Is Criticism of the Israeli Government Antisemitic?
Definitions, Distinctions, and the Disputes Over Both
Abstract
The question of whether criticism of the Israeli government is antisemitic has moved from a quiet academic debate to the center of public life. Federal funding decisions, university discipline, immigration enforcement, and the language of diplomacy now turn on the answer. This paper takes the question seriously, lays out what the leading working definitions of antisemitism actually say, and shows that the answer offered by every major framework, including the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition, is the same. Criticism of the policies of the Israeli government is not antisemitic on its face. The harder problem is identifying when speech about Israel crosses into antisemitism. That line is drawn differently by the IHRA Working Definition, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, the Nexus Document, and Natan Sharansky’s 3D Test. The paper traces the points of agreement and the points of dispute, examines the warnings of Kenneth S. Stern (the lead drafter of the IHRA definition) about the weaponization of his own text, and situates the debate inside the present moment of the International Court of Justice case, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry findings, and the Trump administration’s two executive orders on antisemitism. The conclusion is plain. Criticism of a government, including the Israeli government, is not antisemitism. Conflating the two harms Jews, harms Palestinians, and harms the standing of any society that wants to take real bigotry seriously.
Keywords: antisemitism, Israel, IHRA, Jerusalem Declaration, Nexus Document, free speech, Title VI, Gaza, ICJ, Kenneth Stern
Whether criticism of the Israeli government counts as antisemitism is one of the most charged questions in present American public life. The answer matters in courtrooms (where it has shaped Title VI civil rights cases), on university campuses (where it has shaped funding, discipline, and visa decisions), and in how journalists and policymakers describe events in Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora. The question is not new, but the stakes are higher than they have been in a generation.
This paper makes three claims. First, the leading frameworks for defining antisemitism, taken on their own terms, agree that criticism of Israeli government policy is not antisemitic in itself. Second, those frameworks disagree sharply about when speech about Israel crosses into antisemitism, and the disagreement is real and worth taking seriously. Third, the political moment we are living through, with the International Court of Justice weighing a genocide case against Israel and the Trump administration deploying federal authority against campus speech under the heading of antisemitism, has made it harder for honest disagreement to find oxygen.
The Working Definitions on Offer
Four texts dominate the present debate on what antisemitism is, and how it does or does not relate to speech about Israel.
The IHRA Working Definition (2016)
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is an intergovernmental body whose members include the United States and most European democracies. In May 2016, in Bucharest, the IHRA’s plenary adopted what it called a non-legally binding Working Definition of Antisemitism, drawing on earlier text drafted by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia in 2003-2005 (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, n.d.). The two-sentence definition itself reads, in part, that “antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” and that “rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities” (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, n.d.).
The definition is short. It is the eleven illustrative examples attached to it that do most of the work and most of the fighting. Seven of the examples concern speech or imagery about Israel. The first example contains language that is decisive for the question this paper asks: “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic” (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, n.d.).
That sentence is the IHRA’s own answer to whether garden-variety criticism of the Israeli government is antisemitic. It is not.
The contested examples include those describing antisemitism as “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” and “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” (United States Department of State, n.d.).
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021)
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, or JDA, was released in March 2021 by a group of more than two hundred scholars of antisemitism, Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and Middle Eastern studies, convened by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute (Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, n.d.). The drafters argued that the IHRA examples, though sometimes useful, “blur the difference between antisemitic speech and legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism” and “delegitimize the voices of Palestinians and others, including Jews, who hold views that are sharply critical of Israel and Zionism” (Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, n.d.).
The JDA defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).” Where it differs most from the IHRA examples is in its guidelines on Israel and Palestine. The JDA holds that it is not, on its face, antisemitic to support Palestinian demands for justice; to oppose Zionism as a form of nationalism; to apply Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions methods to Israel; or to draw sharp comparisons between Israeli state behavior and other settler colonial states (Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, n.d.). It does, in Guideline 10, classify as antisemitic the denial of the right of Jews in Israel “to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews, in accordance with the principle of equality” (Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, n.d.). Critics from the left have argued that this guideline simply restates the most contentious IHRA example in softer language (Ayyash, 2021).
The Nexus Document (2021, Updated 2024)
The Nexus Document, drafted by a task force originally hosted by the Knight Program on Media and Religion at the USC Annenberg School and now affiliated with the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, takes a third approach (Nexus Project, n.d.). Its working definition reads: “Antisemitism consists of anti-Jewish beliefs, attitudes, actions, or systemic conditions. It includes negative beliefs and feelings about Jews, hostile behavior directed against Jews (because they are Jews), and conditions that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life” (Nexus Project, n.d.).
The Nexus Task Force was endorsed in the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism released by the Biden White House on May 25, 2023 (Nexus Project, n.d.). Its handling of Israel-related speech is straightforward. The document holds that paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently from other countries “is not prima facie proof of antisemitism,” noting reasonable grounds (special U.S. ties to Israel, U.S. military aid running into the billions, personal connection) for paying more attention to Israeli conduct (Nexus Project, n.d.). The Nexus director, Jonathan Jacoby, has said plainly that the project takes accusations of antisemitism seriously and “speaks out when fears of antisemitism are cynically exploited to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel or US policy” (Interfaith Alliance, 2025).
Sharansky’s 3D Test (2004)
The earliest of the four frameworks comes from Natan Sharansky, the Soviet refusenik turned Israeli politician. Sharansky proposed in 2003 to 2004 that legitimate criticism of Israel can be distinguished from antisemitism by the absence of three Ds: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization (Sharansky, 2004). His own framing assumes that legitimate criticism exists. As he wrote in Newsweek, “the 3-D test for anti-Semitism” is meant to enable people to “easily distinguish between legitimate criticism and anti-Semitism” (Sharansky, 2019).
The 3D test has been folded into the IHRA examples, particularly the double standards example, and serves as a heuristic for many advocacy groups (Three Ds of Antisemitism, 2026). It has been criticized as itself producing the conflation it claims to prevent: when “double standards” are decided subjectively, almost any critic of Israel can be slotted into the category (Palestine Question, n.d.).
The Common Ground
Read against each other, the four texts agree on what they were each written to settle. None of them holds that criticism of Israeli government policy, in itself, is antisemitic.
The IHRA says criticism similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. The JDA holds that opposition to a particular government policy, or opposition to Zionism as a form of nationalism, is not on its face antisemitic. The Nexus Document protects even disproportionate attention to Israel. Sharansky’s 3D test was named after the project to distinguish between antisemitism and legitimate criticism.
That convergence is worth noticing. For a question that has produced campus arrests, federal lawsuits, and entire careers in Israel advocacy or Palestinian solidarity work, the people whose job is to define antisemitism agree, in writing, on the answer to the simplest version of the question. Criticizing the policies of the Israeli government, the way one might criticize the policies of the British, French, Saudi, or American government, is not antisemitism.
