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?

https://nitter.poast.org/MattWalshBlog/status/1812601707806757235

https://www.jta.org/archive/ben-gurion-reveals-suggestion-of-north-vietnams-communist-leader
https://www.jta.org/2014/11/02/culture/from-the-archive-israels-friend-in-hanoi
https://richardpollock.substack.com/p/two-unlikely-national-liberation (pro-Israel blog)

This seems kind of disappointing.

I found this article to be pretty interesting.

Modern nationalism valorises a people’s deep, primordial relationship with land. It also depends on enemies, outsiders and foreigners to help unite the members of the nation...

For much of Western history, however, claiming foreign ancestry was the key to political legitimacy. From the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, noble families across Europe insisted that they were not related to the populations they ruled. They traced their ancestry back to illustrious foreign powers, including figures of myth and legend. Among the most popular were the protagonists of the Trojan War....

...from the long view of European history, nationalist myths about indigenous peoples are a recent invention, a response to elites’ emphasis on their foreign origins.

The article doesn't mention it, but I think another good example of this would probably be the Jewish origin myth of the Exodus. The archaeological consensus is that it never happened, there was never any mass migration from Egypt to Palestine, nor was there any overthrow & expulsion of Canaanites. What most likely happened is that at some point, the Canaanite society experienced a political collapse, the local population started self-identifying differently, and a cohort of self-identified "Israelites" successfully took up the vacuum of power and formed a government. Then they invented an origin myth about how they were actually from the exotic land of the Nile, even though they were really just the same ethnicity as the Canaanite rulers of a generation or two earlier.

In September 1935, the Nazi government in Germany passed two laws, the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour" and the "Reich Citizenship Law", that are together commonly known as the Nuremberg Laws. These laws are most well-known for forbidding marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and "Aryan" Germans; forbidding the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and declaring that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens, with Jews reclassified as merely "state subjects" without any citizenship rights.

There is another thing that these laws did that has been less discussed, but really ought to be given more attention, especially in light of events that have transpired in the past year.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned Jews in Germany from flying or displaying the National flag (meaning the Nazi flag), but stated they were "permitted to display the Jewish colors". Several months later, the Nazi government issued a further statement clarifying that this language refers to the flag used by the Zionist movement at the time.

Per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on January 2nd, 1936:

“It is up to the Jewish nation,” the decree states, “to decide for itself which are to be the colors of the Jewish national flag, but until then the Zionists’ blue-white flag, together with the symbols of all the different Zionist groups, is valid in the Reich as the Jewish flag and as such will be enjoying State protection.”

The "Zionists' blue-white flag" referenced here featured a white background with two blue stripes and a Star of David in between them. It is the same flag that is now used as the flag of Israel.

I learned this from reading Zionism During the Holocaust by Tony Greenstein. Positively eye-opening.

(edit: corrected a grammatical error)

My parents have had a terrible marriage for basically as long as I can remember. I have been anticipating their divorce on some level since I was about 11 (I'm now in my late 20s), and I don't know why they don't just pull the plug. In fact, I don't even know why they got married in the first place; they don't enjoy each other's company, they don't have congruent ideas or tastes on basically anything, they're basically incompatible in every way.

I think they both would have been better off if they had split up early, never gotten married and never had children together. They should have married different people, or just not gotten married at all.

The obvious implication of this, of course, is that I shouldn't have been born. This does cause me some existential discomfort. Thoughts occur to me like, "Why do I care so much about the future? Why do I pay so much attention to politics? What's the point of advocating for socialism or trying to work towards a better future? I don't have kids, I can't have kids*, I don't think I should have kids, and I don't even think my parents should have had me. In a better timeline, I wouldn't even be here anyway."

*(I had a vasectomy a few years ago)

I would like to feel a bit more assured about all of this. What do you think?