When defenders of Jeremy Corbyn—the British Labor party’s Israel-hating, terrorist-loving leader—confront the accusation that he is anti-Semitic, or excessively tolerant of anti-Semites, they usually employ one of two tactics, Ben Cohen notes. The first is to insist that Corbyn is the victim of a nefarious Jewish conspiracy to smear and discredit him with mendacious allegations. More insidious, however, is the second: to insist that Corbyn’s accusers are falsely labeling rational criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism, or blurring the lines between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Taking Professor Ian Almond as one example, Cohen writes:
The . . . argument that Almond chooses to defend from the charge of anti-Semitism [is] that Israel is the outcome of a “racist endeavor,” a favorite theme of the Corbynite left. This argument has historically been the preserve of anti-democratic ideologies and regimes. As early as 1965, Soviet diplomats at the United Nations were bracketing Zionism with Nazism. . . .
If Israel should, as Almond . . . advocates, be presented as a “settler-colonial” project to school students encountering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the very first time, how is that to be done in a way that doesn’t jeopardize attitudes to local Jewish communities? If Israel is to be portrayed as a rogue state of global proportions, whose inhabitants have essentially fabricated their historical and spiritual links to the territory which they now occupy at the expense of the indigenous Arabs, how can such an argument possibly avoid anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish wealth, Jewish political influence, and ingrained Jewish exclusivism? And if the Palestinians are to be portrayed as ongoing victims of ethnic cleansing by Jews (and Jews alone), then how can one neatly separate the opposition to Zionism from anti-Semitism?
The short answer is that you can’t.
That’s because the “racist-endeavor” portrait of Israel, however much one encounters it in Middle East Studies departments, is grounded in the anti-Semitic trope of a distinctly “Jewish” dishonesty—in which . . . disingenuous appeals for public sympathy, ruthless political lobbying, strategic use of financial wealth, and overbearing military might are the essential elements in the story of Israel’s creation, as well as its ongoing existence. If Almond and those who agree with him want to protect diaspora Jewish communities [from anti-Semitism] and achieve concrete progress for the Palestinians, the proper question they should ask themselves is whether their discourse about Israel is helping either of those goals.
Read more on Algemeiner: https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/08/20/how-to-misread-antisemitism/