i’m not shutting the fuck up about this!!!!!!!!!! you CANNOT claim to be fighting for justice and real change if you refuse to acknowledge reality. you cannot make real change until you acknowledge why things got this bad. if those million jews hadn’t been cleansed from their home countries and fled to israel, i don’t think israeli politics would be as extremist as they are today.
because you understand, right, the fact that palestinians’ collective trauma and oppression pushes them towards extremism. i have been hearing people say “october 7th was an act of resistance, when a people are oppressed for this long of course they’ll lash out!” from y’all for MONTHS so clearly you understand that trauma and persecution makes people desperate. it’s human nature. we don’t want to die! we don’t want to be persecuted! you will never ever see me saying october 7th was “resistance”, but i absolutely do understand why so many palestinian civilians in both palestine and israel are resorting to increasingly desperate measures to try to gain their freedom, and that this often pushes people into extremism.
so put yourself in the shoes of the jews who have just been violently ethnically cleansed from arab countries. your parents and grandparents had talked about the unequal treatment they’d faced, some had even been through pogroms, but generally jewish life in these countries had been fairly comfortable. as you hear the news coming out of europe in the 30’s, and restrictions from colonial powers like the vichy and italian regimes start to make life increasingly more dangerous, you start to get nervous. suddenly, you can’t work or attend school alongside your non jewish neighbors anymore. some of your neighbors are indignant on your behalf. some start to say it’s good. some even start to get violent. suddenly, troops start shipping you and your community off to labor camps. you watch as your friends and family and children starve, suffer, and die of sickness.
when you’re finally release, you return to find your synagogue burned down. soon after, your non jewish neighbors start passing around pamphlets full of antisemitic propaganda. one day, a group of people starts looting jewish businesses. your shop is destroyed, your possessions smashed, and your home is ransacked. you and thousands of others are left homeless and without prospects. there are whispers among the community about escape. you’re devastated at the thought of leaving the land your ancestors have lived for three thousand years. this is your home. you were best friends with the little muslim girl who grew up just down the street. you don’t want to leave. but after a crowd storms the jewish quarter, killing dozens of your community members, it’s clear you have no choice. you have to flee. if you’re still lucky enough to have possessions or money, the government seizes that. and the only place willing to take you that you can afford to get to is the country your non jewish neighbors and government have been accusing you of being more loyal to.
you arrive in The Promised Land, the land that promised to save you, exhausted and traumatized. there are tens of thousands of others like you, arriving in the place named in your prayers, written in millennia old manuscripts and prayer books. and yet the land that was supposed to save you is now under attack by the very people you were supposed to be saved from. you get used to ducking into bomb shelters, hearing about another group of civilians killed in a terror attack, and you wonder when will it end? when will they finally just let us live in peace?
you become bitter and jaded. the memories of the people who had been your neighbors for hundreds of years, who you talked with at the shops and sold rugs to, who brought bread to your home after passover to celebrate with you, fade and are replaced with memories of labor camps, pogroms, expulsions, and bombs.
white people halfway across the world living in countries whose wartime regimes placed you or your parents in labor camps to die of starvation or disease just a few decades ago tell you that you have no right to live in the land in which you are a refugee, they tell you to go back to poland — a country you or anyone in your family or community have ever been to, but the mention of which sends your ashkenazi neighbor into panic attacks as they remember hundreds of their community being beaten or stabbed to death and more hundreds being locked in a barn and burned alive by their polish gentile neighbors — they tell you that the violence you and your community experienced and are experiencing is deserved.
your world is nothing but death and bombs and violence and you cry out to god for salvation, and he sends you benjamin fucking netanyahu, who promised to avenge the pain and suffering and trauma that consumes you. you believe him. you don’t care who gets hurt, because no one ever seemed to give a fuck when it was you and your community who was hurting. people say “never again” and you don’t believe them.
this is the pain and trauma that has radicalized many israeli jews. this is the story you need to understand if you want to have ANY hope of peace, because you cannot approach a traumatized population with “who fucking cares also it was israel’s fault anyway just go back to your own countries and stop being evil genocidal maniacs” and expect to get anything but a massive fuck you. and frankly it’s fucking ridiculous that a lot of you can’t seem to understand that.
