Two decades of OSCE’s dedication: Identifying and combating anti-Semitism

The following guest post is by Rabbi Andrew Baker, Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office on Combating anti-Semitism. The views expressed here are his own and not those of the OSCE.

The horrific torture and murder of 1200 Jews by Hamas terrorists on October 7, has rightly been identified as the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. This anti-Semitism is not hard to identify and has been condemned by national leaders in Europe and elsewhere. But its impact on Jewish communities throughout the OSCE region is also cause for alarm and requires a focused governmental response. Exactly what they will do will depend on political will and local capacities. But our expectations today reflect two decades of work within the OSCE on identifying and combating anti-Semitism.

Twenty years ago, the OSCE organized its first conference on anti-Semitism. It was a response to a surge in anti-Semitic incidents primarily in Western Europe that took governments and even Jewish communities by surprise. The stalling of the Middle East peace process and the revival of the “Zionism is Racism” canard at the UN Durban Conference in 2001 were triggering factors. This led some political leaders to describe these incidents as “political” rather than anti-Semitic in nature. But their impact on day-to-day Jewish life was real and profound. Jews were physically threatened and verbally harassed. Synagogues and Jewish schools required special security. Individuals were hesitant to attend Jewish events or to wear anything that would identify them as Jews in public. The State of Israel itself was demonized and European Jewish communities were held responsible for its actions.

It was against this backdrop and political climate that the conference on anti-Semitism took place in 2003. Much has happened since then. Even though the problem of anti-Semitism persists, we now have considerable knowledge, effective tools and methods to counter it. This is due in large measure to the early and continued focus of the OSCE and the concrete work of ODIHR on this issue in these past two decades.

The Berlin Declaration issued at the 2004 OSCE high-level conference declared that anti-Semitism had taken on “new forms and manifestations” – a direct reference to the link between anti-Semitism and Israel. It asserted that events in the Middle East and Israel “can never justify anti-Semitism.” It enumerated the first commitments of participating States to address the problem through the identification and monitoring of hate crimes and the promotion of Holocaust education.

At the time, not many countries recognized the special nature of crimes motivated by hatred of specific groups or religions. Fewer still collected data that identified the targets of these attacks or the specific prejudice which motivated them. Today, it is widely recognized that standardized monitoring and aggregated data collection accompanied by the training of police on a victim-centered response are essential tools for combating hate crime. This is due in no small measure to the pioneering work of ODIHR, building on those early OSCE commitments.

In the ensuing years and following lethal attacks on Jewish targets, the OSCE organized the first expert conference in 2013 to highlight the special security needs of Jewish communities and offer some best practice examples. This was followed several years later by ODIHR’s Words into Action to Address Intolerance  guide for policymakers, which has resulted in concrete steps to improve security and facilitate police training and cooperation with vulnerable Jewish communities throughout the OSCE region.

Those “new forms” of anti-Semitism first identified at the Berlin Conference found their way into the drafting of a working definition of anti-Semitism issued several months later by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) (now the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights). The 10th Anniversary of the OSCE’s Berlin Conference in 2014 reinforced and expanded participating States’ commitments, and it gave voice to the importance of using a common, clear, and comprehensive definition in the fight against anti-Semitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted the EUMC working definition of anti-Semitism with minor edits in 2016, and today the IHRA definition is employed by forty-three national governments and hundreds of regional and local governments to guide their work. Notably, it was a component of the very first police training programmes launched by ODIHR.

Since 2018, the OSCE tradition has called for an annual conference to address anti-Semitism in proximity to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and in early February this year, many of us gathered in Skopje. The Chairman-in-Office, Foreign Minister of North Macedonia Bujar Osmani, opened the conference with a message that resonated with us all. “As long as our societies are not safe from anti-Semitism, no one is safe,” he said. “We are proud of the cutting-edge tools and programs delivered by ODIHR, from which OSCE participating States have benefited greatly.”  

It is also worth noting that over these past twenty years there has been a change in the preferred spelling of the word “anti-Semitism” as today it is more commonly spelled without the hyphen as “antisemitism”. The word itself, coined by a German journalist in the 19th century, was intended to imbue Jew hatred with pseudo-scientific and racial elements. Some have erroneously suggested that it is intended to refer to a broader group of “Semitic” people, which was never the case. By spelling it without the hyphen its unique and specific meaning should be clear. For more information about this see: https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/antisemitism/spelling-antisemitism

In the face of the current explosion of anti-Semitism at a rate not seen in decades we must continue implementing the tools at our disposal to combat it and make progress together. Only then can we ensure that the world’s oldest hatred will not be an eternal one.