New anti-Semitism definition replaced EU version: US official

The new international definition of anti-Semitism that mentions Israel hatred was adopted in part to replace a similar one scrapped by the European Union, an initiator of the new text says.

Robert Williams, a delegate of the United States at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, tells JTA on Tuesday that his intergovernmental agency of 31 Western nations adopted its new definition of anti-Semitism last month partly as a response to the 2013 removal from the website of the EU’s anti-racism agency of a definition that also mentioned the demonization of Israel as an example of anti-Semitism.

“After that happened, we decided at IHRA to have discussions about adopting a definition, and the result was the adoption of a text very similar to the definition abandoned” by the European Union, Williams says.

Manifestations of anti-Semitism, the new definition reads, “might include the targeting of the State of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” though “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.”

Like the abandoned EU definition, the IHRA text also lists comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany as anti-Semitic.

— JTA