I suspect that many people, like me, now hear "antisemitic" as "anti Israel" and assume it's a politically motivated slur without justification. This is not good. As racism and actual antisemitism continues to be very real, any conflating or exaggeration of a real problem diminishes people's willingness to address the real problems.
If you notice a police officer is only ever arresting people of a certain race, you can suspect he’s a racist - even if they actually did commit the crimes.
Having an obsession with Israel, focusing only on them for things done by other countries as well in the same situation, exaggerating what they are doing, and demonising them is antisemitic.
The Overton window has shifted so far that you don’t even realise how it would sound if you replaced “Israel” with other countries in your statement.
Imagine hearing someone say I’m just “anti-Ireland”. Or I have nothing against Ukrainians, I just think Ukraine shouldn’t exist.
If you have genuine criticisms to make about specific people in Israel or specific actions of the Israeli government, and you do so also about many other figures and events internationally, that’s fair. But taking a position of “anti-Israel” in general betrays a prejudice against the only Jewish country that has nothing to do with their actions.
> If you notice a police officer is only ever arresting people of a certain race, you can suspect he’s a racist - even if they actually did commit the crimes.
Ridiculous comparison. Police are obligated to act impartially, private individuals are not. Expecting regular people to give every political matter equal attention is absurd.
Sure, and if the issues you care more about are the ones where Jews are being accused of doing something wrong, I may suspect what specific bias you have.
This is what I'm talking about! The discussion is about Israel and you've shifted it to being about Jewish people so you can make baseless declarations of antisemitism.
People care about Israel because we're directly funding it. Our leaders could easily end that war overnight if they wanted. The same is not true about China's Uyghur genocide.
This is a huge amount of Whataboutism mixed with exactly the problem I mention, which is moving the definition of antisemitism and putting words in the mouth of the speaker to hit that definition.
To pass your test, which is common out there, whenever Israel is criticized we must also: prove that we care about EVERY cause in the world; acknowledge every other conflict in the world; compare against every aggressive country in the world; declare support for Israel's "right to exist" and "right to defend itself" (which are nothing by proxies for aggressive expansionism); declare our criticism is limited to certain actions; denounce every opponent of Israel to an excessive degree; and make caveats that we have Jewish friends.
This is nonsense and this is exactly the nonsense that Israeli propaganda encourages as it suppresses criticism of Israel.
Everyday people talk in generalizations about countries, people, companies, etc... in exactly the way you claim they don't. Israeli supporters especially do it all the time, especially when talking about Iran. The hypocritical double standard is incredibly obvious to anyone not blinkered by pro-Israeli and pro-Zionist propaganda or self interest.
To overlap the Israel & Jewish issues: on Israel and also antisemitism, the Overton window in the west (especially US, UK & Germany) is located well inside the pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish side of the spectrum, especially if you compare it to what you can get away with saying about Muslims, Muslim countries and people of colour. Just think about what would happen if somebody said that in order to stop Israel committing genocide they should be bombed back to the stone age. They'd not only be uproar but that person would be driven out of their job and never serve political office in the US. But that's exactly what the US president and head of the armed forces said. The uproar was very one sided.
There is a prejudice, but it's opposite to what you think it is.
You're kinda proving my point here. Criticizing Israel is criticism of a country, not a people. Racism or antisemitism is not a factor in criticism of Israel unless there is proof of that as motivation. Actual proof, not a bad faith assumption, which is what unfortunately actually happens. Many people purposely come up with reasons conflate the two to use bad faith judgements & declarations which can then be used to devalue legitimate criticism.
