Kenneth Roth deplores Harvard’s decision to adopt IHRA definition

26 January 2025

As recently reported, the Harvard University administration has caved in to pro-Israel pressure by agreeing to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in student disciplinary hearings. This definition is now commonly accompanied by eleven “illustrations”, seven of which refer not to Jews but to Israel, whose purpose is transparently to stifle criticism of that racial state. As Kenneth Roth, the former director-general of Human Rights Watch, points out in the following article in the Boston Globe, this is a lamentable decision, as the definition was not drafted for the purpose to which Harvard intends to use it and can be expected to interfere with free speech and probably also academic freedom, which lie at the heart of Harvard’s raison d’etre. He adds that it threatens to obscure the reality of antisemitism itself and weaken support for human rights in general.

Harvard’s new approach to antisemitism is dangerous

The Israeli-Palestinian situation merits the freest possible discussion. Harvard made a mistake by adopting a definition of antisemitism that has a long track record of inhibiting that discussion.

By KENNETH ROTH Updated January 23, 2025, 3:00 a.m.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022, is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. His book “Righting Wrongs” will be published on Feb. 25.

The charge of antisemitism is often bandied about these days to silence critics of Israeli repression. For example, when the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, filed war-crime charges against Benjamin Netanyahu last year, the Israeli prime minister said, “Khan takes his place among the great antisemites in modern times.”

Such misuse threatens to weaken the stigma attached to accusations of antisemitism at a time when Jews around the world need protection. It lies in a mistaken understanding of the best way to oppose the persecution of Jews.

The “working definition” of antisemitism that Harvard just adopted to guide its assessments facilitates this misuse. Issued by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, it provides examples of antisemitism that partisans of the Israeli government have repeatedly used to censor criticism and interfere with academic freedom.

For example, IHRA highlights as potentially antisemitic “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.” Some Israeli partisans claimed that it is therefore antisemitic even to point out when the Israeli government is acting in a racist way, such as by enforcing apartheid against Palestinians in the occupied territory. Today every serious human rights organization that has examined the issue has found that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid. Are they all somehow antisemitic?

IHRA also says that antisemitism includes “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” That illustration lies behind growing efforts to highlight supposed double standards in how Israel’s human rights record is assessed, or which speakers a university invites — a convenient diversion from the record itself and a major impediment to free debate.

In addition, IHRA finds antisemitism in the “demonizing” of Jews. But demonizing abusive governments is what human rights groups do all the time. That is how they get governments to improve. It is a short step to claim that efforts to demonize the Israeli government are really aimed at demonizing Jews. One prominent Israeli partisan equated the two and asserted that the purpose of the working definition is to stop such criticism of Israel.

Kenneth Stern, who describes himself as the lead drafter of the IHRA definition as the American Jewish Committee’s antisemitism expert at the time, later warned of this misuse. He meant the definition to be a way of counting alleged incidents of antisemitism, not as a hate-speech code.

Because of such misuse, more than 100 human rights and civil rights groups have stated their opposition to the IHRA definition. Although it is billed as only a “working definition,” IHRA has not updated or clarified it, despite its increasing weaponization against legitimate critics of Israeli abuses.

There are widely endorsed alternative definitions of antisemitism, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, but Harvard did not cite them. These alternatives are better because they include examples of what is not antisemitism, including supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and rights, boycotting or disinvesting from Israel, or caring more about Israel’s conduct because of the enormous US support for its military.

Any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian situation is prone to be heated. It would be a mistake for Harvard to limit such discussion beyond excluding clearly antisemitic expression.

Antisemitism is a serious problem. But if people see charges of it as a tool to stifle criticism of Israel, its meaning will be devalued. The Israeli government may feel temporarily strengthened, but Jews around the world will be left more vulnerable.

The consequences extend far beyond what can be said on campus. Behind the debate on academic freedom lie very different conclusions about the lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust. Like many Jews who have been drawn to the human rights cause, I see in the long history of Jews being persecuted the need to build strong human rights norms that raise the stakes for governments or armed groups that attack Jews.

However, this should not be a matter of defending only Jews but rather of recognizing that Jews will be safest by working with others to promote a human rights system in which the persecution of any group faces condemnation. Indeed, the leading American Jewish opponents of antisemitism, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress, at first adopted a similar perspective. So did Aharon Barak, the former president of Israel’s Supreme Court.

But in recent years, the right-wing politicians who dominate the Israeli government seem to have drawn a different lesson from the Holocaust. For them, the Jews were persecuted because they were weak and did not have a state of their own. These politicians are determined not only to defend the state of Israel, as any government would do for its nation, but to be the toughest, most brutal force in the region — the one that no one dares to mess with. As Netanyahu described it, “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive.”

The lesson I draw from the Holocaust dictates the importance of respecting the rights of Palestinians as part of an effort to build stronger human rights norms capable of deterring the persecution of any group. If Palestinians are treated as exceptions to human rights protections, so might Jews. But the lesson that the right-wing governments of Israel draw is that Palestinians, as the perceived threat of the moment, should be crushed and then crushed some more, until they have no choice but to accept their subordination. In other words, the Israeli government sees human rights as an obstacle to its preferred defense, which relies mainly on force, applied as brutally as deemed necessary, as illustrated by the past 15 months in Gaza. The IHRA working definition helps to deter criticism of that strategy.

The right-wing lesson obviously does nothing for Jews outside of Israel, but the Israeli government seems to feel that that is their problem, because they have not immigrated to Israel. Indeed, Netanyahu seems long ago to have hedged his bets on American Jews as a source of support for Israel, given their tendency to be liberal and believe in human rights.

Instead, he banks on a combination of the lobby group AIPAC, which represents highly conservative parts of American Jewry, and Christian evangelicals, many of whom favor a strong Israel not out of any love for Jews but because they see it as a prerequisite to the second coming of Christ, at which point Jews who don’t convert to Christianity would presumably go to hell.

The right-wing lesson from the Holocaust is not a wise policy for the Jews of Israel either, as Hamas’s October 2023 slaughter and abduction of Israeli civilians demonstrated. The aim should be to make such flouting of the most basic rights unthinkable. But refusing to recognize one’s enemy as deserving rights can only encourage, though never justify, such atrocities.

These are gravely serious issues that merit the freest possible discussion in society and on campus. Harvard made a mistake by adopting a definition of antisemitism that has a long track record of inhibiting that discussion.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022, is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. His book “Righting Wrongs” will be published on Feb. 25.

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