Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. [2025] EWHC 1170 (Admin) AC-2024-LON-001310 HUSAIN v SRA to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of this nature in territories under their jurisdiction.) Israel contested the ICJ’s jurisdiction and criticised the decision. What can —and what cannot—be drawn from it is beyond the scope of this judgment. But the fact of these proceedings and their outcome does seem to me to illustrate the difficulty of an approach which places outside the bounds of legitimate political debate claims that the policies and practices of the State of Israel are systemically discriminatory or amount to apartheid. 107. It must also be borne in mind that the IHRA’s examples were billed as “contemporary examples” in 2016. They were not intended to set the parameters of legitimate political debate for all time. Whether a particular criticism of Israel’s conduct falls within the bounds of legitimate political debate depends on the facts—and the facts change. A court or tribunal using the IHRA working definition and examples must be alert to this and must avoid using them in a way which forecloses political debate on new events as they unfold. 108. For all these reasons, where speech is said to fall within the seventh and eighth of the IHRA’s examples, it is unlikely that the substantive content of the message alone will justify the label “antisemitic”. However, depending on the language used, and in context, the speech may be antisemitic. The focus of the court or tribunal should therefore be on the language and context. 109. The tenth of the IHRA’s examples was “[d]rawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”. Mr Magennis may be right to say that it is not possible to stigmatise every such comparison as necessarily antisemitic. Reasoned comparisons between particular policies of the Israeli government and particular policies pursued by Nazi Germany are occasionally made by historians and journalists in the mainstream media in the UK, the US and Israel. However, to the extent that it was formulated as a criticism of the IHRA’s example, Mr Magennis’s submission was directed at a straw man. The IHRA does not claim that every comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is ipso facto antisemitic. Its claim is the more modest one that such comparisons could, depending on the context, be antisemitic. 110. Comparisons between the policy of Nazi Germany and that of any other government are apt to be incendiary. Making such a comparison with Israel is likely to be especially hurtful. That is not enough on its own to take speech outside the protection of Article 10. However, the language or imagery of Nazism is often used as a taunt, which deliberately references and weaponises the most painful events in Jewish history, to which some Jews alive today are witnesses and which continue profoundly to affect many others. Depending on the context, a criticism of Israel which pointedly uses Nazi language and imagery as a racialised taunt of this kind could reasonably be regarded as antisemitic. Mr Silverman’s expert report and evidence 111. In considering the proper approach to the meaning of the tweets, the Tribunal referred to the decision of the Supreme Court in Stocker v Stocker. Although that was a defamation claim, the approach of Lord Kerr (with whom the other members of the Court agreed) is instructive. At [43]-[45], he said that it was “unwise to parse a Facebook posting for its theoretically or logically deducible meaning”. Rather, a court

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