If you publicly criticize Israel, you’ll sooner or later be confronted with the “why are you singling out Israel” critique. “There are so many nations in the world – so picking on the world’s one and only Jewish state must be motivated by antisemitism, right?”
Sometimes the “motivated by antisemitism” part is implied rather than said, as in this essay by Professor Jeroen Bruggeman.
First, why were there far more demonstrations than against other wars with far more casualties, such as Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Congo, Myanmar and Ukraine? Are Israelis and Palestinians more special than everyone else who uses and/or endures violence?
At less rarified levels, it’s often stated more baldly, as in this question on Quora.
On hypocrisy, why are we not protesting as hard for Yemen and Syria which is utterly far worse compared to Gaza/Palestine because villainizing Jews seems to be more politically correct than villainizing Muslims?
The IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has been taken up by many states and cities, the Trump administration and (under pressure from Trump) universities including Harvard and Columbia, includes “Applying double standards by requiring of Israel behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
The Nexus Task Force, an academic group focused on opposing antisemitism, replied:
Paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently than other countries is not prima facie proof of antisemitism. (There are numerous reasons for devoting special attention to Israel and treating Israel differently, e.g., some people care about Israel more; others may pay more attention because Israel has a special relationship with the United States and receives $4 billion in American aid).
Few if any of Israel’s apologists who raise the “why single out Israel?” argument could honestly say they personally give equal attention to all the worlds’ crises; they typically pay far more attention to Israel than any other country.
Which is fine! People are allowed to care more about one issue than another. Even critics of Israel.
I’m pleased with (if you’re less charitable, you might even say “smug about”) the five-panel bunny narrative in the big guy’s tattoos in this strip.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has six panels.
PANEL 1
An outdoor park environment. In the background, a bearded man with a blue shirt holds a “Save Gaza” sign. In the foreground, a man in a polo shirt and a woman in a red skirt and black vest are talking about the bearded man.
POLO: Why does that guy single out Israel for criticism? Lots of countries do bad things!
VEST: I’ll ask him.
PANEL 2
The woman in the vest has approached the bearded man. From this angle, we can see that under the vest, she’s wearing a shirt with the Israeli flag on it.
VEST: There are so many evil governments, and yet you’ve decided to protest the only Jewish state. Do you have something against Jews?
PANEL 3
The bearded man earnestly replies.
BEARD: Huh. I guess I was raised to care about Israel. We talked about Israel a lot in Hebrew school. When other kids fundraised for UNICEF we donated our allowances for growing trees in Israel.
PANEL 4
The bearded man looks angrier.
BEARD: Also, I’m American. We give tons of weapons to Israel. So when Israel commits genocide, my tax dollars enable it.
PANEL 5
The bearded man smiles; the vest woman looks unconvinced.
BEARD: Besides, no one can focus equally on everything. I bet you pay more attention to Israel. If it’s okay for you to prioritize some issues, why isn’t it okay for me?
PANEL 6
The vest woman has returned to talking with the guy in the polo shirt.
POLO: So what did he say?
VEST: It’s like we thought, he just hates Jews.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is antiquated cartoonists’ slang for amusing but unimportant details in the art.
SHIRT: The bearded guy’s t-shirt has an image of a lit candle, then an image of a light bulb, then an image of the sun.
TATTOOS: The tattoos on bearded guy’s arms tell a little five panel story, showing a baby bunny growing up, falling in love, having oodles of babies, and finally dying.
PANEL 2: Charlie Brown is in the background.
PANEL 3: A flyer tapes to the tree says “LOST: Bad Dog,” in in smaller print, “Bad bad doggie! No! If found, do not give treats.” The photo shows a dog smoking a cigarette.
PANEL 6: The plant on the windowsill is Audrey II from “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Graffiti on the wall says “Why are you reading this?” and “BG is here.” (BG stands for “background”). It’s impossible to read, but the graffiti behind the woman says “Bilbo Lives.”
I have mixed feelings on this.
Even leaving aside Israel, it does bother me that certain conflicts, like those in Yemen and Sudan and Myanmar, are “forgotten wars”. If a martian came to earth and did an assessment of human violence, these would feature extremely heavily, and yet they’re rarely discussed.
It’s extremely notable to me that the biggest war since World War II – the Congo war in the late 90s/early 00s – is almost entirely unknown in the West. People don’t even realise it happened.
The “clean hands” argument – that the West is not as deeply involved in wars in Sudan, Yemen, the Congo as it is in Ukraine, Israel or other more “high profile” conflicts – is one this cartoon explicitly mentions. And it makes sense. But it does bother me that it seems like maybe our goal is less to end conflict or violence, but just to disassociate ourselves – not to reach a point where the violence ends, just to reach a point where we don’t have to feel guilty about it.
And while it is true that nobody can focus on everybody equally, the fact that on a societal level, we tend to focus on some conflicts much more than others, implies to me that there’s something more here going on than just a bunch of idiosyncratic personal preferences in aggregate.
When I drew this, I deliberately went against the conventions of mainstream political cartooning – the character with my views is fat and balding, the antagonists are conventionally attractive.
So I was fascinated to read this exchange on Reddit – a reader literally couldn’t understand the comic at first.
(Plus, I’m kinda amused, in an old-person way, by the words I just barely understand.)
“Regular looking people”!!!!!!
I know way more folks who look like the protestor than the ones questioning his motivations.
I have a hard time disassociating anti-Semitism from criticism of Israel, even though I believe that most people do it from a place of honest concern over what Israel is doing.
Part of that is that there are obviously some anti-Semites in the movement. If Jewish students are being harassed, unprovoked, on American campuses, it’s because they’re Jewish, not because of a political stance on a nation halfway across the world. And those anti-Semites have good cover, because they can substitute “Jew” with something like “Zionist” and basically say what they wanted to say without having to speak in code.
The other part is that I think people are by and large victims of the media they take in – If you show someone something that they weren’t aware of ten minutes ago, they’re going to form an opinion on it. They may or may not articulate that opinion, that opinion may or may not be well informed or defensible, but in the back of their head, they think something that they hadn’t thought ten minutes ago, and the only reason that thought exists is that someone told them about the thing. If you continue to add to that opinion by adding touchpoints, you can absolutely what is front of mind for people. Not necessarily what they think on it… But what they “choose” to think about.
China is actively committing the genocide of Uighur Muslims as we speak, and in a couple of generations there will be no more Uighurs in China because of their sterilization programs. There’s been war, conflicts, or coups in Ukraine, Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Myanmar, and Lebanon. The number of people killed in the Somali famine has been atrocious. Has anyone checked in on the state of women in Afghanistan? How are the people of North Korea faring?
On a macro level, I think that the focus on Israel is absolutely attributable to anti-Semitism. People can reasonably come to the positions they hold without hating Jews as a race, culture or religion, but the reason they’re focused on Israel is because people who do hate Jews as a race, culture or religion have been very effective at focusing media attention.
I can’t think of a better example of this than the UN – Something like 60% of all UN condemnations have been towards Israel. These people are tasked with monitoring human rights abuses the world over, and I don’t think that the number of corpses, raped women, and child soldiers they had to ignore to myopically hyperfocus on Israel can be attributed to anything other than anti-Semitism.
The antisemitic Americans that full throatedly proclaim “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” are the same ones that support the current Israeli leadership’s efforts to push Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank.
I kind of hate to agree with Corso, even partially, but I think there are antisemites who are also anti-Israeli. Patrick is also right that there are antisemites who are also very pro-Israeli. But I don’t think Corso is right that antisemitism explains the existence of anti-Zionism.
One of the major flaws of the IHRA definition of antisemitism is that it focuses so much on Israel. Even if one does think that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism, it isn’t the only form. It’s possibly to be extremely antisemitic without ever having any stance on Israel – positive, negative, or even neutral.
At the risk of harping on about it, I think the large scale answer to why we care a lot about atrocities in Gaza, and less about atrocities in Sudan in Yemen, lies in our prejudices and assumptions towards Sudanis and Yemenis, not our prejudices and assumptions towards Israelis or Palestinians.
I don’t think this is as common as you think. Is there anti-Semitism on the right? Yes. Is there an irrationally unwavering support for Israel on the right? Also yes. But are the Anti-Semites the same people as the people who have irrationally unwavering support for Israel? I don’t think so. Or if they are, the overlapping part of the Venn is relatively small. I don’t think you’ll find groypers at pro-Israel rallies.
For clarity… I think that once made aware of the situation in Israel, rational people can come to legitimate criticisms of Israel, and that Israel does itself few favors on the morality front. My second point was that our focus on those issues almost certainly stems from a very active cohort of anti-Semites who hyperfocus on Israel to the ignorance of a whole lot of atrocities the world over.
And there’s a lot of well-maybe-it’s-this-thing-other-than-anti-Semitism-ing going on, but I don’t think they adequately explain the absolute dichotomy between Israel and the rest of the world. As the example from the comic: Does Israel receive a lot of aid? Yes. And that relationship might reasonably increase scrutiny, but it’s not like Israel is the sole recipient of American aid, and if American aid has scrutiny packed into it, there ought to be some amount of attention in a whole lot of other places that is suspiciously absent.
It feels like the scrutiny of Israel comes first, and the justification for that scrutiny comes second, and if one vector of scrutiny is mitigated, the narrative shifts to the next.
That kind of right-wing antisemitism is commom enough to get positions in the Trump administration. An example given by ‘Forward’ web site;
“A Justice Department attorney who has defended the Trump administration’s crackdown on Harvard over allegations of antisemitism once praised Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and submitted an undergraduate assignment written from the Nazi leader’s perspective, according to an article in The Boston Globe.”
The groypers may not be at a pro-Israel march, but they will come to protest against Palestinian and anti-Zionist marches to yell “Antisemite!”
Source, please?
Honest question: What is a “condemnation”? I can’t find any official UN list of “condemnations.” Is this an official UN designation? Is there a compiled list of UN condemnations – not one that just says “Israel has been condemned X times, Sudan Y times” but an actual list of the specific resolutions, including the resolution numbers?
The closest thing I found is this Wikipedia article listing UN resolutions relating to Israel (I didn’t find what I was looking for, which was a list of all UN condemnations). Almost 40 are noted to use the word “condemn” – but the most recent example listed is from 1992. If we look at the word “deplore” too, the most recent example is 2000.
But maybe that article is just failing to mark the post-1992 condemnations – I wouldn’t assume that Wikipedia is reliable. If you have a more reliable list you could link us to, I’m genuinely interested.
I also skimmed at the last couple of years worth of UN Resolutions – both in the Security Council, and in the General Assembly. On its face, it doesn’t appear to be true that the UN is currently “myopically hyperfocus(ing) on Israel” and ignoring the rest of the world.
Here:
The condemnations come in the form of resolutions. UN Watch is a very biased organization, but they also keep very good records and have their sources available. If you just look at the actual motions, and ignore the color commentary, I don’t think there’s a better place to get everything laid out like this.
I think we might be using the term differently… Myopia is when close things look clear and further things look blurry, the UN is intently focused on Israel, but they’re still able to see around the edges and will still spare some attention to the obvious. But on the topic of dead bodies, raped women and child soldiers – The UN has issued probably 500 resolutions against Israel in the last 30 years, and not a single one over China’s treatment of the Uighurs. Not a peep about the child soldiers in Mali, Nigeria, or Camaroon. That’s not legitimate. It can’t be.
And it’s not new, that link is from 2015, before the most recent conflict:
Which is why the current discourse seems artificial… Has Israel, specifically, been so flagrantly awful on the topic of human rights, comparatively to the rest of the world, that it is reasonable and sound to criticize intently this small democratic nation in a sea of dictatorships where the condition on rights is worse? If you were in charge of monitoring human rights abuses for the planet, and you had a finite number of resources, where would you have allocated them? And nevermind in the current context, over the last 30 years. When Russia invaded Ukraine, there were still more condemnations of Israel that year than there were against Russia and the rest of the world put together. I’m not saying Israel is perfect, or even good… I’m saying it doesn’t take much imagination or investigation to find much, much worse, and for some reason, this is where the time is spent, and I’m sorry, but while this not be the reason for everyone, the reality that this is the one nation on Earth that is majority Jew doesn’t escape me.
Before I forget, happy birthday to all the soyjacks among us.
Corso:
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts
Here’s a chart of the top eleven recipients of aid from the US since 1946. Israel has had more than twice as much military aid as any other nation.
Which of the other eleven has perpetrated a genocide you think should be subject to more attention?
There are other countries that receive US aid, but the only one that receives a comparable amount of aid is Ukraine. It’s also notable that in Israel’s case a very large amount of that aid is military-intelligence aid that quite directly contributes to Israel’s ability to commit war crimes.
Ethiopia is another large scale recipient of US aid (although not, it must be said, on the same scale as Israel) but most US aid to Ethiopia is not military-related, so the USA’s complicity in Ethiopia’s war and alleged genocide in Tigray province is less obvious.
The above is broadly true of many European countries which also provide aid to Israel, as well, although not quite to the same degree.
All of the above factors exist independent of any anti-semitism.
There is, in my opinion, a broader, fuzzier but also important factor that leads to us feeling guilty about what Israel does in a way we don’t about what Ethiopia or Sudan does – we feel that Israel is part of the amorphous but nonetheless keenly felt collective trans-national society that we broadly call “the West”. It’s the flipside of the instinct that makes us upset when Islamists kill 80 people in Paris, but less upset when they kill 150 in Lebanon – the victims are “not like us”. Obviously there’s a hell of a lot to unpick here, and this concept is often very, very problematic – but it isn’t in itself an antisemitic concept.
But even leaving all that aside, corso – as you concede, once one’s eye is drawn to Israel, there is a hell of a lot to objectively dislike. Should we, in a principled stance against putatitive antisemitism, close our eyes to that? Shall we say “this is genocide, but I only noticed this genocide because of antisemitism, so therefore, the true evil would be for me to actually care about genocide, so I wont?”
Because even if I concede you are right, that antisemitism leads to a disproportionate focus on the evils of Israel, surely the solution is not to get less mad about Israel, but to get more mad about Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, etc etc. And I don’t really think anybody would argue with you about that. Yes, we as individuals cannot necessarily protest about everything equally all the time, but on a broader level, who could possibly argue against more coverage of the Sudani civil war? Unless we’re concerned about being accused of antinumidianism.
@Daran: I hate to be that guy, but there was a genocide in India in 2002.
And of course there was Iraq’s genocide of the Kurds in the late 80s which happened while Iraq was receiving military aid from the USA.
And while Turkey didn’t commit genocide after 1946, it has been an energetic genocide denier, so, honorary mention I guess?
BTW corso, you said “he UN has issued probably 500 resolutions against Israel in the last 30 years, and not a single one over China’s treatment of the Uighurs. Not a peep about the child soldiers in Mali, Nigeria, or Camaroon”
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/08/1125932 – Uighurs
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/554197?v=pdf – child soldiers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolutions_concerning_Israel – 45 resolutions against Israel, which is a lot, but still massively short of your ‘probably 500’.
Putting aside for a moment that even the UN, which is the authority on the subject and obviously no friend of Israel, hasn’t determined what’s happening in the strip to be a genocide… Because while what’s happening in Gaza is ugly, it’s not the worst thing possible by default, and what’s happening is not a genocide.
From that list? India, arguably. Pakistan, also, partition was ugly. Iraq, twice… First the Kurds in the 80’s, and then ISIS committed a Genocide of Yazidis in the early 2010’s, and US aid continued at the pace of about half a billion dollars a year during. Not on the list, but recipients of US aid during genocides during that timeframe? The Congo, Sudan, and Myanmar.
And I’m not saying “More” attention, I’m saying “Some”. You were so ignorant of the history there, that you proudly belted out that list like a got’cha.
Right…. And the second largest recipient of US Aid, twice that of Ukraine, and fully half of which was military between 1946 and 2024 is Egypt, you know, the other country bordering Gaza, which has also enforced the blockade and not taken in refugees. Previous to 2024, the only way Israel could enforce the blockade is if Egypt also enforced the exact same restrictions at the Rafah crossing. Where was the condemnation of Egypt?
With my tongue firmly in my cheek: You could. You’ve done it for the other genocides that have gone on this decade. What makes this one special?
I’ve mentioned China, how two million Uighurs have been forced into camps, how their women were forcibly sterilized as a matter of public policy and how they’re often gang-raped by police while being given their state mandated, twice-annual pregnancy screen, how because of this, their birth rates have declined by more than 90%, and how in a few generations the only Uighurs on earth will be the descendants of the ones that escaped before the Hans took them. How they aren’t allowed to speak their own language at home. How any child that manages to survive the inspections and state induced abortions are removed from their family and sent to residential schools?
Now that I’ve drawn your eye towards it, will you pursue it as doggedly as what’s happening in Gaza? How could you look at anything else? These people are going extinct. And yet never mind how much attention is paid to Gaza, it feels like we pay more attention to pandas and rhinos.
“A peep” was metaphorical. They’ve never issued a resolution against China, ever. And the oh-so brave condemnation of the use of Child soldiers from 2005 failed to name or shame a single country or organization using them.
No, Between the UN Security Council, the General Assembly, and the Human Rights Council, there are hundreds. Records prior to digital storage aren’t great, I don’t think there’s a complete list anywhere, but if you go here and filter for Israel as the country of concern, and filter “condemnatory”, there are 335. Again… Not a complete database, but it’s a start, and it gives you a sense of the scope… There are 906 resolutions in that database – 322 are praise, 640 are condemnatory, 355 of the condemnatory are against Israel.
‘ ISIS committed a Genocide of Yazidis in the early 2010’s’
That wasn’t done by the Iraqi government, though. Unless of course you believe ISIS was secretly set up and funded by the USA.
Enabled by, perhaps – ISIS surged in Iraq shortly after the US troops were pulled out in 2011. It was kind of a slower (and less successful) version of vacuum-filling exercise of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and technically there was a time where US aid did go directly to people who would eventually become ISIS.
But I take your point, America probably didn’t do that on purpose, and they certainly weren’t sending aid to ISIS at the time the Yazidis were dying.
But uh… Not going to comment on anything else?
‘the second largest recipient of US Aid, twice that of Ukraine, and fully half of which was military between 1946 and 2024 is Egypt, you know, the other country bordering Gaza, which has also enforced the blockade and not taken in refugees’
Egypt has done a lot of nasty stuff, not least to Palestinians, but it hasn’t done to them what Israel is doing. You’re shifting the goalposts. Yes, the USA has given aid to a lot of dubious regimes. But Israel does stand out as uniquely badly behaved even among US aid recipients.
‘With my tongue firmly in my cheek: You could. You’ve done it for the other genocides that have gone on this decade.’
Speaking personally – no, I have not.
‘Now that I’ve drawn your eye towards it, will you pursue it as doggedly as what’s happening in Gaza?’
Insulting of you to assume I’ve never heard of the Uighurs before you mentioned it, especially when I’ve already covered them in other threads on this very site. But for the record – I already have pursued it, and yes, I will continue to do so. I cannot claim that I personally devote exactly equal attention to every single wide scale atrocity that is happening, but I am confident there aren’t any that I am ignoring. I’ve been quite active pointing out several non-Gaza genocides right here, on this very site, in this very thread, in the post right above the post I am responding to here, actually.
Now, since you’ve called me out for not promptly answering your questions, let me do the same, and ask for a real answer, not a tongue in cheek one. Assuming we only notice Israel’s bad actions due to antisemitism, does that mean that we should then look away?
I’m not shifting the goalposts. I’ve never said that Israel is better or worse than other US aid recipients. I haven’t said all the attention has to go somewhere else. I haven’t even said a proportionate amount has to go to other places…. I’d like that, but I have no idea how to quantify it. I said “some”. Those are things you’ve said. Strawmen, because the reality is that aid really doesn’t come with scrutiny anywhere else like it does when it goes to Israel. Going back to UN condemnations: The number of condemnations against Egypt? Zero.
But on this, I actually think you nailed one of the best arguments earlier:
Maybe the fixation on Israel isn’t anti-Semitism, maybe it’s a more generalized racism, and there’s a soft bigotry of low expectations in letting brown people do whatever they want to each other. It explains both the interest in Russia and Israel: Sure, more horrible things are happening the world over, but these people are white (or at least white-coded).
I don’t have a great answer to that, except, again… There’s a lot of people more than happy to hide in the shadows and glom on to any anti-Israeli cause and use the opportunity to speak their hate with very little code because they legitimately hate Jews.
Doesn’t it just grate then? The lack of any media discussion about it? We’re so focused on a conflict where at the end of the day there are just as many Palestinian Arabs alive as there’s ever been, and functionally ignoring the ongoing efficient extinction of a population that used to number 12 million. Walk and chew gum if you want to, I won’t tell people what to care about, but I personally cannot possibly understand someone saying they have a principled stance against genocide not having China as their primary concern.
It was a bad question. I never said you should. This is going to break down at the personal level, I do think the left generally needs to recalibrate on this, and that recalibration would look like a more tempered and proportionate concern. We could still talk, should still talk, about whether America continues to fund Israel, or at what level. We could condition aid on certain objective goals.
But currently there’s a level of focus and hate here that I don’t think is reasonable. Epistemology time… I think it would go a long way for me personally on the journey towards thinking that a chunk of the Israeli discourse wasn’t just thinly coded Anti-Semitism if the people expressing criticism didn’t seem so eager to believe and regurgitate bad narratives.
I don’t know how else to say this except to say it: I think the level of hate and rage people feel is directly correlated with how willing proponents are to lie about or exaggerate the bad actions of the people they’re talking about. The best example is going to be Trump. The left HATES Trump. Trump does a lot of bad and stupid things, things I won’t defend, things I’ll stand beside them on. But they don’t stop at criticizing the actual, horrible things that he says or does. There was an example earlier in this thread: I apparently should be afraid to come to America because trump might round me up and gas me. It would be comical, if it weren’t so serious. This isn’t unique to the left, or even politics. But on the left and on the topic of politics: What Israel is doing is not a genocide. I think “genocide” is the kind of language used when you hate the people you’re talking about, and want to use the most inflammatory language possible.
Ah, the old “singling out” complaint.
Corso, I think I agree with you about the word “genocide.” It’s often thrown around loosely, but it was never a very clear word, so I’d be happy just to avoid its use. (Ditto for “Holocaust.”) That being said, when the leaders of Israel explicitly say that there are no civilians in Gaza and invoke the biblical example of Amalek, that’s genocidal language in the strict sense. But luckily, it’s really hard to wipe out an entire people, even with the advantages Israel enjoys, so apologists can always say triumphantly, “See? We didn’t kill all of them!” If I recall correctly, that’s a popular tactic among Holocaust deniers. (“Hitler didn’t commit genocide, millions of Jews survived, and it’s too bad he didn’t finish the job!” – a sentiment that many apologists for Israel have expressed about Palestine. P.S. I notice that you did it yourself in your most recent comment: “We’re so focused on a conflict where at the end of the day there are just as many Palestinian Arabs alive as there’s ever been, and functionally ignoring the ongoing efficient extinction of a population that used to number 12 million.” Way to go!)
But on “singling out.” I’m amused when someone makes that accusation, because I first encountered it in the Vietnam era, only then we were accused to singling America out. It was false then, and it’s false now. I was criticizing the US long before I criticized Israel, and I’ve condemned violence and oppression by numerous other governments. So do the high-profile activists and commentators who are accused of singling out Israel. Many of those critics are themselves Jewish, like many of the student activists who’ve been demonized by apologists for Israel. Martin Luther King Jr. said it well when he opposed the US invasion of Vietnam in 1967:
If “singling out” was good enough for MLK, it’s good enough for me.
It also happens to be true.
You’re speaking out both sides of your mouth. On one hand, you agree that “genocide” is being used in an inflammatory way, and probably doesn’t apply here. On the other, you’re saying that the language I’m using is the same as language used by people who deny the Nazi genocide of the Jews. I suppose I am… Which makes sense: What’s happening in Israel isn’t a genocide.
Depending on who you’re talking to, there’s this spectrum of genocide-rhetoric, ranging from “Israel has been committing a genocide since the creation of Israel” to “Israel has been committing a genocide since October 7th” but it really doesn’t matter where you start – The population of Palestian Arabs has increased from a million in 1960 to six million now, and the Palestinian population has continued to increase even post-2024 conflict. Again… Not arguing that what Israel is doing is good… Just that it’s obviously not a genocide.
You brought up the holocaust… in four years more than 60% of European Jews were killed. 6 million out of a population of 9.5 million. There were 17 million Jews on Earth before the holocaust, 11 million after, and 80 years later, there are still fewer Jews worldwide than there were before the holocaust.
These things, regardless of what you want to call them, are not the same.
Why?
It’s not good enough to quote MLK and dust off your hands like you’ve said something profound, you actually have to understand what’s being said and why.
You’ve terminally misunderstood what he was saying. That speech, Beyond Vietnam, was a criticism of the American invasion of Vietnam. America in the context of Vietnam was uniquely bad: America had invaded a sovereign nation on the notion that if America didn’t stop communism in a small Asian country, the ideology might spread. Something like a million people died in that war. What MLK was saying paraphrased Matthew 7:5: “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
MLK was saying that it was hard for him to criticize the violence of the activists against the backdrop of America’s violence against Vietnam. Not that the violence of the activists was good or justified, but that Vietnam was so awful that paying attention to smaller issues was unthinkable. It was a call to sanity. How could anyone care about anything else?
Again… You have to remain pretty ignorant about world issues for what’s happening in Israel be the issue that someone with a principled stance against human suffering would prioritize. What’s happening in China is worse. What’s happening in Ukraine is worse. What’s happening in Sudan is worse. What’s happening in South Sudan is worse. What’s happening in Myanmar is worse. Using the MLK metaphor: Those are Vietnam, and you’re paying attention to something else.