Criticizing Israeli state policy is not antisemitic and does not endanger Jews.

Evidence

There is a sharp distinction, often lost, between the notion of selfhating Jew and that of self-critical Jew. To criticize Israel as a state formation, and the Israeli state and governmental policies as enacting, enabling, or turning a blind eye to particularly vicious expressions of humiliation, dehumanization, and degradation, as Judith Butler has pointed out, emphatically counts as the latter without amounting to the former. To criticize the government of Israel and its policies, even to criticize the partial grounds on which that state was founded, is not to criticize Jews as such, nor is it to place Jews anywhere and everywhere at risk, notwithstanding the reported spike in recent antisemitic attacks in the likes of France. It is not even to place Jews in Israel at risk. Quite the contrary; it is to point out the way in which such policies and governmentality manifest the very insecurity they claim to undo. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 577

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader moral-panic and victim-frame literatures in the reader’s corpus, and to Butler’s critique of state violence.
• SEED: Article angle: how the ‘self-hating Jew’ accusation weaponizes identity to immunize state policy from criticism, and how the same move appears across other identity politics.