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#seriously though don't ask young Jewish kids about Israel every gd day it's an extremely harmful microaggression
luckypebble42 · 3 years
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Because I've been asked a million times a year since middle school:
I am not a Zionist. I would like to go to the state of Israel in the same way that I would like to go to Paris. I would like to visit the Kotel in the same way that I would like to see the Paris Opera Ballet. It has meaning for me as a place to travel to. I do not remotely consider it my home.
What I do feel DEEPLY is the impulse to build a Jewish home, a place where, finally, being Jewish would not make us other.
We are carrying thousands of years of being other on our backs and it is exhausting. We just want to go home.
I can't say what my position would have been of I were the age I am now in the 1940s, because I wasn't and I don't know. Many of those zionists were young, idealistic college kids who had just felt the full weight of that otherness drop, so they decided to build a Jewish home. I do vibe with that, and with the restless need to do something that drove them to put in the work.
The state of Israel as it is today does not uphold this impulse, or the idealism that tried to make it a reality (y'know, before it gave way to settler colonialism).
Now, we could get into my personal opinions about statehood and countries in general, and in doing so explain my solution to the problem that you've probably noticed with my reasoning above, but this post is getting long so we won't.
If you actually want to hear more, ask me -- I'm more than happy to continue this discussion. If you just want to yell about how wrong I am without listening to what I have to say, though, please go do it in a place where I can't hear you.
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