By Tal Fortgang
Monday, March 16, 2026
In the ongoing battle against American Jews and
supporters of the Jewish state, a clever polemical and legal strategy in Canada
is now migrating south of the border. The developers of this new front claim it
is a fight against “anti-Palestinian racism,” or APR. They aim to reorient how
all of us in the West talk, and therefore think, about the Middle East. They
argue that hostility toward “Palestinian identity” is a direct threat to
Muslims and Arabs that needs to be identified and stamped out.
APR was first formally described in a 2022 Arab Canadian
Lawyers Association (ACLA) report. The report declares APR a form of racism
that “silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes
Palestinians or their narratives.” Combatting this supposed evil requires
“naming and framing APR as a form of racism and understanding it through the
lens [of] settler-colonialism.” They do not want there to be “a formal
definition” of anti-Palestinian racism. Rather, institutions are to be directed
to prohibit broad swaths of speech not currently covered by antidiscrimination
regimes as part of “a fluid, contextual, and adaptable” framework. These
include “the justification of violence against Palestinians, failing to
recognize the indigeneity of Palestinians, erasing the human dignity of
Palestinians, excluding Palestinians and allies, and attempting to defame
them.”
An American nonprofit called the Institute for the
Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism is now bringing this program to the
United States, following in the footsteps of Canadians for Justice and Peace in
the Middle East (CJPME). The American group has elaborated on the list of
unacceptable ideas to include “denying the settler-colonization of Palestine;
appropriating the culture…of Palestinians without acknowledgment…and denying
their right to return” to Israel.
In Canada, this language is already creeping into
university policies and public-sector standards. In the U.S., acceptance of
APR’s premises is emerging through nonprofits and unions demanding that
schools, employers, and civil rights agencies adopt APR toolkits and treat
“anti-Palestinian” expression as a form of discrimination.
The inspiration for this tactic could not be more ironic.
For the past decade, Jewish advocacy groups have worked strenuously to
come up with a clear and inarguable definition of anti-Semitism—especially as
regards its relation to anti-Zionism—that is sensitive to free speech and civil
rights concerns. Groups like the International Holocaust Remembrance
Association (IHRA) have sought to put institutions on notice that anti-Semites
seek to hide behind euphemisms and use false rhetorical fronts to engage in
acts of anti-Jewish discrimination. In legislation and elsewhere, their work is
designed to differentiate constitutionally protected political speech from
legally prohibited harassment. Thus, IHRA explicitly distinguishes between
criticism of Israel, which is political speech, and “denying the Jewish people
their right to self-determination,” which is not.
The activists and groups whose methods and tactics are
being questioned have tried to claim that the IHRA definition “risks chilling
constitutionally protected speech by incorrectly equating criticism of Israel
with anti-Semitism,” in the words of the American Civil Liberties Union. That
can be correct only if the ACLU believes that the word “criticism” applies to
any and all negative expression, which of course it does not. And even
if it did, that’s no reason to oppose the IHRA definition in particular. It
would seem to require opposing antidiscrimination laws in general. When it
comes to universities, for example, existing civil rights law establishes
consequences for institutions that allow students and faculty to use epithets
in ways that create a severely hostile environment—even though doing so
necessarily chills, or even prohibits, speech that our government cannot constitutionally
punish. This is something the ACLU could stand against, but it doesn’t, and
wouldn’t dare to. The only real question is whether a definition of
anti-Semitism ends up functioning as a regulation on speech based on inaccurate
analysis, in vague ways, or in an overbroad fashion. The IHRA language is
crafted to chart a careful course through this constitutional thicket.
In the end, APR advocates oppose the IHRA definition even
as they are seeking to promulgate their own bizarro version of it. For example,
they are attempting to entrench the infamous equation that “Zionism is racism”
by making it an inviolable orthodoxy.
Now, some APR provisions are justifiable, since they
label speech as discriminatory that is arguably already protected by civil
rights law, like “justifying violence against Palestinians.” (Of course, if
justifying violence against a protected group is per se harassment, Israeli
plaintiffs should have a field day against every group chanting “resistance is
justified when people are occupied” and the like.)
But APR goes much further. It says that any effort at
“denying the Nakba or Palestinian historical experiences”—“Nakba” being the
term used by Palestinian advocates to describe the founding of Israel in 1948
and the flight from the territory by Palestinians to other lands in the
region—is inherently discriminatory. So too would be speech or language that
“erase[s] their human dignity” and “exclude[es] Palestinians and their allies
from discourse.” Then there are provisions that incorporate contested political
views, such as “refusing to recognize Palestinians as an Indigenous people with
collective rights,” or even “defaming Palestinians and advocates as
antisemitic, violent, or anti-democratic.” Chanting about Hamas coming to kill
the Jews? That’s fine. Condemn the chants for lionizing anti-Semitic violence?
Under APR, that’s a problem.
APR therefore does exactly what opponents of IHRA claim
its definition of anti-Semitism does. It uses exceptionally vague terminology
to chill pro-Israel speech. It seeks to rig the game against the pro-Israel
position by forcing institutions to ban speech about the history of Palestinian
violence, anti-Semitism, and kleptocracy from discussions of the conflict, even
though the story of the last century cannot be told without those elements. It
further stacks the deck by smuggling in the Palestinian propaganda narrative as
fact: that Arabs are the only people “indigenous” to the Levant and that they,
not the Jews, have an exclusive “collective right” to be sovereign. It thereby
criminalizes the pro-Israel position.
While IHRA and other good-faith attempts to define
anti-Semitism try to distinguish between political speech and discriminatory
harassment, APR is an exercise in collapsing those distinctions. That threatens
the free exchange of ideas as IHRA never could, of course. Worse, it hijacks
civil rights law for deployment in the global assault against Israel and the
Jews.
Perhaps most galling of all, it seeks to exploit
well-intentioned lawmakers who struggle to see why it could ever be a bad thing
to expand the protection of civil rights law. APR benefits from a superficially
appealing both-sidesism likely to sway decision-makers who fancy themselves
both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. If some forms of speaking harshly about
Israel constitute anti-Semitism, surely some forms of negative speech about the
“other side” in the conflict are likewise discriminatory, right? And who are
non-Palestinians to decide which forms rise to that level? Organized
representatives of the Palestinian diaspora claim that APR traditionally takes
the form of accusing Palestinians of violence and anti-Semitism. Who has
standing to disagree?
Perhaps due to this appeal, APR has made quick inroads
despite its novelty and overbreadth. Toronto’s school board adopted the
definition. Canadian courts have legitimized APR by validating “each side” of
the battle between “Jews and Palestinians,” each “feel[ing] that it is the
victim of either antisemitism or anti-Palestinian racism.” The definition
sneaks into the discourse with each use of the term—and each false equivalence
between the massive spike in already-common anti-Semitic violence and small increases
in already-rare attacks against Arabs and Muslims.
In the U.S., APR is infiltrating primarily through the
education sector. The Massachusetts Teachers Association, which boasts 117,000
members, held a webinar on APR that devolved into Holocaust minimization and
blaming Israel for the Hamas attack on October 7. The federal Department of
Education has at least nine civil rights investigations ongoing in response to
accusations of APR. Such claims are made alongside accusations of ethnic or
national-origin discrimination, and under our laws and regulations, investigations
are mandatory in the civil-rights-enforcement process. But the blithely
asserted equivalence between anti-Zionist anti-Semitism and APR is becoming
impossible to miss. In a recent settlement with students alleging pervasive
anti-Semitism, for instance, Pomona College touted its “framework” for
responding “to other types of shared-ancestry discrimination, such as
anti-Palestinian racism.”
At San Diego State University, a University Senate
resolution submitted by the DEI chair incorporated APR while in the same breath
“reject[ing] the…IHRA definition of antisemitism” in the name of “academic
freedom.” We will soon be told that our civil rights law cannot possibly
distinguish between anti-Semitism and political speech—but that all speech
about the Middle East that does not call for Israel’s elimination violates
antidiscrimination law.
***
APR advocates are clear that they want this new category
to serve as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. The prime example on the
website of the chief American lobbying group for APR retells the story of the
encampments at Columbia University. “Instead of supporting their students’
attempts to end violence and human rights abuses, Columbia University officials
reacted with racism,” goes the case study. “They deemed peaceful protestors as
inherently ‘threatening’ and called the police to arrest and forcibly remove
students.” It considers this APR par excellence.
The revisionism says it all. In reality, Columbia
dithered for more than a month when it came to removing the encampment—and
allowed further takeovers of school buildings and destruction of property. It
did not expel anyone involved in the debacle. And when it finally did get its
act together, it removed the tents for violating school rules against
encampments. There was not the slightest bit of discrimination against the
anti-Israel demonstrators; if anything, they were treated with kid gloves. But
continuing the tradition of Palestinian maximalism from Yassir Arafat to today,
the activists behind APR condemn Columbia for “racism” because the school did
not immediately capitulate to the rule-breakers’ demands. They met Columbia’s
kindness with further hostility.
Analysts of terrorism will recognize the logic at play
here. Break laws, make life miserable for the population you are looking to
influence, and tell them you will only stop if your demands are met. If your
target signals that they can be cowed—and Columbia and its peers have certainly
sent that message—escalate the assault. In this case, that includes calling
Columbia’s begrudging enforcement of its own rules “racist,” probably the worst
thing for a university to be. The threats will continue until morale improves.
It’s no coincidence that the APR movement embraces the
logic of terrorism while seeking to prohibit honest assessment of the
centrality of terrorism to the Palestinian cause. Its stewards, especially in
Canada, are inveterate terrorist sympathizers, glorifiers, and PR
professionals. Established in 2002, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the
Middle East has a checkered history and leadership. Its president, Yara
Shoufani, is the daughter of an elementary school teacher suspended from her
job for giving a pro-terrorism speech in 2016. Shoufani is on record glorifying
terrorism repeatedly, even in support of the October 7 massacres. She is a
longtime organizer and media liaison for the Palestinian Youth Movement, which
holds an annual terror-celebration conference and is under investigation for
conspiring to disrupt the American military’s production of fighter jets.
CJPME has also been identified as a key Canadian front
for Samidoun, which the Canadian government (in conjunction with the U.S. and
some European states) deemed a sham charity raising funds for the designated
terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
After Samidoun was designated a terror-supporting entity, CJPME led a
letter-writing campaign to Canadian lawmakers urging them to “retract the
terror designation against Samidoun.”
Meanwhile, Samidoun’s “international coordinator,”
Charlotte Kates, went to Tehran to accept the “Islamic Human Rights and Human
Dignity Award.” Two other awardees included Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh—who received
the award posthumously—and the general secretary of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Kates dedicated her award to six convicted Palestinian terrorists.
The other leader of Samidoun, Khaled Barakat, told
Iranian state TV in 2022 that “Palestinian armed resistance in particular today
represents Palestinians, and it is the legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people.”
Alongside its APR efforts, CJPME continues to advocate
the removal of Samidoun’s sanctions in Canada. In logic and aims, what presents
itself as a civil rights movement is little more than another front in the
terrorist war against Israel and global Jewry.
***
The great challenge in fending off APR as it gains
momentum will be expressing why it is not simply an analogue to IHRA and
similar attempts to define anti-Semitism. Pointing out that APR does all the
bad things IHRA is accused of will have some legs, but that might take IHRA
down with the ship. How to get IHRA into law and keep APR out? Lawmakers
reluctant to scrutinize groups’ “lived experiences” of discrimination will
likely throw up their hands and say that if Jews are going to get broad
protections against anti-Israel speech, Palestinians deserve an equal and
opposite protection. Ultimately the argument will boil down to a fundamental
asymmetry between Jewish and Palestinian identity, as each pertains to the Holy
Land.
The claim that anti-Zionism is tantamount to
anti-Semitism rests on a few facts about Jews’ self-conception and history. It
is the one movement dedicated to the elimination of an existing sovereign
state—which just so happens to be Jewish. But more than that, contemporary
anti-Zionism, as distinct from arguments that Israel should exist with
different borders or different policies, holds that Jews have zero legitimate
connection to the land and therefore no claim to sovereignty over even an inch
of it.
That is a very aggressive position. To buttress it,
academics and activists have relied on two tools. The first is a manipulation
of the idea of “indigeneity” to exclude the Jews. As the critic Adam Kirsch has
explained, rather than assigning indigeneity to a group or groups who first
possessed a territory, the term now refers to “a moral and spiritual status,
associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom.”
Assigning such status to Arabs is simply a form of ethno-religious supremacy
laundered into highfalutin babble. APR does just that when its adherents
describe their goals as reversing “the systemic oppression of Palestinians as
an indigenous people whose lands have been taken and occupied by settlers.”
The second is to claim that Jews might have some historic
claim to the land of Israel, but that today’s Jews are not the same Jews. When
anti-Israel activists claim that Israel is a settler-colonial state, which is
central to APR’s program, they assert that Jews originated in Europe, and that
is where they should go “back.” Jews, in this anti-history, are white Europeans
(or, bizarrely, descendants of a ninth-century group of Khazari converts to
Judaism) who have either maliciously faked or exaggerated their connection to
the ancient Israelites to displace Palestinians from their ancestral homeland.
Perhaps the “real” Israelites disappeared—or converted to Islam. Whatever it
is, the Jews aren’t who they claim they are.
These conspiratorial claims cut to the heart of Jewish
identity. Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and other Jewish intra-ethnic groupings (such
as the Jews who have lived in Greece and Rome since before the birth of Christ)
have a shared history. Our annual ritual cry of “next year in Jerusalem” on the
holiday of Passover does not simply assert the Jewish connection to Zion; it
unites Jews around the world in a shared aspiration. Our languages may vary,
our ethnicity too, and even our rituals may contain relatively large
differences. What makes us all Jews is that we, like our Torah, came from Zion,
and we hold a common aspiration to return. For Zionist Jews and unwitting
anti-Zionist Jews alike, the Jewish connection to the Holy Land is integral to
national identity. Denying our presence there millennia ago (and continuously
to the present day) rips the heart out of the Jewish self-conception—and calls
us malicious liars in the process. Indigeneity is a stupid concept in the best
of circumstances; wielding it to deny Jews any claim to Israel is
stupidity in service of discrimination.
Contrast this to Palestinian Arab identity, which
crystallized only in the 1960s. The first formal claim of Palestinian national
identity came in 1964, with the formation of the Palestine Liberation
Organization—after Israel’s founding in 1948 but before its territorial
expansion in 1967.
The timing raises eyebrows and further questions, some
uncomfortable. What makes a person in or around the historic territory of
Palestine a Palestinian? Jews, Jordanians, and Israeli Arabs are not
Palestinians. The term does not refer to persons descended from people who
lived in British Mandate Palestine; if it did, the necessary conclusion would
be that there already is a Palestinian state—called Israel. It is not defined
as a lack of Israeli citizenship; otherwise Jordanian Arabs would be Palestinians,
too. Nor does it mean an Arab living in the territory once called Palestine;
Israeli Arabs don’t count. Nor can it have anything to do with living in the
territories Israel conquered from Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in 1967, since the
term was invented before then and is used to demand a “right of return” for
Arabs displaced in 1948-49 from present-day Israel.
What is it to be Palestinian, then? It is, as its early
popularizers were happy to explain, an Arab whose identity is defined by
wanting to destroy Israel. It is the ethno-political fusion of non-Jewish
Levantine ancestry with anti-Zionism.
The Egyptian-American analyst Hussein Aboubakr Mansour
has been one of few scholars willing to state this conclusion plainly. That it
takes an Arab to articulate what is clear to see is unsurprising. Polite
Westerners and Jews consider the notion of discussing constitutive elements of
foreign national identities daunting and rarely worth the payoff. Doing so to
legitimize Jewish civil rights while eschewing the universalist mentality of
protection for all, further, is quite distasteful. It appears to be a violation
of profound liberal commitments, including the equal treatment of all people
before law. But it appears that way, as Mansour deftly explains, only because
the concept of “identity” obscures crucial differences between the Jewish
connection to Zion and the Palestinian connection to Palestine. “The most
central problem of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” he writes, is that “the
absolute and final negation of Zionism, by any means necessary, [i]s the
central ideological content of the Palestinian identity and its symbols.”
There is a stark asymmetry between Zionism and
anti-Zionism. Zionism holds that a Jewish state should exist in the Levant,
though not to the exclusion of a non-Jewish state—clearly. It is minimalist and
rooted in shlilat ha–golah, negating the exile, by granting Jews
self-determination within their ancestral lands. Anti-Zionism, by contrast, is
definitionally opposed to the existence of a Jewish state. It is maximalist and
rooted in reversing the Nakba, the failed Arab attempt to destroy Israel in
1948. This is why Jewish Israelis continue to offer two-state solutions and
peace plans, and why Palestinians cannot accept them. And it is precisely that
honest assessment that APR seeks to prohibit.
Yet it is neither compassionate nor intellectually honest
to give APR an inch. Rather, as Mansour argues, “perhaps the most merciful and
responsible course is for the Palestinian identity—as a state-bound ambition—to
be gently laid to rest.… The cost of perpetuating a vision that repeatedly
descends into cruelty is too high.” It does so not out of boiling frustration
or the inequities of uneven Western civil rights regimes, but because it is an
identity “written in blood,” as the old PFLP slogan goes. Those who “genuinely
care about the lives of Palestinians, Israelis, and their neighbors,” writes
Mansour, should let Palestinians be Arabs again: “Walk away from the fantasy of
‘Palestine’ and offer every real opportunity for inclusion and a dignified
future elsewhere.”
The inapt comparison between IHRA and APR reveals an even
greater irony: While Zionism is called a political movement and Palestinianism
an ethnic heritage, the opposite is closer to the case. The Jewish relation to
the Holy Land is essential and ethno-religious; the ethnic story of the Jews
makes no sense without the land. Palestinians’ relationship to the land is
essentially political; what makes them Palestinian is that they need all the
land. Perhaps that is why APR advocates describe what they seek to prohibit as
anything that “defames…Palestinians or their narratives” or even its
“allies.” They are trying to erect a force field around a political view—the
very accusation they level against Zionists—that just so happens to have ethnic
bigotry at its core.
We may wish there were a rough parallelism rooted in
“nobody’s perfect” that leaves room for moderation and outward signs of
empathy. But the truth is that, in this conflict, there are not two equivalent
sides. There are two people with claims to the land; one has control, right of
first possession, and has been willing to compromise nonetheless. The other has
neither the right of might nor the might of right, yet defines itself by its
very identity as eliminationist.
The charade of false equivalence helps no one and nothing
except the Western liberal conscience, the terrorists waging a long war against
the Jewish state, and sham NGOs that exploit the former to support the latter.
And the growing specter of APR, the evil approaching stealthily from the north,
makes explicating the charade an urgent and unavoidable task.
