I hate all Russians. Russia invaded Ukraine.

I hate all Chinese people. China has imprisoned Uyghurs in detention camps.

I hate all Syrians. The Assad regime killed and tortured civilians on a massive scale during the Syrian civil war.

I hate all Belgians. Belgium’s colonial rule in the Congo was extraordinarily brutal.

I hate all Turks. The Ottoman Empire perpetrated the Armenian genocide.

I hate all Japanese people. Japan massacred civilians at Nanjing and committed atrocities across Asia.

I hate all Ugandans. Uganda punishes consensual same-sex activity with life imprisonment and, in some cases, death.

I hate all French people. French colonial rule and the Algerian War resulted in hundreds of thousands of Algerian deaths.

I hate all Australians too. Aboriginal Australians were dispossessed of their lands, and generations of Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families.

And come to think of it, I hate all British people. The British Empire conquered, colonized, and exploited peoples across much of the world.

I also realize that I hate all Canadians. Canada forcibly removed generations of Indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools.

Apparently, I have several reasons to hate all Americans. The United States displaced Indigenous peoples, invaded Iraq, helped overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom, and still governs Guam and Puerto Rico without full voting representation.

Oh, and all Germans. Germany perpetrated the Holocaust.

I could go on, but this is exhausting. I apparently hate an enormous percentage of humanity, and I haven’t even finished my first cup of coffee.

Of course I don’t believe any of this.

Perhaps you objected to one or more of my historical characterizations. Good. We can argue about them. But suppose that every premise above is accurate. Would that make the hatred any less absurd?

A government is not a population. A regime is not an ethnicity. A soldier is not everyone who shares his nationality. A person born today does not inherit the moral culpability of someone who lived a century ago. The principle is simple: individuals are responsible for what they do, not for what others who share their nationality, ethnicity, or ancestry do or have done.

Now change the identity.

Israeli. Zionist. Jewish.

Something peculiar begins to happen.

The actions of an Israeli government become the responsibility of Israel. The actions of Israel become the responsibility of Israelis. The responsibility of Israelis migrates to Zionists. And because most Jews believe, in one form or another, in the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish homeland, responsibility eventually finds its way to Jews.

Somewhere along the way, culpability stops attaching to conduct and begins attaching to identity. That is what troubles me most about the current discourse. My objection is not to disagreement about Israel. It is to the shrinking distance between disagreement and villainization, between what a country does and what association with it supposedly reveals about a person. Increasingly, identifying someone as Israeli, Zionist, or Jewish can seem sufficient to tell us what that person believes, supports, and ultimately deserves. Once identity supplies culpability, it supplies a ready-made scapegoat.

ASSOCIATION AND CULPABILITY

There is a familiar framework for recognizing antisemitism: demonization, delegitimization, and double standards. The shrinking distance between identification and villainization can produce all three. Israel becomes uniquely malevolent, its legitimacy uniquely conditional, and Jewish or Israeli identity becomes evidence of culpability.

Consider how routinely people debate whether Israel has a “right to exist.” The phrase is so familiar that its peculiarity barely registers. Where else do we debate whether an existing country has a right to exist? We condemn Russia’s invasion of Crimea and subsequent war without debating Russia’s right to exist. We may condemn the North Korean regime without asking whether North Korea should cease to exist. Yet Israel’s legitimacy is routinely treated as an open question.

We recognize this reasoning in familiar forms. When race, ethnicity, or nationality is treated as evidence of character, beliefs, or behavior, we call it prejudice, xenophobia, or racism. We need not hear a slur to recognize a stereotype. Yet similar reasoning can sound factual when the identity is Israeli, Zionist, or Jewish.

The process becomes easier when connection itself is treated as evidence. Jews are White Europeans. Zionists are White supremacists. Jews believe they are superior to non-Jews. Goyim is a slur. Zionists control Congress. All Zionists support genocide. Jews control the media. American politicians are bought by Israel. And when something sufficiently mysterious happens anywhere in the world, “Mossad?”

Imagine responding to every unexplained assassination, explosion, coup, attack, or suspicious death........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)