I wasn’t on Concordia University campus on November 8 of last year — when Jewish student groups honoring the Israeli hostages were accosted by students selling keffiyehs at a different table, erupting into a Jew-hatred frenzy — but I spent my final year at Concordia University sitting in Judaic Studies and Human Rights courses alongside students with keffiyehs on their shoulders and artsy “Viva La Intifada” stickers on their MacBook Airs. I got through it. 

Even when a guy stormed into my convocation ceremony and waved around a Palestinian flag screaming, “Concordia, you have blood on your hands,” I got through it. 

When this school year began, I was less than shocked but nevertheless appalled by the walk-out that happened on campus on September 25, 2024. That same day, I was sent an article from The Varsity, the University of Toronto’s student newspaper, published the day before. 

The op-ed entitled: “Gertler rightly rejects request to implement IHRA definition of antisemitism,” discussed a parliamentary meeting that happened back in May with the presidents of my alma mater along with University of Toronto, McGill University, and University of British Columbia.

The author, Oleskii Varlamov, criticized Liberal MP Anthony Housefather’s questioning during the House of Commons session, especially regarding the universities’ potential implementation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

Varlamov’s main concern is that the IHRA definition: “conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism with each other,” holding that “labelling Israel’s statehood as a racist endeavour in no way denies Jewish people the right to self-determination, given that Israel is a state that denies Palestinian sovereignty.”

When Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism, spoke at the Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal this past Monday, she traced the path of how human rights has become the prevailing lens through which the world is understood. 

That Israel is seen as the antithesis of human rights is a worldview that’s been over fifty years in the making, as Cotler-Wunsh explained. It began with the Soviet-driven UN Resolution 3379 in 1975 declaring “Zionism is racism,” and came to a head at the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, where Israel became “the Jew in the room.” As her father, Irwin Cotler, described it: “If 9/11 was the Kristallnacht of terror, then Durban was the Mein Kampf.”

The Durban conference in 2001, explained Cotler-Wunsh, led to “Israeli Apartheid week” becoming a staple across university campuses, and the notion of “Zionism is racism” flourished unapologetically on campuses after decades of bubbling under the surface of academic discourse.

Am I surprised that a Jewish student at the University of Toronto would go out of their way to assure their audience that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism? No. Varlamov’s op-ed echoes what the few, disproportionately amplified Jewish students at my alma mater repeat to this day. It’s the same stale ideology tokenized by anti-Israel groups and individuals to silence the Jewish-majority opinion on Israel. 

I recognize the nature of the IHRA definition as a “working” definition as crucial in the understanding of antisemitism itself. Anyone writing about or discussing antisemitism should present it as a conspiracy theory that morphs into whatever shape Jew-haters need. As Cotler-Wunsh explained, the contemporary prevailing human rights-based worldview has shaped the Jewish State into the antithesis of its values — just as previous worldviews, religion and science, had done.

Hardly anyone claims that criticism of “Israel and Zionism on their own are not… antisemitic.” But the obsessive, zombie-like fixation students on Canadian campuses have with demonizing Israel as a Nazi state that should be overthrown by violent revolution to create an Islamic state? That’s not criticism.

The antisemitism that targeted Jews in Christian and Muslim societies for their religion as Jews, that targeted and genocided Jews for their “inferior race” in the name of Aryan supremacy in Europe, is the same antisemitism that aims to demonize Jewish sovereignty in their homeland today.

It’s the same antisemitism that saw me sitting in the Hive Café on my first day back at Concordia University after October 7, 2023, wondering about my classmates reading the look on my face and seeing fear, sadness, and “genocidal” empathy for Jews worldwide facing the threat of Hamas, Hezbollah, and western antisemitism alike.

But it’s also the same antisemitism that saw my family in Syria and Lebanon, along with 850,000 others, ethnically cleansed from the Middle East and North Africa — Varlamov’s characterization of this as “comparative stability” is an absolutely preposterous way to whitewash our Diasporic experience — but not merely because we were Jews. Rather because we, not just as an ethno-religion but as a nation, broke away from our second-class status and exercised autonomy in our homeland. 

As Varlamov wrote, this is why “[m]y Jewishness is an important part of my personal identity.” This is what “shaped my commitment to tolerance and open-mindedness toward differing perspectives.”

But instead of falling victim to the mentality that keeps Jews confined to a second-class status, instead of misconstruing the denial of Jewish sovereignty as a “differing perspective” or a legitimate academic, political stance, my Jewishness enables me to see through flimsy attempts to conflate anti-Zionism with Judaism. “But as a Jew myself, I can confirm that” this is a tactic employed by those who seek to undermine our history, our identity, and our very existence.

What Varlamov and others across North American campuses are advocating for is a rebranding of the same hatred that has pursued Jews through every corner of the world. 

When the world insists that Jews apologize for our survival, it’s not asking for dialogue or acceptance—it’s demanding Jewish erasure, stoking the same fires that have been burning for centuries.