I like what you’ve said, I’ve come “undone.” That’s how I feel about this situation, like it reversed all my previously knowledge on the subject. I read about the Balfour agreement, and like the British did everywhere, they cut up countries and left them all divided with artificially imposed borders. But the Israelis kept pushing and pushing, and in the 1967 war they invaded the lands controlled by Syrians in the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip control by Egypt, and the West Bank controlled (or administered) by Jordan. I had realized they took and claimed that land in a war, much like Putin is trying to do in the Ukraine now, having stolen Crimea then coming back for more. The Isreali government is now trying to literally wipe them off that land by bulldozing Gaza and putting up settlements on a “block by block” basis in the West Bank, having already taken the Golan Heights. I does seem like slow eradication for the Palestinians, having violated international treaties in the UN in 1967. The UN made a video I watched, and it told that story and supported the Palestinians. The UN, I was like what?
There are great, peace-loving Jews, to be clear it might even be a majority. I travelled with a pair of Israeli born Jews back in my college days down the Gold Coast of Australia as I hitched a ride from a bulletin board with them. They were the nicest, easy going people. A few years later in Grad school, when I told my Jewish professor about this encounter, from New York, was chatting about the Israeli situation and told me, “You don’t get it, it’s the fanatical American Jews who are resettling Israel that are the problem, not the native population. Of course, he wasn’t a fanatical Jew and didn’t pick up and move to Israel to make a “real” state for Jews. It’s kind of like I had the impression like there was smaller group, like the MAGA twenty percent of the country, who recently dominate and bully. That’s the problem in America, Israel and the Middle East—fanatics dominate the majority.