Note to UN. We are just a bit busy now but will get around to you soon.
I disagree. I think it is a rhetorical dodge to pretend opposition to Israel as distinct from hatred of Jews.
The reason for this was the strident condemnation of antisemitism after World War II. Anyone who expressed antisemitic opinions was immediately dismissed as a kook, *and* what they said was discounted as intolerable ravings.
So criticism of Israel was used to evade such condemnation.
Importantly, it got extra justification from trying to piggyback on Jews, when *they* criticized Israel. But this is as hollow as a white person who uses the “n” word when attacking blacks, using as the excuse that “black people call each other that all the time.”
Looking at Israel objectively for a minute, and the question comes to mind of why, exactly, would Americans criticize Israel, as a nation, in the first place?
To start with, the US is as divorced from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it is, or at least should be, from the Hutu-Tutsi fight in Africa. Any interest that exists in the first place has questionable, and likely, antisemitic origins, mostly from the political left.
So what remains? Why be upset with Israel?
And this goes back to the first point. Leftists and Democrats are coming out of the closet about their hatred of Jews, and by extension, Israel. They are no longer as fearful of being openly antisemitic, so why keep up the pretense on their behalf?
Let them be openly antisemitic. Let the hate both Jews and Israel, as the same thing.
Because this will show everybody else who the left really are. And the rest of us will still look with disdain at antisemites, thus dispelling even more the left’s illusion that they are other than kooks, spewing intolerable ravings of hate.