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Whether Jewish or gentile, liberal or conservative, we supporters of Israel must admit we haven't always framed our defense of the Jewish state in the most fair-minded of ways. Our opponents in this arena—Israel-bashers in politics and the culture, across parliaments and campuses—too often play with one hand tied behind their backs.
Call it the test of antisemitic motives: whether openly or surreptitiously, anyone opposing a particular policy or constitutional feature of Israel is immediately suspected, as many have complained, of harboring antisemitism or connivance with Palestinian terror.
This is done, both deliberately and accidentally, by conflating two different stances. On one hand lies legitimate criticism of Israel's government (which could in theory, though not necessarily in practice, imply anti-Jewish prejudice) while on the other lies anti-Zionism, or the denial of Israel's right to exist under any government, which most watchers do associate—and with good reason—with antisemitism.
Policing the exact inflection point when one stance morphs into the other requires hawkish vigilance, at the risk of importing some of wokeness' tactics in defense of an unwoke cause. After all, much of what passes for criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policies is, in fact, rooted in a frontal dislike of the Jewish people exercising their sovereignty in any direction—the difficulty is to know how much. The Palestinian question, moreover, often finds its way into the domestic fray at Jewish expense.
When the Western left lambasts Israel for its treatment of Arabs, it often unwittingly ends up typecasting Jewish communities in those countries, whose ties to Israel vary but for whom Jewish nationhood is integral to their identity. Consider that, upon progressive victories in a slate of local races in 2015, a handful of Spanish townhalls adopted—and were later made to overturn—clauses from the BDS campaign that forbid the hiring of Jews for fear that they spread pro-Israel propaganda.
Yet much as we should stay vigilant of antisemitism, the fact is that since Bibi Netanyahu's return to the Israeli premiership in 2009 enthroned his brand of right-wing politics over the past decade, the gap between the two stances has become an ever-deepening gulf, with no corresponding sparseness on the part of Bibi's defenders in the use of the antisemitism accusation. This has poisoned much of the discourse on Israel and discouraged many of the Jewish state's fair-minded critics from addressing the shortfalls in their own position, aware that their legitimate criticism may be labeled as antisemitic.
Consider that, in 2019, Bibi lambasted as antisemitic a ruling by the Court of Justice of the EU for labelling wine produced beyond the Green Line as hailing from "occupied territories." Much as Bibi's supporters would like the West Bank to be labeled Israeli territory, the fact is that international law does not recognize it as such and equating the statement of that fact to antisemitism is ludicrous.
Having failed to stem it, the poison has now spread to the other side. This form of logical maximalism—of equating fair criticism with bigotry—is being mirrored on the left as the ongoing round of protests over Bibi's now-stalled judicial reform sweeps Israel. Bibi's leftist critics have now taken to accusing the reform's supporters of embracing Jewish supremacism, homophobia, violence against Arabs and other such evils—the other side's accusations turned inside out.
A new appeal in ad form made the rounds of the press today by an NGO coalition claiming that "destroying the checks and balances of Israel's democracy," which they claim the reform would, "will disenfranchise Arabs, women, LGBT, secular communities, civil society, asylum-seekers and immigrants." At its core, this form of typecasting is no better than the right's slapdash accusations of antisemitism in all directions. If left unchecked, the two will reduce the debate over anything coming out of Israel to a war of insults.
Jorge González-Gallarza (@JorgeGGallarza) co-hosts the Uncommon Decency podcast on Europe.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
