When criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism

What it is

Three documents compete to answer this question, and they disagree with each other on exactly the point people fight about.

The oldest is Natan Sharansky's. Writing in the Jewish Political Studies Review in the fall of 2004, he proposed a three-part test, since known as the 3Ds. ¹ Demonization: when Israel's actions are "blown out of all sensible proportion," when Israelis get compared to Nazis and refugee camps to Auschwitz. ¹ Double standards: when criticism is "applied selectively," when Israel is singled out at the UN while major abusers are ignored. ¹ Delegitimization: when Israel's right to exist is denied, "alone among all peoples in the world." ¹ Sharansky's own framing is that the test exists to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism, which means the test presumes there is a great deal of the former. ¹

The most widely adopted is the IHRA working definition. Its core sentence is deliberately broad: antisemitism is "a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews," directed at Jewish or non-Jewish individuals, their property, and Jewish institutions. ² The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, then 31 member states including the United States, formally adopted it in 2016, building on a text an EU agency had published in 2005. ³ Attached are eleven illustrative examples. Several concern Israel: denying Jews the right to self-determination or calling Israel's existence a racist endeavor, applying standards to Israel not demanded of other democracies, using classic antisemitic imagery to characterize Israel or Israelis, comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, and holding Jews collectively responsible for what the Israeli government does. ² The same document also says: "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic." ²

The main rival is the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, released March 25, 2021, signed initially by 210 scholars and now more than 400. ⁴ Its core definition is narrower and more concrete: "discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)." ⁴ On Israel it agrees with IHRA more than the fight suggests. The JDA calls it antisemitic to apply classical antisemitic imagery to Israel, to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel's conduct, to demand that Jews condemn Israel as a condition of belonging, to assume diaspora Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own countries, and to deny Jews in Israel the right to exist and flourish. ⁴ Where it splits is on the boundary cases. The JDA holds that criticizing Zionism as a form of nationalism is not on its face antisemitic, that evidence-based criticism comparing Israel to settler-colonialism or apartheid is not, that boycott, divestment and sanctions are "commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest" and not inherently antisemitic, and that criticism which looks excessive or reflects a double standard is not automatically antisemitic either. ⁴

Sharansky treats a double standard as diagnostic. ¹ The JDA treats it as insufficient on its own. ⁴

Why it still matters

The strongest case for the IHRA approach is a set of numbers. In its 2024 audit, published April 22, 2025, the ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States, up 5% from 8,873 the year before and the highest total in the 46 years it has tracked them. ⁶ Assaults rose 21% to 196, vandalism 20% to 2,606. ⁶ Campus incidents hit 1,694, an 84% jump over 2023 and 18% of the national total, the highest share in the audit's history. ⁶ And 58% of all incidents contained elements related to Israel or Zionism, the first year a majority did. ⁶ A definition that declines to examine speech about Israel cannot account for most of what is being counted.

The strongest case against comes from Kenneth Stern, who was the lead drafter of the IHRA text, at the American Jewish Committee, and he has spent years arguing against how it is now used. ⁵ In written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 17, 2024, he said the definition's main purpose was to guide data collection on the temperature of antisemitism in Europe, and that it "was never intended to target or chill speech on a college campus." ⁵ Legally endorsing a binary, he told the committee, whether the UN's 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism or "its mirror image (that anti-Zionism is antisemitism)," harms democracy and Jews both, and is inappropriate for legislation. ⁵ He offers a test: would Congress adopt a definition of racism that included political examples, so that opposing affirmative action became a data point? ⁵ He notes that when the House passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, some members objected to the IHRA example about Jews killing Jesus, and one senator proposed striking it, which Stern reads as an admission that the bill reaches expression and belief. ⁵ He is, he says plainly, a Zionist. ⁵ His conclusion is that anti-Zionism is sometimes clearly antisemitic, sometimes clearly not, and sometimes simply unclear. ⁵

Our view, and it is only ours. Stern is right that the definition makes bad law and wrong that this makes it a bad definition. The 3Ds and the IHRA examples are excellent for the thing they were built for, which is looking at a pattern of speech and asking what it is doing. They are poor statutes, because a statute has to decide a case and these tests were designed to inform a judgment. The double-standard test in particular is powerful evidence and terrible proof: a person obsessed with one country is telling you something, but obsession is not a crime and a court cannot measure it.

The words you'll hear

The 3D test. Sharansky's 2004 framework: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization, each treated as an indicator that a given criticism of Israel has crossed into antisemitism. ¹

The IHRA working definition. The 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance text, plus eleven illustrative examples, several of them about Israel, adopted by governments and institutions worldwide and originating in a 2005 EU agency document. ^{2 3}

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA). A March 2021 alternative signed by scholars of antisemitism and related fields, defining antisemitism as hostility to Jews as Jews and explicitly listing forms of Israel criticism it does not consider antisemitic on their face. ⁴

Double standard. Judging Israel by rules not applied to other states. IHRA lists it as an illustrative example of antisemitism ²; the JDA holds that criticism reflecting a double standard is not, by itself, antisemitic. ⁴

Delegitimization. Denying Israel's right to exist as such, which Sharansky treats as antisemitic when Israel is singled out for that denial alone among peoples. ¹

Antisemitism Awareness Act. U.S. legislation that would attach the IHRA definition to federal enforcement, opposed by the definition's own lead drafter on the grounds that it targets expression and belief. ⁵