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?
Why not both? And why does your conjecture give you the ability to speak for the oppressed? In the matters that directly affect me and my family, I want liberation, yes, but I also want revenge. Many harms can never be fixed, so the next best thing is to inflict harm back on the perpetrators so that they suffer too. If we achieve utopia it would be absolutely fucked up to let the monsters who made so many people's lives hell just walk free and enjoy that utopia too. It would be unjust.
Your moral compass is fucked if you think war criminals shouldn't be punished for all the harm they did. Prioritizing the lives of war criminals over their victims' is some white christian-socialized lib shit. The oppressed don't owe liberals like you a performance of saintly turn-the-other-cheek bullshit. There is nothing wrong with the oppressed wanting revenge on their oppressors. Revenge is frowned upon in mainstream christian theology because the dominant strands of christianity encourage meekness and submission in the face of oppression but, at least in the strand of Islam my family comes from, it is actually a moral virtue to strike back against oppressors.
And you know what, here's some cross-religious solidarity between Muslims and Jews: I cannot fault Nakam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTOhItq5Xow. It's a damn shame that their efforts to seek revenge (because justice, the undoing of genocide, was impossible) were stymied and diverted and that they ended up going to Occupied Palestine to become the oppressors. Yet another atrocity to lay at the feet of the Brits, the Brits shouldn't have interfered. And there we have it: anyone who interferes with the oppressed's righteous revenge against the oppressors is inherently siding with the oppressors, protecting them, making it so the oppressors get away with committing atrocities against someone but then are protected from all consequences. A thirst for revenge is simply the natural result of oppression.