General Discussion

my role here on DU is that of an advocate rather than a critical observer. The reason for me choosing this role is fairly well encapsulated in your post: the abundance of closed-minded people (of all ages, IMO) on DU and the extent of their willful ignorance. My focus is on Israel because the views expressed here whenever the subject of Israel/Palestine comes up trigger appalling responses that border on, and cross the border into, overt antisemitism. And that is insulting to me personally. The vast majority of these DUers don't notice their antisemitism - the trend that disturbs me the most. This is not by any means unique to DU - it is the consequence of decades long fairly well documented misinformation campaign waged way beyond the Middle East that has now normalized antisemitism to the point where we see people defending murderers of random Jews and hostage takers. An entirely intolerable situation, which, without sufficient pushback, will only get worse. I push back.

Some of my pushback has to do with comments on the war in Gaza and Israel in general that are full of extreme and often irrational prejudices. Being a Jew, my antisemitism detector is rather fine tuned. Likewise, I am not averse to rational assessment of events. I can tell between a critical remark and an antisemitic remark with a great deal of precision, and in the past decade or so, way before the Gaza war, I have seen a disturbing increase of the latter and a sharp decline in the former. This is why I consider inclusion of unequal treatment of Israel vs the rest of the world in the IHRA definition of antisemitism, as well as the caveat of criticizing Israel on the terms equal to other countries not being antisemitic, well justified.

I rarely see Zionism being critiqued on intellectual grounds. This likely has to do with the immense diversity within the movement we call Zionism which requires a great deal of intellectual effort to navigate and understand, and there are few people among the critics of Zionism willing to expend the time and the energy necessary to understand the subject of their criticism they nevertheless imagine to be qualified to comment on. There is religious Zionism (curiously countered by the religious anti-Zionism of some ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects) which is closely related to a much smaller offshoot of settler Zionism, and evangelical Zionism, which are legitimately worthy of harsh criticism. On the other end of the spectrum, there is liberal Zionism and cultural Zionism which are secular and inclusive of all minorities, including Palestinians, within the identity of the State of Israel. The intellectual laziness of uninformed critics of Zionism doesn't permit any such distinctions - to them "Zionist", along with the nebulous "Zionist sympathizers" denotes one generic expression of disdain towards a uniform mass of people which for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from "Jews". And nothing other than outright declaration of hatred for the Jews can be more antisemitic than this.