A few days ago, Rachel Burnett published a sharp critique of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) in the Times of Israel. Her central argument is that labeling accusations against Israel as “libels” functions as a way to avoid engaging with their substance — and that the libel framework is particularly unjust to Palestinians, whose opposition to the state that they see as having displaced them cannot be reduced to irrational hatred. She’s right about this. But there’s a harder argument to be made — one that neither the libel framework nor its critics are making, and one that matters more.

Here it is: the same accusation can be worth taking seriously and can be used for distortion. These are not contradictory observations — they describe different registers of analysis. The first asks: is this true? The second asks: how is this being used? Neither question dissolves the other — a true accusation doesn’t settle how it’s being used, and a distorted use doesn’t settle whether it’s true.

Think of a screenshot of something you said ten years ago. The quote is accurate, but now, it’s being deployed to an audience to end a conversation rather than have one. Both questions stay open: did you say it, and what is it being used to do? The first doesn’t settle the second. Even if accountability is warranted, the way it’s being used does something else, and both are worth noticing.

The libel framework refuses both questions by declaring accusations “libels” in advance; the content is dismissed before it is examined, and the way accusations circulate is reduced to a single explanatory key: hatred. Antizionists also refuse both questions, but from the opposite direction — the accusations are treated as proven before the evidence arrives, and the question of how they are being used is dismissed as deflection.

Neither side asks the questions before deciding. And engaging with antisemitism requires both questions, asked honestly. The system doesn’t require bad faith — it works on true claims as readily as false ones, impervious to intent.

Start with something almost nobody wants to say plainly: Israel is an ethnostate and pluralistic at the same time.

The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law explicitly reserves the right of national self-determination for the Jewish people. Arab citizens serve in the Knesset, the judiciary, and some serve in the military. It is worth noting that “ethnostate” here does not carry the white-supremacist connotation it typically holds in Western discourse — Israel’s Jewish population is predominantly non-white, with the majority tracing their origins to the Middle East and North Africa.

The word “ethnostate” captures something real about Israel’s legal structure, but to call it only an ethnostate — to treat the label as........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)