Thank you for your response and for taking the trouble to read some of my articles.

I tried to find comments from Joe Blow and couldn't, so it is hard for me to respond to those.

In general, though, when people criticize Israel, as Johnstone often does, I find myself wishing that they would emphasize the committed opposition among many Israeli Jews to the policies of their government.

1. To begin with, reporting on the opposition is factually correct.

2. Second, it implicitly demolishes the idea that Jews are a monolithic group engaged in some sort of sinister conspiracy. It is my impression that Israel's opposition to occupation is far greater and far more dedicated than American opposition to our empire, which is doing some pretty terrible things throughout the world.

3. In the US, more Jews belong to groups urging peace and a Palestinian state than belong to AIPAC. The trouble is that the peace groups are local, underfunded, and not coordinated with other peace groups while AIPAC is centralized and very well organized.

In contrast, while there are a few honorable exceptions, American academia was largely silent on the Iraq war, the outsourcing of torture, and our own torture.

There have been Israeli organizations around for decades such as the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights and the Committee Against Housing Demolitions that have consistently opposed the government on these issues. There is also Rabbis for Human Rights, which opposes the far-right religious in the country. (A personal note: I am NOT condemning religious Jews as a class. I am sympathetic to modern Orthodoxy. If I ever were to leave Christianity, which I would not, I would become a modern Orthodox Jew. )

Lastly, even if Johnstone doesn't want to personally rebuke a commenter, she could write in a way that does less to encourage such people.