On Anti-Semitism

Anti Semitism is an awful allegation and a terrible label.  In fact, being “Anti” anything simply because of differences in religion, ethnicity, physical attributes, etc. has no place among freedom loving people in a civil society.

Anti Semitism seems to be defined these days as “hostility towards or prejudice against Jewish people”.  Interestingly, Semites are peoples from Western Asia and Africa linked together by Semitic languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic. Semites include Jews, Arabs, Phoenicians, Ethiopians and probably others. But today we seem to reserve the term pretty exclusively to bias towards Jews.

There is a natural human tendency to generalize. I grew up as a kid during WW II. The Nazis were waging a bloody war in Europe and the authoritarian, ultra nationalistic Tojo government in Japan was waging a savage war in the Pacific. But we viewed all Germans and all Japanese as the enemy, all were bad, and all were guilty, even though undoubtedly the majority of those people, who had no power to confront their governments on anything, were certainly not complicit in the atrocities that were committed.

An so it is today. Hamas is a radical organization which committed a terrible brazen crime on October 7, 2023. At that time they probably numbered no more than 30,000 in a Palestinian population in Gaza of over 2 million, But we tend view all Palestinians there, and also those n the West Bank, with trepidation and suspicion. 

To me it is very clear that the object of the protests we have seen over the last few years in America and elsewhere have not been aimed at the Jewish people per se but at the horrendous loss of Palestinian life, mainly civilian, and the massive destruction of homes, schools, hospitals and more, perpetrated by the right wing Israeli government since the tragedy of October 7th. Unfortunately protests often attract outside unsavory elements who seize the opportunity to project an unacceptable, unintended slant and to distort the basic objective of the protest.             

The Israelis are masters of many things, including communication and publicity. Anytime there is conflict in the Middle East, the ugly specter of anti Semitism is raised as the driving culprit in the conflict. It is manifestly not that. The one and only one cause for the animosity between the Israelis and the Palestinians is the rigid suppression of Palestinian rights in their own land for the last 70 plus years by right wing Likud governments, which are beholden to the minority Ultra Orthodox Jewish contingent who are aggressively trying to oust Palestinians from all the land and to establish an exclusive Jewish state from the river to the sea.

– – – – Just the  view of a common man