Subject: Re: Cracks in the dem coalition over Israel
A very complete and thoughtful reply, thank you.

My pleasure. Thanks for the kind words.

As an aside, the above analysis is why some Jews argue that being anti-Zionist is being anti-Semitic. Personally, I disagree, at least at that level of generality. But the gist is that some anti-Zionist arguments depend on Jews being "less than" other peoples - that they are denied status or entitlements that others can lay claim to, based solely on the fact that they're Jewish. That even though Jews were originally displaced from the area by enslavement (the Babylonian Exile) and colonization (the Roman occupation and exile after the Jewish-Roman wars), they don't get to have the indigenous status that any other group would have if they suffered those depredations. And that even if a Jewish family were living in the area for generations before 1948 (there were tens of thousands of Jews in the area before Zionism really began in the late 1800's, and the first Zionist-led wave of Jewish immigrants started in the 1880's - three or four generations before 1948 - they don't get to be Palestinians. So while the descendants of an Arab/Muslim family that moved within the Ottoman Empire into the region in 1910 hves a legitimate claim to being a "true" Palestinian, the descendants of a Jewish family that moved there a generation earlier would not - just because they're Jewish.

Again, I don't agree that those objections translate into anti-Zionism as a whole being necessarily anti-Semitic. But they are valid concerns about the anti-jewish biases that underlie some very specific arguments and assumptions about the legitimacy of the Jewish state and which groups are allowed to raise which arguments about belonging in the area.