How the European Commission’s coordinator on combating antisemitism justifies the exclusion of Jewish groups critics of Israel.
The European Commission’s coordinator for combating antisemitism, Katharina von Schnurbein, reportedly said in a closed-door discussion about the French Jewish group TSEDEK: ‘They are not real Jews’, revealed the independent French media YAANI on Monday.
According to an article by French-Israeli political scientist Yoav Shemer-Kunz, the German coordinator von Schnurbein exerted considerable pressure last March to cancel a panel discussion at the European Parliament in Brussels on the subject of genocide or, at least, to modify its composition. Speakers included Francesca Albanese, UN rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Rima Hassan, LFI MEP – both highly critical of the State of Israel and what they described as genocide in Gaza – a representative of TSEDEK! – a Jewish decolonial collective, and other experts. According to the author, von Schnurbein opposed the participation of the Jewish group TSEDEK on this panel.
Since its launch in the European Parliament in October 2024, the European Jewish Network for Palestine (EJP), of which TSEDEK and the Union Juive Française pour la Paix (UJFP) are founding members, has been kept out of the European institutional space on the fight against anti-Semitism. For example, the EJP was the only organisation to be refused access to the Holocaust Remembrance Conference organised by the EU Commission in Brussels in January, despite several requests on its part, while several dozen Jewish organisations, all Zionist, were present, as well as other organisations such as the pro-Israel lobby ELNET, the Anglican church, and Google, among others.
The European Commission also excludes Jewish organisations that take a critical stance towards Israel and Zionism from its working group on anti-Semitism, which is reserved exclusively for Zionist Jewish organisations. According to Shemer-Kunz, ‘This exclusion helps to shed light on the pro-Israeli and Zionist orientation of the EU policy on combating antisemitism’.
Photo by Miles Fischler, during EJP launch at the EU parliament, October 3rd 2024.