you really cannot say
“I hate Isreal so much it’s unreal”
without definitionally meaning
“I hate the sole place on earth made to be safe for Jews”
and
“I hate the country known for housing half the Jews on the planet”
which is easily understood to mean
“I hate Jews”
Especially when you talk about the country and its people using antisemitic language.
I hope this explains why you might be called antisemitic! If you disagree keep it to yourselves. It is not nonjews that get to say what isn’t antisemitism. Or more aptly. judenhass.
People will really try to claim "Just because I hate the Jewish country doesn't mean I hate Jews who live outside of Israel," which is funny because when people say racist shit about Africans and African countries, I 100% assume that their comments on black Africans also reflect their views on black Americans. At best I expect to cringe when I hear their opinions on black Americans, at worst I expect them to be an outright white supremacist. Because it turns out that a lot of the critiques of Africa as a place full of destitute savages with no education getting free handouts from the world, are often bar-for-bar what people use to be racist to black Americans here in the US too 🤷♀️
Xenophobia and racism are pretty much intrinsically linked to each other, like... MAGA-type shit doesn't work so well because people hate all Mexicans for their nationality, for example, it works because to a MAGA believer, "Mexican" is short for "uneducated poor brown manual laborer who can't speak English" or "gang member that sells drugs and rapes women." No leftist/progressive in their right mind would ever try to argue that that sort of rhetoric is "only hating [Latin American country], not being racist." Everyone knows that the xenophobia is heavily racialized and heavily tied to ethnicity and culture via stereotypes related to language, education level, religion, and so on.
So yeah. Jew haters call things "spiritually Israeli" and defend it by going "I'm only insulting Israel," meanwhile one of the most common antisemitic insults/conspiracies is to claim that Jews are cultureless parasites that only steal everyone else's culture. No one with a brain is convinced either that 1. That's not still antisemitism, 2. That Jew haters don't know exactly what they're doing, or 3. That even if they don't know, their ignorance absolves them of responsibility.
get peer reviewed
From now on, whenever someone says "spiritually Israeli", I'm going to say "you mean monotheistic?"
I mean, of course, there is a place to criticize Israel, but a few things come to mind:
Keep it reality-based. Yeah, I did some research, and found that people have libeled Jews going back to at least the Seleucids claiming Jews castrated their sons.
Netanyahu more or less appeals to people because Israel has few friends in the region. Show them leftists who hate Israel, Israelis are more likely to vote for Netanyahu.
Finally, I don't trust anyone who self-identifies as "anti-Zionist".
