I’m Stuck with an Anti-Semitic Labor Union | Hacker News Reader

I’m Stuck with an Anti-Semitic Labor Union

wsj.com

14 pointskerneloftruth15 comments

When Ben and Jerry's boycotts the West Bank due to Israel's illegal settlements, the Israeli president calls it terrorism, and claims it is a boycott against Israel [0].

When people ask why Palestinians living in the West Bank are treated abhorrently, where they cannot use the same roads as Israelis, they cannot use the same legal system as Israelis, etc. Israelis claim that the West Bank is not a part of Israel.

As a Jew that grew up believing Israel is righteous and can do no wrong, I have had quite the rude awakening. I am not alone -- 25% of American Jews now believe Israel is an apartheid state [1]. Even young evangelicals are no longer blindly embracing Israel [2].

[0] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-s-presid...

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-finds-a-quarter-of-us-jew...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/05/26/a...

There are a lot of people who never read any part of any Bible, have no interest in the Middle East and never want to visit there, who might not necessarily understand why criticism of Israel's military is considered automatically racist. Can someone explain that? Because the article doesn't really connect those dots for me. And the article doesn't really make any sense unless you already had that opinion.

Every country's government has flaws, and criticizing them in general is fine. But when the only country you criticize for a given reason is also the only Jewish country in the world, despite there being a lot of other countries with the same (or worse) flaw, it becomes a reasonable assumption to think that anti-Semitism is why.

Everyone hates ethnocentric snowflakes. As they should.

Israel is an apartheid state though there a large component of its population does not have rights that the other does. And it has stayed like this for many decades.

Denouncing human rights violations is not anti-semitic.

It is if Israel, the only Jewish state, is consistently singled out for criticism when other states with far worse human rights records are excused.

For whatever reason, it's become acceptable on the left to be anti-Semitic so long as you sanitize it by wrapping it in anti-Israel sentiment. It reminds of how the right used rationalize anti-gay sentiment by saying "Oh, we don't hate the sinner, we just hate the sin".

By this logic, one can't be anti-CCP without being anti-chinese.

It's not about what can be, it's about what actually is.

People who are not antisemitic typically say "but you can criticize Israel", and they are right, and they don't understand.

The trouble is that in the real world people who criticize Israel and not antisemitic are vanishingly rare.

It's like "black lives matter", people are not not racist find it very racist and respond "all lives matter", and they don't get it. People who experience racism, explain "black lives matter" doesn't imply anything about other people.

In the real world you almost never find people who criticize Israel who are not also antisemitic.

For example, in this very thread "level1" tries to criticize Israel with a factually false accusation, checking his post history finds him singling out Jews. This is pretty typical.

> The trouble is that in the real world people who criticize Israel and not antisemitic are vanishingly rare.

Where is your evidence for this?

By evidence, I mean

  1) empirical, not anecdotal
  2) from a non-partisan source

> For example, in this very thread "level1" tries to criticize Israel with a factually false accusation, checking his post history finds him singling out Jews. This is pretty typical.

To be clear I am referring to this - but then I think you'll criticize all of HRW as anti-semitic as well right? Come one and deal with reality.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...

Most people are past the point of debating whether it is apartheid or not.

Most Israelis believe that Israel should give preferential rights to Jews:

"Most Israeli Jews (79%) say Jews deserve preferential treatment in Israel."

Also 50% support transfer of Arabs out of the state:

"The survey asked Jews whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree with the statement that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” Roughly half of Israeli Jews strongly agree (21%) or agree (27%), while a similar share disagree (29%) or strongly disagree (17%).3"

Both are from: https://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divi...

No, this is just Israel finding a way to avoid criticism. Any time someone tries to criticize Israel, they just get labelled an anti-Semite by Israel supporters. It's a way to shutdown any criticism of Israel. It's extremely disingenuous.

There's other part of this article that are also disingenuous - "It equated the policies of Israel, of which I am a citizen and where I still have family, with apartheid." It's disingenuous to claim Israel's policies aren't apartheid when they literally say things like, "The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people". [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law:_Israel_as_the_Natio...

Many nations have an official religion, often enshrined in their constitutions or even their names; for example, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and several others are officially defined by adherence to Islam. Many of these nations have terrible human rights records with respect to women, gays, and members of other religions. Many make the practice of other religions illegal. Yet only Israel,the world's only Jewish state, is singled out for boycotts and called an "apartheid state" by academics. Why? That is what is so clearly anti-Semitic about these boycotts.

25% of American Jews call Israel an apartheid state [0]. Are those Jews anti-semitic as well?

Israel also doesn't like it when the U.S. criticizes other human rights abusers, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt [1].

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-finds-a-quarter-of-us-jew...

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-officials-cautioned-bi...

Or maybe some people simply disagree with Israel's settlement policies. Automatically assuming that criticism of Israel is antisemitic seems just as productive as assuming that criticism of China is sinophobic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com