Judith Butler: why so defensive, Judith?

Judith Butler is a critic of the state of Israel.  In the American context, she is a courageous critic of Israel.  I participated many years ago in a summer seminar on Antigone that she so ably ran.  She has been vilified by critics unfairly: and mostly by people who have a hard time with her philosphical reference points.  I just read her response to the Jerusalem Post: I am rather disappointed.  1) The Israeli critics have made her most defensive.  Every sentence drips with defensiveness.  2) She has to remind her readers how much she is the product of Judaism and Jewish culture.  I mean, we are all products of our upbringing and the milieus in which we are raised by why do we have to bring it and underline it when attacked by sectarian critics.  I can't imagine myself responding to Muslim critics by reminding them about my Muslim family and about childhood experiences in Ramadan.  Why does that matter except to allow the enemies to score a polemical point.  3) she said:  "In my view, there are strong Jewish traditions, even early Zionist traditions, that value co-habitation and that offer ways to oppose violence of all kinds, including state violence."  This sentence is historically false.  There are NO--NONE--early Zionist traditions that "value cohabitation and that offer ways to oppose violence of all kinds, including state violence".  There are none.  When people--usually left Zionists--write words like that they usually are referring to the writings of either Ahad Ha'am or Martin Buber.  But neither of them, nor together, represented "a Zionist tradition".  They were lone personalities and their entire body of writing don't amount to what Butler is describing here.  Again, way too defensive.  4) She tells us here that she is only partly supportive of BDS.  OK.  Sorry for the misunderstanding as we thought that you were supportive of BDS.  I will make sure to remember that.  Imagine that someone said about boycott of apartheid South Africa: that I am only partly supportive of boycott.  But does that mean that you are only partly opposed to Israeli injustices?  5) She then writes this:  "I do not endorse practices of violent resistance and neither do I endorse state violence, cannot, and never have."  (her emphasis).  In this sentence she clearly and unequivocally equates the violence of occupation with the violence of resistance.  6) Lastly, I want to say that whenever our enemies put us on the defensive they win.