Please don't use the terms "Jews" and "Zionists" interchangeably. It's inappropriate. The two groups are not synonymous-globally, most people who identify as "Zionist" now are NOT Jewish, but right-wing evangelical "Christians", and there are an increasing number of Jewish people in the Diaspora questioning and speaking out against the Occupation and the continued expansion of the illegal West Bank settlements, a growing minority of whom feel such despair and outrage about what the IDF does to ordinary Palestinians and about the indefensible existence of the West Bank settlements at all- none of which bolster Israeli security or do anything but make the possibility of eventual peace or reconciliation even more remote than it is now- that they are choosing not to identify as Zionist at all.
And please don't perpetuate the myth that Palestinians are driven by nothing but hatred of Jews- a hatred they didn't hold for the hundreds of years when Palestinians treated the indigenous Jewish community there far, FAR better than Christian Europe ever did.
It's a land dispute and it's about not wanting to be dispossessed- and there is nothing to be lost in accepting that both national communities are real and both have deep roots in this soil.
What would you even say to young, progressive Jewish people in North American or Britain or Australia or Europe who would say "yes, our ancestors were barbarically persecuted, even subjected to attempts to exterminate them, but why should that require us, at THIS moment of time, in the year 5782(that's 2022 to us Gentiles), to give unquestioning support to the collective repression of a people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the ancestral suffering the creation of Israel was meant to bring an end to? Who could have done nothing to prevent it, since those Palestinians who who were alive in the 1930s and 1940s didn't even control admission to the Mandate- it was largely controlled by the Zionist Agency and the British Mandatory authorities, neither of which were willing to let in everyone who wanted to move to the Mandate from Europe?
Why punish THEM for something they had nothing to do with? And why should we and the rest of the world feel obligated to defend the punishment of these people, 95% of whom weren't even alive when the Holocaust occurred?"
Also, please don't use the term "Arabs" and "Palestinians" synonymously- the indigenous Palestinian community is not responsible for what the Arab Legion (which was mostly made up of non-Palestinians) did in the years prior to 1948.
It is not as though every Jewish person on the planet is in lock-step support of what the Israeli government does to ordinary Palestinians, or accepts the canard that the only way the world's Jewish communities can be safe from extermination is for Palestinians to be both kept in a state of eternal subjugation and denied acceptance of their identity. They are what they call themselves and it serves no purpose to either reject their identity or insist that they confess that their identity and their cause is fraudulent.
How about, instead, treating them with respect, admitting that ordinary Palestinians have a real identity- doing that doesn't threaten Israel's existence- and how about stop making the relentless Israeli government response to everything any Palestinian says something other than "Admit you're not a real people! Admit you have no claim to anything here! Admit we're totally right and you're totally wrong-then take whatever pitiful, humiliating crumbs we might leave you"?
Israel exists. It's always going to exist. It doesn't have to act like the Roman Empire or the way the U.S. did towards indigenous Americans in the "Wild West" days. And nobody should have to defend what the IDF does to ordinary Palestinians, for as long as the Israeli government- which is, after all, just another government, as legitimately subject to dissent and critique as any other- claims it has to do it?
I respect your loyalty to what you believe is right and needed...but you need to be open to the possibility that what people like Netanyahu and Bennett and Lapid are saying might not actually be the ONLY way to do things, and that what they are insisting on is probably not in your best interest.
The status quo isn't working, it isn't possible to get peace by denying that Palestinians are a real people with a real national consciousness, and it isn't possible to end this war by making a Palestinian delegation sign an unconditional surrender treaty on the modern-day equivalent of the USS Missouri.
