Comment by settrans
6 days ago
Zionism to me means that the Jews are entitled to self-determination, and that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of that promise.
Anti-Zionism is the negation of that idea; namely that Jews are not entitled to self-determination and therefore should live at the whims of the countries where they are a minority for their security.
Merely objecting to an Israeli policy or even a Jewish value is not intrinsically antisemitic. But if you criticize only Israel about some issue, and grant a free pass to everyone else on that same issue, that's when things become problematic.
I think I agree nearly 100% with this. The tricky part is always selective-enforcement:
> But if you criticize only Israel about some issue, and grant a free pass to everyone else on that same issue, that's when things become problematic.
I do believe that (a) in aggregate, Israel has far more vitriol directed towards it for any given action vs comparable actions by other nations. However I also believe (b) that there aren't actually any materially more significant penalties attached to them than other nations.
I also believe that (c) most of (a) is due to Israel having a higher salience. People get informed more about Israel's bad actions than comparable ones in other nations. When informed of comparable things, people are generally upset about those in similar amounts. Further (d) Other nations should get a lot more complaints about their bad behavior. Finally, (e) comparisons to other nations in these discussions is useless, because it's whataboutism. The bad behavior of Israel is indeed often bad, but saying someone else does it too isn't a good response unless you actually think the standard is wrong. That has to happen in another discussion.