= new reply since forum marked as read
attacking the right-wing leadership in israel is fair game.
attacking israel per se is complicated. if the attack is really against the government or official policies of the state of israel, then that's also fair game. but attacking israel's right to exist is not.
tying judaism to israel in almost any way is bad.
it would be wrong to use a term such as "the dark continent" (cf. "the jewish state"
, particularly in a negative context; or saying that "blacks want x" when in fact it's just the government of a majority-black country that wants x.
the whole question is more complicated and nuanced, but this should give you a flavor.
Though, I'm kind of surprised at the lack of responses ... I guess that could be telling. 
I think there are a number of things that make people sensitive to some of the more unthinking, ahistorical, or hyperbolic fulminating here (and elsewhere)--even for people (and I would count myself among them) who strongly oppose the current (and also past) Israeli government actions in Gaza.
First, let's put aside one thing: the issue of Zionism. Zionism means simply the historical movement for the right to a Jewish homeland. The term was coined around 1890. Granted, many meanings have been assigned to that term in more recent years. And many American Jews would agree that the kind of extremist nationalism of right-wing Zionists is distasteful (as is all extreme nationalistic right-wingism); but to use the term Zionism interchangeably with actions of the Israeli government is to suggest that you not only oppose those government actions, but that you oppose the right of the state of Israel to exist at all.
I can't go into 2000 years of history in this region--I don't even understand it myself--nor even the history since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1920, when the entire region of Syria-Palestine-Sinai was reorganized, nor the Balfour Declaration or the White Paper or the 1947 UN partition plan or anything that has ensued since, with bad behavior from both Arab and Jewish factions too numerous to mention. But the idea that this tiny nation has no right to exist feels threatening to a people who, having been driven away long ago and having been homeless for endless years, living (often in terror) in other parts of the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, reached a "never again" moment in the existential crisis of the 20th century. And even if Jews, like myself, have no particular interest in Israel or in even visiting it, they tend to feel that at a minimum, something like it has a right to exist. And I think Israelis feel that, having worked hard to turn this tiny slice of desert land into a functional, advanced democracy that has contributed to science and medicine and culture ... they have a right to defend it.
Now, that does not excuse the lengths to which that nation has gone in the name of protecting itself. Many Israelis themselves disagree with their government, emphatically (though none would say that their country has no right to exist). But the emphasis should be on what the Israeli government should do to make peace with its neighbors (and what its neighbors, in turn, must do to make peace with Israel), not on the idea that Israel has no right to exist at all. And that is what some of the criticism sounds like (and not just sounds like: it's what some, but not all, of that criticism truly is). Truth be told, both sides there still fee as if they are fighting for liberation. It's ugly; it always is.
But second, there is the fault, all too common in ideological/political thinking, of believing that if you disagree with one side (Israel) you must automatically support the other side (Hamas). As much as I oppose Israeli government policy, it does not mean I'm reductive enough to say I think Hamas should be supported. Indeed, many Palestinians would agree on that one, too.
The idea that one side is unilaterally evil, and therefore the other side is therefore unilaterally good is absurd. I just (re)watched the 1960s film (Far From Vietnam), only just released on DVD after nearly fifty years. And in it there is one segment, a sort of fictional essay in which a French philosopher goes on a fifteen-minute rant about his depression in the face of the situation. And he expresses exactly that dismay: he loves the Americans because they saved his life and country when they landed in Europe, but he hates them for dropping bombs and napalm on Vietnam. And because he hates them should he, de facto, love the Viet Cong? What he laments is both the simplification of things in the political sphere and his powerlessness to do anything about these kinds of aggression, which keep repeating themselves, again and again and again, all over the world, no matter what we think we have learned from the past. And how had it happened that there suddenly became 40 million anti-Imperialists in France, when it was merely a decade or so since its own aggression in Algeria?
Which brings me to another point. The fictional philosopher also wonders why the world always picks "fashionable victims" while ignoring others ... at that time, victims in Sudan and Central America and elsewhere who were being totally ignored. This is a second (or am I at third ?) thing that is bewildering to some of us: why, as horrible as it is, has the death of 1,000+ Palestinians--deaths that I mourn deeply and deplore even more so--count for so much more than, say, the recent deaths of 170,000 Syrians and the displacement of several million into refugee camps? This is not just because it's the topic du jour: the outrage was never here about Syria among the left, and one searches for the answer for why Israeli killings are worse than those perpetrated by Assad or ISIS ...
And finally, there's the Nazi card. The despicable likening of the current situation in the Middle East to the systematic extermination program of the Nazi government. Imagine the reaction of some bad action of an African government in some geopolitical dispute being called by your compatriots on the left worse than hundreds of years of slavery in the US. It's like a wiping away of history, and reducing everything bad into the same (selective) universe of badness.
I oppose the current actions of the Israeli government. And I know the usual suspects will come to post some picture to show me how wrong I am to think about these issues in a more nuanced (perhaps even jaundiced) way. I will ignore them.
I probably haven't done much to help; it's just ... well, you know as well as I do, that people who have been discriminated against for many centuries can tend to get sensitive. Israel deserves no special dispensation from criticism ... nor does any badly behaving African country. But when you feel that your moral identity as an entire people is being put into question ("how come those black people in Africa are too primitive to run a country without corruption or bloodshed?" it's a different order of thing.
ON EDIT: Now that 24 hours has elapsed since I wrote this post, I feel like I wasted nearly an hour of my life. Which, of course, is insignificant, compared to losing your whole life forever. But I did spend some time writing something; and that something, whether right or wrong, seems to have disappeared into the ether altogether. And now I feel that either I should not have bothered to write anything at all, or should just have written the usual one-liner we find on DU. I'll have to remember than when a question is asked, responses are not really what is being looked for. It's hard to tell rhetorical questions from real ones. I'll be more careful next time.
