Is Israelophobia the latest form of anti-Semitism?

Israelophobia addresses an anti-Semitic mutation ‘evolving out of reach’: the demonisation of the Jewish state. Its author, Jake Wallis Simons, is the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. His antennae are primed for anti-Semitism and he finds plenty of it. In France, 60 per cent of religious abuse is directed at Jews and in Germany anti-Semitic incidents have doubled in a decade. In his telling, Israelophobia – Leon Pinsker’s Judeophobia transformed – is the descendant of the deicide myth, the blood libel and the Shoah.

You can hear it in the quality and narrowness of the discourse, he notes. Liberal Zionism is considered no less murderous by anti-Zionists than Greater Israelism. The desire to remove Israel from the map is not a political position, and political solutions are not desired: no Israelophobe wants to hear about the 1947 Partition Plan, which granted Palestine a state, or the exiled Jews of Arab lands (as in Europe, there are many empty Jewish quarters) or the fact that 50 per cent of Israeli Jews are non-white and cannot be accurately called European colonists.