This event will premiere on this page at 2:00 p.m. EST, Wednesday, February 9. Register for the event here.
By denouncing and attempting to uniquely criminalize Jewish self-determination, Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel of apartheid has earned a place of dishonor in the annals of antisemitism. As an expression of the world’s oldest hatred, using well-known antisemitic tropes and imagery, the report certainly has a timeless quality—but it also has a regressive, anachronistic feel. It transports us back to the 1945 Arab League boycott of the yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-state Israel) and the infamous 1975 UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. This effort to turn back the clock is not unique to Amnesty International, which is simply channeling a major current in the thinking of the progressive left today. The Hudson Institute Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East believes that this has important implications for American foreign policy, the American Jewish community, and the Middle East, broadly speaking. We have assembled a distinguished international panel to analyze them as part of a series of planned events and publications on contemporary antisemitism across the American political spectrum.