| Riassunto: | An influential body of writing has identified much or most international criticism of Israel as amounting to a ‘New Antisemitism’. This thesis argues that New Antisemitism discourse should be understood as an intervention in the long-running international legitimacy war over Zionism/Israel—one peculiar to the distinct, post-1967 phase of that contest. This contention is advanced primarily by demonstrating that New Antisemitism-inspired accounts of critical episodes in the Israel-Palestine conflict possess neither empirical support nor conceptual coherence. By showing that New Antisemitism discourse does not compel as an argument, the thesis suggests that the New Antisemitism’s salience and influence are better explained by virtue of its role as a legitimating ideology. The dissertation’s overarching contribution to Israel-Palestine historiography is, accordingly, the identification and analysis of an influential strand in Israel’s legitimation discourse that has hitherto been overlooked. In developing this argument, the thesis makes several additional, discrete contributions to the diplomatic, legal, and political histories of the Israel-Palestine conflict: the first diplomatic history of United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 3379, based on hitherto unused archival records; a novel comparative analysis of Zionist and Afrikaner self-determination claims as these were contested on the terrain of international law, drawing on hitherto overlooked materials from the International Court of Justice (ICJ); and an original political history of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, based on new documentation secured inter alia through Freedom of Information requests. At the same time, the thesis contributes to scholarship on the New Antisemitism the first scholarly appraisal of the latter’s historical claims.
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