Is antisemitism on the rise?

OK - I have to admit that, as a Jewish person who believes that legitimate criticism of Israel isn't anti-semitic but Maxine Peake's unsubstantiated conspiracy theory based on anti-semitic tropes IS anti-semitic and the decision to sack RLB based on her retweeting it with no initial clarification of her not supporting the claim, nor apologising for it when asked was a welcome one that showed impressive and strong leadership from Starmer, I was a bit cautious coming onto this thread based on what twitter has been largely filled with today. So I am genuinely thankful that this has been a factual, calm, thoughtful and reasonable discussion.

AmnestyUSA (not Amnesty International) was cited as where the initial conspiracy that the technique used to murder George Floyd came from Israeli soldiers and has now been debunked by Amnesty International: t.co/BOxYLPHDih

The original article itself is no more than a blogpost, with no interviews, sources, graphs, etc.

This twitter thread from @sara_Rose_G goes some way to explaining the context of why this is an anti-semitism issue and why those involved, especially RLB, should know better:

“I think the RLB thing is incredibly hard to unpick & you need a sh*t tonne of context to understand why it was dodgy, which is why most people won’t. And it’s so effing hot, I don’t want to have to explain it, but I fear I must & bear with me, will do my best. This is a classic situation where someone has, on the surface of things, criticised the actions of the Israeli state. That in itself is not antisemitic, of course. It is also something where a bit of it is true & a bit of it isn’t. The important bit isn’t. Now - is it inherently antisemitic to say something untrue about the state of Israel? By my measure, no. I feel where criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic is a) where they are held to a higher standard than other countries, probably not the case here and (don’t yell yet), B) where falsehoods about the state of Israel are rooted in long-held antisemitic tropes. Still with me? OK so here’s where we need some more context. There is an age-old blood libel trope where historically Jews have been accused of secretly orchestrating disasters. I think, given that the accusation is demonstrably false, given that there is a widespread far-right conspiracy theory that Jews are trying to start a race war & given that there have been multiple incidents of Jews as a collective being blamed for anti-Black racism that the surrounding context makes a conspiracy theory which is on the surface of it about Israel much more likely to be rooted in antisemitic sentiment. Phew. So given that I just had to explain all of this, could RLB have been expected to know this? Well... yes, frankly. She has just experienced four years of people painstakingly explaining to her what antisemitic tropes look like. She was closely involved with a leadership that ultimately failed in part because of their poor record on antisemitism. At this point, there is no excuse for her not to know better. And yes, this decision is partly political, but it’s also of her own making. RLB was closely tied to the Corbyn project, which caused so much pain for so many Jewish people across the political spectrum. She should have known that a whiff of antisemitic conspiracy thinking would put Starmer in a very difficult position. He campaigned on a promise to stamp out antisemitism in the party. He can’t, in his first few months, have his front bench tainted with it. So in short, I think RLB demonstrated, sadly, that she had learned nothing from the mistakes of the last four years & that she is unable to hear the dog whistles that maybe ordinary people can’t be expected to detect, but at this point, she should. To summarise - criticising Israel = absolutely legitimate. Probably helpful if what you’re saying is true. Probably also helpful if what you’re saying doesn’t echo millennia of antisemitic tropes & current active antisemitic conspiracy theories. I can understand why someone looking at this with no other information might wonder what she did wrong, but the point is she had that information & still isn’t able to deploy it successfully. I think he had no choice but to let her go or be tainted by mistakes of the past”