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By James Renton / Middle East Monitor
In May 2016, an organisation of Western governments headquartered in Berlin, called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), adopted a definition of anti-Semitism that incorporates anti-Zionism. That definition has become the pre-eminent benchmark for identifying anti-Semitism by governments, public bodies and universities across the global North. Due to its conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, the IHRA is also a flashpoint in the global struggle over Palestine/Israel.
Despite the definition’s political importance, much remains unknown today by both supporters and opponents regarding its origins, not least because the IHRA’s archives remain closed, and many public documents have been taken offline. Some commentators have argued that Jewish organisations, in particular, played a pivotal role in the historical origins of the definition, especially the American Jewish Committee, and even the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad. However, my in-depth investigation over many months suggests a very different story.
In the early years of the War on Terror, I have discovered, Western governments were anxious to protect what they had carefully established as a core part of the meaning of liberal democracy – its very purpose – after the end of the Cold War: the memorialisation of the Holocaust. As Western states came to see Israel as the ultimate totem of Holocaust memory, they, in turn, began prioritising the protection of its reputation as essential for the security of their own political system after 9/11. When leaders in the global North label attacks on Israel as attacks on democracy itself, this is the history of what they mean.
Composed exclusively of liberal democratic states, the IHRA began its life as the ‘Task Force for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research’ (ITF) in 1998, established by the United States, UK and Sweden. In 2000, the Task Force held an international forum of governments in Stockholm that was of such political importance that the French Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, called it “the very first world conference of the new century.”
At that event, participants issued their founding document, the Stockholm Declaration, which stated: “The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning.” The idea was not that liberal democracies would agree on the substance of that meaning, simply that it was an essential vessel of meaning per se for their political system, as a universal template. At the conference, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Valentina Matvienko, enunciated the principle quite clearly: the Holocaust was now a “litmus” test for the existence of a “civil democratic society”; the two were now synonymous.
Before 9/11, the ITF was not especially interested in backing Israel or combating anti-Semitism. Indeed, it did not establish a working group on anti-Semitism until 2009. In Stockholm, anti-Zionism was not on the agenda for the many assembled heads of government, or even Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was instead troubled by neo-Nazis and Holocaust-deniers.
Once the War on Terror began, however, the international picture changed dramatically. In that context, and with the rise of pro-Palestinian sentiment in Europe in 2002 amidst the Second Intifada (2000–2003), the Bush administration called for the world’s first conference on anti-Semitism. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) hosted the event in Vienna several months after the invasion of Iraq. In the Austrian capital, the Western political elite was gripped by a new consensus: a new form of anti-Semitism had erupted in Europe, centred on criticism of Israel and perpetrated principally by Muslims.
The White House sent a large delegation, led by Rudolph Giuliani, the former Republican Mayor of New York City and hero of 9/11. Speaking for President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Giuliani wanted European states to deliver surveillance of anti-Semitism, “[d]iscipline political debate” on Palestine/Israel, and enlist “Islamic communities” to counter anti-Semitism.
The demand by the Bush White House for surveillance of anti-Semitism, with a focus on Muslims and Israel, led to the definition of anti-Semitism that is now at the centre of global politics.
Just before the second OSCE anti-Semitism conference in Berlin in 2004, the EU’s agency for monitoring racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism (EUMC) published a report regarding data on anti-Semitism. The report noted that accurate data collection remained an impossible task without an agreed definition of anti-Semitism. The academic author of the report, Alexander Pollack, made an attempt to fill that gap, which drew on studies of Nazi Germany. Yet Pollack’s text did not mention Israel or Muslims. It was, therefore, out of step with the new policy agenda at the OSCE. At the Berlin conference, the OSCE then confirmed the high stakes for the global North posed by criticism of Israel in the context of the War on Terror; they pronounced anti-Semitism as a threat to “overall security” in the “OSCE region and beyond.”
This was the moment that resulted in the EUMC definition, which the IHRA adopted with small changes years later, following the rise of Daesh and its terror campaign in Europe. After the 2004 Berlin conference, important members of the US and EU delegations at the OSCE conference led the new anti-Semitism definition project: the EU’s Beatte Winkler, Director of the EUMC, and the USA’s Rabbi Andrew Baker, Director of International Affairs at the AJC. They were not independent figures acting on their own initiative, as some have suggested. Hence, the drafting process involved specialists at the OSCE from its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).
The ODIHR’s role would not be surprising to anyone who was following events in Vienna and Berlin. The OSCE’s Permanent Council had mandated in March 2004 that all states were now committed to collecting data on antisemitic crimes, and that the ODIHR should play a central function in the collection of anti-Semitism data by member states. Notably, from December 2004, the ODIHR started to take part in ITF meetings.
The structure of the EUMC’s working definition, published in January 2005, demonstrated its surveillance function, focused on Muslims. Firstly, the definition included a series of examples that were designed to facilitate the detection of anti-Semitism by data collectors, as one of the AJC drafters, Kenneth Stern, recalled years later in testimony to the US House of Representatives. No other form of racism had been approached in such a way by Western state bureaucracies. Yet this framework, a tick-box method of guidelines to detect attitudes and behaviour, was to be central in Western state models for detecting radicalisation among Muslim populations, as evidenced by the ‘Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism’ approach championed by the UN, EU, and across the global North.
The text itself of the EUMC definition also reveals the prime concern of its architects with surveilling Muslims. The very first example of “contemporary anti-Semitism”, which is rarely discussed today, is: “Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.” The reference to “radical ideology” and “an extremist view of religion” were evidently focused on Islamists, who were front of mind for those who composed the definition.
In fact, there was no evidence that the pro-Palestinian support among the public in Europe in 2002 and 2003, which caused such anxiety for leaders of the global North in Vienna and Berlin, was driven by Islamism. Nonetheless, Western governments built global surveillance structures over the years following 9/11 on the belief that all Muslims were potential extremists, or in other words, anti-Western revolutionaries. This political structure derived from centuries of Western thought that identified Islam as an incubator for threats to Christian sovereignty.
As we see in Martin Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies, published in 1543, Jews alongside Muslims were also regarded as possessing the inherent potential to overturn Christian power – indeed, he and many anti-Semites thereafter viewed the Jew as the preeminent threat to political and religious order. It is a great irony of history, then, that in the 21st century Islamophobia took such a prominent place in the gestation of the international order’s preferred definition of anti-Semitism.
This article is based on Renton’s recent research paper in the Journal of Genocide Research, ‘Holocaust Memory and the Universal Sovereignty of the Liberal Democratic State.’
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James Renton
James Renton is Professor of History and Co-Lead of the Racial Justice and Migration Research Group, Edge Hill University, UK. A former President of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies, Renton is an historian of anti-Semitism , Islamophobia, empire, and global politics.