hatred.
3.
The
WDA defines anti-Semitism narrowly leaving out a range of behaviours, such as
hostility or dislike, which fall short of hatred. For example a parent who
opposes his children marrying a Jew is not anti-Semitic according to the WDA. That
is why Zionists love
Steve Bannon despite him opposing his daughter going to a Jewish school because Jewish
children were ‘whiny brats.’
4.
In
your talk "The
Working Definition – A Reappraisal" at a conference in 2010, whose
sponsors included Israel’s Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Public Affairs and
Diaspora plus the World Zionist Organisation, you explained that the origin of the WDA lay
in Israel and that the idea for a common definition was ‘first articulated by Dina Porat’ in
April 2004.
I recall Dina, who gets very animated
when she latches on to a good idea, talking to me, to my colleague Andy Baker,
and just about anyone else she could corner about the need for a definition.
5.
Porat is a hardline Zionist. When Netanyahu reached an agreement with the Polish government
over legislation which criminalised
saying that the Polish state or people had participated in the holocaust, it
was Porat who signed off on it. Even Zionist historian Yehuda Bauer branded it as ‘collaboration’ with
holocaust distortion.
6.
You said
that the
WDA was a ‘workable, non-ideological
approach to task of identifying antisemitism.’ This is dishonest. The WDA was
only ‘non-ideological’ to a committed Zionist.
7.
You gave a list of organisations which
had adopted it including courts in Lithuania and Germany, making a mockery of the
claim
that it was ‘non-legally binding’.
8.
You said that ‘of course the definition has been a target of some who would like to
protect criticisms of Israel which are antisemitic in nature’, which is wholly
untrue. Unsurprisingly you gave no examples because there are no examples.
9. You
also said that the problem arose because the EUMC had defined anti-Semitism in
terms of Jewish stereotypes. However if anti-Semitism was defined as attacking
Jews because they are Jews then that problem disappears. You also said the EUMC had constructed a ‘clunker of a definition’ which seems a good description of the
definition that you drafted!
10.
If your real concern was attacks on Jews
because of the actions of Israel, then surely one remedy would be for Israel to
stop calling itself the State of the Jewish people? Another remedy would be for
groups like the Board of Deputies, which claims to be the ‘Voice of British
Jews’, to stop supporting
Israel’s murderous attacks on Palestinians in the name of all British Jews.
11.
If Jews are attacked because of the
actions of the Israeli state then there are more than adequate definitions available,
such as the Oxford English Dictionary
definition
of anti-Semitism,‘Hostility to or
prejudice against Jews’ or the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism [JDA]
‘Antisemitism is discrimination,
prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions
as Jewish).’
12.
Instead
you constructed a definition of anti-Semitism which is a model of obfuscation
and opacity. David Feldman described it as ‘bewilderingly imprecise.’ Hugh Tomlinson QC described its language
as ‘unusual and therefore potentially
confusing’. Geoffrey
Robertson QC stated that it
was ‘not fit for purpose’
13.
Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal judge went further arguing that it is ‘calculatedly
misleading’ and ‘fails the first test
of any definition: it is indefinite.’
14.
The WDA says that:
“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....”
15.
This
raises a number of questions:
i.
If anti-Semitism is a ‘certain perception’ what is
that perception?
ii.
Why confine anti-Semitism to perception? Who does
the perceiving? Is this not an example of looking into someone’s head, which
was what you said the definition was designed to avoid?
iii.
If this perception ‘may be expressed as hatred towards Jews’ what else might it be
expressed as? Anti-Zionism?
iv.
Why define anti-Semitism as being ‘directed
toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals’? Is everyone a victim of anti-Semitism?
16.
In the WDA A Reappraisal you recalled how you questioned Beate
Winkler, the Director of the EUMC, about a Montreal Jewish school which had been firebombed in
reaction to an Israeli assassination. You said that this attack did not fit
within the existing EUMC definition of anti-Semitism and that ‘something better needed to be crafted,
something that was easy for the monitors to understand – count this, don’t
count that.’
17. Could
you explain why this attack, which was clearly anti-Semitic, would not have come
under the OED or JDA definitions? It was an attack on Jews because they are
Jews.
18.
The only
conclusion that can be drawn from the above is that the WDA wasn’t about the
difficulty in defining attacks on Jewish schools as anti-Semitic. You don’t
need 500+ words to do that. If I am wrong perhaps you would care to explain:
a. How
does the WDA’s:
‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary
Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ help with the problem of defining an attack
on a Jewish school as anti-Semitic?
b.
How does
labelling as anti-Semitic criticism of Israel as ‘double standards’, help when Jews in the diaspora are attacked?
c.
How does
defining criticism of Israel as a racist state ‘anti-Semitic’ help you call out
attacks on Jews outside Israel?
d. How does rejecting the ‘right’ of the ‘Jewish people to
self-determination’, which assumes that there is one single Jewish people, help
you define anti-Semitism? Why is this hatred?
e.
The WDA states
that ‘Manifestations [of anti-Semitism] might include the targeting of the state of
Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.’ Historically it was anti-Semites
who asserted that Jews formed a separate nation. As Herzl wrote in The Jewish State ‘It
might more reasonably be objected that I am giving a handle to Anti-Semitism
when I say we are a people – one people.’
That was also the basis of the
Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws.
When Donald Trump accused American Jews of being ‘very disloyal’ he was defining Israel as a ‘Jewish collectivity’. How is a
definition of anti-Semitism, which includes the assumption that Israel is an
entity to which Jews feel loyalty, helpful?
19. Another
anti-Semitic illustration in the WDA is the assertion that Israel is a product
of Jewish self-determination. If that is true then Jews are responsible for Israel’s actions, since Israel is the state of
the Jewish people, as it claims. How can you then criticise those who hold Jews
responsible for Israel’s actions? The WDA also says that ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of
Israel’ is anti-Semitic. A total contradiction!
20.
Not only is the
WDA incoherent and opaque but it’s anti-Semitic!
21. In ‘Israeli Attempts To
Define Antisemitism’ (circa 2006), you wrote that
whilst there is
‘less
difficulty in classifying an act or expression as antisemitic when it is
motivated by religious or race-based hatred. Matters get somewhat more problematic,
or at least controversial, when dealing with anti-Zionism.
‘when
the perceived deficiencies of the society are used to undermine its basic
legitimacy... this is, in effect, antisemitism.’
22.
You go on to say that ‘Trickier still, is anti-Zionism
antisemitism?’ and that there are ‘two
rare exceptions to contemporary anti-Zionism being antisemitism.’
23. You also say
that:
‘There is a strong argument to be made that
antisemitism is involved when the belief is articulated that of all the peoples
on the globe (including the Palestinians), only the Jews should not have the
right to self-determination in a land of their own.
There are many people e.g. the Scots, Kurds and Basques who are denied
the right to self-determination. Unlike Jews they are nations. Why do you
suggest that the motivation is racism? The WDA is clearly not a neutral definition
of anti-Semitism for the purpose of collecting data but a politically loaded definition.
24.
What has any of the above to do with hatred or
hostility to Jews as Jews? What you were doing was redefining anti-Semitism for
Zionist purposes.
25.
IWhy you did not include a fourth category – anti-Semitic
Zionism? Unlike anti-Semitic anti-Zionism you are spoilt for choice, from Tommy
Robinson to Steve Bannon, Donald Trump to Richard Spencer, Viktor Orban to Arthur
Balfour. Indeed it’s extremely difficult to find a prominent anti-Semite who
wasn’t also a Zionist. Why did you omit this category?
According to Stern, demonstrations such as that in Afula do not mean that Israel is an apartheid state
26.
Your initial
draft (p.13) of the WDA in 2006 makes your agenda very clear. Your concern
was not the protection of Jews but the protection of the Israeli state:
Antisemitism is hatred toward
Jews because they are Jews and is directed toward the Jewish religion and Jews
individually or collectively. More recently,
antisemitism has been manifested in the demonization of the State of Israel.
(my emphasis)
27.
The 38 word WDA definition defines anti-Semitism in terms of hate, yet you
argued
that people could say or do things that are anti-Semitic ‘without
harboring hate’. Leaving aside this obvious
contradiction what is the purpose in labelling political speech ‘anti-Semitic’ if you are not suggesting
hate or hostility to Jews? Which Jews is it protecting?
28. You were the American
Jewish Committee’s anti-Semitism expert. The AJC is an unashamedly Zionist
organisation boasting that ‘Around the world—from the hallways of the UN in New York... AJC
advocates for Israel at the highest levels.’
Stern doesn't consider excluding Israeli Arabs from 'Jewish' villages an example of Apartheid
29.
You went on to give further examples of
‘anti-Semitism’:
In my
view, the comparison between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa, while
perhaps less serious than that made between Israel and the Nazis, should still
be considered an expression of antisemitism, just as I do not see much
distinction between denial of the Holocaust and the similar anti-historical
canard that rejects any significant historic Jewish link to the land of Israel
30.
I realise that Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish
People
was only published in 2009 but the ideas behind it are not new, e.g. Abram
Leon’s The Jewish Question – A
Marxist Interpretation. Was Leon, who was murdered at Auschwitz, also anti-Semitic?
Is it still
your view, in the light of the B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch reports, that to
call Israel an apartheid state is anti-Semitic? Are B’Tselem and HRW also
anti-Semitic?
31. The suggestion that denying
any political or genetic link of Jews to Palestine is comparable to Holocaust
denial is bizarre. It was Wilhelm Marr, the ‘father of anti-Semitism’ who argued that Jews
were Semites.
The fact that Israel, like Nazi Germany, is not a state of all its inhabitants doesn't make an apartheid state according to Stern
32. Israel is
a state
of its Jewish citizens not all its citizens. In the West Bank there are two
sets of laws – one for Palestinians and another for Jews. That is apartheid.
According
to the Jewish
Electoral Institute 25% of American Jews believe
Israel is an apartheid state. Are a quarter of American Jews also anti-Semitic?
33.
What you are saying is that something can be
anti-Semitic and also true. Historically
Zionists did believe this but I am surprised that you agree with them. Jacob
Klatzkin, the editor of Die Welt and the
Encyclopaedia Judaica wrote that
‘If we do not admit the rightfulness of
anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism... Instead of
establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce
our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends, who
desire to defend our rights.’
34.
You claim that comparing Israel and Nazi Germany is anti-Semitic? Why? Such
a comparison might be right or wrong but how does it demonstrate hatred or
hostility to Jews?
According to Kenneth Stern, holocaust survivor Ze'ev Sternhell was an anti-Semite for comparing Israel to Nazi Germany
35.
Ze’ev Sternhell, a child survivor of the Nazi ghetto of Przemysl, wrote in Ha’aretz of ‘In Israel, Growing
Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazis’. Was Sternhell an anti-Semite?
Another Israeli Professor Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz, wrote of how the creation of Israel was ‘the
tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler’. Was Elkana also an anti-Semite?
36.
You seem to suffer from the Zionist habit of labelling all arguments you
find difficult to argue against ‘anti-Semitic’.
37.
You also wrote that ‘everyone is
entitled to their own point of view, people are not entitled to twist the
facts.’ But that is exactly what you and Porat were doing. Can anyone
seriously dispute a comparison between mobs in Israel chanting ‘death to the Arabs’ and mobs in Nazi
Germany shouting ‘death to the Jews’?
38.
You condemned in your testimony
to Congress the ‘chilling and McCarthy-like’
attempt of the misnamed Campaign Against
Anti-Semitism to have a Jewish professor at Bristol University, Rachel
Gould, dismissed for writing ‘Beyond
Anti-Semitism’. However your attempt to dismiss
this as the machinations of
right-wing Zionists is disingenuous. It was the definition that you were
responsible for drafting that fashioned a weapon for the CAA to use against
critics of Zionism, including Jewish critics.
I
therefore wish to ask whether you now accept that the WDA/IHRA Definition was
fatally flawed from the outset? Do you accept, as Peter Eisenstadt wrote
in a review of your recent book that ‘If
you give witch hunters a manual for the discovery of witchcraft they will find witches.’ That was the problem of the WDA. Attacking free
speech on Palestine/Zionism was inherent in it from the start.
I hope that you will now
reject the WDA in favour of the JDA which,
unlike the WDA, does focus on anti-Semitism?
I suspect that you
will disagree with what I have written. I am happy to debate these issues with you.
I am sure it would be an interesting debate!
Regards,
Tony Greenstein
.jpg)
Clive Ponting's Prosecution in 1985 is famous because the Judge directed he be convicted and the Jury refused
