Is the Term ‘Israel-Firster’ Antisemitic?

There’s been a controversy raging over the past month or so that I’ve avoided writing about mainly because it has a Groundhog Day quality to it. It began with this very interesting Ben Smith piece, but lately it has become tiresome. Apparently, it is not tiresome to other pepole, because it just keeps going. The seemingly most urgent question to emerge from this controversy is whether or not the term “Israel-firster” is antisemitic. The term is used by Media Matters, the left-wing advocacy group, to describe American Jews with whom it disagrees on American Middle East policy, and it was also used by staffers of the Center for American Progress, the important liberal think tank, to describe same. CAP has disavowed the language, and apologized on behalf of the staffer who used the term; Media Matters doesn’t seem to care.

So, is “Israel-firster” antisemitic? Its origins are certainly antisemitic, and the idea that Jews are incapable of being loyal to the country of their citizenship and are only loyal to world Jewry, or the Jewish state, is an age-old antisemitic trope. This doesn’t mean that those who use it are antisemitic.

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RTWT.