Extract from ABC News
When does anti-Zionism amount to anti-Semitism?
It's a question debated in op-eds, on university campuses and within the Australian Senate.
Last year, Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi announced in parliament that she and Senator Jordon Steele-John had written to Australian university vice-chancellors "urging them not to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism".
The Australian government adopted the legally non-binding IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition in 2021.
Several Australian universities have also adopted it, and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry is calling for more to follow suit. However, a number of tertiary institutions have already chosen to reject the definition.
The contention is around the definition's accompanying examples, one of which states that "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" is anti-Semitic.
Some parliamentarians, like Senator Faruqi, are concerned by the definition's ability to "stifle academic freedom, silence Palestinian voices and prevent legitimate criticism of Israel".
Understanding Zionism in Australia
According to the Macquarie dictionary, Zionism is "a worldwide movement founded with the purpose of establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, which now provides support to the state of Israel".
It was established as a political organisation in 1897 under Theodor Herzl, more than half a century before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Here in Australia, experts say the majority of Jews are Zionists.
According to one poll from June 2023, 77 per cent of respondents identified in this way. The poll also found that 86 per cent of respondents viewed the existence of Israel as essential for the future of Jewish people.
Greg Rose, a professor of international law at the University of Wollongong, says Zionism is central to Judaism.
"When you consider the idea of Jews as a people, as an ethnicity, then from the anthropological perspective, the place where a people's myths, history, language and self-conception is formed and centred, for the children of Israel, is in the land of Israel," he says.
"It's central in so many ways that to disassociate the land of Israel from being Jewish is a very artificial and contrived act."
Max Kaiser is an expert on anti-Semitism and Australian Jewish history. He says that while Zionism is the political ideology of many Jewish representatives, organisations and other institutions in Australia, not all Jews are Zionists nor do they support the formation and existence of a Jewish state.
"Jews in Australia have a proud history of debate and difference over political ideas," he says.
"There are many groups and individuals today who are non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, like the Loud Jew Collective in Melbourne and Tzedek in Sydney."
It's for this reason that Dr Kaiser and a coalition of Jewish academics, lawyers, writers and teachers formed the Jewish Council of Australia — which officially launched in February.
"We saw that there was a big gap in the Australian media scape and in the Australian community, more generally, for diverse Jewish perspectives," Dr Kaiser says.
He says areas of concern include the conflation between the Jewish community and Israel, and the characterisation of pro-Palestinian sentiment or solidarity as being an attack on Jews.
What exactly is anti-Zionism?
For David Slucki, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are distinct — but there is capacity for one to bleed into the other.
"Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews and that can be manifested through speech through action, through intimidation," he explains.
"Anti-Zionism is, as the name suggests, opposition to Zionism, which is a political ideology.
"Criticising Israel is not, in and of itself, anti-Semitic. Imagining different ways of Israel being organised politically … or a different form of self-determination is not, in and of itself, anti-Semitic."
According to Dr Kaiser, opposition to Zionism has existed since the movement was created.
"Anti-Zionism was a part of both socialist, liberal, religious, all sorts of different strands of Jewish thought and politics that were all opposed to Zionism," he says.
After the Zionist movement began encouraging mass Jewish settlement in Palestine, it grew into an anti-colonial movement, he adds.
"Zionism was basically seen as very suspicious, both because it was dispossessing Palestinians and buying up land exclusively for Jews, but also because it was in league with the British Empire and with imperialism more broadly," Dr Kaiser says.
For Suzanne Rutland, professor emeritus in the department of Hebrew biblical and Jewish studies at the University of Sydney, there are other factors at play.
She points to the Soviet Union for its role in propagating the anti-Zionist narrative.
"Stalin initially supported the creation of the State of Israel," she explains.
"He thought that Israel would become a satellite of the Soviet Union, and when the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, made it clear that … he was not going to be dictated to by Stalin, Stalin viciously turned against the Jewish communities in the Soviet Union."
Dr Rutland says Soviet authors began portraying Israel as an "evil colonial state" well before the 1967 war.
"That is the basis of modern anti-Zionism, basically calling for the destruction of Israel," she says.
Can anti-Zionism be classed as anti-Semitism?
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), anti-Semitism is defined as:
"A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."
Professor Rose says it's the most widely accepted definition, globally.
"The definition has been adopted in Australia by both the Liberal and Labor parties at federal level, by federal parliament, by state parliaments in New South Wales and Victoria, for example, as well as a range of universities," he says.
Although this definition is legally non-binding, Professor Rose says that it "provides a signpost that can be adopted in policy".
"Within domestic law or domestic policy, a government can choose to transpose the IHRA definition into binding form if it wishes," he says.
Dr Rutland is a member of the IHRA and sits on the Australian expert delegation.
"The major definition which the IHRA uses is not under dispute, although the examples that they give have caused a lot of debate," she says.
Of the 11 examples given by the IHRA, Dr Kaiser says those that align criticism of Israel or criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism are "problematic".
One of those could be example seven, which states:
"Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour."
In its preamble, IHRA says that "[anti-Semitic] manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic."
Dr Rutland says that IHRA allows legitimate criticism of Israel.
Last year, Dr Rutland spent a couple of months in Israel for research. During that period, she was one of thousands of people to protest judicial reform. These protests took place on a weekly basis in Israel for nine straight months in 2023.
But Dr Rutland believes there's a distinction between legitimate criticism and sloganism.
"There is a big difference between criticising government policies, being opposed to actions of settlers or settlements in the West Bank, and saying that Israel has no right to exist and should be destroyed," she says.
For her, the problem is two-fold.
"Eighty per cent of Australian Jews believe in Israel's right to exist," Dr Rutland says.
"Therefore, if [you] believe in Israel's right to exist, in the anti-Zionist narrative, you are an evil person, because you are supporting this evil, apartheid, settler colonial state that's carrying out its ethnic cleansing and genocide.
"That's where it crosses over into anti-Semitism. It leads to both verbal and physical abuse against diaspora Jews."
The other point, she says, is that almost half of the world's Jewish population now lives in Israel.
"If you're supporting the destruction of Israel … you're also supporting violence against the Jews of Israel," she says.
Recognising the real threat
The IHRA working definition isn't the only one espoused by anti-Semitism academics.
Dr Kaiser says that the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, for example, is clearer in its separation of what is anti-Semitism and what is anti-Zionism.
He adds there can be real-world consequences from conflating the two.
"When we launched the Jewish Council, a lot of the comments were like, 'Why are you talking about anti-Semitism? There's no such thing … You're just trying to defend Israel.'"
"When people do hear about anti-Semitism, they don't take it seriously anymore.
"I hope that that sort of broader definition, if you can call it that, doesn't catch hold, because not only will it harm the Palestinian cause and demonise Palestinian people, but it's also really harmful to the real fight against anti-Semitism.
"We all have a stake in joining together to fight against racism in all its forms."
For Dr Slucki, who's leading a newly launched research cluster into anti-Semitism in Australia, definitions aren't necessarily the answer.
"Even when they're adopted, the framers of the definitions all say they're not legally binding documents; that's not the aim of them," he points out.
"They're to help us make sense of what instances that might be anti-Semitism."
He adds that some of the debate around definitions "detracts from the very real threat posed by — even if it's a small number — people on the far-right".
"Sometimes that gets lost in this discussion, because it seems so obvious," Dr Slucki says.
"But the images of neo-Nazis marching around cities in Australia, and sort of having a bit of a free pass to do so, that is very alarming to me.
"And I'm wondering if we're taking that threat seriously enough."
But he does understand why some Jewish Australians may want to "cast the broadest net possible" when defining anti-Semitism.
"If one identifies themselves as Zionist, and that becomes part of the sort of core of their Jewish identity, then an attack on that becomes an attack on their Jewishness," he says.
"Naturally, they're going to see expressions of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic."
Dr Slucki emphasises the need for empathy, not just between different communities, but between family members that may have diverse views.
"We're not talking about a binary here, between Zionist and anti-Zionist," he points out.
"We're really talking about a spectrum. And Jews exist along all parts of that spectrum."
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