AJ: Nick has said that criticism of the settlement policies isn't necessarily anti-Semitic—I'm not actually aware of anyone saying that it was. Of course, there's certain language that can be used-for instance in criticism of Netanyahu—that's anti-Semitic. We saw the Steve Bell cartoon in the Guardian, with Hague and Blair as his glove-puppets. Clearly that plays to a conception of the puppet-master Jew, which has a very strong anti-Semitic resonance. 

Although it is commonly said of supporters of Israel that at least a number among them take the position that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, when one challenges that claim—say by asking, "Name one such supporter of Israel who takes that position"—no convincing answer can be given, no single person who takes that view can be identified and named. I don't think anybody takes that view. On the contrary. Now, the idea that Israel could so recklessly squander such small goodwill as it has acquired, in consequence of stopping the campaign in Gaza when it did, and arriving through the massively overplayed Morsi intervention, and some kind of semi-stable ceasefire—the idea that it could recklessly throw that away by a gratuitous announcement of a further enlargement of settlements, is almost incomprehensible to me, and deeply, deeply dispiriting. But there it is. 

On the subject of circumcision and animal slaughter, there is something in Maimonides where he says, just as the ritual sacrifices in the Temple were God's way of weaning Jews from pagan practices, and therefore represented only a kind of intermediate step towards the summit of devotion, which is represented in prayer, so there is a proposition buried somewhere in the Talmud that kashrut is simply a staging post towards vegetarianism. Speaking as someone who has vegetarian tendencies, I'm not altogether unsympathetic to that as a principle, and it certainly does put the campaign against shechita in a certain light. As far as vegetarianism is concerned, or rather, the campaign against meat-eating, it seems to me that a campaign against animal slaughter in principle could not be, in itself, anti-Semitic, but a campaign against shechita is deeply problematical, because it's predicated on an absolute distinction between two forms of slaughter, which actually is scientifically unsustainable. And where you have bad reasoning associated with a campaign which is targeted against Jews, anti-Semitism rushes in. However, I think Daniel is right, that there is something so fundamental to the making of a covenant with God in the very first days of birth that would make a campaign against circumcision necessarily a campaign against Judaism. And the idea that it's not a campaign against Judaism is a kind of self-deception which is, in itself, quite troubling, because it shows a certain lack of interest in the implications and consequences of the position that one takes.