Israel uses it to silence critics of its Gaza war while the right uses it to attack opponents. Meanwhile, the issue itself goes unaddressed<\/p>\n
When the international criminal court issued arrest warrants<\/a> for Israeli officials in November, the response from the country\u2019s government was all too familiar. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected outright the warrants for alleged war crimes in Gaza against him and the former defence minister Yoav Gallant, calling them \u201can antisemitic decision\u201d. The ultranationalist national security adviser, Itamar Ben-Gvir, declared<\/a> that the court had shown \u201conce again that it is antisemitic through and through\u201d. And the transport minister, Miri Regev, chimed in, claiming<\/a>: \u201cThis is modern antisemitism in the guise of justice.\u201d<\/p>\n Bleakly, none of this was a surprise. Over a year into Israel\u2019s assault on Gaza, which some experts have described as a genocide<\/a>, accusations of antisemitism raised to counter criticism of Israel have gone into overdrive. Such claims have been made against protesters<\/a> crying out for an end to the bloodshed in Gaza and against the UN and aid agencies warning of a humanitarian catastrophe. They have been levelled at global news channels and the international court of justice<\/a>; against actors, artists, pop stars<\/a> and even British-Jewish film-makers<\/a>. So sweepingly and speech-chillingly are such claims made by Israel\u2019s diehard defenders that the very term \u201cantisemitism\u201d is losing its meaning. It is exactly as the British-Jewish philosopher Brian Klug warned 20 years ago<\/a>: \u201cWhen antisemitism is everywhere, it is nowhere.\u201d Blanket misuse has, troublingly, turned the term into a feature on an Israeli politician\u2019s lingo-bingo scorecard.<\/p>\n Rachel Shabi is the author of Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Israel uses it to silence critics of its Gaza war while the right uses it to attack opponents. Meanwhile, the issue itself goes unaddressed When the international criminal court issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials in November, the response from the country\u2019s government was all too familiar. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected outright the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}