I come from a non-Zionist Orthodox Jewish family on my dad’s side, for a different perspective that is almost never heard these days.
The objection was never to Jews moving to historical Israel, or settling there. The objection was in using violence to set up an explicitly “Jewish state”. Their objection was rooted in part in theology - they believe the Messiah was to do that, not a bunch of ordinary people. But there was also a sense that forcibly imposing a Jewish state on people who had already been there for centuries was wrong. Even worse was displacing people from their land - a sense of why are Jews doing to these people what was done to us so long ago?
When I bring this up I frequently find I’m immediately countered with “you’re wrong” (hey, this is the viewpoint of someone else, not me personally) and/or “you don’t understand, you need to know [fill in the blank] or remember [name atrocity]”. Keep in mind this is the viewpoint of people living literally on the other side of the planet who fled to North America to escape (largely successfully) the constant fighting, killing, and conflict of the Old World. They viewed the US as the promised land, a place they could be openly Jewish, move all over the place and not be confined to a shtetl or ghetto, buy land, acquire a surname, conduct their business successfully with both Jew and Gentile, there were no progroms, their rights were protected, and they could send their children to higher education and greater prosperity. Why move somewhere else - even Israel - to fight in yet another war? They could visit the Holy Land - especially now that they had the financial success to afford to do so! - but they didn’t see a reason to move there and participate in a project they thought contrary to the will of G*d and believed would end, eventually, in disaster.
For this difference of opinion they were called traitors, self-loathing Jews, and antisemitic. Because Zionism went from a voluntary organization to one with guns that adopted a “you’re either with us or against us” attitude that persists to this day.
I don’t entirely share the views of my Orthodox relatives, either my grandparents or later generations. I do, however, identify as an American Jew, not an Israeli Jew. My family probably last lived in the Levant 1800 years ago. You know, if I tried to assert that I had claim to land once owned by my grandparents in (take your choice of country) Ireland, Germany, or Russia I’d be laughed out of the room and that was merely 100-150 years ago. Asserting a land claim 1800 years old? That is insane The Torah is not recognized as a legal deed to land.
But, because some people are trying to do just that it affects MY life half a world away. The current Israeli government insistence on ethnic cleansing and genocide is only making the situation worse for - at best - a temporary increase in safety in a very small place. Meanwhile, there is global blowback not just on Israelis but all Jews.
Thanks a lot. Your war of conquest is making my life less safe. I want no part of this war. At all. On either side. Yet I am being forced to deal with it. And you wonder that I object?
Oct 7 didn’t occur in a vacuum. Attempting to date the war from that point without discussion of the proceeding decades of conflict is bullshit. The history doesn’t justify what was done - nothing would justify it - but it goes a long way to explaining why it happened beyond a knee-jerk racist answer of “they hate us because Palestinians are evil bastards who want us dead, it’s in their DNA”.
You do understand that not ALL Palestinians by dint of descent are not murdering terrorists, right? Because if you don’t understand that you’re a bigot. Granted there are too many who fit that description these days, but failure to recognize an equal bloodthirst among some on the Israeli side is an equal failure of objectivity.
One of the problems here is that too many assume you can know a person’s viewpoints, politics, and morals by examining their family tree. Also a hefty dollop of collective ethnic guilt.
Until that stops there will be NO chance of peace in the region. Unless one side or the other conducts a successful genocide leaving no opposition alive, not even babies. The current Israeli administration is trying to cast itself in the role of Joshua and the Palestinians in the role of Amalek.
Currently, Jews have a “right of return” to the area - why wouldn’t the displaced Palestinians want the same?
Currently there are people in the Israel government who want the land to be Jewish “from the River to the Sea” (and a bit more, including parts of Syria and Lebannon) - why wouldn’t the Palestinians want the same?
Yeah, I get it - your country feels under threat and so do you, and you want to protect your country and yourself. But the way your government is doing that - ethnic cleansing, genocide, and atrocity - is going to result in Jews (because of the insistence of both sides of conflating “Jew” and “Israeli”) world-wide being pariahs.
That argument doesn’t work on me. I’m Jewish, too, whether or not I want to be. Even if many of the Orthodox Jews don’t think that, the 8 billion gentiles do, which means whatever shit is being imposed on Jews I get to “enjoy”, too.
So fuck all the warmongers, terrorists (on BOTH sides), bigots, and people who promote and cause the slaughter of innocents regardless of what flag they wave or what uniform they wear (or don’t). Fuck 'em all, to hell with them all, if there was justice they’d all die in slow agony trapped in their beds, unable to move as they slowly burn to death/are crushed by a collapsed building after not being able to find food for a week.
It would help if Israelis and the more rabid supporters of Israel’s current government both there and in the West didn’t keep insisting on trying to drag me into a conflict that, as a “Western Jew”, I want no part of.