In the comment section beneath Jonathan Freedland’s CiF essay, “Gilad Shalit has been brought home to an Israel that has no plan for peace.“, there was this comment by someone using the moniker FreshNews:

The reasoning which informs such vitriol against Israel is nothing new to CiF Watch readers.  

One of the more prolific antisemites on the far left, Gilad Atzmon – who was given a platform by the Guardian several weeks ago – has written the following:

“There is no anti-Semitism any more. In the devastating reality created by the Jewish state, anti-Semitism has been replaced by political reaction. I am saying that these acts [vandalizing synagogues and Jewish cemeteries] should be seen as political responses rather than racially motivated acts or ‘irrational’ hate crimes. If Israel is the state of the Jewish people and the Jewish people themselves do not stand up collectively against the crimes that are committed on their behalf, then every Jewish person, Jewish symbol and Jewish object becomes an Israeli interest and a potential terrorist target….we should be consistent and regard any act against Jews as a political reaction rather than an irrational racist attack.”

CiF commentator, Medhi Hasan, has advanced a similar narrative:

 ”...the state of Israel – created ostensibly to protect Jews from across the world from hatred, prejudice and violence – through its actions today, and through its self-proclaimed role as the leader and home of world Jewry, provokes such awful anti-Semitic attacks against diaspora Jews.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had a great response, in an interview by David Frost, to the question of whether Israel’s actions provoke violence:

Begin told Frost that during his youth in Poland, he asked a group of Poles why they felt a need to beat up Jews, and they responded that the very presence of Jews was a “provocation.”

As such, it is a morally grotesque proposition to suggest that the actions, or mere presence, of Israel, causes or provokes antisemitism.  

While manifestations of antisemitism have varied throughout history, the one common thread which unites them all is that such bigotry existed as an a priori phenomenon, and was not informed by any particular Jewish behavior.  

Modern antisemites don’t gravitate towards Jew hatred as the result of Israeli behavior.  

The hatred of Jews has simply never been informed by such causation, nor any semblance of moral or political logic. 

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