Is criticizing Israel anti-Semitic?

“The line that separates legitimate disapproval of Israel from anti-Semitism may not always be obvious,” said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. But there are demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe shouting "Nuke Israel!" and accusing the Jewish state of genocide because of its war against Hamas. That's going too far—“siding with some of the world’s most virulent Jew-haters” makes you one, too.

The real moral crime, said the Tehran Times in an editorial, would be standing silent while “a defenseless, imprisoned, and starved nation is experiencing attacks by a cruel adversary.” It’s hard to hold back tears, and anger, when you see Palestinian babies being killed.

“We've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now,” said Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. The death of a child is “a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing,” but the only reason this ghoulish “pornography” is out there is that Hamas routinely uses its own civilians as human shields and uses pictures of the victims to rally supporters.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

Israel’s propaganda machine would have us believe that Palestinians are a heartless bunch of anti-Semitic “religious fanatics,” said Avi Shlaim in Britain’s The Guardian. Certainly, Hamas isn’t blameless. But that doesn’t justify “all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted” in its quest for domination over the Palestinians.

Welcome to the “upside-down world of Israel haters,” said Jonah Goldberg in National Review, where Zionists are the “new Nazis,” and Palestinians are miraculously surviving a brutal effort to wipe them out. The Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel, you see, and the only way for the haters to make such a Hitlerite agenda defensible is to convince the world “that the Israelis deserve it.”