10 No. 78 JUSTICE and sports, and perhaps most explosively, on university campuses. There is much indifference and little action or outrage about this. Antisemitism has become socially acceptable throughout our society. This led to the fourth finding, which is the marginalization of combating antisemitism within the broader framework of combating racism and hate. When calling for the combating of all the other forms of racism, including hatred aimed at Indigenous people, Blacks, Muslims, people of color, and Asians, it was common practice not to include reference to antisemitism. This sort of marginalizing or erasure of Jews, the notion that Jews do not count, was disturbingly commonplace even before October 7. The fifth finding is that alongside the marginalizing of antisemitism within the broader struggle against racism, there was an actual laundering of antisemitism under the very cover of anti-racism policy itself; for example, where antisemitic individuals were the recipients of government grants for anti-racism work. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan advised me in 2005, that “a United Nations that does not put the struggle against antisemitism at the forefront of its international agenda is a United Nations that has forgotten its past and origins, and will forfeit its future.” The sixth finding pertains to the politicization of antisemitism, whereby antisemitism is called out in the other's political party, but not in one's own, which in part reflected the growing divisiveness and polarization that we already witnessed in the political sphere. The seventh and final finding was the disconcerting erosion of allyship, where in recent years, other marginalized communities who the Jewish community had stood by and stood with, have increasingly begun to turn their backs on the Jewish community. Collectively, these alarming findings — even before October 7 — call for a strong, multifaceted response, guided by the following seven recommendations in my 2021 report, but which remain relevant today: 1. Governments should enact, and implement, National Action Plans to Combat Antisemitism, encompassing “a whole of government commitment” and requiring numerous entities and agencies within governments to work both singly and collectively, and not in silos and disconnectedly. 2. The importance of Holocaust education and broader antisemitism education, underscored by an appreciation of the relationship between the Holocaust as a paradigm for radical evil and antisemitism as a paradigm for radical hate. 3. Emphasis must be placed on celebrating the vast, positive contributions of the Jewish People, and celebrating the history and heritage of the Jews as a prototypical indigenous people — a people that still inhabits the same land, embraces the same religion, studies the same Bible, observes the same traditions, speaks the same indigenous language, Hebrew, and bears the same indigenous name, Israel, as it did 3500 years ago — a prototypical anti-colonial people. 4. It is important to affirm that antisemitism is toxic to democracies, and therefore, the combating of antisemitism must be part and parcel of efforts to support, safeguard, and promote democracy. It also constitutes an assault on our human rights and fundamental freedoms, and therefore the promotion and protection of human rights must include combating antisemitism. 5. We must continue to promote the importance of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism — the most authoritative, comprehensive and international consensus definition that we have, adopted over a fifteen-year decision-making period, in which I had the privilege to participate both as a member of Parliament, starting with the initial drafting — together with Nobel Peace Laureate Professor Elie Wiesel and Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Per Ahlmark — in the aftermath of the World Conference in Durban. 6. We must combat hate crimes using the four Ps, as I have called them: the prevention of such hate crimes to begin with, the protection of the targets of hate crimes, the prosecution of the perpetrators of hate crimes, and the partnerships between governments and civil society in combating hate crimes. 7. Finally, we must be wary of what we label antisemitism, lest if we are indiscriminate in our labelling of antisemitism, we will undermine the very struggle against it. Equally, we must guard against the weaponization or politicization of antisemitism, and guard against selective condemnations. This brings me to October 7, which is not so much a fourth tipping point as it is a transformative historical inflection moment reflecting and representing the following four dynamics: First, the weaponization of international law, legal institutions, legal language and legal norms. This involves not so much the instrumentalization of antisemitism as it does the institutionalization of a groupthink that finds expression
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=