Erasing Palestine Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom

How the redefinition of antisemitism has functioned as a tactic to undermine Palestine solidarity

The widespread adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism and the internalisation of its norms has set in motion a simplistic definitional logic for dealing with social problems that has impoverished discussions of racism and prejudice more generally, across Britain and beyond. It has encouraged a focus on words over substance.

Erasing Palestine tells the story of how this has happened, with a focus on internal politics within Britain over the course of the past several years. In order to do so, it tells a much longer story, about the history of antisemitism since the beginning of the twentieth century. This is also a story about Palestine, a chronicle of the erasure of the violence against the Palestinian people, and a story about free speech, and why it matters to Palestinian freedom.

Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of Writers and Rebels (2016), Cityscapes (2019), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020), Beautiful English (2021), and The Persian Prison Poem (2021). She teaches at the University of Birmingham, where she directs the ERC-funded Global Literary Theory project. She has written for the general public in The London Review of Books, The Global & Mail, and World Policy Journal and her writing has been translated into eleven languages.