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?
Hmmm... Well, when my dad died when I was a preteen, my family considered moving to Occupied Turtle Island. And we can ask ourselves: what would've happened if my family actually did move in with my maternal grandparents, or with my cousins, or whatever else might've happened if we crossed the sea?
Well, the person who was me before we crossed the sea, would simply cease to be me after that point. Now she would share some childhood memories with me, albeit corrupted or forgotten in notably different ways; she might have a similar face and a similar voice and the same first languages, albeit with different mannerisms and idiolects. But aside from that she would have gone to different schools and met different people; she would have different favorite foods and drinks and different interests and fashion; she would've pursued a different education and a different career, and she'd have a different name and different problems in life; most things about her would indeed be unrecognizable compared to the me that actually exists.
Which is to say that there's a pretty decent chance that if I ever got to meet let's call her Maggie, that I would look at her sympathetically, this wounded bird who went through something no child should ever have to go through, and suddenly found herself in another country because of it... And then I would hate her fucking guts. Now I couldn't fault Maggie for ending up in an occupation zone, nor could I necessarily fault her mother for making such a difficult decision with the knowledge that she had; but if Maggie ended up a smug-ass lib not resisting but rather promoting the occupation of the Seven Council Fires, and if she generally came to be the antithesis of everything that the extant me believes and values — then I would not care that she was genetically my identical twin, because she'd still be a fucking asshole.
Do you think that if your great-grandparents had gotten the chance to meet "themselves" in that alternate timeline where they ended up in Palestine, that they'd also find little in common with "themselves"? Then how much would your great-grandparents' children have in common with their equivalents in that other timeline? And how about their children vs your parents? And then their children in turn vs yourself? Indeed, by the time we get to today, it would turn out that having ancestors who fled from the same persecution is much less meaningful a similarity than what the people alive today actually make of that history. And when the people alive today use that history to justify a colonial and fascist agenda, then you should revile them exactly as you should revile yourself if you had done the same thing.
Fair point