Fifteen Israeli nongovernmental organizations, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, B’Tselem and Peace Now, issued an open letter in September stating their concern that the resolution, especially the IHRA definition, could be weaponized to “silence public dissent.”

This could also affect Jewish voices speaking out for Palestinian rights and opposing the occupation, they added. “Paradoxically, the resolution may therefore undermine, not protect, the diversity of Jewish life in Germany,” the letter argued.

• https://archive.is/iyARK

"The IHRA definition has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism, including in the US and Europe,” the letter said.

US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Israeli rights group B’Tselem, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) were among the signatories

The letter is the latest attempt by human rights advocates to urge the UN not to adopt the IHRA definition. In November, more than 120 scholars called on the world body to reject the definition, due to its “divisive and polarising” effect.

• https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/3/128-scholars-ask-un-not-to-adopt-ihra-definition-of-anti-semitism

In a statement published on Thursday, the 128 scholars, who include leading Jewish academics at Israeli, European, United Kingdom and United States universities, said the definition has been “hijacked” to protect the Israeli government from international criticism

• https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/3/128-scholars-ask-un-not-to-adopt-ihra-definition-of-anti-semitism

The drafter of what later became popularly known as the EUMC or IHRA definition of antisemitism,including its associated examples, was the U.S. attorney Kenneth S. Stern. However, in written evidence submitted to the US Congress last year, Stern charged that his original definition had been used for an entirely different purpose to that for which it had been designed. According to Stern it had originally been designed as a ”working definition” for the purpose of trying to standardise data collection about the incidence of antisemitic hate crime in different countries. It had never been intended that it be used as legal or regulatory device to curb academic or political free speech. Yet that is how it has now come to be used. In the same document Stern specifically condemns as inappropriate the use of the definition for such purposes, mentioning in particular the curbing of free speech in UK universities, and referencing Manchester and Bristol universities as examples. Here is what he writes:

The EUMC “working definition” was recently adopted in the United Kingdom, and applied to campus. An “Israel Apartheid Week” event was cancelled as violating the definition. A Holocaust survivor was required to change the title of a campus talk, and the university [Manchester] mandated it be recorded, after an Israeli diplomat [ambassador Regev] complained that the title violated the definition.[See here]. Perhaps most egregious, an off-campus group citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before. The university [Bristol] then conducted the inquiry. And while it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like. [square brackets added – GW]

• https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/why-the-man-who-drafted-the-ihra-definition-condemns-its-use/