Distinguishing prejudice from political disagreement

This article is part of a debate. Read The one minority whose self-definition of prejudice is rejected by Adam Slonim.

Adam Slonim’s article on institutional resistance by organisations such as the ABC and SBS to adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism captures something many Australian Jews genuinely feel: that hostility directed at Zionism is often experienced not as abstract geopolitical disagreement but as hostility toward Jewish identity, belonging and security itself.

That emotional reality should not be dismissed. Since October 7, 2023, many Jews have experienced public discourse as frightening, exclusionary and destabilising. Slonim is right to insist that antisemitism can mutate, become coded, and emerge through political language rather than only through explicit racial slurs.

But the article ultimately rests on a conceptual move that deserves closer scrutiny.

Its argument is not simply that antisemitism sometimes appears within anti-Zionist spaces – which is clearly true. Rather, it can be read as implying that institutional resistance to expansive Zionism-linked understandings of antisemitism reflects a failure to accord Jewish concerns the same legitimacy granted to other minority communities. There is also a further implication: institutional caution risks being interpreted not merely as disagreement over definitions, but as contributing to an environment in which antisemitism flourishes. Yet this is a much stronger causal claim, and there is little evidence that disagreement over definitional frameworks itself produces antisemitic violence.

This is where the argument becomes less convincing.