Good News From Down Under

Australian Supreme Court rules (like every other court in the world should) that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, is not anti-Jewish, and is a perfectly legitimate expression, held by many, including Jews. Many of those people are clearly not anti-Semitic.

Key Concepts

1) Israel is not the Jewish people. It is a country, and does not represent or symbolize the Jewish people. It represents only itself. Opposing Israel does not constitute any opposition to the Jewish people.

QUOTE:

The state of Israel cannot be equated with the Jewish people:

Disparagement of Israel is not antisemitic in the accepted sense of the term firstly because the Jewish people, who as a whole are the object of antisemitism, are not coextensive with or in any sense equivalent to the state of Israel. The world’s total population of Jews is approximately 15.8 million. About half of that number are members of minority communities in the populations of many countries, including Australia. Israel’s population accounts for only the other half the world’s Jews and includes about 1.6 million Palestinian Arabs.

Israel is a nation state, the product of the Zionist movement that began in the late 1800s. The openly stated objective of Zionism, at least from early in the 20th Century, was the establishment of a state in Palestine with demographic Jewish dominance. On 29 November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181 concerning partition of Palestine. The inception of Israel was declared from 15 May 1948. It achieved demographic Jewish dominance during that year and into 1949 by forcible expulsion of 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from the territory of which it took control and by the demolition of over 500 of their villages. Those events are uncontroversially established in extensive historical literature, much of it compiled by professional Israeli and other Jewish historians, drawing upon Israeli and British archives.

The Jewish people, an entire group spread around the globe and identified by their common faith and culture, are distinct from Israel, a state comprising a localised population in a small territory (the borders of which have never been declared by Israel), living under a constitutional legal structure applicable only to that population. The Jewish people are not a political or juridical entity capable of adopting or carrying out policies in the name of the whole. Israel, as a state, is such an entity: it adopts policies and takes unified action to implement them.

As objects of possible hostility or prejudice, the Jewish people and the state of Israel are in every material respect different things. Logically, conceptually and empirically, hostility or prejudice towards Israel cannot be equated to hostility or prejudice towards the Jewish people.

2) The so-called IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism is ridiculous.

QUOTE:

The IHRA core text is so verbose and imprecise that it could not realistically be attributed to the ordinary, reasonably informed member of the Australian public ...

Discussion of the IHRA wording and adoption of it by some institutions does not change the established meaning of a word that has been in use in the English language for 150 years. The IHRA formulation propounds a concept different from that which “antisemitism” has long been understood to describe and appropriates that word to the novel concept.

3) Zionism is an ideology and can be opposed; Israel is a state and can be opposed. The fact that Zionists consider Zionism part of their "identity" (whatever that means) doesn't change people's rights to oppose any ideology or state that they choose.

QUOTE:

As an ideology of Jewish nationalism, Zionism is open to political discussion and criticism, notably on grounds concerning the rights of the Palestinians. It may well be correct that “most, but not all Jewish Australians” regard Zionism as “a core part of their Jewish identity”. That does not mean that anti-Zionists are hostile to that majority of Jews on account of their Jewishness; only that they hold a negative view of a political ideology with which the majority of Jews have chosen to identify. A contestable political question does not lose its political character upon a large proportion of a particular confessional group taking one side of the issue and feeling that it is closely associated with their religious identity. Further, the words “most, but not all” are important. How can disparagement of Zionism be hostile or prejudiced towards Jews as Jews when it is only “most, but not all” Jews who support the ideology, with whatever degree of fervour?

4) THE FACT THAT THERE ARE ANTI-ZIONIST JEWS MEANS THAT ZIONISM CANNOT BE ANTISEMITIC.

QUOTE:

How can disparagement of Zionism be hostile or prejudiced towards Jews as Jews when it is only “most, but not all” Jews who support the ideology, with whatever degree of fervour?

Download the doc:
https://www.caselaw.nsw.gov.au/decision/1a00e6b4787e30be37fd7ccd#