On June 10, 2020, I participated in an online debate. It was organized by Ryerson University’s Centre for Free Expression (CFE) and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA). The debate was entitled, “Fighting Anti-Semitism or Silencing Critics of Israel: What’s Behind the Push for Governments to Adopt the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism?”.
The debate was purposefully produced in the spirit of free expression and open dialogue. Two panelists, myself included, argued that the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition does risk silencing critics of Israel. Two other panelists argued that it doesn’t. I was the only panelist who was not Jewish.
Two weeks later, based on comments I made on the panel, I became the target of a national petition calling on my employer, York University, to ban me from teaching human rights. The petition was part of a smear campaign initiated by B’nai Brith Canada, designed to falsely make me look like an antisemite.
The petition put a target on my back. The racist hate mail began to arrive on cue. The attack on my career didn’t end with the petition. B’nai Brith CEO, Michael Mostyn, wrote private letters to York University President Rhonda Lenton demanding my removal from the classroom. Although President Lenton rejected the demand in her own private correspondence with Mostyn, she never made any public statement to denounce the petition and defend my academic freedom even after she learned of the racist and hateful abuse. That failure in leadership is the subject of a grievance brought by my union, the Osgoode Hall Faculty Association, against the University.
Then, in September, as I was teaching legal ethics to first year Osgoode students, B’nai Brith filed a formal complaint against me with the Law Society of Ontario (LSO). It alleged “discreditable” and “discriminatory” conduct based on the smears. The complaint was so baseless and vexatious the LSO dismissed it without even opening an investigation. I only found out about it after the file was closed.
The bitter irony of being on the receiving end of a B’nai Brith vendetta is that in making the argument that the IHRA definition of antisemitism is dangerous to free speech, I fell victim to the very worry I was addressing—that the definition would be deployed to chill criticism of Israel and punish those who dare speak openly.
B’nai Brith calls itself Canada’s oldest “Jewish Human Rights organization” and a “principled grassroots voice”. Within 48 hours of the release of the petition, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) published a powerful open letter, calling the B’nai Brith petition a “slanderous campaign”. I received countless emails of support from total strangers, mostly Jewish. It goes without saying that B’nai Brith doesn’t speak for all Canadian Jews.
The IHRA definition’s originator, Dr. Kenneth Stern, an anti-Semitism expert, warned in 2019 that “rightwing Jews are weaponizing” the definition to target anyone who criticizes the state of Israel or its founding ideology, Zionism. Similarly, the B’nai Brith petition takes my words out of context and then recontextualizes them in a way which distorts them badly.
On January 12, 2021, the Canadian Jewish News reported that the New Israel Fund Canada, a liberal Zionist organization that had previously urged Ontario to adopt the IHRA definition, was reversing its position. In a statement, the group’s executive director, Ben Murane, cited “worrying evidence in Canada that at least some actors in the Jewish community believe they can use Ontario’s policy to suppress free speech or otherwise curtail academic freedom in order to suppress criticism of Israel”.
The B’nai Brith petition targeted me in this way by taking my words out of context and then recontextualizing them with a distinct purpose of distortion. The first comment in question was a critique of Zionism, and the second was a critique of the wording of the IHRA definition. By any objective standard, both comments, properly understood in context, were well within the bounds of an academic discussion. I will briefly summarize my understanding of the issues, what I said on the panel, and what any reasonable observer would conclude based on my comments.
In discussing “Zionism”, I referred to a political ideology developed in Europe in the 19th century calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in what was then a region of the Ottoman empire populated overwhelmingly by non-Jewish, non-European peoples. As Europeans seized and settled many parts of the global South, Zionism used “Jewish return” as a justification for European settlement in the Middle East.
Zionism was, well into the 20th century, a minority view among the world’s Jews, including most of the Jewish community of Palestine. The brutal outcomes of WWII, including the attempted extermination of European Jewry and the resultant refugee crisis, turned that around. After the war, Zionism came to be widely embraced as necessary for Jewish survival and renewal. After Israel was established in 1948, Zionism became the official ideology of the state.
Notwithstanding its postwar purpose in defining Israel, Zionism never defined Judaism or Jewish people. It is still viewed by many Orthodox Jews as a heresy, and by many left-wing Jews as bourgeois nationalism. Even liberal Jews now openly question Zionism’s moral validity in light of Israel’s inescapable record.
When one of my fellow panelists emphasized the importance of protecting Zionism from critique, he justified it on the basis that Zionism is about “Jewish self-determination”. I disagreed. Instead, I posited, Zionism in practice is necessarily about ensuring Jewish supremacy over Palestinians. As a form of ethno-nationalist ideology, it insists upon greater, not equal, rights for Jews in the historical land of Israel/Palestine.
Today, the population of Jews and Palestinians in that territory is about even. Yet, most of the Palestinians living there are stateless refugees, while all of the Jews living there are citizens of a state that privileges them, as Jews. Further, Jews anywhere in the world have an automatic right to Israeli citizenship, while Palestinians living there under Israeli occupation are denied citizenship solely because of their ethnicity and religion.
As Hagai El-Ad, executive director of Israel’s most respected human rights organization, B’tselem, told Ha’aretz newspaper on July 28, 2020, at the height of racial justice protests in the United States, “It’s like George Floyd. We have our knee on the Palestinians’ necks”.
The Zionist goal of Jewish dominance in the Holy Land has been realized and is maintained, but only through violence and discrimination against non-Jews. To say so has nothing to do with hating Jews. It is to accurately describe a reality. Understanding Zionism as systemic oppression makes apparent the parallel to white supremacy. It also highlights Zionism’s inconsistency with purposes of anti-colonialism and anti-racism.
I’m not unfamiliar with the long tradition of Jewish religious yearning for Jerusalem. I also understand that the Holocaust created inter-generational trauma so powerful that many Jews who don’t live in Israel believe they can’t be secure against a future genocide without a designated Jewish state to serve as sanctuary.
Yet Zionism has dealt with the Palestinians by ignoring them at best, and by forcefully removing them at worst. At the time of Israel’s creation in 1948, more than 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and driven off their land to make room for Jewish immigration. Zionism does not account for the basic humanity of those Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Israel has never acknowledged or accounted for the civilian displacement and statelessness directly produced by its creation.
There may be many reasons, even valid ones, why a Jewish state that excludes or subjugates non-Jews may be appealing to Jews. Such reasons must be balanced with other factors, including the fact that there is an equal number of non-Jews living in the land that Israel claims as its historical right and over which it continues to insist on exercising complete control.
The heart of Zionism was revealed in summer 2018 when Israel adopted a new, quasi-constitutional Basic Law on nationality. The law for the first time explicitly defines the state of Israel’s national character as “Jewish” and recognizes only Jewish Israelis’ right to self-determination in Israel. The effect of this law is to deny one in five Israeli citizens, who is not Jewish, equal citizenship in the land of their ancestors. The law lays bare the limits of Israel’s claims of being a constitutional democracy.
Israel’s Supreme Court used to be heralded around the world as a jurisprudential leader. In an oft-cited passage, the Court’s former Chief Justice, Meir Shamgar, observed that “Israel’s Jewishness should not interfere with its democratic nature any more than France’s Frenchness interferes with its democratic nature.”
Of course, the respected jurist was clever enough to know this was a false analogue: an immigrant or their children can aspire to become French; but becoming Jewish is another matter altogether. Nearly two million Palestinians are citizens of Israel, but they and their offspring will never be Jews.
Ayman Odeh, a non-Jewish Israeli parliamentarian, stated that the nation-state law made Israel a “Jewish supremacy” and would signal to its minorities that they “will always be second-class citizens.” This is coming from an elected member of the Israeli Knesset.
Even if one is not persuaded that Israel is a racist state, in a free society like Canada one should at least be able to make the argument that Israel is a racist state without being smeared and threatened.
The second comment that upset B’nai Brith was my assertion that it is possible for Israel to “exaggerate” the Holocaust. This apparently sounded too much like I was accusing Jews of inflating the number killed by the Nazis in WWII, which is a mainstay of Holocaust denial and of course is a lie.
The particular IHRA example of antisemitism I was discussing is this: “Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.” My point was that this is terrible drafting. There’s an important difference between “Jews as a people” and “Israel as a state”. It’s actually antisemitic to espouse the opposite. There’s also a significant difference between “inventing” something that happened and “exaggerating” it. The former is impossible while the latter is not.
I believe that these conflations are used deliberately to erase meaningful difference. The result is the IHRA definition can be dangerously wielded in ways that do little to combat actual antisemitism and will end up persecuting Palestinian Canadians and their supporters.
When the Guardian newspaper reported on January 3, 2021 that Israel was providing vaccinations for Jewish residents of the West Bank but not Palestinians, federal NDP MP, Charlie Angus, tweeted the story with the hashtag “#apartheidstate”. B’nai Brith wasted no time in condemning Angus for participating in “antisemitic conspiracy theories”. Ontario Conservative MPP, Gila Martow, tweeted, “Comments like this one highlight why Ontario needed to adopt @TheIHRA definition of antisemitism”.
This open call for censorship came from a member of the provincial government.
Many conservatives, including Ontario’s government, claim to be defenders of freedom of expression. Universities are often portrayed in such circles as bastions of socialism and hostility to freedom. Yet, when it comes to stifling pro-Palestinian expression, conservative pundits and politicians are eerily silent in the face of anti-Palestinian calls to curtail expressive freedom.
The fight against antisemitism, like the battles against all forms of discrimination and hate, is important and deserves public attention. The IHRA definition, and the aggressive campaigning of pro-Israel groups like B’nai Brith, do nothing to protect Jews from discrimination. Instead, they promote racism, denigrate Palestinians and smear their supporters.
Arguing against a smear is not fair or easy. The threat of censorship that a smear produces is real. It drives up the cost of expression; it can make certain types of expression prohibitive. Smears seek only to silence and punish. This is a threat to everybody who cares about freedom, not just the smeared. Sadly, the climate is only worsening and those in power seldom have the will or courage to denounce false accusations of antisemitism. To counter this trend, it is more important than ever for individuals of conscience to stand up for freedom of expression rights, particularly of marginalized voices and especially in the university setting.