I was raised reform Jewish and am half Jewish by family history. I have ancestors who were victims of the pogroms in the Russian pale of settlement – specifically, all four of my great-grandparents on my father’s side, along with their parents (my great-great-grandparents). When they were children their families fled and eventually resettled in the USA.
There is another place that they could have gone instead: Palestine. At that time it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and some of the displaced Jews of that time did elect to go to Palestine. As it happens, my ancestors chose the US, but they could have gone to Palestine if they’d wanted to.
The fashionable posture on the left to take towards Israeli Jews recently has basically been a combination of glibness and vitriolic hatred, often reaching the point of wishing death upon them (examples: 1 2). I don’t know… I just can’t really feel good about stuff like that. The fact that my family ended up in the US and not Palestine is really just a quirk of fate. I don’t think that my ancestors were, like, morally better people for choosing the US over Ottoman-era Palestine. (And given the recent uptick in “Turtle Island” discourse, it seems like a fair number of leftists believe my ancestors shouldn’t have been allowed to resettle in the US either.)
I think that Zionism (with the possible exception of cultural Zionism) has generally been a noxious idea throughout its history. I don’t think the state of Israel should continue to exist as it is currently constituted, and I think the near-ubiquitous racism among Israelis is shameful. But I also don’t think that every Jewish person who moved to Palestine in the last 150 years was a bad person for doing that, and I’m not prepared to circle-jerk over the deaths of people that I have a fair amount in common with historically.
Am I missing something? Have I been hoodwinked by Zionist propaganda?
I think it would be perverse to hate israelis who genuinely want a democratic nation that doesn’t need to be called israel, and want to have equality with the actual indigenous people of the land. That is an incredibly, vanishingly small portion of the population, so the odds are that any Israeli who gets got in some way held disgusting, fascist beliefs and would have clapped and celebrated in glee at the death of a Palestinian child. I don’t think Zionists should be treated the way that they treat Palestinians, but I’m not going to shed any tears if they are.
Some people from the sect with the long hair have been caught on video flying Palestinian flags, getting harassed by cops. Not sure if it was a change of heart or they always believed in some starry-eyed lib vision of an American colony and the indigenous population coexisting, but the small number of folks like that I have some mixed sympathy for. There’s some kids who have no choice as their parents just brought them in tow, but seeing some of those racist videos of Israeli teens, I can’t say I have much in my heart in the way of forgiveness.
Yeah I was being a little glib, I think there’s a pretty significant (though small proportionally) number of hasidic jews who oppose zionism and regard palestinians as their equals and the land as palestinian land. The videos I’ve seen of how brutal the occupation cops are with them are really shocking, they’re very brave people.
That’s like 4 guys (if we exclude the Arabs)
i’m trying to be very charitable here, I know of at least two israelis whose youtube channel gets recommended to me a lot who are principled anarchists and welcome the collapse of israel so they’re definitely out there, gotta be maybe a dozen or more overall
Those Israeli anarchists that refuse to join the IDF and actively fight the settler state are brave mother fuckers and have my full support. Pretty much anyone else including the labor-Zionist “socialists” can get fucked.