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'How could I have become so evil': Jewish-French director grapples with antisemitism
(www.haaretz.com)
The famed director also questions, as others have, why Israelis and Jewish people are automatically associated with the actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "Why, when we put Netanyahu on trial, do I too often hear the trial of Israel, or even the trial of the Jews, instead of simply putting the extreme right on trial," Hazanavicius asks.
a) this happens with literally every country on earth. Even your farthest left Americans still get associated with the far right nutjobs, by virtue of both being American and the human mind inherently being biased towards categorization / chunking.
b) because many of the actions that make people angry are being carried out by the IDF, and all Israelis have to serve in the IDF, making every Israeli seem complicit.
c) because Israel is not just a state filled with citizens. It is explicitly the state of the Jewish people, to the point of being an apartheid state that treats non-Jewish citizens worse, so it's actions end up associated not just with Israelis but with Jewish people on the whole.
d) because Israelis have repeatedly elected Netanyahu to power for several decades. Regardless of him not winning a majority of the popular vote, having one guy as your country's leader for that long (especially through repeated elections as opposed to a dictatorship), will automatically associate his actions with those of the citizens in the eyes of the rest of the world.
e) because large influential parts of the Jewish diaspora (especially in the United States), have been extremely and militantly supportive of Israel no matter what it does. Just look at the ADL and AIPAC that think that the act of comparing the actions of the Israeli government to the acts of the Nazi government to be inherently anti-Semitic. They're quite frankly nationalist nut jobs who are trying to censor any criticism of Israel, and in the process they've made it look like there is actually a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
"Why couldn't a Jewish asshole just be an asshole? Why does every Jew who says or does something stupid have to take all his people with him? Why do I feel like, for a while now, Jews are the coolest enemies to hate? Much cooler than the Russians or the Chinese, for example."
Maybe when Israel stops killing and abusing civilians on the scale of the Russians or Chinese, again, explicitly in the name of the Jewish people, the villainous characterizations would stop.
- Make a country associated explicitly and exclusively with a religion
- have that country commit atrocities
- watch there be an increase in deserved hate towards that country and undeserved hate towards the people of the religion it's associated with
I don't understand why people find the above process confusing. Do you really not understand how the average person works and thinks? Have you really not seen roughly this same pattern play out repeatedly?