I feel like this would be less strawmanny if the kid was saying “ethnic nationalism is evil” instead. Because while no one’s actually defending “genocide”, lots of people do defend zionism and the definition of zionism is basically white nationalism, but specific to jews.
The problem is that people have equated Israel to genocide to jewish people in general. So if you criticize the genocide the listener is free to imply you are critical of jewish people, therefore an antisemite.
I feel like this would be less strawmanny if the kid was saying “ethnic nationalism is evil” instead. Because while no one’s actually defending “genocide”, lots of people do defend zionism and the definition of zionism is basically white nationalism, but specific to jews.
The problem is that people have equated Israel to genocide to jewish people in general. So if you criticize the genocide the listener is free to imply you are critical of jewish people, therefore an antisemite.