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July 27th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Champions of the International Holocaust Memorial Alliance – Working Definition of Antisemitism (IHRA-WDA) insist that their definition is merely aspirational, meant only to rally opposition to hatred of Jews and is not legally binding.
But an event in the Canadian city of Winnipeg is a perfect and lasting example of how toxic is the definition’s threat to freedom of expression about Israel and Palestine and how it is really meant to be used. It was the nightmare scenario that critics of the IHRA-WDA warn about and a lesson to all of us.
On February 28, 2018 several Winnipeg organizations marked US President Donald Trump’s move of the US embassy to Jerusalem with a meeting at the University of Winnipeg entitled “My Jerusalem.” Panelists from Jewish, Muslim and Christian backgrounds reflected on their connections to the beleaguered city.
But, working from a well-worn playbook, the pro-Israel group B’nai Brith Canada (BBC), set to work to smear the event. Unable to shut down the meeting in advance or to force the organizers to accept one of its own speakers, BBC complained to the university that the meeting was held on a Jewish holiday and included antisemitic statements..
This particular scheme in the playbook is called “throw mud and hope that something sticks.” In this case, the mud stuck in exactly the way it was meant to.
The university’s Human Rights and Equity officer investigated the complaints, using the IHRA-WDA and reported that, “certain statements made at the event could be considered anti‐Semitic.” When meeting sponsors asked precisely which statements were antisemitic, the officer declined to answer.
The IHRA definition is now notorious. Seven of its eleven examples of supposed antisemitism involve criticism of the State of Israel. It has been roundly condemned as an exercise meant not to combat antisemitism, but to protect Israel from negative critique. It has recently been challenged by the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), signed by over 300 of the world’s top scholars on Jewish studies, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. But, as the saying goes, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
The University of Winnipeg ended up issuing a fulsome apology to the Winnipeg Jewish community.
“In response to concerns raised by community members, the University Human Rights and Diversity Officer conducted a review of the My Jerusalem event and concluded that comments made during the event were antisemitic. The University regrets the antisemitic statements made at the My Jerusalem event.”
Further event on Israel/Palestine frustrated
When the organizers of the maligned gathering attempted later that same year to organize a teach-in about Israel and Palestine, they ran up against a duly-chastened and uncooperative university and had to hold that event elsewhere.
The university’s response is a classic example of how with the IHRA’s bizarre definition, even mild criticism of Israel is punished and sanctioned and discouraged, if not shut down.
Readers who are interested can judge for themselves as a recording of the meeting is available. For those with less time, a longer version of this report does a close reading of the event.
This close reading reveals an event so anodyne, so polite, so full of good will, that one wonders if the detractors were at the same meeting. If the IHRA definition succeeds in becoming the benchmark, and such a meeting falls afoul of that definition, then we are in deep trouble and can kiss reasoned debate and academic freedom goodbye.
The Winnipeg meeting was sponsored by an impressive and diverse array of community organizations, including Independent Jewish Voices – Winnipeg, the Canadian Arab Association of Manitoba, Conference of Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario of The United Church, and Global College – University of Winnipeg.
Speakers included Esther Epp-Tiessen, of the Mennonite Central Committee, Rabbi David Mivasair, a member of Independent Jewish Voices/Canada, Idris Elbakri, a Palestinian Muslim Canadian, born and raised in Jerusalem, and Fadi Ennab, a Palestinian Christian Canadian, born and raised in the Middle East.
What specific complaints did B’nai Brith make about the meeting?
B’nai Brith’s complaints
First B’nai Brith Canada claimed that the meeting was held on a Jewish holiday and thereby precluded participation of Winnipeg Jews. The “holiday” was Purim, a largely non-religious celebration, unlike the “high holidays” of Rosh Hashanah or Passover. On Purim, as on Chanukah, Jews are not religiously enjoined from working or attending to business or going to political meetings.
BBC also complained that the meeting should have chosen a different Jew than Rabbi David Mivasair, demanding “an authentic Jewish perspective.” Granted, Mivasair is not an authentic apologist of Israel, as B’nai Brith defines authenticity. He is an outspoken critic of Israel and a member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada.
As for an “authentic Jewish perspective,” the claim by B’nai Brith and the other Jewish establishment organizations that they alone represent Canadian Jews ignores the deep divisions within the North American Jewish communities on the question of Israel and Palestine, as we will show below.
Fishman made only three specific allegations about the supposedly antisemitic content of the meeting (numbering added):
- “Ennab falsely accused Israel of committing a ‘genocide’ against Palestinians, while (2) Elbakri tarred indigenous Israeli Jews as ‘European settlers.’ He went on to suggest that (3) there is no space for a ‘Jewish ethnic enclave’ in the ‘Arab Middle East.’”
With regard to (1), Ennab said precisely the following:
“So 1948 for my dad and his family, it wasn’t good. Whether you call it ethnic cleansing, or whether you call it colonialism, whether you call it, genocide, cultural, social, genocide… You don’t have to just kill the physical body. The Holocaust genocide experience [of the Jews] is really enlightening. The limitation is that people start thinking that when you say genocide, you just start thinking of bodies physically dying, but you can kill a whole whack of people through culture. It’s called kill the Indian in the child, but save the child. So, we’re kind of killing the Palestinian and saving their bodies.”
If using the word “genocide” is indeed hate speech, then the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide stands guilty. It defines five characteristics of genocide. Besides mass murder, it includes:
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Likewise, cast the line further and reel in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which called the system of Indigenous residential schools, “cultural genocide.” A recent poll shows over half of Canadians agree. It is well-accepted in human rights parlance that genocide is a broad term.
Settler colonialists
With regard to complaint (2), Elbakri used the term “settlers” only twice. The first time he referred to European settlers in Canada. The second time, he mentioned “settlers” as follows:
“…there are different narratives of land without people for people without a land, the narrative of the Jewish immigrants and settlers going there to make a desert bloom, and so on.”
With regard to complaint (3), Elbakri said that the moving of the embassy and the whole process of forcing or inducing Palestinians to leave is leading to an unfortunate outcome, and that people of good will should ask themselves:
“Do we want an ethnic enclave? What’s being called for is basically an ethnic enclave in the middle in the Arab Middle East for Jews only.”
These then, are the examples Fishman used to make accusations of antisemitism. Are these examples so horrendous that the meeting should not have been allowed to go forward, or that the university needed to apologize to the Jewish community, or that a freezing pall of silence on the subject of Israel should fall on the University of Winnipeg? Or were they, at worst, debatable? We will come back to that word presently.
The longer version of this article scours the transcript of the meeting to find anything provocative and finds several uses of the words “colonial”, “settler,” “dispossession” and “occupation.” The phrase “ethnic cleansing” and “boycott, divestment and sanctions” are used precisely once each. Just to make sure we haven’t missed any other possible examples, scouring the transcript of the meeting for perhaps provocative words or phrases reveals the following:
Using the “A” word: Apartheid
The word “apartheid” was used three times. We note that its use has become well-accepted. A recent report by the respected Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem concluded that Israel was practising apartheid from “the river to the sea.” Shortly afterward, the prominent international NGO Human Rights Watch, which has usually refrained from provocative language, also decided to use the term apartheid.
This then, is the entire extent of terminology employed by the speakers that could possibly be discomfiting, unless the very notion of a meeting criticizing Israel, even mildly, is to be forbidden.
As for the allegedly discomfiting words and phrases, we must ask “discomfiting to whom?” Given what we will see in the EKOS poll below, we cannot assume that it is discomfiting to all Jews, only to those who do not wish to see Israel accused of misdeeds.
But let us even assume that some of the remarks made at the meeting were not innocuous, but rather actually hurtful to some supporters of Israel. Setting the question of the actions of the State of Israel and the Zionist movement aside for a moment, did any of the comments express hatred toward or disparagement of Jews as Jews? No, there was not one example of that in the entire meeting. None of the speakers engaged in toxic stereotypes of Jews, or suggested that Jews in general are responsible or even answerable for Israel’s actions.
One of the tropes we often hear accompanying the IHRA definition is that only Jews themselves can tell us if something is antisemitic. The problem is: Which Jews? Jewish communities have long been divided on the question of Zionism and Israel. Jewish intellectual icons, including Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, all rejected political Zionism.
Jews strongly divided on Israel/Palestine
And, despite 73 years of communal indoctrination since the founding of the State of Israel, Jews are divided still.
In a 2020 survey, only half of those in the 18-29 age group “feel very/somewhat attached to Israel.” Indeed, only 58% of US Jews of all ages feel this attachment.
The recent (2021) attacks by Israelis upon Palestinians has further estranged American Jews from Israel.
In another recent survey, 25% of American Jews polled agreed that Israel was an “apartheid state” and 22% agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” With Jews under 40, those numbers rose to one-third on both questions.
A 2018 EKOS poll of Canadian Jews indicated, among other things, that:
- 44% say Israel is not making sincere efforts at peace with the Palestinians
- 37% have a negative opinion of the Israeli government
- 30% think boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel are reasonable
- 48% agree that “Accusations of antisemitism are often used to silence legitimate criticisms of Israel”
Proponents of the IHRA definition insist that they are not seeking to have contraveners criminalized. But with the concept of legal pluralism, legal scholars have long recognized that there is formal law, and informal law. In formal, or state law, various levels of the state explicitly set out prohibitions on our actions. For example, it is against the law to cross the road on a red light or to physically harm another person outside of self-defence. If we contravene these prohibitions, we can expect sanctions to follow.
But our society is full of examples of informal law. Universities and schools have rules and norms of comportment which carry consequences. And this last is precisely what we saw at the University of Winnipeg.
The purpose and threat of the IHRA definition need not be its power to formally criminalize alleged transgressors or to impose state-initiated punishment or restraint upon them (although that has happened in some places, notably Europe.) It need only to be adopted into informal law to change the discourse so that rigorous critique of Israeli policies and practices is considered outside the pale and thus invites censure and withdrawal/or privileges.
Independent Jewish Voices Canada has compiled a catalogue of instances from around the world of the IHRA definition being used to cancel events or silence Palestine solidarity movements.
Finally, and most importantly for a university, the worst that could be said about the comments made by the panelists at the “My Jerusalem” is that they are “debatable.” So where better than a university to have an ongoing debate? I hold an event to present my findings and my view. And you present your view. But don’t you dare shut me down.
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