Anti-Israel Sentiment and Criminalization Is Not a Hate Speech

Opposing and resisting occupation by all possible means is a right and a humanitarian, ethical, and legal duty, not only for the people under occupation but for all the peoples of the world. This stance does not contradict the pursuit of peace, and it is entirely outside the context of what some countries are calling for regarding the rejection of hate speech and the promotion of tolerance; for occupation and its practices are in complete contradiction to peace and the dissemination of values of love and tolerance among nations.

While hatred and criticism of Israel are on the rise in the West, and even in America, due to its crimes against the Palestinian people, some Arab regimes are working to improve Israel's image and absolve it of the crimes it commits against the Palestinians, the latest being the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing, under the banner of "calling for peace and rejecting violence and hate speech." Some countries have even gone as far as to revise educational curricula to eliminate anything that offends Israel or discusses the Palestinian narrative, and some countries are censoring even the sermons of mosque preachers on this same subject.

These regimes either forget or ignore that the reason for people's animosity towards Israel is not because it is a Jewish state, but because it is an occupying state and a state of racial discrimination, and what it does in terms of practices contradicts international law and all humanitarian values. These regimes also ignore the hate speech against the Palestinian people—even denying their existence—and against Arab and Islamic countries, issued by leaders of the right-wing government in Israel, to the extent of questioning even the legitimacy of these countries' existence and calling for the establishment of Greater Israel extending from the Nile to the Euphrates, and what is being taught in Israeli schools, both religious and non-religious, of teachings that incite hatred against Palestinians and Arabs and incite their killing.

So that the slogan and principle of "rejecting hatred and calling for tolerance" does not deviate from its true humanitarian meanings, we remind of what happened with the laws that were enacted in the West to protect Jews from any bad treatment even verbally because they are Jews; the term "anti-Semitism" emerged in the late nineteenth century, but Israel and the Zionist movement have exploited this slogan and Western legislation—which criminalizes hatred against Jews on a religious basis—to turn it into a weapon to be wielded against anyone who opposes Zionism as a political movement and Israel as an occupying state.