Fourth Discourse Report

The fourth Discourse Report analyses antisemitic responses to two major international events: the Russian invasion of Ukraine and an eruption of terrorist violence in Israel in early 2022. In the case of the attacks on Israeli civilians, antisemitic posts legitimise the recourse to violence by painting victims of terrorism as aggressors. In the same vein, it encourages grossly simplified views of complex geopolitical situations by pushing misplaced analogies between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the war of aggression waged by Russia against Ukraine.

Moreover, the report examines four national case studies: novelist Sally Rooney’s boycott of Israeli publishers in the UK, the Pegasus spyware affair in France, the controversies around singer Gil Ofarim and the documenta 15 art exhibition in Germany. In all cases, users engage in a form of delegitimisation and demonisation of the state of Israel. Our analysis demonstrates again how antisemitism can deftly attach itself to any debate in society, thus reaching very different audiences.

 In addition, the first steps in using our annotated data sets for machine learning approaches are presented. The implementation of our first artificial intelligence model to automatically detect antisemitic content in web comments already yielded promising results.