Is it in any way reasonable to insist that progressives can only prove they aren't antisemites if they do what you demand and give unquestioning support to everything the IDF does to ordinary Palestinians, including the practice of throwing Palestinian kids in military jails? Why should people have to prove the oppose bigotry and oppression against one group by SUPPORTING the oppression of another?
The best definition of antisemitism is offered by the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism(whose authors were Jewish)
"Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)."
https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/
Why tie antisemitism to anyone's attitudes towards Israel or Zionism at all? Why equate a (now permanently and unchangeably right wing) nationalist movement with an entire set or religious traditions, philosophical views, ethnicities and cultures? Why make support of oppression the litmus test for opposition to bigotry? And how can there possibly be any chance of getting the Israel-Palestine dispute ended if the Israeli government is bound and determined to deny Palestinians self-determination and make any Palestinian leadership it would negotiate with agree to be humiliated and forced to play the role of the vanquished nation and the side solely responsible for the conflict, when in truth both nationalist movements share responsibility?
Also what possible justification can there be for the Israeli government constantly invoking the Holocaust to justify what it does to ordinary Palestinians, when nobody in Palestine had anything to do with that or any power to prevent it? Hitler was always going to exterminate and he would never have been satisfied with just having the Jewish communities of Europe and the UK move somewhere else, and Netanyahu was lying when he implied that it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who gave Hitler the idea for the Shoah.
I support Israel's right to exist in peace and security on the pre-1967 lines (which are the only legitimate lines that can be used, since Israel had no right to put the West Bank under permanent military occupation and has no right to try and reduce Palestinians to getting nothing, ever, but a pathetic, truncated statelet on sufferance that the Israeli government could take away again at any moment) but there is no way it can possibly be considered reasonable to make everyone back the Israeli stance on this without question, make everyone endorse the endless collective punishment and humiliation the IDF imposes on the vast majority of ordinary Palestinians who have played no violent role in the matter.
And Jeremy Corbyn was never an antisemite- he was just someone who was trying to work for peace and reconciliation, and to do that he HAD to try and talk the people he talked to into trying peace- joining in the denunciations of them and the demands that they simply admit they were totally wrong and totally to blame was never going to work. And as leader, he made it clear he would work within official Labour policy that called for a two-state approach, so what DIFFERENCE does it make whether he personally identified as a Zionist or not? And why spend years accusing him of personal antisemitism when he was obviously completely innocent of that charge and when he had spent decades, before he was leader, organizing protests AGAINST antisemitism? When nobody, prior to his winning the Labour leadership, had EVER accused him of antisemitism? And why not admit, now that he's never going to be prime minister, that he is innocent of that hatred and never did anything whatsoever to deserve to be tarred with accusations about it? Why not, at long last, move on on that part of it? Why is anybody still obsessed with making him crawl, with making him plead guilty to a bigotry he is obviously completly innocent of?
And in any case, why act as if Israel's survival depends on everybody in the entire world giving it unquestioning support against the Palestinians while demanding that any Palestinian leader say the exact words Netanyahu demanded, in the exact way he demanded?
Finally, it is unforgivable that dozens of Jewish antizionists- good, decent, principled people
whose only crime was not supporting a right-wing nationalist movement they felt was a betrayal of their values and their humanity- have been collectively punished and persecuted by Keir Starmer. It was never his place, as a Gentile, to tell them they were obligated to be Zionists.
Zionism has prevailed, it's never going away- but it has never been synonymous with Jews or Judaism and the actions of the Israeli government- including such actions as Netanyahu's decision, when still in power, to ally himself with the Jew-hating governments of Poland and Hungary- do nothing to combat antisemitism or protect anyone, anywhere against it.
Israel exists, it's always going to exist- but its leaders don't deserve the political equivalent of papal infallibility on "security" issues- any more than the papacy itself ever deserved papal infallibility on anything.
