for all your hard work on this, Hunter.  Others might not agree, but I think you've been extraordinarily patient with all you've been bombarded with.  

I gave up on posting much in I/P diaries lately after getting tr'd for cutting an pasting your shergald warning in a diary by shergald :O)  Made the point to me that it was no longer about the discussion; just about the sides people were taking, which is a shame.

There's a comment below with an interesting suggestion that is worth consideration.

Whatever you decide to do, thank you for all your hard work.  It is much appreciated.

not sure if anyone's still reading these comments, but anyway.

Hunter, you say:

"I ain't gonna screw around trying to invent elaborate ways of detecting this clown, I'm just going to ban anyone that sounds vaguely like him."

Well, that's just totally unfair (and putting "fair" in scare quotes doesn't make being so less important). If you don't have time to continue to hunt for and ban shergald sockpuppets, then why not employ an additional moderator, perhaps one whose sole focus is the I/P diaries? However you decide to deal with it, surely the absolute worst  outcome would be for legitimate, serious diarists to end up banned. Yet that's the route you seem to be opting for, I guess out of frustration.

"It should be clearly noted here that from where I stand, the pro-Palestinian side is more organized in their manipulation of this site in an effort to make their views seem more dominant then they are. And that's entirely because of a very small but ongoing collection of posters surrounding Shergald. He lost a lot of his old friends when he lied to them, repeatedly, about sockpuppeting here -- to their distinct credit, they cut him loose when they found out about it -- but it seems there's never any shortage of new associates he can hang out with. (It's especially aggravating because I am personally quite empathetic to the Palestinian side of the debate -- they've gotten screwed quite constantly by Israel, a point which isn't lost on reasonable people.)"

What "manipulation" of the site? Reading the actual diaries and comments, it seems blindingly obvious to me that there is a sizeable section of commenters whose aim is simply to disrupt or distort the debate. It is equally clear that they overwhemingly come from the side that designates itself "pro-Israel". Do you disagree?

"I'm personally thinking it's time to ban these discussions outright, and send them elsewhere."

Right, and what would that achieve? It would silence from mainstream Democratic discourse, as represented on this site, discussion of what is surely a morally despicable aspect of current U.S. foreign policy, and one in the Democratic party looks likely to further perpetuate if allowed to do so.

"Nobody gives a flying damn about actual policy resolution; nobody is going to convince anyone."

That's not true at all.I really think your understandable frustration is clouding your view of the I/P debates as a whole. The purpose, incidentally, isn't necessarily to convince those who have obviously made up their minds already (these are the people you usually find commenting below a diary). The purpose is to inform the wider DKos community, which may read the diary but avoid commenting.

"Or, hell, we admins can rightly determine that the pro-Palestinian side is far, far more invested with sockpuppets and dishonest manipulations, and just ban that side of the argument outright. That'd maybe be the fairest short-term thing to do"

Except that it wouldn't. In what possible way could that be considered "fair"? It would be, to use the language of I/P, collective punishment,which, I may add, is a crime under international law. :)