Growing up in a religious Jewish household, Israel was meaningful and important to a lot of my family members, some of whom were holocaust survivors.
(Try, for a moment, by the way to put yourself in the headspace of a holocaust survivor on this. You've been through hell and back and lost most, if not all of your friends and family on the other side, your entire life has been defined and dominated by antisemitism and being an outsider.
And then you find out Jews are getting their own m***********g country. HOT DAMN. Sounds pretty f*****g sweet. So, I get the appeal.)
So there was a lot of subtle pressure in my life to see the actions of Israel's government in a positive light, pretty much no matter what, and most of my Jewish peers went on "birthright" trips to Israel and came back really adamantly zionist (it was a little spooky even).
And I really just wanted to believe that and wanting to believe it for a long time functioned as believing it until... it just didn't anymore and now I'm just a self-aware critic of Israel. I don't think Israel can be made to not exist as a country, but I think there needs to a be a radical reformation within its government and culture that moves it away from being a flagrant ethnostate.
(Try, for a moment, by the way to put yourself in the headspace of a holocaust survivor on this. You've been through hell and back and lost most, if not all of your friends and family on the other side, your entire life has been defined and dominated by antisemitism and being an outsider.
And then you find out Jews are getting their own m***********g country. HOT DAMN. Sounds pretty f*****g sweet. So, I get the appeal.)
So there was a lot of subtle pressure in my life to see the actions of Israel's government in a positive light, pretty much no matter what, and most of my Jewish peers went on "birthright" trips to Israel and came back really adamantly zionist (it was a little spooky even).
And I really just wanted to believe that and wanting to believe it for a long time functioned as believing it until... it just didn't anymore and now I'm just a self-aware critic of Israel. I don't think Israel can be made to not exist as a country, but I think there needs to a be a radical reformation within its government and culture that moves it away from being a flagrant ethnostate.