If you keep replying I won’t shut up.

Perhaps a better way to articulate my issue is to refer to the book, “Jews Don’t Count” by David Baddiel. You may be familiar with him, if not the book. It addresses the double-standards and omission of Jewish identity within historically oppressed groups—conflating Jewish identity with white supremacy/white supremacists (based on a singular Jewish ethnicity)—and how it’s fomented a lot of the Jew-hatred we are seeing today under the guise of social justice. So it’s not about being anti __________. It’s about being white-washed, alienated, and vilified. This is the justification for blaming all Jews for whatever Israel does.

I don’t believe I denied Israel was doing something wrong. My defense is of its existence. While the Arab league nations have largely given up on their attempts to remove Israel from the world map (genocide), groups like Hamas—and the Iranian government—maintain that goal. So I see what’s happening as an extension of the original Arab/Israeli conflict, using proxies and PR tactics.

The partition plan that created Israel, and what would have been a Palestinian Arab homeland was not unique to the Jews. A year prior, the model was very notably used to create India (Bharat) and West and East Pakistan (Bangladesh as 1971) to help quell violence between Hindus and Muslims. I believe more recently, there was the creation of North and South Sudan to stop the genocide. And then there are the vast majority of Muslim nations that have Islam as their official state religion. Couldn’t those be considered Muslim homelands?

So as much as the idea of a Jewish homeland seems shaky to you, there’s precedent and on-going practice for other oppressed groups. I don’t believe it’s a big ask for you or anyone else to apply equal application of this practice to Jews.

Maybe another way of relating the meaning of Israel to Jews is something like this: even though you are English, it’s safe to assume your ancestry traces back to Africa. What does Africa mean to you? Is there a spiritual, emotional, or other underlying connection to those roots? Does it give you any comfort knowing that having Black skin in Africa is just normal—even if you never planned on living there? For many Jews, the idea of Israel brings some sense of psychological safety that there is a homeland—that we are not at the mercy of the whims of any other religious, racial, or other persecution for being a Jew—even if we never plan to move there. Jews have been run out of every place they dwelt in the Christian and Muslim world at some point in history. This is including the Spanish, English, and Dutch colonies of the "New World." Your home country of England has even apologized for ethnically cleansing its Jews 800+ years ago. Memories are long.

Or how about this…humans don’t learn from history and keep replaying the same tape on a loop. The Levant has been conquered and colonized repeatedly for millennia. To some it’s a holy place, to others, a strategic military and economic cross-roads. And probably something else to someone else. But everyone wants it.

Anyway, I am planning to pull down my posts and move on with my actual real life. These are conversations I prefer to have in person and removing the posts is the best way I can think to cut through this Gordian knot of a topic.