A group of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters on France has been arrested and apparently faces charges on incitement of racial hatred due to their outspoken rebuke of Israel's policies in relation to Gaza and the West Bank. The suggestion would seem to be that, at least for this French prosecutor, criticizing Israel is the same thing as anti-Semitism.
This isn't the first time this association has been made. A few years ago, Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch (and a Jewish man himself, son of a Jewish man who fled Nazi Germany),
openly criticized Israel for it's indiscriminate attacks on Lebanese civilians. The response to his criticism was fairly serious.
The New York Sun suggested that Roth had a pro-Hezbollah bias and suggested that he was engaging in the de-legitimization of Judaism, which is the basis for anti-Semitism. Among those charged with anti-Semitism for criticizing Israel or voicing support for Palestine are Jimmy Carter, Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi, Arnold Toynbee, and George Orwell.
While I can imagine that criticizing Israel could be a politically correct way for an anti-Semite to vent their feelings about the Jewish people, I'm concerned that the labeling of Israel's critics as anti-Semites is ultimately dangerous. On the one hand, it's clearly an attempt at censorship. Being called anti-Semetic is one of the worst charges on can face in the court of public opinion, and people who want to criticize Israel's (Israel meaning the Israeli government and IDF, generally) policies could be silenced by the threat of such serious charges. In addition to that, mislabeling dissidents as anti-Semetic actually gives aid and comfort to real anti-Semites because as more people recognize the charge is being used incorrectly, the label will become less and less meaningful.
In his book, Necessary Illusions, Noam Chomsky wrote, "It is now necessary to identify criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitism – or in the case of Jews, as "self-hatred," so that all possible cases are covered." Noam Chomsky concluded that labeling dissidents as anti-Semetic is less about people being uninformed and more about essentially removing any criticism of the state of Israel from any discussion or debate.
Where do you come down on this question? Do you believe that some criticism of Israel is just masked anti-Semitism? Do you believe all criticism of Israel is anti-Semetic or borderline anti-Semetic? Are you at all concerned that labeling criticism of Israel as anti-Semetic may be censoring legitimate dissent? Could the use of the anti-Semite label actually cause the term to lose some of its meaning?