Rebecca Ruth Gould, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and author of Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2020), discusses the political reframing of “antisemitism” by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) which tailored a new definition designed specifically to silence criticism of both Zionism and the state of Israel. Recalling how she was caught within the radar of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism in 2017 while an academic at the University of Bristol for a short article she had written years earlier, Gould analyses how the IHRA definition has very clear implications far beyond Israel and Palestine, even to the extent that it exists as a quasi-law that is treated as law while never having gone through any kind of democratic parliamentary vetting process. Moreover, Gould observes how the IHRA definition of antisemitism basically set out to define what we can and cannot say about Israel while also serving to foreshadow how free speech on Palestine would be persecuted for the following decade. Considering the language of mass starvation and famine within the media, Gould confirms how the famine of the Holodomor, in a 1933 New York Times piece, was narrated in an eerily similar way to how the famine in Gaza is currently represented. Articulating how “Never again” has never really been true, given the numerous genocides since the Holocaust, Gould describes how older generations have internalised the state-based nationalist “Holocaust memories” which have blinded them from seeing, much less understanding, that Israel is currently carrying out a genocide of Palestinians.

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