On the 27th of February, Universities Australia (UA) — a group of 39 universities that includes the University of Sydney — unanimously endorsed the adoption of a new definition of antisemitism. The definition labels “criticism of Israel” as potentially antisemitic “when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel” and labels Zionism a core part of the Jewish identity of “most, but not all, Jewish Australians”. As a Jewish student, I am deeply concerned about what this definition means for freedom of speech on campus, and how it limits the range of possible discussions around Israel –– in the Jewish Council of Australia’s press release, they warned that “the definition’s inclusion of ‘calls for the elimination of the State of Israel’ would mean, for instance, that calls for a single binational democratic state, where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights, could be labelled antisemitic.”
This position, termed one-state realism by Dr & Rabbi Shaul Magid, has been favoured by many prominent Jewish & Palestinian intellectuals and scholars, including Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, and Edward Said. The Universities Australia definition endangers one-state realism and drastically limits the possibilities for scholarship into the future of the Levant. If Israel, a Jewish state, is a necessity, one can no longer discuss its roots and foundations, and instead must discuss how to reform Israel into something tenable. The scope of discussion has been drastically reduced, and Israel has become a given; something that must be worked around –– it’s akin to treating a rotting plant by simply trimming the brown leaves while ignoring the disease nested in the roots and soil.
In Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile, he warns against reformist frameworks, criticising them as simply “shrinking the occupation”, rather than doing away with it altogether. Pappé observed similarly in 2014, saying it is considered okay to criticise “specific Israeli policies” but not “the very nature of the Israeli regime”. The UA definition seems to penalise the systematic critique that academics — including Jewish Australian researchers like Dr Naama Blatman & Dr Max Kaiser — seek to do, by stopping one from wrestling with the fundamental claims of Zionism and making Jewish statehood in Israel a necessity.
The notion that Jewish statehood is both a necessary and fundamental part of Jewish identity is concerning. A political ideology like Zionism should not be grafted onto Jewish identity. Judaism was not, and is not, uniformly Zionist, even if the UA definition states that “most, but not all, Jewish Australians” are Zionist. Around 70-77% of Australian Jews are Zionist, but including political views in a definition of Jewish identity not only limits how the political spectrum of Jews may change in the future, but also risks legitimising stereotypes that Jewish people all think monolithically.
Opposition to Zionism has existed since its invention in the 1800s; groups like the Jewish Labour Bund rejected antisemitism as something that could be solved by forcibly creating a Jewish state in Palestine. The UA definition also fails to acknowledge non-stated ideas of Jewish self-determination: by linking anti-Zionism with antisemitism, Jewish self-determination becomes tied to the idea of statehood. This is not the case — there is no inherent reason why the self-determination of the Jewish people needs to manifest in a Jewish state. The linking of Jewish statehood to Jewish identity is ahistorical and homogenises Jews as one; and the support of any state whatsoever — including Israel — is a fundamentally political act, and should not be codified in the definition of Jews as a cultural & ethnoreligious group.
The UA definition seeks to limit both the possibilities of discussion around Israel’s future and Jewish identity. It is precisely these limitations that damage possibilities for a just future in Israel: when Jews are treated as one group politically, and the origins and nature of the Israeli state are unable to be interrogated and criticised, one is forced to discuss how to make occupation just. As a Jewish student, this is not a discussion I am interested in, and this is not a conception of Judaism I feel at home in.
