Critics missing point on Israel and antisemiticism

No, the anti-Israeli position is not disguised anti-semitism. It cannot be repeated often enough that this canard repeated endlessly by Irish commentators from Gerard Howlin (Opinion, September 3) to UCC historian Kevin McCarthy is complete nonsense. It represents intellectual laziness of a noxious kind propagated by men with exceptional literary ability and all the worse for that.

The glib lack of any historical perspective on Israel/Palestine from any of these writers is unbelievable. Zionism was a late 19th century European colonial creation fostered by imperial Britain with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Long before WW2 Balfour said: “We deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination for the present inhabitants of Palestine, because the question of the Jews outside Palestine is one of world importance”.

And here is Winston Churchill: “No wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or at any rate, a more wordly-wise race, to put it that way, has come and taken their place”. Here is undeniable racism, imperialism and colonialism in one neat package.