Singling out Israel is wrong, even by Zionists
TI was pleased to read someone else’s attempt to bring some sanity back into the debate over Israel and Palestine. I’m referring to “When criticism of Israel is and isn’t anti-Semitic” (May 15, 2022) by Jonathan Jacoby. I’ve been aware of the difference between policies and people for quite some time. Some of my distant relations, the Levys/Levis of Krakow, Poland, were murdered en masse because some Germans decided to confuse Jews with communism. It doesn’t matter who does the conflation — Zionists or antisemites — I regard the people making that conflation as sharing guilt in those murders.
There’s one caveat I would add to his article: When Israel is treated differently because it is a Jewish state, it’s antisemitic. A double standard about Israel is not antisemitic unless it treats Israel differently because of its Jewish character. When Palestinians are denied the right of self-defense or retaliation, yet EZL and Lehi are held up and honored, as are the various settler assault teams that routinely assault Palestinian farmers (under the assumption they are acting in self-defense, though clearly “pretaliation”), and the person so honoring them is doing so because EZL, Lehi and the settlers are Jewish, you have a double standard — Israel being treated differently because it is Jewish.
According to Jacoby’s article, that is antisemitism. So you have a whole lot of antisemitic Jewish Zionists sitting cheek-to-jowl with Tomás de Torquemada and other deplorables! I would love to see various Zionist organizations desperately trying to claw back credibility after seeing this flaw in the semi-official International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism exposed.
I don’t care for antisemitism, as I might have indicated.