Could have written almost all of that myself, to the letter. Yep, now I remember your amusing description of the "responsible centrist" or whatever's the term of mockery. Personally I am that odd type (possibly not so rare these days) who finds the left extremely annoying while never voting for anything else.

I was also banned from another community BTW (relax, there are only 2!) for objecting to the egregious community rule "No Zionism", which IMO was very close to literal racism given that none of the other rules concerned specific countries or nations. The mods there would do well to read this piece just out today, by an Israeli pacifist, and consider again the value of open debate and speech, not to mention empathy (something they are always so keen to ask of others). Absolutely heart-rending.

PS: I'll add a quote from the cited article because it's so uncannily relevant to this whole thread:

So I ask myself: Where should I go, as an Israeli pacifist?

My own relatives question whether I belong in Israel, because I criticize the troops in Gaza for the killing and starvation of Palestinians. Abroad, a theater colleague once told me to “go back to where you came from”—that I don’t belong in the land where I was born but in the lands where my ancestors faced pogroms and the Holocaust. Nuance has no currency in a world addicted to absolutes.

Of course, there are far greater tragedies than mine. Palestinians are being killed in Gaza, and Israeli hostages are still in captivity. I carry the weight of those horrors daily. I’m not comparing my suffering with theirs. But I do believe that if we want a different future, we need space to speak from wherever we are—even from the uncomfortable middle.