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.

Criticism of Indigenous people, Muslims or LGBTQ Australians is not structurally equivalent to criticism of Zionism, Israel or nationalism. One concerns vulnerable identity groups. The other concerns a political ideology, a nation-state and a historically contested project of sovereignty deeply entangled with war, displacement and competing historical claims. It also involves the complex relationship between Zionism and Jewish identity itself.

That distinction matters enormously, although we should also recognise that some extreme actors make little or no distinction between Jews and Zionists in their rhetoric or violence. Antisemitic attackers and extremists often collapse these categories entirely, treating Jews collectively as responsible for Israel or Zionism. But that is not the issue under discussion here. The question is not how extremists think; it is whether institutions, definitions and public debate should adopt narrow interpretive frameworks that risk increasingly collapsing some forms of anti-Zionism into antisemitism itself.

Throughout the article, Slonim narrows the conceptual distance between hostility toward Jews, hostility toward Zionism, opposition to Israel and criticism of Israeli state power. These categories can overlap, but they are not inherently identical, and democratic societies depend upon preserving distinctions between hatred directed at Jews as Jews, and disagreement over political projects or state actions.

Once not only political Zionism, but also its historical expressions and contemporary consequences, become treated as inseparable from every aspect of Jewish identity itself, criticism increasingly risks being interpreted not as disagreement over a political project but as hostility toward Jewish existence.

To be clear, Slonim is right that many Jews experience attacks on Zionism as emotionally threatening. Attacks on Zionism are sometimes historically simplistic and morally reductive, treating it as uniquely malignant among modern national movements. Such rhetoric can overlook the historical circumstances from which Zionism emerged: centuries of statelessness, exclusion and persecution culminating in the Holocaust. For most of us, Zionism emerged not as an abstract colonial doctrine but as a response – however contested — to profound historical insecurity.

But recognising this complex relationship does not mean anti-Zionism as such is inherently antisemitic.

Intense criticism of Israel today may also arise from multiple motivations operating simultaneously – moral outrage at civilian suffering, anti-war commitments, selective political attention and, in some instances, genuine antisemitism. Treating these as a single phenomenon risks oversimplification.

Perhaps most importantly, Slonim appears to give insufficient attention to alternative explanations for institutional hesitation toward expansive interpretations of the IHRA working definition. His article tends to assume that resistance reflects an unwillingness to listen to Jews or take Jewish concerns seriously.

Yet the argument moves further than that. It implies that anything short of adopting a particular Zionism-linked understanding of antisemitism undermines the "moral seriousness" with which Jewish rights are treated.

The IHRA working definition was originally developed as a practical guidance instrument intended to help institutions recognise contemporary forms of antisemitism, rather than as a prescriptive standard through which institutional legitimacy itself would be judged.

Institutions may hesitate not because they discount Jewish concerns, but because they are attempting – however imperfectly – to navigate difficult boundaries between protecting minority communities and preserving legitimate democratic disagreement.

Australian Jewish Democratic Society (AJDS) correspondence with the ABC Managing Director in 2020 suggested a substantial awareness of Jewish concerns and of the complexities institutions face in navigating highly contested issues. Organisations such as the ABC must also respond to competing complaints and claims from supporters of Palestine who perceive bias in the opposite direction.

Alternative frameworks emerged because many scholars – including Jewish scholars deeply concerned about antisemitism – worried that political disagreement over Israel could too easily become collapsed into racism. Critics also warn that highly prescriptive approaches risk creating a climate in which disagreement itself becomes interpreted as evidence of prejudice, narrowing the space for legitimate debate.

The strongest parts of Slonim’s article are those describing Jewish fear, alienation and vulnerability. Those experiences deserve serious attention.

However, if demonstrating moral seriousness toward Jewish rights becomes contingent upon accepting one particular interpretive framework linking Zionism and antisemitism, disagreement over political ideas risks being transformed into evidence of prejudice itself. That would have profound implications for democratic life, academic freedom and the capacity of societies to distinguish prejudice from political disagreement.