What confuses me is that I don't see the conceptual jump from the Guardian using a passive voice which de-emphasises the Israeli government's responsibility in this, and rampant antisemitism. Particularly when you give examples of how this is a larger problem in media.

Unless I'm missing something here, is it not more likely to be just a questionable grammatical choice with no ill intent?

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 points 9 months ago

If I can attempt to explain what I thought @NaevaTheRat@vegantheoryclub.org was doing (certainly, it's how I interpreted their initial comment), it's that they were playing off of the very, very common refrain from Israel and its supporters that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Sometimes they'll be quite explicit about that, but they'll also often pretend otherwise while levying the "antisemitism" critique at anyone who calls out the actions of the state of Israel.

A reasonably common response to this is that actually, no, that is itself antisemitic. Because it's implicitly tying the actions of one country with the Jewish people. And so the Israeli government and its supporters are being antisemitic when they try to deflect blame for Israel's actions by calling the blame antisemitic.

Naeva was doing something kinda similar to that here. Except this time instead of being about deflecting the blame, it was about how the article implicitly phrases it as though Israel had no choice but to commit genocide. It was just automatically triggered by the Hamas attack.