"Criticism of Israel is not Anti-Semitic"

 We hear this statement all the time, often spammed throughout subs under an anti-Israel video, or during debates. It is accompanied with the notion that calling critics of Israel antisemitic is a silencing tactic meant to hide Israel's crimes against humanity and serve as a diversion from the plight of the Palestinians. The idea that Jews are "invoking the Holocaust" to justify persecution and have a "victim complex" comes up very frequently. I just wanted to make a post summarizing my thoughts about just how misguided this sentiment is, as an armament to those of you who frequently encounter it. Feel free to criticize or add to it.

1: The level of criticism leveraged against Israel is completely disproportionate to the wrongdoings of Israel. This will often be countered with claims of "whataboutism." The reality is, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the lowest-scale conflicts on Earth. The amount of people who die in the conflict pales in comparison to almost all other modern conflicts, including many that few have ever heard of, and pretty much all the ones that people have heard of. The level of humanitarian crisis and oppressive policy caused by the Israeli government, doesnt match that ongoing in many parts of the world, that again gets very little attention. There are hundreds of "ethnostates" in the world and the Palestinians demand one of their own, yet the only ethnostate in the world worth attacking as an ethnostate is Israel.

The problem with the "whataboutism" retort is that the invocation and critique of Israel, both online, in the real world, in student governments, by actual governments, on any single piece of content made by a Jew anywhere on the internet or in a scholarly setting, and down to what people say when they first meet a Jew, is extremely disproportionate, to a level way beyond people who aren't Jewish can imagine without living our experience. Yes, "this post is about Israel, stop with the whataboutism" is a good argument in a vacuum. When every 2 days a heavily upvoted top reddit post is a video specifically designed to portray Israelis as evil, and you have entire news networks, websites, and organizations devoted to diverting all conversation about war/racism/healthcare/financial inequality/trans rights/feminism/video games/artwork to attacks and boycotts on Israel, that argument becomes weaker and weaker.

2: The nature of criticism leveraged at Israel is completely out of proportion to that done on other countries. When people criticize America, or China, you'll find the occasional sentiment that Americans and Chinese as individuals are evil people, but by and large that attitude is shot down and felt to be discriminatory and bigoted. When people criticize Israel, not only is that sentiment far more commonplace, but there are far fewer people noting that the people of a nation and its government deserve to be distinguished. Moreover, many anti-Israel videos, pictures, and "documentaries" posted on hate subs like publicfreakout, worldnewsvideo, etc go beyond criticizing Israel as an entity and are specifically attempting to make the argument that Israelis, as individuals, are subhuman racists, usually through carefully curated interviews or videos of the worst Israelis there are. I've seen plenty of people saying "well, we shouldn't hate everyone just for being born in Israel" get downvoted to oblivion with heavily upvoted comments saying that Israelis should be hated for who they are, or actually suggesting that by not leaving their homes and "moving to Europe," they are monsters. Particularly, despite the real colonial nature of many countries, Israeli Jews (and only Jews) are often referred to as "colonizers" by default, whether Israel is the only home they've known and their grandparents were refugees, or they are a recent immigrant.

You can find people literally calling for the nuclear devastation and total destruction of Israel as a state with cheers and upvotes. Mods will almost never actually call these statements out, and people who call them out get accused of being shills and Zionist bots. There is literally no other country on Earth that gets this intense of an assault onto its citizenship at an individual level by so many people, under the guise of "criticism." There is no other country on Earth that gets its right to exist as a nation questioned, and the reality of it having institutions, schools, research, hospitals, businesses, homes, etc all waved off as "fake" and irrelevant as the whole place needs to be dissolved to save the world. There is no other country on Earth where it is considered legitimate criticism to boycott the language and all the individual people, whether they be musicians, writers, scientists, Holocaust survivors speaking against racial bias, etc, and think barging in to seminars to silence the speaker and threaten the attendees is just "criticism" and not at all bigotry over one's national origin.

3: Objectively, to anyone who knows the history of WWII and the Holocaust, Israel on its worst day does not even begin to compare to the systematic murder and torture committed by the Nazis. Palestinians are not being led by the millions into death camps to be gassed. Palestinians are not being enslaved to create Israeli weapons for no pay while being subject to unlivable conditions until they die en masse of communicable disease and starvation. Palestinians are not being mass experimented on. Israel is not waging a campaign of racial superiority seeking to take over the entire Middle East, killing all Muslims encountered, with the goal of dominating the world. There is PLENTY Israel is doing that warrants serious criticism. However, the immediate and unwavering decision by tons of Israel's critics to immediately invoke Israel as "the new Nazis" is telling of a deeper issue. To a degree Nazi accusations are too common across the board, but the use of "Nazi" as a label to apply to Israelis or people who so much as believe Israel has a right to exist, is more than just a tactic to achieve a sense of moral superiority, but really a tool to silence and bully Jews by invoking our collective trauma shamelessly.

Even darker, scratch away at this and you'll often find a sentiment of "the Jews didnt learn from the Holocaust." As though the Holocaust was a lesson plan for Jews, where we were meant to atone for unnamed sins and become complacent pacifists that shine love and brightness onto everything evermore at the minor cost of a third of our population being slaughtered. Nevermind that Jews are at the forefront of a ton of social justice, charity, and equal rights movements. This idea is so unbelievably toxic and offensive; the people who say this would absolutely balk at a statement such as "Blacks who commit crime didnt learn from slavery," or "Muslims didnt learn from Iraq to stop doing terrorism," but will happily say "Jews didnt learn from the Holocaust," and that "Jews have a persecution complex." We did learn a lesson from the Holocaust- no matter how much we contribute to society and demonstrate loyalty and assimilation, we can always be centrifuged out from the pack and murdered, under the nonchalant gaze of the world. It was the callousness of the world regarding treatment of Jewish refugees both in Europe and the Middle East that led to Israel's existence in the first place.

4: Jews remain one of the highest victims of hate crimes throughout the world, per capita. We face attacks by white supremacists, Black Hebrew Israelites, Islamists, communists, and everything in between. Yet despite this fact, we are the only minority that is regularly told that we either deserve such attacks, or that the attacks are "understandable due to Israel's actions, even though I don't support them," by people who fashion themselves as fighters for social justice and anti-racism. The notion that anything Israel does justifies condoning hate crimes against Jews is pure antisemitism, yet this attitude is extremely popular on Reddit and among various circles in the progressive world (and others). As usual, standards are applied to us that are not applied to any other minority group on the planet. Even more disgusting, videos and documentation of hate crimes against Jews regularly get censored on the same subreddits that post anti-Israel videos every few days. I've seen this happen multiple times. Then when these hate crimes, which in some places (particularly Scandinavia) are dismissed by governmental authorities as understandable, Jews who immigrate to Israel to escape get lumped in as "colonizers."

5: A LOT of criticism against Israel falls squarely into antisemitism territory. The idea that US support for Israel comes from shadowy Jews who control the US government (and Saudi Arabia, and Ireland, and Poland, and every other country whose government tolerates us when the populace hates us). The idea that Jews have no culture or ancestral claim to the Levant and are actually "Khazar imposters," a theory proven wrong through genetic analysis time and time again. The idea that Israeli food is "cultural appropriation" which erases the identity of Middle Eastern Jews who spend millennia cooking and creating foods alongside the culture they lived under. The extremely common claim that "Zionists control the media" despite intense criticism of Israel by mainstream networks, humans rights organizations, and the UN. The repetition of anti-Jewish tropes about Jesus, drinking children blood, and other classics from the Middle Ages with "Zionist" just swapped for the word "Jew." The notion that all of the Middle East's wars and 9/11 and all of modern warfare is due to Israel, completely ignoring every other war and power struggle in the Middle East which have had far greater consequences in terms of casualties. The claim that Israelis harvest Palestinian organs and harvest organs of people in developing countries when they send teams to help in natural disasters. The idea that anything good an Israeli does (ie, helping in earthquakes, agricultural technology, LGBT rights) are specific campaigns to whitewash the inhumanity of Israelis, as though Jews are not capable of being good people or doing a good deed without an ulterior motive.

More important than these "criticisms" themselves is the sheer silence by the rest of the anti-Israel movement. You almost never see a critic of Israel, such as a member of BDS, call out the sentiments above. You almost never see these toxic attitudes get thrown out of the movement. They are either fostered and championed, or ignored. In an era where we are deciding that silence against a minority is violence, the calculated decision to exclude Jews from this by the anti-Israel movement and then revert to accusations of a "persecution fetish" make it all quite clear.

Please let me know your thoughts, and if you find this a good reference next time you debate someone who says "criticism of Israel is falsely labeled as antisemitism."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Jewish/comments/qu4mnl/criticism_of_israel_is_not_antisemitic/ Taken with permission