Of course I support Professor Robinson, but that means little from somebody like me.
What I have to offer that I hope is of value, is advice and some arguments. If you're an academic faculty or student, or a political official and you want to tackle Israel, Zionism, anti-semiticism, and the Palestinians, etc. you have to be smart about how you go about it.
I've come to the conclusion, making comparisons with the Nazis and the Israel is a bad idea and is not a knowledgeable way to go after Israel or Zionism.
The reason it is a bad idea is at least two fold. It is just an inflammatory rhetorical device. That kind of rhetoric obscures a concrete historical connection, that if full detailed out is far more politically devastating. There is plenty of historical material to make a case that gets to the same point. In other words, Israel is ruled by a brutal, racist regime that has imposed a murderous system of apartheid through military occupation.
What is the material history behind a linkage between Zionism and National Socialism, considered as political philosophies? Well, I found plenty and it goes back to the 19thC race theories. This was the intellectual and political milieu out of which both European nationalism, and European Jewish nationalism have their conceptual birth. Just read the history surrounding the first several WZO conferences and the social intellectual history of the people and time. That's the link. You can read later essays by Strauss and others in the 1920s on the relationship between Zionism, ethnic German Jews, Judaism, and the Orthodox councils. From the start the relationship was mutual antagonism, each against all.
In that historical context, the concept of race was used by various factions within Zionism as a way to unify or merge a religious and/or ethnic concept to a political identity. The concept of race in this case follows from the tribal and religious custom of tracing inheritance along maternal blood lines. The inheritance of blood line was the political solution to the conflicting answers to the question of who was Jewish. Both the National Socialists and the Zionists agreed on a blood line, or a racialized political definition. Blood and soil.
The current policies as well as the military brutality of the current right wing Zionist regime can be traced back to Vladamir Jabotinsky and others in the hard right within the Zionist movements political battles of the 1920s over what to do about the Arabs. See Jabotinsky essay The Wall. It is even more chilling today, since it is now a fact on the ground.
There is nothing special about Zionism on these points. It is one example from a whole world of political movements and doctrines that share similar characteristics of attempting to equate race, ethnicity, language, and or religion as the sole basis of entitlements to the political concept of citizenship in a national state (see below). These identity movements can be politically useful up to a point to build group identity and political solidarity, raise consciousness, gain political power. But ultimately these movements and their ideologies come to confront the dilemma of political action and power within the existing world of polyglot national states that have never been homogenous in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, or language.
I found some of the most interesting and enlightening social history I've ever read, just following the traces of these ideas back in German history. The German history both illuminated and complimented my understanding of the US and its history.
So my suggestion for Robinson and others, do your homework. Make the case you want against Israeli government actions and policies, but don't be uninformed about it. You'll face charges of anti-semiticism, treason, professional misconduct, hate speech, bigotry, and more, so back up your position in advance. In our current political climate, being Jewish is no excuse. We are dealing with deep conflicts of political philosophy.
You have to historically deconstruct a whole series of conceptual linkages that are presupposed by your political opponents beginning with the non-overlapping categories of Jewish, Zionism, Judaism, and Israel. It took me a long time to figure out or intellectualize this deconstruction. Jew is a cultural or ethnic custom based category. Zionism is a political doctrine. Judaism is a religion, and Israel is a nation state. One way to ground the historical, philosophical and theological justifications for this deconstruction, is to go back to Barach Spinoza and trace out the history of the Pantheism controversies among the German literati in the time of Goethe, Lessing, and Moses Mendelsohn. Both Strauss and Arendt followed this history in their own intellectual efforts to perform such a deconstruction for themselves. In short they were both tracing out their roots, to found themselves as intellectuals and as Jews. Arendt quipped in a letter to Jaspers (I think), that Zionism was Germany's gift to the Jews. That was her short hand way to link Zionism to National Socialism within German nationalist identity politics of the period.
Just as today, Strauss and Arendt came to different political philosophies and they denounced each other. Arendt thought Strauss was a nazi and Strauss thought Arendt was an anti-semite. They went at it hammer and tong over her book on Eichmann. I haven't been able to find the historical details, but Strauss lead a student and faculty protest against Arendt at the University of Chicago in the early 60s when the book came out. (Anybody who knows a source for this story, please let me know).
For me the more important political conflict is a right wing Zionism that insists on merging all of these identity categories into one, under its own presumed ownership, and sole possession, along with granting itself special property rights. This kind of presumption of ownership, is virtually identical to the white wing Christian and US neo-conservatives who want to insist they are the special owners of all that is truly American, that they speak for traditional American values and somehow embody The American.
I hope this helps. The above brief sketch helped me to sort these issues out. In the end, I discovered a world of political philosophy. For those interested here is what looks like a good summary of Arendt's political philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/
The purpose of reading this summary is to deconstruct the ADL's little noticed phrase in this Robinson controversy, ``legitimate criticism'' [of Israel]. The political illegitimacy of the phrase itself can be deconstructed through Arendt's concept of Citizenship:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/#AreConCit
``The stress on the artificiality of politics has a number of important consequences. For example, Arendt emphasized that the principle of political equality does not rest on a theory of natural rights or on some natural condition that precedes the constitution of the political realm. Rather, it is an attribute of citizenship which individuals acquire upon entering the public realm and which can secured only by democratic political institutions.
Another consequence of Arendt's stress on the artificiality of political life is evident in her rejection of all neo-romantic appeals to the volk and to ethnic identity as the basis for political community. She maintained that one's ethnic, religious, or racial identity was irrelevant to one's identity as a citizen, and that it should never be made the basis of membership in a political community....''
[Artificial here means constructed, invented]
When the above concept of citizenship is put into its historical and philosophical context, it is the basis of Arendt's argument against Zionist political doctrine as a whole, and the constitutional definition of the right to citizenship in Israel in particular.
The bottom line is Hannah Arendt was just about number one, on the ADL's enemies list for a very long time.
CG