It’s true that PJ didn’t acknowledge the distinction. They may not have realized that was the source of the pushback. But regardless, I still don’t think that’s enough to say the ban was retaliatory.

PJ listed 'sexual assault denier' as the reason for the ban, seems pretty clear that - at the very least - this interaction was top-of-mind when he was issuing it.

I haven’t seen PJ actually claim that it was systemic but they could be implying it by seemingly trying to use that quote as a contradiction to OP saying that it’s an Israeli lie.

This is the thing I'm pointing to as a pattern with him:

• Felix says "anything that follows 'Israel says' is usually a lie"
• PJ jumps on it and quotes the UN finding that SA occurred (leaving out the second part of the original claim by Israel which is addressed later in the UN report that they didn't find it 'systemic')
• Felix responds with the drop site article that discusses that exact claim (that the SA was systemic)
• PJ ignores the topic of the article, jumps on the specific part that mentions the Dinah Project, pulls the commonly sighted quote from it that says they found 'patterns' of SA (but the next sentence says they could not verify any instances due to Israeli obstruction)
• Felix then responds with the item in the article he was referring when he linked to it (that the UN does not have evidence of systemic sexual assault). Note that the quote he is pulling is referring to a statement made by a top UN official, not to the link PJ is harping on
• PJ then incorrectly attributes that statement to the article he is talking about, which is the one felix's article is criticizing as being used by Zionists as evidence of systemic violence despite that report saying explicitly that they did not have evidence of systemic violence, only "patterns indicative of sexual violence" but of which individual instances could not be verified due to obstruction

Whether or not PJ went into that interaction knowing felix's intent is hard to say, but it should have been clear to him by the end that there was no actual disagreement being expressed. In the end, PJ mis-represents the source material and doubles-down on his accusation of SA denial in his ban reasoning in the modlog. An interaction that should have ended in clarity instead ends in him banning the user, if not for the stated reason in the log, at-best for downvoting posts in another comm.

It's a pattern with PJ that he dives headlong into an argument making an assumption about a user's intent, and then when the user clarifies their position against his accusation, he doubles-down by either misrepresenting that user's statements or by twisting source material to fit the accusation being made. By the end of that argument, all he's doing is accusing felix of lying by mis-attributing the source material he's using. He's being unnecessarily hostile when, in the end, there wasn't an actual substantive disagreement between them.

I don’t follow Lemmy politics enough to remember much of PJ’s history other than that they are a big enough contributor to be a familiar name and that they were involved in some drama with 196.

He's a prolific poster/commenter and a mod of probably a dozen communities. I don't care about the history comms he spends a lot of time in, but I do often see him pop up in political gossip/snark communities like 'tankyjerk' and 'meanwhileongrad'. Most of his original content he posts is fine, if not good - but he often gets into it with other users on politics and does exactly this kind of rage baiting, occasionally posting it to the political snark comms if he's worked up enough about it.