6 No. 78 JUSTICE Traditional antisemitism was the discrimination against, denial of, and assault upon the rights of Jews to live as equal members in whatever society they inhabit. The new antisemitism – which began with the human rights and international law revolution in the 1970s — is the discrimination against, denial of, assault upon the right of Israel and the Jewish People to live as an equal member of the family of nations. What is common to both forms of antisemitism, old and new, is discrimination. All that has happened is that it has passed from discrimination against the Jews as individuals to the discrimination against the Jews as a people, and then reverberating back against the Jews as individuals, and as a community wherever they reside. Accordingly, I share what transpired in the immediate aftermath of Durban and which continues to reverberate to this day. Jews and Israel were blamed for 9/11, a conspiratorial trope that continues to this day. The UN General Assembly met, and passed some twenty resolutions condemning Israel, with only five resolutions against the rest of the world combined. The UN Commission on Human Rights, as it then was, met, and in a disproportionate set of resolutions, again singled out Israel for selective opprobrium and indictment. At the University of Michigan, the first convening of what became the BDS movement took place, where a resolution proposing and supporting a two-state solution, if Israel were to become a democratic state — itself somewhat problematic —was defeated in favor of a resolution condemning Israel as an apartheid state. Finally, perhaps the most egregious international legal indictment of all: For the first time in 52 years the contracting parties to the Geneva Convention convened in 2001, and they did so to put one state in the docket of the accused. It wasn't Russia. It wasn't China. It wasn't Syria. It wasn't Iran. Only one state was put in the docket of the accused, and that was Israel. Notably, the contracting parties to the Geneva Convention have met twice since then – and again, condemned only one state – Israel. And so it was then, that in the aftermath of Durban, we witnessed the emergence of five strains of antisemitism that have continued to gain strength ever since – genocidal antisemitism, demonological antisemitism, political antisemitism, legalized antisemitism and ideological antisemitism. Genocidal antisemitism — the toxic convergence of the advocacy of the most horrific of crimes, genocide, embedded in the vilest of hatreds, antisemitism — involves calling for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews wherever they may be. The 21st century began on January 3, with the Supreme Leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei, saying that “there can be no resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict without the annihilation of the Jewish state” — he did not even use the typical euphemism of the “Zionist regime.” The Islamic Regime’s genocidal antisemitism has continued and metastasized since, ignored by the international community, in contravention of their international legal obligations under the Genocide Convention. This kind of genocidal incitement — emanating from Iran, its proxies, and elsewhere — has been allowed to continue with impunity, which only serves to incentivize its occurrence, including after October 7, 2023. Demonological antisemitism involves the notion and condemnation of Israel as a racist, settler-colonialist, imperialist, ethnic cleansing, child-murdering apartheid, genocidal, Nazi state — the delegitimization, dehumanization, and demonization of Israel. This type of antisemitism is the direct continuation of the core conspiratorial trope that Jews, and by extension, the Jewish State, as the “Jew among the nations,” are the enemy of all that is good and the embodiment of all that is evil. Political antisemitism is the denial of Israel's right to exist and more: the denial of its legitimacy — in other words, the denial of the Jewish People's right to self-determination. In addition to denying Jewish indigeneity in their ancestral homeland, political antisemitism often goes so far as denial of the Jews as a people — the denial of Jewish People in any form or manifestation often under the crude cover of “anti-Zionism.” The fourth indicator of the new anti-Jewishness, legalized antisemitism, is even more sophisticated and insidious, but no less prejudicial and pernicious. For here antisemitism seeks, at one and the same time, to mask itself under the banner of human rights, to invoke the authority of international law, and to operate under the protective cover of the United Nations – the lynchpin of international human rights law. In an Orwellian inversion of human rights, language and law — the singling-out of Israel and the Jewish People for differential and discriminatory treatment in the international arena is “legalized.” From a juridical human rights perspective, I set forth a series of case studies of this “legalized” antisemitism: The first case study, as set forth above, was the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism in Durban, which became the “tipping point” for the emergence of the new anti-Jewishness.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=