Racism definitions as instruments of mandatory zionism

[Quotes from this article from the SBS have been used in writing this post]

In the final chapter of The New Racial Regime, ‘Against Definitions’ I argued that faced with the adoption of instruments such as the IHRA working definition of antisemitism (IHRA-WDA), the last thing we should do is demand that institutions such as universities adopt definitions of other types of racism. Such demands represent a failure to understand the terms of ‘the war on antisemitism’.

Australia is currently mired in a Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion which is seeing a constant stream of astroturfed zionists equating discomfort at the sight of pro-Palestine protests with mortal fear for their future in this colony.

It is in this context that the federal government’s announcement that ‘Australian universities will be required to develop their own definitions of racism towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples under new national standards aimed at strengthening responses to racism on campus’ must be understood.

The politics of antisemitism definitions as tools for mandating zionism via their adoption into the policy of public institutions, including universities, state, and professional bodies such as, most recently in australia the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), are well-understood. As I expressed it in The New Racial Regime, the aim of mandating the IHRA-WDA is anything but dismantling antisemitism. Rather, its ‘role is to generate the antisemite the west requires for its own reproduction’ by displacing antisemitism from its European Christian roots and tying it to Arabs and Muslims (Palestinian in primis) and by extension anyone who resists zionism.

As a repressive tool, the IHRA-WDA’s role together with anti-hate legislation is to define zionism as a protected identity category thus fusing zionist and jewish, and effectively curtailing the right of antizionist Jews to protection under anti-discrimination and/or hate crimes legislation. However, this effect is secondary to the much more dangerous capacity it holds to criminalise antizionism which is naturalised as a racial property embodied by Arabs and Muslims.

It is important to understand the racialised symmetry of this transmutation of politics into identity: Zionist identity is naturalised in the Jewish body and opposed to antizionist as racially embodied by the Palestinian. I would argue additionally that there is a blurring of the boundaries of the identity category of antizionist that mirrors the zionist refutation of Palestinian identity, thus extending its categorial boundaries to Arabs in general. In the context of global Islamophobia, moreover, the importance of Islam as a driver of the resistance to Zionism and the racist identification of this form of anticolonial resistance with the “reactionary Islam” of Isis and Al Qaeda, allows these boundaries to be extended further still to incorporate Muslims as the longstanding internal and external enemies identified by the West as in need of containment and collective punishment by any means necessary. This is consistent with australian ‘counterterrorism’ and racism immigration and border politics going back to at least 2001, but with antecedents dating back to 1967 as is the case elsewhere.

The government’s declaration of ‘a new anti-racism standard’ in which ‘definitions of racism towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ must be developed is tied to the requirement upon universities to ‘adopt definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia’. The former, which reflects the findings of the Australian Human Rights Commission's Respect at Uni report (itself to be understood within the parameters of the ‘war on antisemitism’ - only the blatant hypocrisy led to the research design also including racism against other groups apart from Jews) which found that ‘81 per cent of First Nations respondents had experienced direct or indirect racism at university’, is a vehicle for the further imposition of what Ihab Shalbak calls ‘mandatory zionism’ across the institutions. As the SBS article cited here notes, the Australian Human Rights Commission did not conclude that the adoption of racism definitions was a necessary or adequate response to the gravity of the report’s findings:

It noted First Nations participants also expressed concerns about prescribing definitions without broader structural change.

In responding to the government’s announcement there should be no waivering. There is no ‘both and’ approach to be recommended here. Ceding any ground to the government’s agenda to install its Special Envoy on Antisemitism’s plan to install mandatory zionism across all institutions should be resisted. There is no world in which applauding the government’s admittance of the existence of racism against Indigenous people and Muslims (why not Africans?) can coexist with a critique of its actions against those who stand up for Palestine. These are mutually exclusive.

It is vital to recognise that the government’s employ of its zionist Special Envoy has nothing to do with the conspiratorial argument that it is succumbing to zionist (jewish power). Neither has it anything at all to do with any special concern with antisemitism (whatever way it is defined). Rather we can resume the problem in simple terms: Zionism = Australianism and vice versa (in fact Australianism precedes zionism). The opportunity to install mandatory zionism, ramped up following the Bondi killings, is primarily to further the settler colonial project whose exploitative and extractivist aims require the capacity to criminalise dissent. In this it is consistent with the foundational and ongoing murderous racialisation, criminalisation and immiseration of Indigenous people on which the persistence of white supremacist settler colonialism both here and in Palestine relies. For that reason it is extremely perverse to use anti-Indigenous racism as the vehicle for further mandating zionism as a tool of colonial repression.

It is now up to those of who are university workers to resist. However the clanking of dollars in the near-empty tin of research funding and the promise of higher earnings for those waiting in line to be tapped as university ‘antiracism champions’ do not bode well for that to be forthcoming. I would, however, like to be pleasantly surprised.