Although we only later came to realise its significance in our lives and for Palestine advocacy generally, February 2017 turned out to be a watershed month for those of us on the frontlines of the Palestine advocacy movement within the UK. During this month, amid a wave of cancellations of events critical of Israel, we were attacked in the media, smeared as antisemitic, and both supported and censored by our universities. The following month was marked by unprecedented censorship of Israel-critical events across the UK. As we now know, these events were linked to the UK government's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. 1 While many communities and activists were affected by the event cancellations and the many different forms of censorship linked to the IHRA adoption, to our knowledge, we are the only UKbased academics who were directly targeted as a result of our written statements relating to Israel during this tumultuous year.
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Shwaikh et al. (2019) studied this question.