Why Are Jews So Sensitive About Israel?

So why are we so hypersensitive about all things Israel? Is it birth-to-death conditioning as so many progressives would have it? Is it as so many antizionists have it, a fascist connection to the Mogen David that represses any thought that contravenes our tribal mentality? Is it, as so many Jews would have it, the extreme frustration at gentile hypocrisy? Or is it as so many Jewish fundamentalists have it, that the world is crawling with antisemites?

It's none of the above.

It's far more basic than any of those, simultaneously more primal and more real.

There is a baseline fear, often an unconscious one, but I maintain it exists in every Jew you've ever met, even somewhere in Jewish antizionists. The fear is this:

If you get rid of our state, you get rid of us.

There is that nameless dread in every Jewish soul, repressed until we hear you talk about Israel, that all this security and prosperity is as paper thin as the citizenship documents which were always taken away from us. Other groups worry about prosperity and denied opportunities, Jews worry that it all will be taken away. 

Here's something I wrote a while back: 

"So many gentile lives are constrained from too few choices, most Jews are stuck by too many. So many gentiles worry that they'll never get what they need, Jews worry that everything they need will disappear tomorrow. So many gentiles feel the chip of humiliation, and dream that with more things: titles, privileges, pride, their humiliations will cease. Jews are history's ultimate proof that everything you think is helpful is worthless: from materials to titles to privileges to pride to ESPECIALLY MONEY. There is no such thing as a life protected from humiliation - the whole point of how to live a good life is that we endured our humiliations with faith, honor, responsibility, righteousness, kindness and community; that we show seven good faces to a world that's wanted Jews dead for 2000 years, will want us dead many times yet again; and many people who seem friendly to us now may stand by as we get annihilated.

No Jew seems oppressed until every Jew you know disappears overnight. No amount of money protects us, no amount of prestige stops us from being blamed, no amount of power cannot be stripped at a moment's notice. It is the eternal Jewish lot to rise as high as any outsider can possibly rise in a foreign society, only to fall the very moment when things go wrong and the true insiders need meat to throw to the populace."  

Look at every immigrant in the world whose state threw them out, then look at us. Other modern peoples get displaced for generations, or a hundred years, but our whole lifespan as a people is one long displacement and this is the one period since Christ himself that has been the exception. If we don't have Israel, we have no country at all, just memories of countries that threw us out whenever we became marginally inconvenient. We exist lifelong with stories of ancestors exiled from every corner of the world. That fate was what 2000 years of Jews worked so hard to avoid with no avail. It's the fate in which our guts tell us we will partake again. Even if the Palestinian refugee status lasts for the rest of my lifetime, it's still temporary compared to the Jewish stories I and fifteen million other Jews have heard our whole lives. If we get displaced again, it's not just us or even our grandchildren who might be refugees, it might be all our descendants for all coming time until we get another brief blip of security 2000 years from now.

And that's only if we live. When we didn't have a state of our own, we were subject to all the same persecution as any other minority, only to then encounter complete, systemic, total extermination. Not the extermination of a substantial portion of us, not our extermination over the course of 400 years, but near complete extermination over two or three years, spanning our population over an entire continent. And not once, but repeatedly. In the Crusades and the mass expulsions of the Middle Ages, in the conquest of Judea by Rome, in the aftermath of the Black Plague, in the Chmielnicki massacre in Ukraine - that state which now means so much to liberal Jews, in exterminations thousands of years ago that seem ever so distant until the moment their stories reappear in our consciousness as horrifyingly present, and of course... that thing that happened to my grandparents.

So many leftists and intersectionalists and anticolonialists find all things Israel distasteful, but they would read the above and see a complete affirmation of their worldview. "That's exactly why we fight for the dispossessed!", they would answer. "That's why we fight against nationalism! That's why we fight against genocide! That's why we fight for the rights of victims!"

Why should we believe you? What makes your movement so special when every other revolution to save the world has backfired?

No one reaps the whirlwind ideological movements create the way Jews do. 

Let me repeat that. 

No one reaps the whirlwind ideological movements create the way Jews do. 

The proof will be for another day.