In an op-ed for France’s Le Monde, Oscar-winning director Michel Hazanavicius expresses fear over the dramatic change in the way the world perceives Jewish people, as if being Jewish had become something really murky, vaguely suspect, possibly detestable.’
a) this happens with literally every country on earth. Even your farthest left Americans still get associated with the far right nutjobs, by virtue of both being American and the human mind inherently being biased towards categorization / chunking.
b) because many of the actions that make people angry are being carried out by the IDF, and all Israelis have to serve in the IDF, making every Israeli seem complicit.
c) because Israel is not just a state filled with citizens. It is explicitly the state of the Jewish people, to the point of being an apartheid state that treats non-Jewish citizens worse, so it’s actions end up associated not just with Israelis but with Jewish people on the whole.
d) because Israelis have repeatedly elected Netanyahu to power for several decades. Regardless of him not winning a majority of the popular vote, having one guy as your country’s leader for that long (especially through repeated elections as opposed to a dictatorship), will automatically associate his actions with those of the citizens in the eyes of the rest of the world.
e) because large influential parts of the Jewish diaspora (especially in the United States), have been extremely and militantly supportive of Israel no matter what it does. Just look at the ADL and AIPAC that think that the act of comparing the actions of the Israeli government to the acts of the Nazi government to be inherently anti-Semitic. They’re quite frankly nationalist nut jobs who are trying to censor any criticism of Israel, and in the process they’ve made it look like there is actually a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
Maybe when Israel stops killing and abusing civilians on the scale of the Russians or Chinese, again, explicitly in the name of the Jewish people, the villainous characterizations would stop.
I don’t understand why people find the above process confusing. Do you really not understand how the average person works and thinks? Have you really not seen roughly this same pattern play out repeatedly?
This comment has been reported and mentioned a few times. As best as I can tell, the reporter wants to remind people that it can be dangerous to associate individuals with the decisions of their government. As a comparison - should all Americans be considered to be white nationalists while Trump was in power? Reality is often much more complicated. I would remind people on this instance that we should not victim blame, and that there are going to be people who are not in alignment with the structures of power that exist. I don’t know how government works in Israel, but in the US our leaders often are not elected in line with what the populace thinks (when they do decide to vote), but heavily manipulated via Gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement.
With all that being said, I think it’s valid to have a strong criticism of a government committing genocide. I think it’s also valid to criticize people who align with a government that commits genocide if they are not actively criticizing their own government over said genocide. I think it’s important to voice our disgust with hate and hate based violence and to be strongly critical of individuals who don’t share these values.
That’s wild that people would report a dispassionate explanation of the factors that led to the currently increased levels of antisemitism, written in response to an article asking how we got to currently increased levels of antisemitism.
My great grandparents fled Poland while it was Germany because they were Jewish. You don’t have to hate Jewish people to see how many dumb and misguided people in the world there are, and how many of them will invariably link the actions of an explicitly Jewish state with the Jewish people.
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Maybe in practice, but certainly not in law.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that “Arab Israelis are citizens of Israel with equal rights” and states that “The only legal distinction between Arab and Jewish citizens is not one of rights, but rather of civic duty. Since Israel’s establishment, Arab citizens have been exempted from compulsory service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).”
https://web.archive.org/web/20160803050854/http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/mfaarchive/2000_2009/2001/8/arab israelis
This kind of article is really senseless, you are completely right. There is nothing mysterious, nothing at all to think or talk about except that Israel is committing genocide. That’s it
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