Zionist attempts to silence criticism running in top gear after ICJ ruling
By Kellie Tranter
Jul 22, 2024
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Friday’s findings of the International Court of Justice on Israel’s conduct must be at the forefront of our legislator’s minds when they are pushed by the Israel lobby to enact the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
The attempt by Zionist lobbyists to silence criticism of Israel is running in top gear to try to counter the swell of public opinion against Israel flowing from the exposure in real time of the barbarity of its actions in Gaza.
The attempted suppression is widespread in the United States where pressure has been put on Congress and many universities to adopt and implement the definition, and the lobby has been equally diligent in its efforts in England and Europe.
It is also openly trying to achieve a similar outcome through similar processes in Australia, as witness the Israeli lobby’s push to have universities formally adopt their desired definition of antisemitism and the AHRC complaint filed against Mary Kostakidis, the real objective of those efforts being to have the Australian government give that definition legislative force and give the lobby a more solid footing for their attempts to muzzle actual critics and ‘chill’ potential critics from expressing rational, factually based criticisms of the actions of the State of Israel and the actors behind them.
In the US, the Zionist lobby has had some success in having its wider definition implemented, probably substantially due to the ignorance of legislators, wrote Elliott Colla. There the Lobby is not only co-opting politicians and pushing hard on universities: Why anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, it is also targeting writers. “Defenders of PEN America, the US literary and free speech organization that has been facing ongoing outcry for their relative silence on Gaza, have used the specter of antisemitism to avoid engaging with the actual critiques at hand” wrote Daniel José Older in LitHub on 11 June, 2024.
He described being “..outraged by these claims of antisemitism, but not because I’m Jewish—that just makes it personal. I’m outraged because in their desperation to distract from the ongoing genocide in Palestine they don’t even bother trying to make sense.” and went on to say:
Judaism had, of course, been around for thousands of years before the European colonial ideology Zionism came along, and Judaism will hopefully be around for thousands of years after it’s gone. Millions of Jews are not Zionists, and the vast majority of Zionists are Christian Evangelicals.
Not only are Judaism and Zionism not at all synonymous, the conflation of the two serves the strategic purpose of providing cover for Israel’s documented war crimes. In a time when actual antisemitism is on the rise from fascist right-wing elements across the globe, it’s deeply cynical and harmful to casually invoke this term to evade accountability and to muddle an uncomfortable conversation.
The Lobby’s power in the British Parliament recently came in for scathing criticism by former UK Minister Sir Alan Duncan, who called on Israel to end its occupation of Palestine, criticised the British government’s rejection of the International Criminal Court (ICC) legal processes and the United Nations generally and condemned the rise of politicians undermining institutions they are part of, emphasising the need to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism: “Unjustified accusations of antisemitism to silence legitimate comments on Israel are damaging to the Jewish community…… There’s a real lack of understanding about the history and the facts, and it’s very difficult to teach people when so many have been on paid trips to Israel, funded by the Conservative Friends of Israel.”
Also addressing the state of affairs in the UK, journalist Jonathan Cook recently said,
…..Those who make (Zionists) feel uncomfortable by highlighting the reality of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and their blindness to it – are accused of being “offensive”
That supposed offensiveness is now conflated with antisemitism, as the treatment of Ken Loach, the respected film-maker of this parish, attests. Disgust at Israel’s racism towards Palestinians is malevolently confused with racism towards Jews. The truth is inverted.
This confusion has also become the basis for a new definition of antisemitism – one aggressively advanced by Israel and its apologists – designed to mislead casual onlookers. The more we, as anti-racists and opponents of colonialism, try to focus attention and opprobrium on Israel’s crimes, the more we are accused of covertly attacking Jews.
… …
Here the battle over Zionism – defining it, understanding it, confronting it, refusing to be silenced by it – is in full flood. The Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn, was politically eviscerated by a redefined antisemitism. Now the party’s ranks are being purged by his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, on the same phoney grounds.
Professors are being threatened and losing their jobs, as happened to David Miller at Bristol university, with the goal of intensifying pressure on the academy to keep silent about Israel and its lobbyists. Exhibitions are taken down, speakers cancelled.
And all the while, the current western obsession with redefining antisemitism – the latest cover story for apartheid Israel – moves us ever further from sensitivity to real racism, whether it be genuine prejudice against Jews or rampant Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.
Welsh writer Adam Johannes has also helpfully addressed the misrepresentative weaponisation by the Zionist lobby of the Palestinian, and now worldwide, call.
The improbability of any judicial body in Australia finding that Mary Kostakidis’ journalistic republications of various news items, statements of involved parties and viewpoints about the State of Israel’s actions has now been highlighted by the ICJ’s published findings on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and its apartheid practices, particularly when that is read in conjunction with the ICJ’s earlier finding that there is a plausible case of genocide against it.
Israel’s contemptuous refusal to follow the orders of the World Court on its illegal settlements, on the expropriation of Palestinian land, on its breaches of the Palestinians’ human rights and on the invasion of Rafah and other matters relating to its conduct in Gaza, and its contumelious refutation of the validity and applicability of the findings concerning its illegal occupation, speak volumes about its attitude towards the concepts of human dignity and equality in any ‘rules-based international order’ .
Calling out such inhumane and nihilistic behaviour by public exposure and criticism should be an obligation of good citizenship and responsible nationhood, not the subject of state repression through an engineered abuse of legal provisions intended to protect real people from real harms.
Shielding from public criticism an anti-democratic apartheid State that illegally occupies the territories of others, persistently abuses human rights and plausibly is committing genocide is not a proper function of our anti-discrimination laws.
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Kellie Tranter is a lawyer, researcher, and human rights advocate. She tweets from @KellieTranter
