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I find it a struggle to differentiate between criticism of Israel’s policy and being called-out for anti-semitism. This article I found tries to define the fine line between the two: a healthy criticism of Israel’s policy and the ugly presence of a racist overtone in arguments. The difficulty arises from the fact that Israel wants the exclusivity of being Jewish and the continuous return in discussions to victimhood and the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis.
(Jewish News) – At the risk of sounding like the shtetl police, there’s a right way and a wrong way for American Jews to argue with one another. The right way focuses on whose ideas are better–for America, for Israel, for the Jewish community, and for the world. The Jewish left should be right at home with this kind of substantive debate, since I believe those ideas are better than those of our cousins on the Jewish right. But the wrong way, regretfully, is now on the rise among Jewish progressives.
Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States.
Toulouse Attack Devastates Community
David Ben Ichou, the social welfare director at the Fonds Social Juif Unifié (FSJU), the country’s main Jewish welfare organization, said the Jewish community in France also has a Jewish community protection service consisting of volunteers who guard Jewish institutions in time of crisis.
Jewish community leaders also wasted no time in making sure frightened students at the Ozar Hatorah school and their parents received psychological counseling and help, according to Ben Ichou. The government automatically deploys counselors to schools after such an event, but the students and families at Ozar Hatorah also will have the chance to speak with Jewish social workers, he said.
The Ozar Hatorah school reopened Wednesday for the first time since the attack, in which a man riding a motorbike opened fire Monday outside the school where students were waiting to enter the building at the start of the school day. Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, 30, and his two young sons, as well as the 7-year-old daughter of the school’s principal, were killed in the attack.
Thousands attended the funeral of the victims at Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul cemetery.
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On Monday night, thousands of Jews and non-Jews, including politicians, gathered in Paris for a silent demonstration organized by the French Union of Jewish Students. One banner among the many French flags held aloft by the marchers read, “In France, we kill Blacks, Jews and Arabs.”
“It could have been anyone’s child,” Jacques Benichou, the executive director of the FSJU, said in a phone interview as he was boarding a plane for Paris after spending a large part of the day with Jewish leaders in Toulouse. “Even if the killer was targeting other minorities, there’s no escaping that he targeted Jewish children as well. We all feel deeply sad and very alarmed.”
UPDATE: Just reading Haaretz editorial …
Israel must not cry anti-Semitism after Toulouse
(Haaretz Editorial) – From a complex, grim event, Israel must not produce an exclusive outcry, charging a friendly state with sweeping anti-Semitism. By so doing, Israel is undermining France’s sovereignty.
Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah’s background, alongside his boasts that although he worked alone he belonged to Al-Qaida, characterize the murder of three children and a rabbi at the Ozar Hatorah school as an unmistakable terrorist act.
However, it is difficult to ignore the tragic, bitter echoing of the Jewish memory in France and its new political context – the act of terror was directed against the children of a Jewish school, and the murderer said explicitly he was avenging the blood of Palestinian children. Thus he bound the fate of France’s Jewish citizens with that of Israel, and brought disaster on them because of the conflict taking place in the Middle East.
But this is not the whole picture, which is especially complex in this case. The rash statements of Israeli politicians, who called on France’s Jews to “come home” and flee the dread of anti-Semitism, illustrate how precarious and blurred Israel’s self-perception as a sovereign nation state is, and the depth of its identification with Jewish communities around the world.
This natural empathy constitutes an inseparable part of Israel’s identity as the state of the Jews. But calling on France’s Jews to leave their country is a wretched mistake.
While the ugly, acute “old” anti-Semitism still exists in France, radical Islam’s blatant spokesmen are filled with a “new” kind of hatred toward Jews – the kind that is fed, among other things, by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
