Am I Antisemitic?

Oh I bitch about the Islamic states, and I certainly don't support the terrorist groups (as I made clear, but you missed it) but why don't you elaborate on this idea instead: "Not one person killed in Gaza is innocent." OK, convince me. Children? Doctors? Hamas hostages?

I'm sorry I had to skip participating in this thread for a while due to internet privacy and family etc. (Maple Leafs notwithstanding) but then again, I'm not sorry. I guess it blew up in my absence and then repaired itself. For me, simple concept is, I think Jews are equal to all other humans and that really doesn't even need to be said; but I think "Zionism" in certain definitions is not a very good thing. I do believe in Israel's right to defend itself, now that Israel exists in the form as established in 1948 and we're definitely not going to simply eradicate it due to some theory, and I also believe in the Jewish people's right to self-determination. But there are some internet resources that go further, and say, I think wrongly, that any belief that is counter to Zionism is inherently antisemitic. I disagree, since I believe that one can be both (a) equal-minded about Jews (Jews aren't stupid, or greedy, or somehow a lower form of life, or any other dumb racial opinion) and about the Jewish people's right to self-determination, but one can also simultaneously be (b) unhappy about the usurpation of non-Jewish people's homes in 1948, which was a necessary component of the current Zionist establishment of current form of Israel the nation-state. I think many forms of Zionism go way too far into zealotry and racial exclusion. Thinking that Jews aren't allowed to racially exclude other tribes, is thinking (IMO) that Jews ought to live by the same rules we expect everyone else to live by. (And I do think most Jews try to do exactly that, and succeed most of the time, doing their best like the rest of us, slipping up like the rest of us, so I'm not saying they're to be criticized on that score.) So honestly, I was surprised when the first few respondents included the "duration" argument -- people who listed how long the Jews have been in that location, and the fact that it's their ancestral home. Yes, I wanted to say, but so what? By logical extension of that argument, I personally own the African nation of Mali, because it's my ancestral home (after all, Y-chromosomal Adam was from there, and I'm descended from him), and never mind the people whom I, the conquering White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, am going to evict on my way to my ownership. Or, by a less tenuous logical extension, the Volga Bulgars who are currently residing mostly in Bulgaria would, as a group, have a right to evict everyone from Kazakhstan all the way to Mongolia, to make more space for their horses, because the steppes are the Volga Bulgars' ancestral homeland. The Bulgars left that land much more recently than various portions of the Jews left the Levant area. But this is idiotic, and I don't believe either of those extensions does much justice to the Jewish duration argument. Yet the Middle East has had various conquerors and changes in leadership for thousands of years, Ottomans or Seljuks or Hittites or Babylonians or Persians or the damned British mandates or what-not else. Why do we pick one particular year, and one particular tribe, to privilege? I disagree with that privilege, since it so radically disenfranchised people who were right there well settled and had long duration leading up to the year 1948, but I also can't really come up with a better way to solve the problem, personally. And it's not like full eviction occurred in 1948. There wasn't wholesale mass-deportation everywhere, though it did happen in places. Today, the current nation of Israel is deliberately multi-cultural; the non-Jewish (mostly Arab-descent) people who live there are among the most successful and safe individuals in all the Middle East; and the population of Israel is mostly not European Jews traveling toward their ancestral home due to the Nazi holocaust, but rather, Israel's Jews are mostly Middle Eastern people in the first place. Further, it can be rightly said that the inhabitants of Gaza WANTED Hamas to run the place, they voted for them several times over, and it can also rightly be said that Israel did what it could to accommodate the "Palestinian people" (if such a tribe exists, which is questionable) on several previous occasions. (And BTW there's no such thing as a human "race." We really should be using the word "ethnic group" or similar, I guess ...) It's very mixed. I don't have an opinion that won't offend someone. So, for me, when I was playing a bit of an obvious devil's advocate up there in my first post, I think it was most important to me to see what other people's responses were. I don't know why I posted it, I didn't have my motivations well worked out, I just wanted to shake the hornet's nest and see which Maple Leafs shook out. The reliance on the 5000-years-duration argument to me is the least convincing. I think I can be both anti-Zionist and not antisemitic, but you have to fiddle with the definition of Zionism to make it logically coherent. I think many of the college protesters don't know that they've signed up for events sponsored by major political professionals whose agenda is to eradicate Israel. And I think eradicating Israel on the basis of tribal or racial animosity is definitely antisemitic, and also (in an enlightened-self-interest sort of way) a poor plan for the future. And I think Netanyahu's prosecution of this war is unreasonable, very much inappropriate, though this doesn't mean the whole state of Israel is at fault any more than the whole of the USA was at fault for the Vietnam debacle. I think the attacks on Gaza have gotten perhaps to the point of ICC's definition of War Crimes (attacking civilian targets, seems to me to be the easiest element to prove), but then again, how else ya gonna prosecute this war against what is essentially a civilian professional dug-in infrastructure? I mean, he couldn't send troops to go house-to-house with a questionnaire, right? "Do you like Hamas, or dislike Hamas? Right, check, dislike, nobody here, move on to the next house." Kind of "Cake or Death" Eddie Izzard ... So Go Leafs Go next year I guess.