Somewhere in Western newsrooms and political backrooms, there must be an instruction manual or playbook entitled “How to make accusations of antisemitism with hardly any facts.” I imagine that Steve Paikin got hold of it and employed it to write his latest column. I am afraid that the piece is seriously lacking in intellectual honesty.
The attempt by Netanyahu and his far-right allies to get us all to conflate a dislike of them and their actions with a dislike of Jews is one of the most antisemitic messages around. They are the ones who are trying to taint people’s understanding of Jewishness itself by associating it with being a belligerent, murderous asshole, and they do it with utter disrespect for Jewish identity, for Jews who disagree with them, and for the damage this could do to Jewish people’s lives and other people’s understanding of Jews. If you want to resist antisemitism, resist the cynical, self-serving and short-sighted messaging of Netanyahu and his friends.
If there’s one upside of Israel’s actions in the last year, it’s that this gap between attitudes to Israel and attitudes to Jewishness, and the distortion Israel’s government attempts by painting its critics as antisemites, have become much clearer to people around the world. They have been so heavy-handed about it that people are now less likely to conflate these things.