@Eboue i had an even longer post written out but I’ll leave it for the sake of our time, etc. Enough to say that while I don’t share the basic assumptions which underlie your approach to this conflict, we could legitimately discuss and argue over any of your points without it ever crossing my mind that antisemitism was a motivating factor in your critique. I’ll just comment on the fifth point though, because it presents an opportunity to look at just how I feel the popular contemporary leftist critique of Israel tends to leave spaces to be filled by antisemitic discourse.
Left wing people who criticize Israel do so because they (rightly IMO) see Israel as the oppressor and Palestinians as the oppressed. I think your last paragraph addresses the issue as the left should protect minorities but I think its more than the left should protect the oppressed against the oppressor. Look at Israel's history of support for Apartheid South Africa, look at their rabid support from US Republicans, look at their alliance with Orban. These arent the minorities who need protecting here. They are the oppressors. At least that's the way the left sees this.
It is of course the nature of the left to focus on the power relations it deems define the conflict and issue its support accordingly. I think this approach has its limitations but it's completely legitimate as long as it's just the start of the analysis, not the end of it. A good old-fashioned Marxist approach to the conflict would strive to identify the roots of the apparent power imbalance by applying the classic critiques of imperialism and nationalism to the conflict, identifying the various material factors which produced it and continue to prolong it, while honestly and without hesitation accounting for everything that complicates a purely black-and-white assessment (this is the approach taken by the Marxist Arabist
Maxime Rodinson who wrote one of my favorite books on this conflict,
Israel and the Arabs).
Unfortunately I think today an influential (though perhaps not particularly large) section of the left has little interest or time for this kind of approach, it prefers a reflexive analysis based to some degree on the identification of the conflicting parties with the identity and racial politics which have come to dominate so much leftist discourse in the West. The idea that there are clear-cut divisions between certain privileged groups and the not so privileged - a valuable approach generally in my opinion, but always problematic when applied to the Jews because antisemitism
requires at least some Jews to be perceived as privileged and powerful in order to flourish. So Israel becomes the privileged White Man in the Middle East, or worse the successful powerful Jew, imposing itself on a basically defenseless subaltern people, and no further explanation is really needed since all we need to understand are these relations of power.
Problems arise when this simple approach is confronted with complicating factors. Some obvious examples would be: the antisemitism which drove the original Zionist project and ultimately produced the Holocaust; the fact that about half the Jewish-Israeli population is descended from the MENA region; the very real and genuine historical, cultural, religious and emotional ties Jews have always maintained with the contested land; the genuine liberal strain that exists in Israeli society; the very real security challenges Israel faces in the region; the sorry state of politics in the surrounding hostile region; and the fact that the regional confrontation with Israel over the decades has been channeled primarily through two ideologies - Arab nationalism and Islamism - which are inherently illiberal, intolerant, and some might argue fascist in nature. Acknowledgement of these things needn't alter the ultimate conclusion that Israel is the oppressor and the Palestinians the oppressed. But without an honest accounting for them in the analysis, they will be ignored, minimized, distorted or denied when raised, and lazy, reflexive, conspiratorial and in some cases antisemitic rhetoric will fill the gap (hence "it's AIPAC" or "Zionist controlled-media!").
So Zionists are resented for having suffered the Holocaust which they now employ to secure their privileged status, while being told they are actually implicated in the Holocaust (or else the Holocaust is explained away in some fashion); Mizrachi Jews are told they're suffering from a false consciousness; Ashkenazi Jews are dismissed as the descendants of the Khazars; Israeli Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorism are told they themselves are responsible since they are represented by a "baby-killing" military; Israeli liberalism is an insincere facade used to "-wash" Israel of its crimes for a Western audience; Arab dictatorships are simply serving the Zionist agenda and nothing more; and the "resistance" is actually an authentic and legitimate left-wing socialist response in Middle Eastern garb. What this all looks like to any Jew with any kind of attachment to Israel (i.e. most of them) is a collective attempt to dismiss their history and narrative as contrived, fraudulent, and nefarious; so that even in cases where no antisemitic implication is intended or indeed even explicitly apparent, there is a natural tendency to see antisemitism nonetheless. I do think many Zionists could be more understanding of the ways that well-meaning people can get sucked into this kind of discourse. And of course there will be those who seek to cynically employ "antisemitism" in any case - in an age where so much political discourse places premium value on the idea of a hierarchy of victimhood, it would be extremely strange to find that Jews alone were somehow immune to the temptations of the race to the bottom.
Mozza with his finger on the pulse of the Jewish community.