Thank you for confirming that you do, in fact, have nothing to say beyond vitriolic name calling.
My use of a pseudonym on my Medium account long predates the current events in Israel and Gaza and has nothing to do with them. It’s just a nom de plume; there’s nothing sinister or cowardly about it. (Ask the Argumentative Penguin.) If you go to my profile page and open any of my published articles, you’ll find my name clearly displayed in the Creative Commons notice at the end of the article. In any case, it has no substantive bearing on the present conversation.
You began by arguing that criticism of Israel is not in itself tantamount to antisemitism, and of course that’s completely right. Whatever your criticisms of Israeli policy in the occupied territories, I can assure you that they’re no stronger or more forthrightly expressed than mine. Your suggestion that I know nothing about the issue literally made me laugh out loud; I’m quite confident I’ve been steeped in the issue longer than you’ve been alive.
But when I point out, using your very own words, the symmetry of the situation—that condemning the savage butchery perpetrated by Hamas two weeks ago does not in itself make one anti-Palestinian—you still somehow can’t bring yourself to join that condemnation. Instead, you answer with evasions and denials and irrelevant ad hominem remarks about my publishing pseudonym.
No, of course criticism of Israel is not synonymous with antisemitism. But in this present moment, there are unmistakable signs of the one bleeding over into the other. We Jews know the phenomenon when we see it. Here in America and elsewhere (from your references to UK newspapers and your use of quaint expressions like “sod off,” I gather that you’re British), we’ve been seeing a rising wave of it in recent years: until now mainly from the neo-Nazi right, but now also increasingly from the self-styled “progressive” left. If you deny it, you’re either willfully blind to it or part of the problem.
One of its hallmarks is the kind of denialism you’ve been espousing about the Hamas atrocities. Do you seriously mean to deny that they occurred, that “the false story of baby killing by Hamas has been propagated” by malevolent “forces” to justify genocide? The Israelis just made the whole thing up, as (you claim) they made up the story about the errant Islamic Jihad rocket hitting the al-Ahli Hospital? You sound like Donald Trump denying the 2020 election.
Anyone who truly desires peace, for Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike, can see that the only viable solution is two sovereign states, side by side, with mutual recognition and non-hostility. The obstacle to that solution is, and always has been, intransigent Palestinian rejectionism. Their enemy is in the mirror.
