Israel has continued bombarding Gaza’s south despite telling 1.1 million people in the north of the besieged enclave to relocate there ahead of an expected ground offensive.
“We were displaced from Tal al-Hawa to Rafah at the request of the Israeli army, and this is what happened to us. My son is a 3-month-old martyr,” the father of a child killed in an attack in Rafah told Al Jazeera.
The previous mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, ended their status as sister city with Tel Aviv over the systematic crimes from the state of Israel against Palestinians. The immediate reaction of the Israeli embassy was denouncing her as antisemitic, both in the media and in courts, which recently found her innocent.
The position that denouncing Israeli crimes is antisemitic has been the official position of Israel for decades, and that’s a very dangerous game for the well-being of Jews in a world where actual nazis are slowly gaining power, because once you’re run the term down through the ground, calling actual hate crimes against Jews “antisemitic” will no longer have any meaning.
So you are basically saying that Israel uses Jews as human shields against antisemitism.
At this point, that’s just a template answer, not different than the template answers China delivers everytime someone says something about the Uygur genocide, the Hong Kong occupation, or claims over Taiwan.
If people want to tie their religious identity to a nation state and call me antisemetic when I criticize that nation state – the same as I criticize any other nation state – they are in fact trivializing the experience of those who experience actual antisemitism.
I’m sure they don’t see it that way, but it’s hard for me to see such an attitude as anything other than disrespectful of one’s own history.