What People Actually Mean When They Call Criticism of Israel “Antisemitic”
From a Non-Zionist Christian Skeptic, four working definitions, one drafter who walked back his own work, and the question almost nobody asks honestly anymore.
Here is a sentence I never thought I would have to write down: criticizing the policies of the Israeli government is not antisemitism.
I never thought I would have to write it down for the simple reason that it sits at the level of “the sky is blue.” Of course, one can criticize a foreign government. People criticize the British, the French, the Saudis, the Hungarians, and the Chinese. They criticize the Americans every day on cable, in print, in their cars, at Thanksgiving. Nobody calls that bigotry. Nobody calls it a hate crime.
And yet here we are in 2026, with American university funding canceled by the hundreds of millions, foreign students arrested outside their apartments and shipped to Louisiana detention centers, and a federal executive order whose stated purpose is to root out antisemitism but whose actual mechanism is to discipline speech about a foreign country. The drafter of the antisemitism definition that the order relies on has gone on the record, repeatedly, saying his text is being misused.
So I want to lay this out the way I would for myself if I were trying to figure out what is true. Slowly. With sources. With names attached.
This is the long version of the argument I made in my research paper on the same question. The conclusion is the same. The path I take to get there is more direct, since we are not in a journal here. We are in a place where you can talk like a person.
Four definitions, written by people whose entire job is to define this
Four texts dominate this debate. I am going to walk through what each of them actually says, in order, since almost no one in the public conversation has read any of them.
1. The IHRA Working Definition (2016).
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is an intergovernmental body that includes the United States and most European democracies. In May 2016, in Bucharest, it adopted a non-legally-binding working definition of antisemitism. The definition itself is two sentences. Attached to it are eleven illustrative examples, seven of which involve Israel.
Pay attention to this sentence, since it is the IHRA’s own answer to the question this essay 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.”
That second sentence is doing a lot of work. The IHRA, the document being weaponized in courtrooms and on campuses to silence speech about Israel, says in its own opening that ordinary criticism of Israel is not antisemitic. Period. End of.
2. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
In March 2021, more than two hundred scholars of antisemitism, Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and Middle Eastern studies released the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, or JDA. They argued the IHRA examples blur the line between antisemitic speech and legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism, and that this blurring delegitimizes Palestinian voices and Jewish dissident voices alike. The JDA defines antisemitism as discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence against Jews as Jews. It then spells out what is and is not antisemitic about speech regarding Israel.
The JDA holds that supporting Palestinian demands for justice is not antisemitic, opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism is not antisemitic, supporting BDS is not antisemitic, and drawing comparisons between Israeli state behavior and other settler colonial states is not antisemitic. It does say that denying Jews in Israel the right to live as Jews in equality with everyone else is antisemitic. That is a meaningful line, and a defensible one.
3. The Nexus Document (2021, updated 2024).
The Nexus Document was drafted by a task force first hosted at USC Annenberg’s Knight Program on Media and Religion and is now affiliated with the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. It was endorsed by name in the Biden White House’s 2023 U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. Its handling of Israel’s speech is straightforward: paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently from other countries is not on its face proof of antisemitism. There are reasonable grounds (special U.S. ties to Israel, the roughly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid, personal connection) for paying closer attention to what Israel does than to what, say, Belgium does.
4. Sharansky’s 3D Test (2004).
The earliest of the four. Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet refusenik who became an Israeli politician, proposed in 2003 to 2004 that legitimate criticism of Israel can be told apart from antisemitism by the absence of three Ds: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. Notice the framing. Sharansky took for granted that legitimate criticism of Israel exists and is a normal feature of political life. The whole point of his test was to draw a line around it.
The thing nobody is saying out loud.
Read those four texts side by side, and something jumps out. They disagree with each other on hard cases. They argue in print about anti-Zionism, double standards, and where the line falls.
In the easy case, they all agree.
Criticizing the policies of the Israeli government is not, in itself, antisemitism. The IHRA says it. The JDA says it. The Nexus Document says it. Sharansky’s entire test is designed to distinguish the two.
The people whose actual job is to define antisemitism agree, in writing, on the answer to the simplest version of the question. Whose policy is being criticized matters. Bombing campaigns can be criticized. Settlement expansion can be criticized. Cabinet ministers can be criticized. None of that is antisemitism.
Where it actually gets hard
The four definitions disagree about three kinds of speech, and the disagreement is real. I do not want to flatten it.
Anti-Zionism. The IHRA examples treat the claim that the existence of a Jewish state is a racist endeavor as antisemitism. The JDA holds that opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism is not, on its face, antisemitism. Jewish Voice for Peace, with more than 32,000 dues-paying members, argues that anti-Zionism is a recognized political position that has lived inside Jewish life for as long as Zionism has. Peter Beinart, the Orthodox Jewish journalist who studies Talmud daily and sends his kids to a Zionist day school, wrote in 2024 that “in most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”
Double standards. The IHRA holds that demanding behavior from Israel “not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” is antisemitism. The Nexus Document holds the opposite. Americans pay closer attention to Israel than to other countries for a simple reason: we are paying for Israel. About four billion dollars a year, in our names. That is a reason for attention, not bigotry.
The line between criticism and delegitimization. Everyone agrees that calling for harm to Jews qua Jews is antisemitism. They disagree about whether a sharp critique of Zionism, a comparison of Israeli policy to other settler colonial projects, or the use of the BDS framework, reaches that line. The JDA and Nexus say no. The IHRA examples can be read to say yes. The 3D test sits in the middle, depending on how each D is decided.
These are real disagreements. They are not the disagreements being litigated on cable news, in congressional hearings, or in deportation court.
The drafter of the IHRA definition has gone public against its current use
This is the part that I think most people do not know, and I think it changes the conversation.
Kenneth S. Stern was the lead drafter of the text that became the IHRA Working Definition. He directed the American Jewish Committee’s division on antisemitism and extremism for twenty-five years. He now runs the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. He is not a peace activist. He is the guy who wrote the thing.
In a 2019 op-ed in The Guardian, Stern wrote that Trump’s first executive order on antisemitism would “harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.”
In testimony to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2024, he wrote that his definition “had examples related to Israel because there was a correlation between such expressions and the level of antisemitism. But it was never intended to target or chill speech on a college campus.”
In a March 2025 interview with NPR, Stern said the Trump administration is “absolutely weaponizing antisemitism” in “a total assault on the university.”
That is the man whose definition is being applied. He thinks the application is wrong. The numbers back him up: a 2023 study by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies examined 40 cases between 2017 and 2022 in which UK university staff or students were accused of antisemitism under the IHRA definition. Thirty-eight of the forty accusations were dismissed.
Thirty-eight out of forty. That is not a definition catching antisemites. That is a definition-smearing criticism.
Why did this stop being abstract a year ago
In a different decade, this would be a debate confined to journals and conferences. It is not anymore. Three things converged.
The International Court of Justice case. On December 29, 2023, South Africa filed a case against Israel at the ICJ under the Genocide Convention. On January 26, 2024, the court found South Africa’s allegations plausible enough to indicate provisional measures, ordering Israel to take all measures available to it to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. South Africa filed its memorial in October 2024 (more than 750 pages of text, 4,000 pages of exhibits). Israel filed its counter-memorial in March 2026. The case is now in the merits phase.
The UN Commission of Inquiry. On September 16, 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, chaired by former International Criminal Court judge and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, released a 72-page report concluding that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza. The Commission found Israel had committed four of the five genocidal acts named in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Israel rejected the findings and called for the Commission‘s dissolution’.
The Trump executive orders. On January 29, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14188, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” reaffirming his 2019 Executive Order 13899. Together, these orders direct federal agencies to incorporate the IHRA definition into Title VI civil rights enforcement. Within months, the administration had canceled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University, opened Title VI investigations at sixty universities, and used the orders to detain and attempt to deport foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests.
The most visible of those students is Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and lead negotiator in the campus protests. ICE took him from his apartment building in Manhattan on March 8, 2025, with no warrant, on orders to revoke his student visa. When agents found out he was a lawful permanent resident, they revoked his green card instead. He was shipped 1,300 miles to a Louisiana detention facility. He spent 104 days in immigration jail and missed the birth of his first child. The government’s case rested on a memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio claiming Khalil’s presence posed “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” with no allegation of any crime.
“The only thing I am guilty of is speaking out against the genocide in Palestine, and this administration has weaponized the immigration system to punish me for it.” Mahmoud Khalil, March 2026.
That is a green card holder, married to a U.S. citizen, with a newborn American child, facing deportation for political speech. The mechanism is an executive order on antisemitism whose drafter has publicly disowned this exact use.
Where the loudest disagreement actually lives
I want to say this carefully, since it matters. The fight over whether criticism of Israel is antisemitism is not a fight between Jews and gentiles. It is, overwhelmingly, a fight between Jews and other Jews.
The Anti-Defamation League, the largest mainstream Jewish civil rights organization in the United States, has expanded its catalog of antisemitism since October 7, 2023, to include rallies that feature anti-Zionist chants and slogans. In June 2024, after a deliberation by hundreds of editors, the English-language Wikipedia community designated the ADL as an unreliable source for matters of antisemitism related to Israel and Zionism, citing what they called the ADL’s consistent labeling of legitimate political criticism of Israel as antisemitism.
Jewish Voice for Peace has filed amicus briefs in federal court arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism and that the federal government deciding what counts as a valid Jewish belief violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
J Street, Bend the Arc, T’ruah, IfNotNow, and the Nexus Project itself have all said publicly that recent ADL practice “blurs the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.”
Peter Beinart’s book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza won the 2026 PEN America/Galbraith Award for its argument that American Jewish institutions have placed the existence of a Jewish ethno-state above Jewish ethical traditions.
These are not fringe voices. These are mainstream Jewish writers, scholars, and organizations. Many of them have spent their lives doing the hard work of fighting actual antisemitism. They are saying, with their names attached, that the version of “antisemitism” being used against critics of the Israeli government is not the antisemitism they have spent their lives fighting.
What an honest version of this conversation looks like
Here is the line, as best I can draw it, based on sitting with all four definitions and the people who wrote them.
Criticizing the Israeli government’s policies is not antisemitism. It is a criticism of a government’s policies.
Holding any individual Jew responsible for the actions of the Israeli government is antisemitism, regardless of the politics of the Jew or the speaker. A Jewish student walking to class did not bomb Gaza.
Using classic antisemitic tropes (blood libel, dual loyalty, Jewish conspiracy, Jews secretly controlling the press or banks) to characterize Israel or Israelis is antisemitism. Old hate, dressed in new clothes, is still old hate.
Singling out Jewish institutions or Jewish individuals for protest, rather than the government whose policy is at issue, is antisemitism. A synagogue is not the Knesset.
That line cuts in both directions. It rules out a great deal of speech that has recently been cataloged as antisemitic: chants opposing Israeli policy, classroom assignments on settler colonialism, faculty letters questioning Israeli military conduct in Gaza. It rules in speech that has sometimes been excused as merely anti-Israel: a sign at a protest blaming “the Jews” for Gaza, a tweet caricaturing Jewish students as agents of a foreign government, an attack on a synagogue for what its members are presumed to think about a country thousands of miles away.
The same line that protects critics from being smeared protects Jews from being made into hostages for a foreign government’s policy. Both protections matter. Both populations need them.
Where I am writing from, and where this leaves us
I am a non-Jewish queer transgender Christian who came up in the Lutheran tradition in South Dakota. I am not the keeper of this argument. The Jewish writers, scholars, and organizers I cited in this essay are. I am writing in their margins, with their permission implicit in the fact that they have published their disagreements in public for me to read.
What I can say from outside the family argument is that the literature is unambiguous on the narrow question. Criticism of the Israeli government’s policies is not antisemitism. The frameworks designed to identify antisemitism say so. The original drafter of the most widely adopted of those frameworks says so. The disagreement concerns the harder cases, which deserve patient, honest, fine-grained reading. The political moment is making that harder, not easier.
The cost of getting this answer wrong falls in two directions, and both directions hurt.
If criticism of a foreign government becomes a hate crime by definition, the First Amendment shrinks for everyone, and the people most likely to be punished first are non-citizens, students, and members of minority faith and ethnic communities. That includes Jews who hold dissenting views, who are now being publicly read out of their own tradition by self-appointed gatekeepers.
If actual antisemitism gets diluted in a flood of mislabeled political speech, the word loses the weight it needs to carry when blood libel posters appear on a synagogue door, when a gunman walks into a Jewish community center, when neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville, chanting that Jews will not replace them. That dilution is a gift to actual antisemites. It is the worst possible thing for Jewish safety.
Defenders of Jewish life and defenders of Palestinian life have a shared interest in keeping the word antisemitism honest. They should be able to agree on that, even when they agree on nothing else.
I think the people who wrote the four definitions were trying, in their own ways, to do exactly that. I think the people now using one of those definitions to deport students, defund universities, and intimidate critics are not.
That distinction is the whole game.
If this resonated, the longer, fully cited research-paper version of this argument is available. Thanks for reading.
Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.