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�ճ����’s announcement on February 26 that Australia’s 39 universities have endorsed a new definition of antisemitism is deeply concerning.

�ճ����, the �����Ի��� have all warned about Universities Australia’s (UA) new definition.

Allowing for antisemitism to be conflated with anti-Zionism in cases undermines foundational principles and the role of universities.

By softening the differences between Jewish identity and Zionism, the new proposed UA definition fails the core principles of intellectual inquiry, education, as well as its own stated goal of fighting antisemitism.

It fails on two levels.

First, at the conceptual level, the following two statements are observably true.

Not all Jewish people are committed to/identify with Zionism (both secular and religious Judaism have a long history of anti-Zionism); and not all Zionists are Jewish (many non-Jewish people, secular and religious, believe in and are committed to the Zionist project).

Deductive reasoning — the process of drawing logically valid conclusions from premises and the foundation of Western intellectual inquiry since Aristotle — automatically highlights that concluding that one term infers the other categorically, or that the two are in any way synonyms, is logically false.

The consequences of this are hard to overstate: a definitionally false statement, or policy, will necessarily run into practical enforcement paradoxes, while precluding our ability to address these paradoxes by thinking them through rigorously.

Secondly, at a practical level, the definition endorsed by UA explicitly states that “substituting the word ‘Zionist’ for ‘Jew’ does not eliminate the possibility of speech being antisemitic”.

This is indeed true, and it is cause for concern.

However, it shows that UA is concerned about the misuse of the term “Zionism”, not about its proper use.

This should call for pause. Any word can be misused by anyone at any time to convey something else than the original/literal meaning of the word.

This is not always bad (it is how we joke), nor is this a new challenge for sound scholarship and education. Rather, it has been a perennial challenge that has, so far, failed to ever be resolved by conflation and (self) censure.

Inductive reasoning — drawing probable conclusions from past observation — confirms the faith we have, so far, put in formal reasoning: logical consistency tends to solve logical and political problems; logical inconsistency tends to either produce them or prevent us from resolving them through agreement rather than through force.

Up until now, universities have sought to tackle this challenge by not stifling open discussion and by providing and cultivating the tools and frameworks necessary for critical inquiry and discussion — political and otherwise.

Until now, universities stood their ground against political expediency that conflates, confuses, obfuscates and censures rigorously defined terms that enable humanity to address the challenges it faces.

Until now, universities have provided clarity, consistency and transparency on protocols and procedures that underpin academic inquiry. They have refused vagueness, arbitrariness and the culture of fear and self-censure that ensues and within which no one feels safe.

Until now, universities understood that all of the above are prerequisites for their teaching staff to fill their mentoring role as well as for students to engage constructively.

Universities in Australia and the Australian state(s) already have laws and codes of conduct in place that condemn and punish hate speech.

If it is the misuse, rather than the proper use of the term “Zionism” that UA is hoping to stem, it must demonstrate how the definitional conflation it proposes would help stem hate speech against Jewish people, rather than undermine universities’ own mission statement as well as their ability to tackle actual antisemitism.

Much of law and policy making relies on spotting and highlighting definitional and logical inconsistencies, given that these necessarily lead to practical inconsistencies.

Allowing for the conflation of the two terms in any situation is contradictory, both formally and practically: it allows for more confusion which, in turn, undermines not only our ability to tackle challenges, such as the rise of antisemitism, but also undermines the very frameworks we have to resolve the problem.

Explicitly refusing to use logic in one place is not just an isolated breach, it is an implicit renouncement of logic as the most reliable tool to adjudicate contested matters.

In the long run, the implications are very serious.

Here are some illustrations of the logical inconsistencies the new definition leads to:

1. The new definition undermines the very possibility of exploring the concrete political solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Indeed, as the Jewish Council of Australia underlines “[T]he definition’s inclusion of ‘calls for the elimination of the State of Israel’ would mean, for instance, that calls for a single binational democratic state, where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights, could be labelled antisemitic.”

2. The new definition tends to reduce Jewish identity to political commitments. This is not only false (as pointed above: not all Jewish people are Zionist and not all Zionist are Jewish), it is also dangerous and in direct contradiction with the fight against antisemitism. Even if the majority of Jewish people supported Zionism, racial and religious identity should be kept separate from the political persuasion of group members as an intrinsic part of the group’s identity. Such conflation risks producing and/or reinforcing the harmful stereotypes that all Jewish people think in a certain way or necessarily have a shared political agenda - the crux of antisemitic sentiment. The definition already singles out both the state of Israel and the Jewish people as a whole, no such definition is proposed for any other state or people.

3. Finally, the new definition raises real questions as to which factual statements and underlying principles are permitted in the classroom. If the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and most respected non-governmental organisations, with their expertise, rigorous protocols, universal mandate, universal principles and observations on the ground come to the conclusion that Israel is plausibly committing genocide and is currently committing war crimes and crimes against humanity; is it not the role of universities to relay this information, which stands for the closest thing we have to universal rule of law and inalienable human rights for all?

Is it not entirely consistent to condemn observable wrongful deeds on the basis of universal principles and evidence rather than condemn particular identities and peoples on the basis of prejudice? Would these factual reports and legal decisions now be construed as antisemitic depending on how an ad hoc definition is interpreted in each particular case, according to good, but also bad faith actors? And if that is the case, is this not a direct attack on basic evidence, expertise, due process, democratic mandates, law and human rights, rather than a warranted fight against antisemitism?

Given the lack of logical consistency of the new definition, the only logical conclusion is that it disserves foundational academic principles, as well as the fight for justice, and against antisemitism and racism.

This makes it impossible for academic staff to teach their classes or for students to learn the tools of critical inquiry.

For those less directly impacted, it nonetheless sets a precedent for arbitrariness and inconsistency in academia and in political conflict resolution, which is something that should alarm everyone.

The direct impact of the new definition will be the emergence of intractable contradictions for students and staff, the silencing of debate, the stifling of critique and the undermining of the grounds for dialogue, intellectual inquiry, and learning across Australia.

[Gwenael Velge is a member of Academics for Palestine. This piece is slightly abridged from Velge’s substack, .]