France: Sartre said condemn Israel and you find myself in the same camp with the anti-Semites

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote after the Liberation of Paris Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946). In the book he tries to explain the etiology of "hate" by analyzing antisemitic hate.  He understood what many non-Jews and Jews still igore: that viciously condemning the policy of the Israeli government means finding yourself in the same camp with the anti-Semites he detested.

The left-wing Zionist (and onetime Stern Gang soldier) Amos Kenan once told me Sartre reveled in being reviled in both Cairo and Tel Aviv. 

When Kenan died in 2009, the peace activist Ury Avnery, who had been introduced to Sartre by Kenan in the 1950s, wrote that Sartre told him then: “I cannot approve of the policy of the Israeli government, but I also don’t want to condemn it, because I do not want to find myself in the same camp with the anti-Semites I detest.”

More: The Tablet