The bill would accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism.
Today I testified at a hearing in Trenton, New Jersey to the State Assembly and local government committee to oppose the adoption of Bill A3558 in New Jersey. The bill would accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism. The IHRA definition has been recognized by 35 states in the U.S., and New Jersey may soon become the 36th.
Posted here is the video with slight audio touch-ups, video editing and captions.
I am the former Pulitzer-prize winning Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times. I spent seven year covering the Middle East, including in Gaza and the West Bank. I am an Arabic speaker. During my time in the Middle East, I was based in Jerusalem and Cairo. I am also the author of 16 books and have taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and Rutgers University. I live in Princeton.
I strongly oppose A3558, which expands antisemitism’s definition to include most anti-Zionst expression for the purpose of civil rights law. This is a dangerous assault on free speech by seeking to criminalize legitimate criticism of Israeli policies.
The Trump administration’s campaign to ostensibly root out antisemitism on college campuses is clearly a trope to shut down free speech and deport non-citizens, even if they are here legally. This bill falsely collapses ethnicity with a political state. And let’s be clear, the brunt repression on college campuses was directed against students and faculty who opposed the genocide in Gaza, 3,000 of whom were arrested and hundreds of whom were censored, suspended, or expelled. Many of these students are Jewish. What about their rights? What about their constitutional protections?
I have had numerous relationships with Israeli journalists and political leaders. I knew, for example, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who negotiated the Oslo peace agreement. Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli ultranationalist who opposed the peace accord, stated bluntly that the occupation was not beneficial to Israel. Israeli colleagues frequently criticize Israeli policies in the Israeli press in language that would be defined as antisemitic by A3558.
For example, the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who served in the Israeli army and writes for the newspaper Haaretz, has called for sanctions to be imposed on Israel to stop the slaughter in Gaza, saying “Do to Israel what you did to South Africa.”
Omer Bartov, who served as an Israeli company commander in the 1973 war, is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He stated in an article on July 15 in The New York Times that his “inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
These kinds of statements, and many more I can quote from Israeli colleagues and friends, would see them under this bill criminalized as antisemites.
As someone who speaks and writes frequently about the conflict, I fear that any criticism I make of the Israeli government, although grounded in my long experience in the region, will make me a target if this measure is adopted.
It is imperative, especially with the press under attack from the Trump administration, that we do not erode our constitutionally protected speech and political expression.
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When the history of the genocide in Gaza is written, one of the most courageous and outspoken champions for justice and the adherence to international law will be Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, who today the Trump administration is sanctioning. Her office is tasked with monitoring and reporting on human rights violations that Israel commits against Palestinians.
Albanese, who regularly receives death threats and endures well-orchestrated smear campaigns directed by Israel and its allies, valiantly seeks to hold those who support and sustain the genocide accountable. She lambasts what she calls “the moral and political corruption of the world” that allows the genocide to continue. Her office has issued detailed reports documenting war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, one of which, called “Genocide as colonial erasure,” I have reprinted as an appendix in my latest book, “A Genocide Foretold.”
She has informed private organizations that they are “criminally liable” for assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide in Gaza. She announced that if true, as has been reported, that the former British prime minister David Cameron threatened to defund and withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, which Cameron and the other former British prime minister Rishi Sunak could be charged with a criminal offense for, under the Rome Statute. The Rome Statute criminalizes those who seek to prevent war crimes from being prosecuted.
She has called on top European Union (EU) officials to face charges of complicity of war crimes over their support for the genocide, saying that their actions cannot be met with impunity. She was a champion of the Madleen flotilla that sought to break the blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid, writing that the boat which was intercepted by Israel, was carrying not only supplies, but a message of humanity.
You can see the interview I did with Albanese here.
Her latest report lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as BlackRock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law, are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.
You can read my article on Albanese’s most recent report here.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned her support for the ICC, four of whose judges have been sanctioned by the U.S. for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant last year. He criticized Albanese for her efforts to prosecute American or Israeli nationals who sustain the genocide, saying she is unfit for service as a special rapporteur. Rubio also accused Albanese of having “spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.” The sanctions will most likely prevent Albanese from travelling to the U.S. and will freeze any assets she may have in the country.
The attack against Albanese presages a world without rules, one where rogue states, such as the U.S. and Israel, are permitted to carry out war crimes and genocide without any accountability or restraint. It exposes the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It reveals our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. No one, from now on, will take seriously our stated commitments to democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law or human rights. And who can blame them? We speak exclusively in the language of force, the language of brutes, the language of mass slaughter, the language of genocide.
“The acts of killing, the mass killing, the infliction of psychological and physical torture, the devastation, the creation of conditions of life that would not allow the people in Gaza to live, from the destruction of hospitals, the mass forced displacement and the mass homelessness, while people were being bombed daily, and the starvation — how can we read these acts in isolation?” Albanese asked in an interview I did with her when we discussed her report, “Genocide as colonial erasure.”
The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watchtowers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheide existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance, are as familiar to desperate migrants along the Mexican border, or attempting to enter Europe, as they are to Palestinians.
This is what awaits those who Frantz Fanon calls “the wretched of the earth.”
Those that defend the oppressed, such as Albanese, will be treated like the oppressed.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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