3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization

Summary

Natan Sharansky, 3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization (Jewish Political Studies Review 16:3-4, Fall 2004; republished by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, October 21, 2004): a short programmatic article by Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs, written from his brief monitoring anti-Semitism. Sharansky argues that a “new anti-Semitism” aimed at the Jewish state, rather than at the Jewish people or religion, now hides behind the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel and advances in the name of human rights, and he proposes the “3D” test to distinguish that anti-Semitism from legitimate criticism: demonization (Israel’s actions blown out of proportion, Israelis compared to Nazis, Palestinian refugee camps to Auschwitz), double standards (selective criticism, Israel singled out by the United Nations while China, Iran, Cuba and Syria are ignored, Magen David Adom denied admission to the International Red Cross), and delegitimization (denial of Israel’s fundamental right to exist, alone among all peoples). The article’s second half turns to the Arab and Muslim world: his office’s 150-page report Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary Middle East is said to find genocidal anti-Semitic propaganda becoming commonplace in the government-controlled press of eight states and bodies, with a direct link claimed between the lax international response to it and the sharp increase in attacks on Jews and Israelis globally. Positive steps by the OSCE and the UN Commission on Human Rights are welcomed but judged insufficient, and the article closes by prescribing a policy of linkage — making combating anti-Semitism a prominent issue in America’s bilateral relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds, on the model of the Helsinki Group’s linkage of Soviet relations to human rights — because anti-Semitism, unchecked, imperils all the values and freedoms civilization holds dear.

What the file is

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs web page for the article, dated October 21, 2004, accessed free from the publisher. The original as saved is the HTML file; the paired text copy supplied with it is a plain-text rendering of the same page, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers in the text copy (633 lines as split, 634 by newline count; 2,294 words in total). The article itself occupies lines 313-385 of the text copy; the rest is the site frame — navigation and topic menus repeated before and after, a current alerts list and related-item listings dated 2010-2026, a second and later author biography block, newsletter blocks and the footer, which names the publisher by its current name, Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs — recorded in the reading notes and not part of the 2004 article. The page states the article’s original publication as Jewish Political Studies Review 16:3-4 (Fall 2004) (line 327). The opening paragraph is printed twice, once as a standfirst (line 317) and once as the article’s opening (line 333). In the text copy the article’s hyphenated “anti-Semitic” is repeatedly broken as “anti- Semitic” with a space, a line-break artifact preserved as printed; quotations on this page are given in the article’s clean form where the sense is unaffected, and the artifact is recorded in Open questions. Text quality is otherwise good.

Section by section

The article is a short essay with an unheaded opening and three headed sections.

• Opening (lines 333-337): Sharansky recalls that as a dissident in the former Soviet Union one of his regular activities was monitoring anti-Semitism and smuggling out evidence and records of it to the West, believing the free world, particularly after the Holocaust, would always be a staunch ally against anti-Semitism. “Unfortunately, I was wrong.” Today, as a minister in the Israeli government in charge of monitoring anti-Semitism, he regularly summons the ambassadors of West European states to protest anti-Semitic attacks on Jews in their countries and their governments’ often meek response. Over the past four years there has been a resurgence of anti-Semitic activity in the democratic world: in Europe, synagogues burned, rabbis abused in the streets, Jewish children physically attacked on the way to school and inside schools, and Jewish cemeteries desecrated.
• Recognizing the “New Anti-Semitism” (lines 341-351): the so-called “new anti-Semitism” poses a unique challenge. Whereas classical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people or the Jewish religion, “new anti-Semitism” is aimed at the Jewish state; since it can hide behind the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel it is more difficult to expose, and the task is made harder because this hatred is advanced in the name of values most would consider unimpeachable, such as human rights. Nevertheless “we must be clear and outspoken in exposing the new anti-Semitism”, and a simple test — the “3D” test — can help distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism. The first “D” is demonization: when the Jewish state is being demonized, when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion, when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz — this is anti-Semitism, not legitimate criticism. The second “D” is double standards: when criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross — this is anti-Semitism. The third “D” is delegitimization: when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied — alone among all peoples in the world — this too is anti-Semitism.
• The Rise of Arab and Islamic Anti-Semitism (lines 355-367): Sharansky is particularly concerned about the constant and growing stream of anti-Semitic propaganda from the Arab and Muslim world, including propaganda genocidal in nature against both Jews and the State of Israel, which should concern men and women of good conscience everywhere, defiles the Middle East and the international climate of discourse, and makes unabashed Jew-hatred expressible with impunity. Earlier this year his office published a 150-page report, Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary Middle East, surveying anti-Semitic reporting, editorials and editorial caricatures in the government-controlled press of Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states; in the more than one hundred editorial cartoons included, Jews and Israelis are invariably represented as poisonous snakes, murderous Nazis, and bloodthirsty Crusaders. The report found vicious anti-Semitism expressly calling for massive terrorism and genocide against Jews, Zionists, and the State of Israel becoming more and more commonplace across the Arab Middle East; the borders between anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Westernism have become almost completely blurred; and the overwhelming majority of this propaganda is issued from government-controlled media and supposedly respectable publishing houses closely tied to the Arab regimes. A direct link is asserted between the laxity of countries’ responses to growing Arab/Islamic anti-Semitism and the sharp increase in physical and verbal attacks on Jews and Israelis globally. Positive developments are recognized: the OSCE has held several meetings on fighting anti-Semitism, and for the first time ever the UN Commission on Human Rights condemned anti-Semitism in three separate resolutions, adopted by consensus. But these initiatives are not sufficient against state-sponsored anti-Semitism, especially of the Arab/Islamic variety; real progress requires the free world publicly and forcefully to condemn it and to pursue a policy of linkage against states that support anti-Semitism.
• The Need for a Linkage Policy (lines 371-381): the effectiveness of linkage was powerfully demonstrated a generation ago, after a group of dissidents inside the Soviet Union, including Sharansky, formed the Helsinki Group in the wake of the Helsinki accords — the very agreement that led to the establishment of the OSCE. With the help of courageous Western leaders willing to link their relations with the Soviets to their treatment of their own people, the Helsinki Group ensured the Soviets could not take one step in the international arena without their human rights policies becoming an issue, and real progress was made. Combating anti-Semitism ought therefore to become a much more prominent issue in the bilateral relations between America and the Arab and Muslim worlds; linkage can be used to marginalize the extremists and to encourage and support those who reject this hatred. Anti-Semitism is not a threat only to Jews: left unchecked, the forces behind it will imperil all the values and freedoms civilization holds dear, and never again can the free world sit on the sidelines. The article closes: “Armed with moral clarity, determination, and a common purpose, this is a fight that we can and will win.”
• Author biography (line 385): Sharansky, the former Prisoner of Zion who spent nine years in Soviet jails, was Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs when he wrote the article; in 2003 he founded the Global Forum against Anti-Semitism, bringing together Jewish leaders and organizations from five continents; he has also served as minister of industry and trade, interior minister, minister of construction and housing, and deputy prime minister; his memoir Fear No Evil was published in the United States in 1988 and translated into nine languages, and his book The Case for Democracy was published by Public Affairs (New York) in 2004.

Key passages

• “When I was a dissident in the former Soviet Union, one of my regular activities was monitoring anti-Semitism, and smuggling out evidence and records of such activity to the West.” (line 333)
• “Whereas classical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people or the Jewish religion, “new anti-Semitism” is aimed at the Jewish state.” (line 343)
• “Since this anti-Semitism can hide behind the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel, it is more difficult to expose.” (line 343)
• “I believe that we can apply a simple test – I call it the “3D” test – to help us distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism.” (line 345)
• “when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz – this is anti-Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel” (line 347)
• “when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross – this is anti-Semitism” (line 349)
• “when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied – alone among all peoples in the world – this too is anti-Semitism” (line 351)
• “There is a direct link between the laxity with which countries have responded – or not responded – to growing Arab/Islamic anti-Semitism and the sharp increase in physical and verbal attacks on Jews and Israelis globally.” (line 363)
• “Linkage can be used to marginalize the extremists and to encourage and support those who reject this virulent hatred.” (line 377)
• “Armed with moral clarity, determination, and a common purpose, this is a fight that we can and will win.” (line 381)

Evidence the work relies on

• The article carries no footnotes, citations or bibliography. Its only named source document is its author’s own office’s report: the 150-page Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary Middle East, published earlier in 2004, surveying reporting, editorials and more than one hundred editorial cartoons in the government-controlled press of Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states (line 359). The report’s findings are summarized, not quoted or reproduced: the invariably poisonous-snake, murderous-Nazi and bloodthirsty-Crusader representations in the cartoons, and the finding that expressly genocidal anti-Semitism is becoming commonplace (lines 359-361).
• The resurgence of anti-Semitic activity in Europe over the past four years — synagogues burned, rabbis abused, Jewish children attacked, cemeteries desecrated — is asserted without figures, dates, places or a cited source (line 337).
• The two institutional examples inside the 3D test — Israel singled out by the United Nations while China, Iran, Cuba and Syria are ignored, and Magen David Adom’s exclusion from the International Red Cross — are asserted without a cited resolution, vote or document (line 349).
• The positive developments — several OSCE meetings on fighting anti-Semitism, and the UN Commission on Human Rights’ three consensus resolutions condemning anti-Semitism, described as a first — are asserted without dates or resolution numbers (line 365).
• The Helsinki precedent is given from the author’s own participation: the Helsinki Group, which he helped form, and Western linkage of relations with the Soviets to their human-rights treatment (lines 373-375). His authority throughout is presented through the biography at line 385: former Prisoner of Zion, nine years in Soviet jails, minister in charge of monitoring anti-Semitism, founder in 2003 of the Global Forum against Anti-Semitism.

Analysis

The work is a short programmatic essay — about 1,100 words of argument once the site frame and the repeated opening paragraph are set aside — written by a serving minister from inside the brief it argues about, not a study. Its method is definition by test and assertion by example. The 3D test is offered as “simple”: each “D” is stated as a conditional (when X, this is anti-Semitism) with illustrative instances — Nazi and Auschwitz comparisons for demonization, UN selectivity and the Magen David Adom case for double standards, denial of Israel’s right to exist for delegitimization — but no threshold is given for its own operative terms, such as actions “blown out of all sensible proportion” (line 347), and no case is worked through in which criticism of Israel passes the test. The second half’s empirical weight rests entirely on the summary of the author’s own office’s 150-page report, whose contents are reported in two paragraphs without quotation, sampling method or reproduced evidence, and the causal claim that lax responses to Arab/Islamic anti-Semitism are directly linked to the global increase in attacks is asserted in one sentence (line 363). The prescription, linkage, is supported by a single historical analogy from the author’s own dissident past, the Helsinki Group, whose transfer to America–Arab/Muslim bilateral relations is proposed but not specified: no sanction, condition or demand is named. The article’s significance for the wiki is as the originating statement of the 3D test and of “new anti-Semitism” as a state-directed category, a framework later definitional debates in the ingested sources presuppose, adopt or contest: see How it relates to other sources.

People, organizations, places and events

Natan Sharansky, Global Forum against Anti-Semitism, Helsinki Group, Magen David Adom, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Jewish Agency, Soviet Union, Palestinian Authority, Israel

Concepts

3D Test of Anti-Semitism, New Anti-Semitism, Antisemitism, Delegitimization, Linkage Policy

How it relates to other sources

• Sharansky’s article is the wiki’s earliest statement of the framework the definition debate is later fought over. Kenneth Stern, lead drafter of the EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism, testifies in 2017 and again in 2025 against using an Israel-related definition of antisemitism to police campus speech, arguing the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism would give anti-Zionist Jews less protection than Zionist Jews and restating his position that anti-Zionism is sometimes clearly antisemitic, sometimes clearly not antisemitic, and sometimes simply unclear (Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern (2017), PDF p.11-12; Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern (2025), PDF p.33). Sharansky’s test, by contrast, is built to classify criticism of Israel: each of its three conditions is a property of speech about the Jewish state, and failing any one of them settles the classification as anti-Semitism. Neither Stern testimony names Sharansky or the 3D test; the relationship is one of opposed answers to the same classificatory question, as the texts stand.
• On delegitimization the two ingested uses of the term run in opposite directions. For Sharansky, delegitimization is something done to Israel — denial of its fundamental right to exist — and is itself anti-Semitism (line 351). Barghouti answers the Israeli charge that BDS “delegitimizes” Israel by saying BDS strives to delegitimize oppression, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, not a people’s existence, and that no other boycott has been said to aim at the target state’s physical existence (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, PDF p.27). Both accounts stand, attributed, on the Delegitimization page.
• Chapter 7 of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction records more than forty international Jewish groups in 2018 condemning the conflation of legitimate criticisms of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism, as a means to suppress the former (Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, lines 1415-1435). Sharansky’s 2004 article is an early instance of the classificatory move that statement condemns: distinguishing legitimate criticism from anti-Semitism by a test whose three prongs are all forms of criticism of Israel. The collection does not name Sharansky; the disagreement is recorded here as a difference of framework, not a direct reply.
• Where Rose’s 1986 account roots antisemitism in economics — Jews cast as middlemen and moneylenders, made scapegoats by rulers — and treats Zionism as exploiting fears of it (Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, lines 713-789), Sharansky treats contemporary anti-Semitism as a hatred that has changed its object from the Jewish people and religion to the Jewish state, and prescribes state-to-state pressure (linkage) against the governments whose press spreads it. Brenner’s account, that classical Zionism held anti-Semitism inevitable and un-fightable and accommodated it (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.3, p.14), stands against Sharansky’s closing claim that the fight against anti-Semitism “is a fight that we can and will win” (line 381), though Sharansky’s subject in that line is the new, state-directed form.

Open questions

• The text copy prints “anti- Semitic” and “anti- Americanism” with a space after the hyphen throughout the article, a line-break artifact of the rendering; the original journal printing is not in the file, so whether any instance reflects the 2004 printing cannot be checked from this file.
• The page gives two dates for the work: October 21, 2004 as the JCFA page date (line 313), and Jewish Political Studies Review 16:3-4 (Fall 2004) as the original publication (line 327). The frontmatter published field uses the JCFA date, following the file as supplied.
• The publisher is named two ways in the file: the page header and title name the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, while the footer names the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA) with a 2026 copyright (lines 577-613). The footer is current site frame; which name the center bore in 2004 is not stated in the article itself.
• The 150-page report Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary Middle East, on which the article’s second section rests, is not itself in the file; its survey method, its cartoon sample and its findings cannot be checked from this source, and it is listed from this page only as Sharansky’s office’s publication of earlier in 2004.
• Sharansky gives no criterion, beyond the examples, for when Israel’s actions are “blown out of all sensible proportion” (line 347), no source for the Magen David Adom exclusion or for the UN selectivity claim (line 349), and no dates or numbers for the three UN Commission on Human Rights resolutions (line 365).
• The article states that the Helsinki accords are “the very agreement that led to the establishment of the OSCE” (line 373); no date or intervening step is given, and the statement stands as printed.
• The later author block carried on the page (lines 387-397) names Sharansky “Chairman of the Jewish Agency” in the present tense; it is current site frame at retrieval, undated in the file, and is not part of the 2004 article or its printed biography (line 385), which names only his ministerial posts.

Coverage

lines 1-634 of 634, read in full