[The following, by Eamonn McDonagh, is crossposted from Z Word.]

In the Huffington Post, Hagai El-Ad has this to say:

Three aspects common to many recent critiques of Israel are present here: Israel is seen as having once been very good and much loved and now to be very bad and widely hated, the person making the critique is Jewish (in this particular case, there's the added bonus of the fact that Stéphane Hessel, the cited drafter of the Declaration of Human Rights is a Holocaust survivor) and Israel is seen to be heading for catastrophe if it doesn't change its ways.

With regard to the first point; Israel came into existence for many reasons but one of them was the willingness of Israelis to kill enough of their enemies to make these latter desist in their attempts to prevent Israel coming into being, and to bear the resulting casualties on their own side too. Israel has survived for many reasons but one of them has been its continuing willingness to kill its enemies and itself suffer losses in the process. The history of many post-colonial states has been equally or more bloody. There was no happy time when Israel settled its disputes with its enemies over tea and biscuits and to evoke this notion you either have to be very ignorant of history or to have special moral expectations for Jews; something along the lines of "Well, in 1948 they had learned their lesson but today they seem to be in danger of forgetting it".

The second point concerns the attraction of critiques of Israel by Jews. To some degree there is nothing odd about this, after all, most Israelis are Jews and Israel was founded as a state for Jews. However, it's hard to avoid the feeling that this is not the only factor at work. Some critiques of Israel by Jews are particularly valued because they are seen as being both immune to accusations of antisemitism ("But he's one himself! So how can it be??") and as offering special insights not available to other observers. Take, by way of comparison, the Northern Ireland conflict. I'm open to correction on this but I don't recall any attention being paid to the ethno-religious status of critics of Britain's counter-insurgency campaign there. There were no op-eds condemning the torture of prisoners by journalists identified as being a "British Protestant" and no "not in my name" type pieces from celebrities not previously known for their affiliation to or identification with the British state's official religion.

The third point connects back to the first. Israel, which once behaved well, is now seen as behaving badly and very severe consequences are predicted for it if it doesn't improve its behavior. This is important because the emphasis here is not on protecting the real or imagined victims of Israel's abuses but of protecting the Israelis from the consequences of their own behavior. It's pretty hard to imagine coming across an opinion piece expressing worries about the continued existence of the Turkish Republic if it doesn't abandon its occupation of northern Cyprus or of India, if it doesn't allow Kashmir to go its own way. Yet articles warning that the continued existence of the Jews' state is subject to how it resolves a particular territorial dispute and to its winning favor with a particular section of world opinion are ten a penny.

Let me now offer some discursive safe conduct passes, I'm thinking of appending them to every single text I post here: I don't think that criticism of Israel is necessarily antisemitic, I don't think it's necessarily not antisemitic either. I favor the prompt foundation of a Palestinian state though I do not think that this will "bring peace".