Why I don’t support Israel…and no one should.

Look – this isn’t about Judaism.

Seriously, it’s not. Israel, despite a half century and more of propaganda, is not synonymous with Judaism. It’s a country, not a religion.

I was born a mere 15 years after WW2 ended, and raised to believe that Israel was just this tiny enclave of “pull ourselves up by the bootstraps” scrappy little enclave a of brave freedom fighters.

And maybe that was true then. Certainly the Arab nations surrounding it were determined to crush it out of existence, and the West, laden with guilt about having ignored the hundreds of verifiable reports of just what Germany was doing to Jewish people for at least a decade (out of, I might add, the West’s own ingrained anti-Semitism), felt they had to support and defend the new country.

But the creation of Israel – the western imposition of fiat decisions displacing and deligitimising the people that had been inhabiting the region for basically forever – was fraught with problems, and these problems were all extremely predictable.

(No. Don’t @ me with bs about how “Palestine never really existed” – there are travel posters from prewar decades urging people to visit Palestine, and anyway, as Shakespeare pointed out: what’s in a name? There were people, real, actual people, who lived there.)

There were a lot of ways that everyone should have known this would go wrong.

Anyway, guilt and the fact that there was money to be made convinced the world to arm the Israelis. They were just trying to live, right?

In the beginning, I guess that was true. They were trying to build a country.

And somewhere along the line, the political class in Israel took the problem and turned it on it’s head. “Trying to build a country” became ‘annexing as much land as possible”, and then morphed into “kill those people we are scared of”, and then the fiction that the area had been a hellhole/wasteland with no one living here” was used to justify pretty much anything.

In the last thirty years or so, that justification began to sound increasingly familiar, and so did the actions that proceeded from that justification.

Lebensraum, anyone?

Look, I don’t know what the answer is. Nobody really does, but a lot of the problem stems from the major powers assuming that Israel is always blameless, that every action they take is defensive, and that because of what we pretty much let the Germans do to Jews in Europe, Israel now has every right to do to the Arabic population they displaced.

I think, after a quarter century of slow genocide and the constant appropriation of land belonging to non-Jews, it is no big surprise that Hamas re-emerged and started to fight back.

I don’t like it. I don’t think it has any chance of a good ending. But I cannot find it in my heart to blame them.

It’s entirely predictable, and considering that in the 60s, people often complained about the fact that the Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Russia, France and all the other places the Nazis invaded never really fought back (not completely true, but, ok) it’s the absolute height of hypocrisy for us to condemn the Palestinian people for resorting, once again, to violence.

Again, Israel is not Judaism. Israel is not a religion – it’s a country. It’s a country that has been, from the very start, reliant on the Holocaust guilt of the west to garner money and arms, and far from defending their borders, have used those arms to expand into other people’s territories, and destroyed other people’s homes and lives.

It’s not a good look, and many people just turn their eyes away and stick with the fiction, but history is merciless, and sooner or later, the willfully blind will answer for this.

We need to find real solutions. Ones that don’t end with “Ooops, sorry about ignoring your genocide” kneejerk reactions, where we find another group of people we don’t give a shit about and displace them, and start the cycle all over again.

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