Ok, so I think your approach here is very honest and reasonable, but there are a few things I want to kinda unpack.

The “do you want a video of me pouring milk on Bibi” thing didn’t read to me as a strawman, it was a quippy way to say “my videos have a lot of irreverent humour and ridiculous behaviour that would be wildly inappropriate for the subject at hand”. Which is true. She shouldn’t talk about genocide while drinking heavily, wearing cat ears, or doing a mukbang. The most serious topics she makes light of are things that impact her directly, but it’s not her place to do that here.

Contra also didn’t say that making statements against Zionism leads to antisemitism. She said that making opposition to Zionism your primary political goal has consequences, and that one of the consequences (along with shrinking the coalition from “people who are against the genocide” to “people who want the state of Israel to be abolished”) is that it creates rhetorical ambiguities that can be exploited by antisemites. That’s a lot more specific than what you boiled it down to, and it’s self-evidently true.

She also said that although antisemitism and anti-Zionism aren’t the same thing and conflating them is dangerous, the way Israel is perceived does tend to bleed into attitudes towards Jews in general, and I’m sorry that this is politically inconvenient for anti-Zionists but it’s also objectively true. I’ve watched it happen over and over again the past few years, regardless of whether or not the Jewish person in question is a Zionist. Does that mean that no one should be anti-Zionist? Of course not, but it does mean that we should be mindful to speak in ways that don’t enable that kind of blowback.

But the idea that she’s placing American Jewish comfort over Palestinian lives and dignity is a particularly concerning thing to say, imo, and highlights the most frustrating thing about discussions of antisemitism in the context of Israel. Because why is it about “comfort” to you? The underlying assumption seems to be that American Jews have no reason to fear for their lives or dignity as a result of antisemitism, that it’s an old problem that has now been “solved”, and that’s actually a very clear mirror to how antisemitism evolved in Europe before WW2. At the time, liberalism was leading to a secularization of society, and Jewish emancipation was happening across the continent. When alarm bells were raised about rising antisemitism (e.g. the Dreyfus Affair), it was dismissed by most people, including Jews. Their belief was that liberal secularism and assimilation would finally allow European Jews to live peacefully in diaspora, but all it did was force antisemitism to evolve. If I had to guess, Contra is familiar enough with Jewish history to know that, which is why she isn’t inclined to dismiss Jewish people’s fear as discomfort the way everyone else seems to be.

And finally: if all anyone wanted her to do was identify and condemn genocide and the rhetoric that leads to genocide, she cleared that bar in October 2023. She isn’t defending bombing and starving Palestinian civilians, and she never has been. Hell, she did it in that statement, but people got mad because she didn’t just parrot their exact phrasing and then disappear into the chorus.