Jerry,

I would argue that the Marxist meme is very strong and leftists following it have shown themselves easily capable of ignoring all sorts of contradictory information in other areas. Read what the anti-war people were saying in the Vietnam era. I have certainly seen the most horrible behavior justified by this (including Palestinian suicide bombers). Some people I have encountered who support some of the really evil Palestinian tactics are not, in my opinion, motivated by anti-Semitism. Rather, they are morally obtuse, validating those killings of civilians with various complex rationalizations. These people disliked Israel because:

1) It was an ally of the US, and they hate Bush.

2) Israel “oppresses” Palestinians and stole their land.

The chilling fact is that those reasons were sufficient for them to justify the killing of civilians – especially the “revolutionary action” of the bombings.

Those reasons seem to be all it takes – no need to hate Jews… just Israelis. Most of these people, by the way, are European.

Knucklehead, you provide an interesting challenge. The issue would be to discern policies or actions where anti-Semitism isn’t the cause. Unfortunately, it is easy to infer anti-Semitic motives for lots of behavior, so the challenge is almost self-verifying.

lindanen

For anti-Zionists, the only people in the world for whom having their own state is illegitimate is Jewish people. Come on.

That still doesn’t require anti-Semitism. The reason is that Israel was created on somemone else’s land (or that’s how many anti-Zionists look at it). There is another group without its own land, by the way: gypsies.

In other words, it is the historical accident of the diaspora that made Jews a landless group, and it was the League of Nations and later UN that changed that. Now, in reality Jews have always been in Israel, and many moved there before WW-II. But in a way, Israel is seen by Europe as payoff for the debt incurred by the holocaust. Certainly many Jews feel similarly – avoid another holocaust by having a Jewish nation.

We have many cases in the world where old conflicts over land still exist. Israel/Palestine goes back to AD 70. Northern Ireland is another old one – where it is two cultures (not religions) which conflict over land theft (by my ancestors). This sort of thing is true all over the world.

Israel is special in a few ways:

1) It is an officially religious state. But so are a bunch of Muslim states.

2) It’s people have no other place which is combined with their identity. We have lots of Jews in the US (more than Israel, I think), but the US is not a Jewish place (although it is a very safe place for Jews). As far as I know, Gypsies have no place to call home at all.

3) It is extremely powerful and economically successful by the standards of the region.

4) The region hates not just the nation but all of its Jewish people, for several reasons.