Criticizing Israel or voicing sympathy for the Palestinians are not antisemitic. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:
In a 2002 interview the former Israeli government minister Shulamit Aloni was asked by Amy Goodman: “Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called antisemitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?” Shulamit Aloni replied “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country [the US] people are criticizing Israel, then they are antisemitic.” She added that there is an “Israel, my country right or wrong” attitude and “they’re not ready to hear criticism.” Antisemitism, the Holocaust and “the suffering of the Jewish people” are exploited to “justify everything we do to the Palestinians.”
Currently Israel is involved in a conflict with Hamas in Gaza that it has described as a “war” though the disparity in force levels involving a country with a modern fully equipped army, navy and air force versus something more like a militia armed with small arms and home-made rockets suggest that a different label might be more appropriate. The fighting has been constant apart from a six day pause to exchange hostages and prisoners and promises to continue into the New Year, and possibly much longer, due to the difficulty in engaging in anything like conventional warfare in a bombed out and devastated urban environment that favors the defense.
Israeli extreme brutality has been on display for all the world to see. Last week, Israeli soldiers shot dead three Jewish hostages who had escaped from their Hamas captors under cover of an Israeli bombardment. The hostages took most of their clothes off so it could be clearly seen that they were unarmed and they were carrying a white flag with their hands in the air, but the soldiers reacted by shooting two of them immediately. The third took cover in a building while calling for help in Hebrew, but he too was pursued and killed. In another incident two Catholic women, mother and daughter, taking shelter in Gaza’s only Catholic church were targeted and shot by Israeli snipers. This produced a rebuke from the Pope.
