Core liberal positions on Zionism: • Two-state solution • Human rights • Criticism ≠ antisemitism • Occupation opposition Where Zionist policy diverges: • Settlement expansion • Annexation and one-state realities • Security-first approach

Trolling: • Trolls conflate sympathy for Israel’s existence with blanket endorsement of all Israeli policies, to stifle nuanced debate. • Liberal Zionism exists, advocating Israel’s right to exist while opposing occupation and settlement policies, is deliberately oversimplified by both sides.

Man, read the article. You can’t go ahead with establishing your terms of the debate without even bothering show the other side the same respect. In a way, this blind self-righteousness only reminds one of the Israeli side in the conflict more generally...

I read it when it dropped. I have read others like it. I just reread it. Doesn’t change what I said.

Your original point was that people are free to see the story as a metaphor for any number of things... and that simultaneously those who see it as a metaphor for Israel/Palestine are ‘red-pilled conspiracists’. Given the formative influence of IL/PS on the show’s creator, that claim is... bonkers.

It is not bonkers. It’s conspiratorial hermeneutics, which assumes the narrative is an encoded manipulation. You and he are working to deflate the metaphor, which strikes me as a kind of motivated literalism, not so different from evangelicals interpreting the Bible as literal.

By collapsing the figurative or allegorical into that which inspired it, you ignore how metaphors operate as flexible, evolving tools for meaning-making. You WANT to dismiss it, so this is a form of motivated literalism.

No one has dismissed anything here. We’re simply pointing out the show’s themes were inspired by the Israel/Palestine conflict. I mean this is like claiming the Mein Kampf could be a metaphor for personal hygiene and anyone who thinks it’s motivated by antisemitism is ‘like a Biblical literalist’.

Its theme of conflict between two groups being inspired by the conflict Druckmann experienced is not in question. Writing off the work because some cannot separate it from its inspiration is the problem; and a small minority’s focus on just that says more about them than the work, hence red-pilled.

Yes, it says that they find the particular political framings advanced by such an interpretation distasteful. It says something about me that I have no interest in reading Mein Kampf, even in some tortured way to see it as a metaphor for something else, *knowing* its authors ideology full well.

This in itself is a liberal fantasy about liberal Zionism, which does not actually include any of those things

To create the future, we must first imagine it. Cynicism is the refuge of those lacking both ambition and curiosity.