Insidious Racism and the "Jerusalem Declaration" on Antisemitism

Originally published on 22 February 2022. Re-posted as a podcast February 2025

I was about 9 or 10 years old when my father taught me the dangers of insidious racism. We were travelling on one of the many flights we took between the USA and South Africa. I cannot recall the precise date, but it was around 1980 and apartheid was still in full swing. The exact details of the incident are hazy, but I recall that there was a black man at the airport and he had said something rude or done something wrong - I can't remember what but he had indeed done something. A white man was telling him off, and I remember that I briefly joined in, as of course, he had done something (I can't remember what).

The next thing I remember was my father taking me to one side and telling me to be quiet. Did I not understand what was really happening here? This black man had done something, but it was minor, the sort of thing you would point out and then move on. This white man was so exercised not because of what the black man had done. Rather, this was about race. The white man was just using this as an excuse to have a go at someone black. I should know better than to support such racist behaviour.

I felt so ashamed. It made me realise how hard we have to work at not being unconsciously racist when racism is normalised around us, as it was in those days.

It is easy to deal with explicit racism. When someone says disparaging things about black people, Jewish people, or whatever other group, we know what we are dealing with. But there is another kind of racism which is insidious and dares not speak its name, and this type is far more dangerous precisely because it is so subtle so that it finds itself at home in polite company. It expresses itself in patterns of behaviour and double standards which can be hard to notice when you are in an environment in which such behaviour is normalised.

So today on my Facebook feed, I noticed an article by David Feldman, promoted by the Guardian, on "What we are getting wrong in the fight against antisemitism in Britain". The article starts out as a reasonable enough discussion, but it quickly became clear that Mr Feldman is simply promoting the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (which he helped to write) as opposed to the IHRA definition. He argues that the Jerusalem Declaration is better because it helps to distinguish what sorts of criticism of Israel is actually antisemitic, and which is not.

So I took a good look at the Jerusalem Declaration. The main purpose of this declaration is to be an alternative to the IHRA definition, which, it is argued, is faulty because too many of the examples relate to Israel, and, there is a need "to protect a space for open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine."

So what is different about the Jerusalem Declaration? The key point is that the Jerusalem Declaration lists a set of examples of what is antisemitic talk about Israel, and also lists examples of what is not, they argue, antisemitic. In agreement with the IHRA definition they do say that antisemitic stereotypes to describe Israel or holding Jews responsible for the actions of the State of Israel are both antisemitic (point B6).

However, they differ markedly with IHRA on one particular point, to do with double standards. IHRA gives as an example "Applying double standards by requiring of [The State of Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation". By contrast, the Jerusalem Declaration claims as follows:

15. Political speech does not have to be measured, proportional, tempered, or reasonable to be protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and other human rights instruments. Criticism that some may see as excessive or contentious, or as reflecting a “double standard,” is not, in and of itself, antisemitic. In general, the line between antisemitic and non-antisemitic speech is different from the line between unreasonable and reasonable speech.

In other words, the white man who abused that black man at the airport after he did something minor was not being racist. It was a matter of opinion whether he was over-reacting because the black man did after all do something wrong. Who are we to assume that the actions of the white man are racist just because we feel he is being unreasonable and the man he is abusing happens to be black? The race of these people may just be a coincidence.

Of course, that would be an absurd argument because we know very well that in that airport the races of the actors were not a coincidence. This happened on a flight between the USA and South Africa during the heyday of apartheid. No one could view race as irrelevant in that interchange unless they were either blind, or a naïve child, or an apologist for racism.

We all understand that in situations of racism, context is everything. When people saw that video of George Floyd being murdered, they did not see just any cop abusing his power over just any man. They saw a white man abusing his power over a black man, in the context of a history of repeated similar incidents in which such abuses of power had been normalised. There was no way to prove conclusively that this specific incident was racist, but the incident reeked of racism - if you had any sense for racism, you could just smell it.

So how can the same people who understand so easily how normalised racist behaviour can lead to double standards applied to people based on skin colour, how can they not understand that antisemitism works the same way - that any kind of entrenched prejudice works that way?

People don't go around in polite company saying "Hi I hate Jews" any more than they go about saying "Hi I'm a racist". Instead they obsess over the "war crimes" of Israel, while not paying attention while other countries literally commit genocide. By engaging in repeated, abusive, disproportionate criticism of Israel, they are no different from that man in the airport and his abuse of that black man.

And this is the problem with the Jerusalem Declaration. It provides cover for antisemites by excusing insidious racism, when of course it is the insidious racism that always does the most damage precisely because it pretends to be respectable.