It's happening increasingly often: a prominent public figure makes a vituperative criticism of Israel, accusations of antisemitism follow and then come emphatic denials. This time it's Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd vocalist, who has fanned the constantly glowing embers of controversy. Among other things, he has claimed that the "parallels [between Israel's actions against the Palestinians] with what went on in the 1930s in Germany are so crushingly obvious", that the Israeli rabbinate views Palestinians as "sub-humans", and that the "Jewish lobby" is "extraordinarily powerful". This comes on the back of Waters' long history of pro-Palestinian activity, including supporting a cultural boycott of Israel.

In response, Waters has been accused of antisemitism by firebrands such as Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and more measured voices such as Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Educational Trust. Waters vociferously denies antisemitism, complaining that defenders of Israel "routinely drag the critic into a public arena and accuse them of being an antisemite".

So who is right? Is Waters guilty of antisemitism?

The problem with viewing the Waters controversy through the lens of the antisemitism debate is that it becomes a zero-sum game: whether his words were antisemitic or not. If they were not, then the assumption is that they would be acceptable.

Yet there are other ways to analyse discourse on Israel. What would happen if one temporarily (and, yes, artificially) removes the question of antisemitism and looks at Waters' remarks the way one might look at other forms of political discourse? This leads to other questions: was Waters' intervention useful? Were his words proportionate and reasonable? Should we take what he says seriously?

Accusations that Israel is behaving in a Nazi-like manner are hardly novel. In fact they are something of a cliche not just in the controversy over Israel but in a wide range of other debates. Godwin's Law draws attention to the wearisome regularity with which Nazi Germany is invoked; for some, its corollary is that in any debate the first one to mention the Nazis has lost.

Not only is comparing Israel to Nazi Germany predictable, even the harshest reading of Israel's actions shows that the analogy is completely over the top. Israel can arguably be accused of subtle and not-so-subtle forms of discrimination and even ethnic cleansing of Palestinians over its history, but it has never committed systematic mass murder and the existence of Palestinian citizens of Israel (albeit often marginalised) is something that no genuinely neo-Nazi regime could tolerate.

Waters' other arguments are similarly cliched and disproportionate. It's a lazy commonplace to dismiss Jewish concerns of antisemitism as the cynical suppression of pro-Palestinian campaigners. It's similarly predictable to attribute US support for Israel to Jewish lobbying.

So there are multiple reasons to condemn Waters' interventions in the Israel-Palestinian debate. Whether or not he is guilty of antisemitism, he is guilty of being trite, predictable and using disproportionate language.

There is something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that sucks people in and brings out the worst in them. In Waters' case it is his penchant for grand gestures and narratives, which work brilliantly in the musical sphere but can easily tip over into the boorish and hackneyed in the political.

Waters isn't alone in this. Both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian campaigning too often consists of a self-perpetuating set of constantly repeated, unsubtle formulas. The antisemitism debate has also been drawn into this vortex.

It may be too much to hope for a calmer, more nuanced discussion of Israel-Palestine and antisemitism, but perhaps it's possible for protagonists to find new ways to talk about their concerns. The first step could be calling out instances of banal interventions in the debate. Even if you don't believe Waters is guilty of antisemitism, he is certainly guilty of perpetuating a tiresomely unhelpful way of talking about a vitally important issue.