Calling someone anti-Semitic is exactly the same thing as calling someone Russophobic, Sinophobic, or saying they have Trump Derangement Syndrome. It's a rheto

Calling someone anti-Semitic is exactly the same thing as calling someone Russophobic, Sinophobic, or saying they have Trump Derangement Syndrome. It's a rhetorical weapon to call people who are critical or people who have been harmed irrational. It switches the roles of abuser and victim by accusing the victim of irrational hatred towards their abuser. The only reason that word isn't experienced the same as the other words that express an identical idea is because of the horrific history of violence against Jewish people carried out by Nazi Germany, legitimizing the word. Times have changed and Israeli's find themselves in the position of power rather than on the receiving end of it, so they consume the legitimization of the word while abusing it in the same way all other authoritarian regimes abuse language. Worse, actual anti-semites are able to abuse the word to harm jewish people, their history, and damage the word/idea itself. Here is a more eloquent explanation of the whole thing by Timothy Snyder: https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-and-antisemitism https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-and-antisemitism