When Deborah Lipstadt was appointed special envoy of the Biden administration to combat anti -Semitism abroad, he began visiting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for those who described as encouraging exchanges with the leaders of the two Muslim nations.
His hope was that Gulf leaders could use their voices to help arginemitism among Muslims around the world.
“It was all very promising,” said dr. Lipstadt, who was historical and scholar of anti -Semitism and genocide before taking on the role, with the degree of ambassador in 2022. “I think there was a real conversation in progress”.
Then came the attack led by Hamas on Israel on 7 October 2023.
It was the most fatal day for the Jews from the Nazi genocide of the Second World War. Israel’s devastating response that took place in the next 15 months, a war that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, internally displaced almost all the population of over two million and has left the territory in ruins.
“Ott. 7 Of course he changed everything, “said Dr. Lipstadt in Jerusalem in January just before the end of his mandate.
Now, Dr. Lipstadt is teaching hemory university as an illustrious professor and is writing a memories book on his experiences at the service of the former president. He refused an offer to teach a course next year at Columbia University.
In a piece of opinion published on Monday on the Free Press, Dr. Lipstadt said he did not want to “serve as a support or a fig leaf” or put at risk, after what he described as the weak response of the administration of the campus to the anti-Israeli protesters who have broken regulations and harassed other students. Columbia, in a declaration, said that dr. Lipstadt had been “informally” invited to consider the teaching of a course and that when he reported his intent “not to continue the conversation”, the interim president of Columbia Katrina Armstrong “contacted to involve it personally and share his personal commitment to fight anti -Semitism”.
In the interview of Dr. Lipstadt in January, reflecting on his two years as a correspondent for Mr. Biden, he said that the 2023 attack on Israel sparked a chain of events that brought what he called “a tsunami of anti -Semitism”.
He said people accuse Israel of online genocide while rescue was still collecting the bodies of the victims of 7 October by the Israeli communities near the Gaza border. And there were immediate support and defenses of Hamas as soon as Israel launched his military campaign in Gaza.
In the months that followed, while death, anguish and destruction mounted in Gaza, pro-Palestinian demonstrations crossed university campus and cities around the world, sometimes with anti-Semitic shades.
The number of anti-Semitic episodes in the United States has risen to the highest level ever recorded, according to the anti-Diffamation League, an organization for rights, with triple the number of cases reported to the group in the year following the attack on 7 October compared to a year earlier.
A survey on Jews in the European Union conducted in the months preceding the attack found that 90 percent of interviewees had met online anti -Semitism in the previous year, 56 % had met offline anti -Semitism by the people they knew and 37 % had been harassed to be Jewish during the previous year. Some European Jewish organizations have reported an increase of more than four times in anti -Semitic accidents after the attack.
Anti -Semitism, a centuries -old curse, has always been suburb, said dr. Lipstadt, 77 years old, which is the same Jewish itself. But after October 7, “he suddenly became ok, almost normalized,” he added.
The White House of Trump accused the Biden administration of having closed an eye on a “campaign of intimidation, vandalism and violence on the campus and in the streets of America” of “aliens pro-haamas and radical left”.
Dr. Lipstadt wrote on the Free Press that President Biden condemned violence on the campus, often unequivocally, “but there were too many moments that were welcomed with silence”.
The Biden administration in 2023 published the first national strategy of the United States to counter anti -Semitism asking for a bipartisan effort to obtain governments, law enforcement and schools to hold the spread of online hatred. And in 2024, the United States led 38 countries and four international bodies to outline the best practices for having faced Jewish hatred known as global guidelines for the contraction of anti -Semitism.
In January, President Trump signed an executive order by promising to protect the American Jews more strongly from anti -Semitism. It allows the cancellation of visas and the deportation of foreign students who sympathize with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that has governed Gaza for most of the last two decades.
Israel has leded the accusations of anti -Semitism against countries, foreign leaders and institutions on issues including the issuance by the International Criminal Court of stopping mandates for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant and a case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice. They were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Dr. Lipstadt described anti -Semitism as the oldest continuous hatred, so deeply rooted that it is almost impossible to eradicate. He saw his job as an opportunity to call it and use the diplomacy and the government levers to repress the ancient prejudice.
Dani Dayan, president of Yad Vashem, World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, said that dr. Lipstadt provided global resonance to the question. But unfortunately his assignment “did not understand US anti -Semitism at a time when it was very necessary,” he said.
In the summer of 2022, shortly after taking on his role, Dr. Lipstadt made an counterintuitive choice for his first trip abroad going to Saudi Arabia.
The rich kingdom of the Gulf has no formal diplomatic relations with Israel. But less than two years earlier, two of his Gulf neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrein, have established complete bonds with Israel. And there was soon Saudi Arabia, a possibility that Mr. Trump is again pursuing in his second term.
“I went there to make a statement,” he said.
His tone was that, regardless of their position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “anti-Semitism is something that is wrong and unacceptable”.
After his Saudi visit, he went to the United Arab Emirates, where his first meeting with the president, sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed, ran for a long time, lasting 95 minutes.
Towards the end of his mandate, Dr. Lipstadt returned to the two Arab Nations of the Gulf. But the war of Gaza and his ripples around the region had generated a new hesitation around the theme of anti-Semitism, he said, with the leaders of the Gulf highly aware of the anti-Israeli feeling among their people.
And a debate already framed on the border between legitimate criticisms of Israeli policies and anti -Semitism had sharpened.
At the same time, the atmosphere on American university campus was accused.
Many Jewish students were saying that they felt dangerous. At the same time, other students complained about the anti-muulman prejudice and the suffocation of freedom of speech between students and Filosinse teachers.
But Dr. Lipstadt said he had no difficulty distinguishing between the legitimate criticisms of Israel and anti -Semitism.
A functional definition of anti -Semitism, adopted in 2016 by the international alliance of the memory of the Holocaust and approved by over 40 countries, includes manifestations of the “Targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish community”, but not critical of Israel similar to that level against any other country.
If all these criticisms were considered anti -Semitic, said dr. Lipstadt, then many Israelis would be considered anti -Semitic.
“Israel’s national sport is not football,” he said. “They are the criticisms of the government.”
Criticism becomes anti -Semitic when the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish or single state outside Israel is questioned and applies a double standard compared to other countries, he said.
Now, people are or are committing in clear anti -Semitism while saying that they are only criticizing Israeli policy or, on the contrary, by calling normal criticism of Israeli anti -Semitic, he added.
“Both are illegitimate,” said dr. Lipstadt.
He said he considered the case of genocide in the anti -Semitic age.
A Special Committee of the United Nations concluded last year that the Israeli military campaign in Gaza was “consistent with the characteristics of the genocide”, citing the high balance of the victims and the accusations of use by Israel of hunger as a weapon of war. Amnesty International also concluded that Israel committed a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Several countries, including Belgium, Ireland, Mexico and Spain, joined the genocide case started by South Africa against Israel in the Supreme Court of the world.
There is no discussion that the suffering of civilians in Gaza and the level of destruction was horrible, said dr. Lipstadt.
“But is it genocide?” he said. “It does not adapt to the definition of genocide,” he added. “I mean, there must be an intent to wipe out a culture or a people.”