The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is an intergovernmental organization founded by Sweden’s then Prime Minister Göran Persson in 1998. In 2016, the IHRA adopted a definition of anti-Semitism that the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights has also adopted: “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed against Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”. This definition was further strengthened by the Swedish government in 2020 with the inclusion of eleven examples. Among these are Holocaust denial, comparing Israel’s policies to Nazism, and holding Jews collectively responsible for the policies and actions of the State of Israel.
Anti-Semitism thus means other people treating and judging Jews differently – based on hostility, prejudice, or discrimination, for example – for the sole reason that they are Jews.

Antisemitism has different starting points:
– Nazi ideology was based on the alleged superiority of the “Aryan” and Germanic race and described a struggle between one’s own race and the Jewish race (and others) that must be defeated or annihilated.
– After the surrounding Muslim countries failed to wipe out the state of Israel in 1948, anti-Semitic stereotypes have become commonplace in school textbooks, media and political agitation in many Arab countries.
– Replacement theology and Jew-hatred throughout church history is another source of Jewish persecution and anti-Semitism.

Today a large proportion of the Jewish people live in the state of Israel, and anti-Semitism today is also directed against the Jewish state. The researcher Henrik Bachner writes in his doctoral thesis The Return: “anti-Semitism in Sweden after 1945 describes a far-reaching continuity between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism after the Second World War”.
Anti-Zionism is a form of racism that calls for the abolition of the Jewish state. The IHRA describes various forms of anti-Zionism directed at the State of Israel, including:
– accusing Jews as a people or Israel as a state of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust
– accusing Jewish citizens of other countries of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of the nations of which they are citizens
– denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example by claiming that the existence of the state of Israel has a racist starting point
– applying double standards by demanding behavior that is not expected or required of any other democratic nation
– using symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism to characterize Israel or Israelis
– making comparisons of modern Israeli politics with that of the Nazis
– holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel