I don't care so much about the word Semite, whose meaning IIUC encompasses Palestine and Israeli alike, as I do about false claims of antisemitism for opposing the genocide that is underway. that sort of claim seems to be a common tactic of victim reversal. denying this ongoing genocide is, to me, no different from denying the holocaust that took place during WWII. I honestly don't recall whether you labeled me antisemite, or whether you denied the genocide, or something else, but my use of the term semite, without knowing that background you just told me about (thanks for that!), is in response to the IMHO abusive labeling of antisemite used against people who call out the genocide of arabs, who are also a semitic people. please don't read more into it than that in what I wrote before: that would be a mistake, and leads to wrong conclusions.

now, I can't really apologize for the meaning that you (and presumably others) associate with a word that is in no way intended by me, and wasn't even known by me. it would be like apologizing for using a word that is offensive in another language you speak but I don't. to me, semite means the peoples who speak semitic languages. that encompasses hebrew, arab, aramaic, and other languages, and their peoples. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Semite covers those meanings at the top. the derogatory meaning that you appear to (reasonably) object to, that wasn't known to me, is only the last one in that list. now, it should be clear that I didn't mean that upthread, because I hope it's clear that there I referred to people of Gaza, so the narrow derogatory-to-Hebrews meaning unknown to me couldn't possibly apply. I shall also note that the derogatory meaning is not present in cognate words in other languages I speak or learn: semita in Portuguese and Spanish, sémite in French. so please excuse my use of the cognate English word with the meaning that overlaps with that of my native language, instead of leaping to condemnation.

as for the etymology claims you referenced... they don't seem to hold a lot of water, I'm afraid. so many romance languages besides Latin itself have used the term under Latin-originated word derivation rules to refer to this broad set of peoples, mostly held as descending from the biblical Shem, who speak Semitic languages, that whatever a German came up with over a millennium later may very well be meaningful for Germans and those impacted by that hateful cultural artifact, but not to others to whom that term already had, for very long, an established meaning that didn't carry those hateful connotations.