The claim that labeling anti-Zionism as antisemitism is an "Israeli government censorship tactic" collapses under the weight of basic institutional fact. The most widely adopted working definition of antisemitism in the democratic world was crafted not by Israel, but by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental body of 33 member states including the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Israel did not author it, did not control its adoption, and cannot unilaterally enforce it. To describe the definition as an Israeli censorship instrument is to fundamentally misrepresent how it was created, by whom, and why.

Crucially, the IHRA definition draws a clear and deliberate distinction between the two things the myth conflates. It explicitly states that "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic." What does qualify as antisemitism, under the definition's illustrative examples, is "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor." These are not the same thing. Criticizing Israeli settlement policy, military operations, or government decisions is entirely permissible and legally protected speech. Calling for the dissolution of the only Jewish state in the world — and doing so exclusively for the Jewish state while no other nation faces equivalent demands for abolition — is something categorically different.

The "anti-colonial" framing used to launder calls for Israel's elimination deserves direct scrutiny. Jewish people are the indigenous population of the Land of Israel, with archaeological, historical, religious, and genetic continuity in the region stretching back over three millennia. The United Nations itself, in General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947, recognized the right of the Jewish people to establish a state in their ancestral homeland — a recognition grounded in self-determination, the very principle anti-Zionists claim to champion. Invoking anti-colonialism to deny Jewish self-determination while championing it for every other people is not a coherent political position; it is a selective application of principle that targets Jews alone.

The Facts: What the IHRA Definition Actually Says

The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, adopted by consensus of its 33 member states on May 26, 2016, provides the democratic world's standard framework for identifying antisemitism. It has since been formally adopted by the United States State Department, the European Parliament, the United Kingdom government, and over 40 countries and hundreds of universities, local governments, and international organizations. The U.S. reinforced adoption through Executive Order 13899 (2019), signed under the Trump administration and reaffirmed under subsequent administrations.

• The IHRA definition explicitly protects criticism of Israeli government policy, stating that such criticism "cannot be regarded as antisemitic" when it mirrors criticism applied to other countries.
• The definition identifies as antisemitic: "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor."
• In March 2026, the University of California, Berkeley agreed to a $1 million legal settlement and policy overhaul that included adopting the IHRA definition, following a lawsuit over documented antisemitism on campus — demonstrating that U.S. courts and institutions increasingly treat anti-Zionist harassment as actionable discrimination.
• In July 2025, Columbia University adopted the IHRA definition under pressure from the U.S. federal government, which had frozen grants over documented failures to address antisemitism — again, a process entirely independent of the Israeli government.

Historical Context: Why This Myth Exists — and Why It Is Wrong

The rhetorical strategy of couching eliminationist anti-Zionism in the language of anti-colonialism is not new. It gained momentum at the 1975 United Nations General Assembly, which passed Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism — a resolution so intellectually discredited that the UN itself revoked it in 1991 (Resolution 46/86). The Soviet Union, which co-sponsored the 1975 resolution, did so as part of a Cold War propaganda campaign to delegitimize the Western-aligned Jewish state, not out of genuine concern for human rights. That ideological lineage — weaponizing anti-colonial rhetoric to single out Jewish self-determination for unique condemnation — runs directly through contemporary anti-Zionist movements.

Scholars of antisemitism have long documented what is sometimes called the "3D Test," developed by Israeli statesman and Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky: when rhetoric about Israel crosses into demonization, double standards, or delegitimization, it enters antisemitic territory regardless of how it is politically labeled. Calling for the abolition of the Jewish state — and only the Jewish state — satisfies all three criteria simultaneously. No serious academic framework treats the demand to dissolve a sovereign state and eliminate its people's national self-expression as ordinary political commentary.

The charge of "censorship" is equally baseless as a matter of legal and historical record. In every Western democracy where the IHRA definition has been adopted, it functions as a definitional guideline for identifying prejudice — not a criminal statute. No one in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, or France has been jailed, charged, or legally sanctioned solely for expressing anti-Zionist views. The definition enables institutions to recognize and address antisemitism; it does not — and cannot — function as a government gag order in any free society.

Conclusion: Why This Myth Is Dangerous

The myth being debunked here is not merely factually wrong — it is strategically constructed to create a false safe harbor for antisemitism. By insisting that calls for Israel's elimination are purely political speech immune from scrutiny, and by falsely attributing the IHRA definition to Israeli government manipulation, its proponents seek to pre-emptively delegitimize any institutional effort to identify and address hatred targeting Jewish people. The result, in practice, has been documented at universities across the United States and Europe: Jewish students subjected to harassment, exclusion, and intimidation under the protective banner of "anti-colonial" rhetoric.

The IHRA definition does not silence criticism of Israel — it never has. What it does is provide a principled framework, developed by the democratic international community, for distinguishing legitimate political debate from the targeting of Jewish people as a collective. That distinction matters. Democracies have a right and a responsibility to make it. Claiming that exercising this responsibility is censorship is itself a form of disinformation that the historical record — and the plain text of the definition itself — emphatically refutes.