The ABC’s announcement on February 26 that Australia’s 39 universities have endorsed a new definition of antisemitism is deeply concerning.

The Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, the Jewish Council of Australia and Amnesty International have all warned about Universities Australia’s (UA) new definition.

Allowing for antisemitism to be conflated with anti-Zionism in cases undermines foundational principles and the role of universities.

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By softening the differences between Jewish identity and Zionism, the new proposed UA definition fails the core principles of intellectual inquiry, education, as well as its own stated goal of fighting antisemitism.

It fails on two levels.

First, at the conceptual level, the following two statements are observably true.

Not all Jewish people are committed to/identify with Zionism (both secular and religious Judaism have a long history of anti-Zionism); and not all Zionists are Jewish (many non-Jewish people, secular and religious, believe in and are committed to the Zionist project).

Deductive reasoning — the process of drawing logically valid conclusions from premises and the foundation of Western intellectual inquiry since Aristotle — automatically highlights that concluding that one term infers the other categorically, or that the two are in any way synonyms, is logically false.

The consequences of this are hard to overstate: a definitionally false statement, or policy, will........

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