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Segal’s antisemitism plan takes us down a path we should fear to tread

This week, the federal government joined 27 other nations in condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic need of water and food”. That same government’s own antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal, also published a report which proposed that universities, arts organisations and perhaps even public broadcasters should have funding stripped if they “engage in or facilitate antisemitism”.

This raises a question: if the words of the Australian government came instead from an academic, or artist at a festival, would it risk their public funding? The government is making grave allegations against Israel – ones that enrage its Israeli and American counterparts. It’s possible some people could misuse those allegations to bolster their hatred of Jews, especially in the cesspit of social media. Could the government’s words be taken to “facilitate antisemitism” under their own envoy’s plan?

Australia has joined 27 other nations in condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic need of water and food”. This image was taken in Gaza City on Tuesday.

Australia has joined 27 other nations in condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic need of water and food”. This image was taken in Gaza City on Tuesday.Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images

Personally, I think not. Trump and Netanyahu might disagree. And that’s a worry.

The definition of antisemitism Segal wants used to determine when institutions fall foul of it – drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – states “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”.

Accordingly, those suggesting the envoy’s report condemns all criticism of Israel as antisemitism overstate the position. But the trouble is it’s very difficult to know by how far. By what criteria, exactly, is someone to determine when anti-Israeli commentary becomes antisemitic? It’s a crucial question when you’re specifically proposing to make research grants terminable if the academic receiving those funds “engages in antisemitic … speech or actions”. Or when you propose to strip charities of their tax deductibility if they “promote speakers” who “promote antisemitism”. Define this too broadly and you silence perfectly legitimate debate. Define it too narrowly, and these proposals have no purpose at all. Either way, it would need to be defined extremely clearly.

The IHRA definition doesn’t quite match this brief in two ways. Firstly, it is deliberately drafted vaguely because it describes itself merely as a working definition: guiding, illustrative and non-binding. Its drafters intended it more for the purposes of data collection than meting out punishment: a filter, not a sword.

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Secondly, the illustrative examples attached to the definition, which outline the kinds of criticisms of Israel that would amount to antisemitism, were not unanimously adopted by those drafting it. One drafter, Antony Lerman, recalls there was so much disagreement about them that they were severed from the part of the definition to be formally adopted, to obtain a consensus. That’s significant because it is in the examples that most of the controversy resides. It leaves a breach, now flooded by the most febrile cacophony, largely because this has become a contest to draw sharp lines to define something that simply cannot be defined that way.

Take one common example, most recently reiterated by the chair of one of Australia’s most influential Jewish advocacy organisations: that it is antisemitic, amounting to a “blood libel”, to accuse Israel of genocide. Fine, if the allegation rests on some trope that Jews by their nature delight in slaughtering children and are merely searching for an excuse to do so. Or if the accusation is so wildly fanciful that only the most prejudiced, conspiratorial mind could entertain it.

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But in just this past week alone, Omer Bartov – an Israeli genocide scholar who once served in the IDF – published an essay in The New York Times arguing genocide is now the only label that fits Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Meanwhile, former British Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption examined Israel’s most recent words and actions in a cover story for The New Statesman and argued that, while it is debatable, “a court would be likely to regard that as genocide”.

Many pro-Israeli readers will take issue with these arguments. But there isn’t an antisemitic trope among them. They are precisely the kinds of arguments that would be made about another state behaving as Israel is. Dispute them, by all means. But to dismiss them – by definition – as simple blood libels is to expand the definition of antisemitism beyond tolerable limits.

To apply something that elusive to institutions of public debate such as universities, the arts, or public broadcasters is therefore hugely fraught. Indeed, if you believe Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, it would be a “disaster” for Australia to do so. Not because the definition is bad, but because it wasn’t designed for this purpose. To “go after speech”, he says, undermines democracy and “blinds us to how antisemitism works”. It is also, he notes, unworkable if you begin to apply it to other forms of prejudice similarly. It proposes a standard for policing antisemitism that isn’t universalisable.

What would happen if the same applied for Islamophobia, or anti-Palestinian racism? Would an academic be defunded for saying pro-Palestinian protesters are doing Hamas’ work? Or would an organisation like the Australian Jewish Association lose its tax-deductible status for saying a Palestinian state is a “fabrication”, and that the Palestinians don’t even exist as a people except as a political strategy cooked up by the KGB?

Or what if these proposals were made in the name of a range of other prejudices: transphobia, homophobia, anti-Indigenous racism, sexism? Would we defund any researcher who adopted a biological definition of a woman? No doubt some would welcome this – though those people would likely be aghast at Jillian Segal’s proposals. And no doubt many would rail against it as rampant wokeism, drastically undermining free speech – though many of these people are now silent, and certainly not criticising the Segal plan for embodying some kind of woke logic.

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The only way these competing claims could cohere would be to shrink each one back to such a minimal position we would end somewhere like where we started: with discrimination, vilification and hate speech outlawed, and courts determining cases at the margins. Laws that have seen a man convicted of antisemitic hate speech, and a woman compensated for being unjustly fired for her pro-Palestinian commentary.

Much more than that, and it quickly becomes a matter of which group’s experience of prejudice is deemed most important. That’s not a road a multicultural liberal democracy can walk. It’s also not a road a country like ours has ever really walked before.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.

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Original URL: https://www.theage.com.au/national/segal-s-antisemitism-plan-takes-us-down-a-path-we-should-fear-to-tread-20250723-p5mhc1.html