Islamic Leftism

When we create, they call us copy right breaking thieves. When they kill us, they call us weaklings who can't defend themselves. When we starve, they tell us we can't live without the white man. When we fight, they call us terrorists. and we build something, they calls us a dictatorship regime. and just like we say in Algeria "Yetnako"

Well yeah. It's just a term for it, it's not a statement. Criticisms of essentialism can be just as problematic (or not) as essentialism itself is (or isn't) (see Glen Coulthard's Red Skin White Masks). It is has been useful for a long time. Certainly figures like Pontiac and Tecumseh used it in their rhetoric.

It is 'strategic' because the essentialism is usually borrowing white notions of race and flipping them around (I.e. Calling the white man barbaric because he does exactly what he accuses others of doing and calls them barbaric). It's not meant to justify the notion of barbarism or lack of civilization, or to double down on white ontology, rather it's meant to flip the script and name the oppressor. It's how the Seminole clans describe the White War, as barbarism, but this is a flipped version of essentialism that is created by white settlers and weaponized against Native people and enslaved people (especially those that escape). Thus, strategic essentialism. It is meant to have rhetorical utility accross major political divides while also uniting a coalition.

And your point about women and men also works well. Women that use strategic essentialism are generally not intenting to advance sexist paradigms, but are naming the system they are subjected to.

These are unexpected figures. Similar to @[email protected], I thought Jewish support for Israel was a lot lower than the media often suggests. I wonder the extent to which the survey questions led towards these headlines.

These kinds of surveys do it with everything else. Like that recent one that essentially asked, 'Do you support Israel's right to defend itself?' on the one hand and 'Do you condemn Hamas for beheading babies and eating their livers?' on the other. Almost everyone will support Israel over Hamas if you ask it like that.

The first question, for example, suggests a 'quiet majority' of strong pro-Israel opinion roughly correlating to the size of the US population that votes Republican. Then some dispersed views on an apparent but false continuum from support to oppose. For instance someone might support the goals of BDS but think that BDS is ineffective. That can't be captured by the current question. Oppose, therefore, will capture Zionists and anti-Zionists, whereas support is likely only to capture anti-Zionists. I don't think the results necessarily show that only 10% of US Jews support Palestinians.

The figures also don't add up. Net support/oppose tallies 'somewhat/strongly' support/oppose. Then there's an average of 2% who didn't answer. In total, the table only captures 55% respondents. So we're missing the views of roughly 45% of US Jews.

The second question can be interpreted in two ways. (1) What does Israel mean for someone's own Judaism. (2) What does Israel mean for someone's own concept of Judaism in general (which includes what any one person thinks other people think about their own Judaism and Judaism in general). If it's the former, you get one answer. If it's the latter, you get people answering based on what the friends, media, etc, tell them about what other Jews mean when they talk about being Jewish.

I'd also wonder about non-Jewish responses to see whether these results are from living in the US as opposed to being Jewish. I suspect that Jewish views would reflect USian views now broadly. The fact that the survey only asks Jews is potentially an inherent problem with the survey itself. (Maybe it asked everyone but asked participants to identify their ethnicity/religion or something like that and the surveyors disaggregated the stats?)

All this doesn't necessarily discount your conclusions. I'd just be wary of fully relying on a survey like this to reach conclusions about actual levels of Jewish support for Israel. The labels themselves are poorly written and do not, in my view, support what is represented in the tables, nevermind the way that the survey was structured, framed, and shared, or when and how participants were chosen.

This does not even take into account theliberal zionists.