How the JDA can and cannot advance Palestinian rights

The Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism is not, as some argue, ‘an Orientalist text’.

On April 21, before the latest escalation in violence in Israel-Palestine, Professor Mark Muhannad Ayyash offered a creative reading of the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism (JDA) on this website. He cherry-picked several phrases of this document to infuse it with opprobrium, hidden marginalisation, or assumed irrationality of Palestinians or pro-Palestinian political speech. When I read Professor Ayyash’s argument, I found myself wishing that he had been, to use the oft-quoted line from the musical Hamilton, “in the room where it happened”. My personal experience as one of the 20 people who debated and helped draft the JDA affirms that our explicit intent belies any effort to subtly lace our work with orientalist assumptions or demean Palestinian or other political perspectives. At the same time, among the JDA’s diverse proponents, even those who decry the challenging conditions and gross power inequities that Palestinians face, recognise that our document can’t do much to help. This is because the JDA is meant to be useful specifically to foster clarity around the meaning of anti-Semitism in order to help combat ongoing challenges of that particular form of bigotry. When read as designed in its interconnected entirety, the JDA seeks in part to deter the weaponisation of the important struggle against anti-Jewish prejudice against open and robust speech related to Palestine-Israel.