# Where criticism of Israel ends and antisemitism begins

The IHRA text, BDS practice, and votes in Berlin and Brussels mark a line between policy critique and targeting Jews as Jews.

## Key takeaways

- The IHRA working definition states that criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic (Jewish Virtual Library).
- On 1 June 2017 the European Parliament called on EU member states to adopt the IHRA definition themselves (Jewish Virtual Library).
- On 17 May 2019 the Bundestag judged BDS methods antisemitic and said “Don’t Buy” stickers on Israeli goods recall the Nazi slogan against Jewish shops (CAMERA; Jewish Virtual Library).
- PACBI calls for a boycott of all Israeli academic and cultural institutions and urges audiences to shun ensembles such as the Israel Ballet and the Israeli Philharmonic (NGO Monitor).

## A working line, not a gag

Democratic argument about Israel is not, by itself, antisemitism. Israeli newspapers, courts, and officers argue over settlements, proportionality, and the conduct of war every week. Independent Israeli work such as [the film](https://nazadocumentary.com/film) exists because those arguments are real. The useful question for a skeptical reader is narrower: when does speech or a campaign stop treating Israel as a state that can be wrong, and start treating Jews as a people who may be shunned, blamed, or denied the rights other peoples keep.

That line is contested. It is not imaginary. Definitions, boycott rules, campus cases, and parliamentary votes leave a paper trail.

## What the IHRA text actually says

In May 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a non-legally binding working definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” The same document states, in a sentence critics often omit, that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” The illustrative examples that follow are about context, not a ban on talking about Gaza, occupation, or Netanyahu. They flag, among other things, denying Jews a right of self-determination while leaving other nations intact, applying standards not demanded of other democracies, using classic antisemitic images to describe Israel, comparing Israeli policy to the Nazis, and holding Jews collectively responsible for the Israeli state.

The Anti-Defamation League, which supports IHRA as guidance and training rather than as a new speech crime, notes that some of the Israel-related examples remain protected expression under the U.S. First Amendment. The value of the text, on that reading, is diagnostic: it explains why certain tropes are antisemitic even when they arrive dressed as foreign-policy talk. It does not convert every harsh op-ed into hate.

On 1 June 2017 the European Parliament approved a resolution endorsing the IHRA definition and calling on member states to adopt it themselves, to protect Jewish communities from hate crime and hate speech, and to support law-enforcement investigations of antisemitic attacks. Germany adopted the definition later that year. In 2019 the Bundestag returned to the same distinction when it condemned statements “that are formulated as alleged criticism of the policies of the State of Israel, but are actually expressions of hatred of the Jewish people.”

## The debate around the definition

Opposition is serious and should be stated in its own terms. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue records that free-speech activists have argued IHRA stifles expression by treating some criticism of Zionism and Israel as antisemitism. Competing texts, including the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, try to draw the line more narrowly. The American Jewish Committee notes that no government has endorsed those alternatives, and that the Jerusalem Declaration defends holding Israel to a double standard and defends the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign whose founder has said he wishes to dismantle the Jewish state. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, describing the Jerusalem Declaration in its own words, says its authors are especially concerned to protect advocacy for the rights and self-determination of Arabs in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria, that it treats support for a binational state of full civic equality as not antisemitic even though that would end Israel as a Jewish state, and that it treats BDS as a campaign of boycott and sanctions rather than as antisemitism in itself.

That is a free-speech claim, not a finding that antisemitism is rare. It should be weighed against IHRA’s own carve-out for ordinary country criticism, and against cases in which “criticism” is applied only to Jews.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has noted a large area of overlap that the shouting conceals: both sides agree that Israeli policy can be criticised, and both agree that criticism can be antisemitic in form or motive. The fight is over double standards, denial of Jewish self-determination, and Nazi or apartheid analogies. Those are not semantic nits. They decide whether a Jewish student is a citizen with a view, or a stand-in for a government.

## When boycotts hit Jews rather than policy

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement presents itself as a campaign against the Israeli state, modelled on the isolation of apartheid South Africa, and not as a campaign against Jews. CAMERA has recorded the Palestinian BDS National Committee’s insistence that it opposes “all forms of racism, including anti-Jewish racism,” and its complaint that opponents conflate pressure on Israel with anti-Jewish racism. That self-description should be recorded. So should the written rules.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, launched in 2004 as a founding arm of BDS, has called on the international community to boycott Israeli academic and cultural institutions on the ground that those institutions are complicit in a system of oppression. NGO Monitor quotes PACBI urging audiences to boycott Israeli artists such as the Israel Ballet and the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, which PACBI accuses of being a “partner with the state in planning, implementing, and whitewashing war crimes and international law violations.” InfluenceWatch records PACBI’s claim that the “vast majority” of Israeli and pro-Israel academics are complicit, either by defending the state or by insufficiently condemning it. That is not a sanction on a statute. It is a loyalty test on musicians and universities.

On U.S. campuses the same logic reaches diaspora Jews. An ADL review of 2020–2021 campus activity found that the official BDS cultural-boycott guidelines, which call for the shunning of “activities that involve Israel, its lobby groups and complicit institutions,” have had an “inordinately large impact on the Jewish community,” because pro-BDS groups often treat ordinary American Jewish organisations as “lobby groups” or “complicit institutions.” Anti-normalisation rules, which treat events involving Israelis and Arabs from Gaza or from Judea and Samaria as illegitimate if they imply “parity,” have the same effect. That is how a policy boycott becomes a communal one.

Individual cases show the same shift from government to person. In September 2018, University of Michigan professor John Cheney-Lippold withdrew a promised recommendation after learning the student sought a programme in Israel; the university disciplined him, saying his “conduct has fallen far short of the University’s and College’s expectations for how … faculty interact with and treat students.” An independent investigation into the UK National Union of Students, summarised by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, found failures to prevent antisemitic harassment that used blood-libel and Rothschild tropes and held Jewish students responsible for the Israeli state. Those are IHRA examples in ordinary clothes: collective blame, conspiracy, and a test that other ethnic groups are not asked to sit.

## Parliaments, stickers, and the BDS reply

On 17 May 2019 the Bundestag, on a motion of the CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, and Alliance 90/The Greens, adopted a resolution to resist the BDS movement and combat antisemitism. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies notes that the vote was political, not a criminal statute. The motion quotes IHRA, restates a two-state goal, and then makes a historical point German legislators are entitled to make. CAMERA quotes the adopted text: the “pattern of argument and methods of the BDS movement are anti-Semitic,” and BDS calls to boycott Israeli artists and “Don’t Buy” stickers on Israeli goods “recall the most terrible phase of German history.” The Jewish Virtual Library’s English rendering of the same motion says those stickers “inevitably kindle memories of the Nazi … parole ‘Kauf nicht bei Juden!’ (Don’t buy from Jews).” The Bundestag resolved not to fund organisations that question Israel’s right to exist or that actively support BDS, and asked other public bodies to follow.

BDS and some German critics answered that the resolution chills political expression. CAMERA quotes the Palestinian BDS National Committee rejecting “anti-Jewish racism” and insisting that it targets a regime, not a people. Jürgen Trittin, a Green legislator who opposed the motion, claimed there was “a climate of intimidation towards critics of Israel’s occupation policy” and that equating BDS with antisemitism would slander non-violent campaigners. Readers can hold both thoughts: boycotts of states are a known tool, and a boycott whose written criteria brand Israeli choirs and orchestras as complicit, and whose campus practice treats Jewish student life as complicity, is no longer only about cabinets and borders.

The same distinction applies to the worst charges of the Gaza war, including [the genocide allegation](https://nazadocumentary.com/blog/the-genocide-claim). Evidence, law, and military practice can be argued, as the film tries to do with named officers rather than a chorus. What cannot be smuggled through as “critique” is the older move: Jews, as Jews, must answer for a state, lose cultural standing, or prove innocence that no other diaspora is required to prove. IHRA does not end that argument. It names it.

Related reading: [what BDS is, in its founders' own words](https://nazadocumentary.com/blog/what-is-the-bds-movement).