It is possible to be very critical of Israel and its actions without being antisemitic; the Spanish writer Jordi Soler proves it in this op-ed published in El País, part of which I translate below. You could argue with some of his points and not everything is phrased in the most judicious manner. Nevertheless, the attempt to offer a harsh critique of the actions of the Israel while simultaneously separating himself from the mile-wide streak of antisemitism in many similar critiques is as noteworthy as it is laudable.

After mentioning that the news of Kristallnacht was welcomed on the Francoist side in the Spanish Civil War, he goes on to say,

Forty years of official antisemitic discourse is long enough to contaminate various generations, to deform the view the country has of the Jewish people and the individuals who make it up. Is Spain the most antisemitic country in Europe? According to the Pew Research Center it is, and it’s also the country with the most powerful, vociferous and archaic [Catholic] clergy on the planet, two complementary anomalies that must be seriously examined for what they are, anomalies in a European country with the eighth largest economy in the world, anomalies like the bones of republican fighters that their families can’t exhume.

What I want to say is that Spanish antisemitism has a lot of backwardness in it and is related to that zone of stupidity that the dictator [Franco] spread across the country over decades in order to develop an environment that would serve his own purposes. Just as it’s imperative that every citizen be able to exhume his dead relatives from the Civil War, in order to subsequently give them a decent burial, a personal analysis of that antisemitic impulse which -according to the researchers in Washington - possesses half of Spain is also a priority.

The war between Israel and Palestine has put that impulse into overdrive. In the demonstrations in Madrid and Barcelona we’ve heard slogans and read placards that had more to do with the purest and toughest antisemitism than with the war itself. In the Barcelona demonstration, for example, we saw photographs of respectable citizens of that city with targets superimposed on their faces and this for the mere fact that they are Jewish. In the same city in recent days we have seen a synagogue vandalized by a group of hotheads who thought that they were supporting the Palestinian cause. And these events have just occurred, it’s good to recall, in a city that is often thought of as an example of a civilized and tolerant metropolis.

I began these lines by mentioning the concentration camp at Argelès-sur-Mer because that episode, almost forgotten though it is, illustrates the barbarian streak in Spain and Europe in general. On that beach, exposed to the elements, Spanish and French people were detained just for being Reds and Jews, both without a country to which to return, without a corner to take refuge in, with a relentlessly black future ahead of them and both victims of a prejudice which, in the case of the Jews, continues to operate with alarming virulence, a prejudice which in the case of Spain owes much to the axis of evil glimpsed by the dictator, has much backwardness in it and is frequently a form of ignorance and stupidity.

We all agree that the response of the Israeli army [in Gaza] was disproportionate and that the massacre of the Palestinian civilian population, with emphasis on the children, was unspeakable and unforgivable even by God. But, arising from this, what blame attaches to a peaceful Barcelona, Paris or Mexico City Jew for what that army does? Why does support for the Palestinian people, a support shared by many Jews, have to lead to antisemitic barbarity? Important as the anti-war demonstrations have been, a similar level of energy would want to be devoted to distinguishing that army and the leaders of Israel from those people who just happen to have been born Jewish and live amongst us.

At the dinner table where there is a Jewish guest and the question of the Israel-Palestine conflict is brought up, an uncomfortable tension arises; that’s the level at which antisemitism plays itself out. The thing begins there, at dinner tables today, where the struggle between civilization and barbarism is going on.