I read Sharon Durant’s editorial, Stop Using Antisemitism as a Shield, and I agree with more of it than some readers might expect. Criticizing the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic, nor is criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israel Defense Forces, settlement policy, or the conduct of the war in Gaza. Israel is a country governed by human beings, and human beings make bad decisions, elect bad leaders, and sometimes commit acts that deserve investigation. No Israeli government should be exempt from the standards applied to other governments simply because Israel is a Jewish state.
Where Sharon and I differ is over what happens when criticism of Israeli policy begins bleeding into a rejection of Israel itself. This distinction has become increasingly difficult to discuss because people tend to place every argument about Israel into one of two camps. Either you support everything Israel does, or you oppose Israel and everything associated with it. Neither position leaves much room for the reality of a country that contains millions of people, competing political movements, serious internal disagreements, and a history more complicated than most slogans acknowledge.
I came to the United States from Israel in the mid-2000s, after serving three years in the IDF. I do not remember Israel as a place where everyone marched around agreeing with the government, because that place has never existed. Israelis argue about politics constantly, and the disagreements can be vicious. Military service did not teach me that the Israeli government was infallible; if anything, being part of a national institution gives a person more opportunities to understand how imperfect institutions can be.
Israel can be criticized, investigated, condemned, sanctioned, voted against, and pressured to change its policies. What cannot be treated as an ordinary extension of that criticism is the idea that the country should simply cease to exist. There are millions of Jews living there who were born there, built families there, own homes there, and have nowhere else that can reasonably be described as their country. There are also millions of Arab citizens and other minorities whose futures are tied to the same state. Talking casually about eliminating Israel means talking about the political future and physical security of all of those people, whether the speaker acknowledges it or not.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not begin with Benjamin Netanyahu, October 7, the settlements, or even the creation of Israel in 1948. Jewish attachment to the land is thousands of years old, while modern political Zionism developed long before the Holocaust as Jewish communities faced persecution and exclusion throughout Europe and elsewhere. In 1947, the United Nations recommended partitioning Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, and Israel declared independence the following year. The war that followed also produced enormous Palestinian displacement and suffering, which remains central to Palestinian history and identity. Anyone who tries to tell this story while erasing either people’s history is simplifying a conflict that has never been simple.
Sharon is right to raise the settlements, because settlement expansion in the West Bank deserves serious criticism. I believe Israeli leaders have repeatedly made the possibility of peace more difficult by allowing and encouraging policies that create new facts on disputed ground. Palestinians have legitimate reasons to look at those developments with anger and fear about what territory would remain for a future Palestinian state. However, there is an important difference between arguing over settlements in the West Bank and describing the entire State of Israel as stolen Palestinian land, a distinction that increasingly disappears in political discussion.
Palestinians have a right to self-determination. I believe that plainly, and I do not see any contradiction between that belief and the conviction that Jews have the same right. A durable solution cannot depend upon one population receiving national rights while the other is expected to surrender them. Whatever political arrangement eventually emerges, it has to provide Palestinians with meaningful rights, security, dignity, and political control over their lives while also recognizing that millions of Israeli Jews are not temporary occupants waiting to be sent somewhere else.
The war in Gaza deserves scrutiny as well. Hamas committed an atrocity on October 7, 2023, and Israel had every right to defend its citizens and pursue the organization responsible for murdering and abducting them. That right does not remove Israel’s obligations regarding civilians, nor does it prevent legitimate questions about individual strikes, military decisions, humanitarian conditions, or the conduct of soldiers. Allegations of war crimes should be investigated on their merits, and individuals who commit crimes should be held responsible when the evidence supports it. Accountability does not require pretending that the state itself loses its legitimacy whenever its military or political leadership does something wrong.
I also disagree strongly with Sharon’s argument that the Israeli government makes life harder for Jews around the world. Israel’s actions can certainly affect public attitudes, and no Israeli politician has the authority to speak personally for every Jew on Earth. However, responsibility for antisemitism belongs to the people who practice antisemitism. A Jewish person in Philadelphia, Paris, London, or Melbourne should not become an acceptable target because somebody is angry about something the Israeli military did in Gaza.
We would immediately recognize how dangerous that reasoning becomes if it were applied to almost any other ethnic or religious minority. Chinese Americans are not responsible for decisions made by Beijing, Russian Americans are not responsible for the Kremlin, and Muslims living in Western countries are not responsible for the actions of governments or armed groups in the Middle East. Jews should receive the same consideration. Anger at Israel does not create a moral exemption allowing strangers thousands of miles away to be harassed outside synagogues, threatened on college campuses, or expected to publicly account for the decisions of a foreign government.
Sharon also asks people to stop using the Holocaust as a shield, and on the narrow point I agree with her. The Holocaust cannot excuse unlawful conduct by an Israeli government, and invoking six million murdered Jews does not settle an argument about present-day military policy. Still, the Holocaust cannot be stripped from the discussion of why Jewish sovereignty matters either. Jewish history contains centuries of examples in which the safety of Jewish communities depended upon the tolerance and protection of governments that could change their minds very quickly.
That history is one reason accusations of antisemitism surrounding Israel have to be considered carefully rather than automatically dismissed as attempts to silence criticism. Some accusations are exaggerated or wrong. Some criticisms of Israel are entirely legitimate. Other rhetoric crosses a recognizable line when Jews are treated collectively as guilty, old antisemitic ideas are repackaged in political language, or Jewish national existence is treated as uniquely illegitimate while the national existence of other peoples is accepted without question.
Israel does not represent Sharon simply because she is Jewish, and she has every right to say so. I would never ask her to defend Netanyahu, settlement expansion, a military operation she believes was unjustified, or any other decision made by Israeli leaders. I would ask her, and everyone participating in this argument, to preserve the distinction between holding Israel accountable and treating Israel’s continued existence as something the world gets to reconsider whenever its government fails.
Governments come and go. Policies can be changed, borders can be negotiated, leaders can be removed from office, soldiers can be prosecuted, and nations can be forced to confront terrible mistakes in their own histories. None of those principles require the disappearance of Israel.
Israel has the right to exist, and Palestinians have the right to a future in which their own national rights are respected as well. Any serious path forward has to begin by accepting both of those realities.
Sharon, I will buy you a coffee the next time you are actually in the office instead of taking the afternoon off for another pro-Gaza protest.
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