Maybe; but on the other hand, many political decisions were, erm, sub-optimal, including some of the reasons Israel came into being (genocide in Europe).
That is - to me - where the ability to distinguish between a 'people' or 'tribe', and a modern state, becomes vital: There are many Israelis with Arab, uh, genes, or blood; some of those follow the muslim and others the jewish religion (the forefathers of the latter moved to Europe and converted Europeans, who later founded Israel.) Ironically, some european-looking jewish Israelis don't like arab-looking jewish Israelis who in turn don't enjoy being called Arabs ... and there are Christans and atheists in Israel as well. That may include many of the immigrants from Russia who were allowed into Israel because of papers saying they are jewish ... paper can be bought, it seems, at least pork butchers are said to be thriving in the Russian districts. ... the Russian immigrants seem to like guns and dislike arabs, from what I've heard.
And ... erm, when you say jew, do you mean "of jewish descent" or the religion? If it's race, do you include the "1/4 jew"? Do you really want to adhere to an outdated model of thought based on "science" that has long been disproven, that created such racial categories for people who just wanted to live their lives ... and which btw directly led to gas chambers for people such as atheist college students who happened to have an atheist, german-nationalist, jewish-born parent, or most of the European gypsies? Oh, it's the religion? What about converts? Ethnic Europeans who're of jewish religion dominate Israel, oh and by the way: Genetically, the Palestine Jews are Palestinians. European jews are Europeans, the "race theory" they had 100 years ago is snake oil and humbug once you examine the genetic code.
And so on. The closer you look, the more complicated it becomes: There is no one "jewish people" ruling Israel, it's just a messy democracy full of racial and religious hate.
Israel is also a democracy; when we criticize its war against Palestine, its aggressive stance, human rights violations, bombs on UN buildings, we criticize a government, not just those of its citizens who happen to be Jewish.
... but in order to be fair, one should then also mentioned that Hamas etc. are no angels either, and that any country in the world would react to having rockets shot into its territory.
Most antisemitism seems to be based on the rather outdated, primitive world view of tribes fighting each other ... once you look more closely, and apply Occams's Razor to some of the wilder conspiracy theories, it's all so complicated as to be nearly overwhelming and seemingly unsolvable ... IMO people who fear this level of complexity and intertwined issues retreat to stupidity, because simple explanations and beliefs are easier, and more comforting, than having to dig for information, think about which information and its interpretation to trust, etc.
(So to some people magical beliefs in something they want to be true seems better than having to search for knowledge. To some, the world is flat, God created us 6000 years ago, ethnic group X controls the government and/or and caused 9/11, Bush and the CIA caused 9/11 in order to christianize Iraq, Russia watched calmly as NASA tricked the world into believing they'd landed on the moon ... all assumptions so completely unlikely they may well be called idiotic; anyone who believes that is not interesting in being too firmly rooted in our mind-shatteringly complex reality.)
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Topic: Criticism of a nation is equal to criticism of a ethnic group within that nation (Read 26358 times)