It was the new phenomenon of Israel-focused antisemitism that required the new definition of antisemitism. David Hirsh responds to a recent ‘call to reject’ the IHRA

40 UK-based Israeli academics, broadly from the anti-Zionist left, have issued a ‘call to reject’ the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. David Hirsh, author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism, reviews and rejects their arguments here. He points out that the phenomenon of contemporary antisemitism came before, and required, the definition: ‘The IHRA highlights the possibility of antisemitism which is related to hostility to Israel because that is a significant part of the antisemitism to which actual Jewish people are subjected in the material world, as it exists’. Calls to reject the definition, he argues, are ‘not concerned with the constructive work of describing and opposing antisemitism,’ but only with ‘the purely negative work of rejecting efforts to do so’. Too often that negative work gives succor to some of the core ideas of contemporary antisemitism.