This on is very good. I'll spare you by just posting a piece of it, but you should read the whole thing.
I grew up being indoctrinated by Zionists throughout my life. As a child, I was told that the state of Israel is somehow “necessary” to prevent another Holocaust. I was also told that Palestine/Israel was empty and uninhabited when Jews began emigrating there in the late 1800s, and was still sparsely populated after World War II. I was taught that the Jews are a chosen people with the right to their own homeland.
Eventually, however, I started to see the contradictions and began questioning this ideology.
Every time I make my views on Zionism heard, there is a backlash from Zionist Jews who know me and who take it as their responsibility to educate me – as though I am somehow naive about the history of the colonisation of Palestine.
I often hear arguments such as, “… but Hamas uses children as human shields” or “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East”. Eventually, when these arguments are addressed, I’m inevitably dismissed or declared a “self-hating Jew”. But as someone born into a Jewish background, with the knowledge of thousands of years of persecution that this entails, it is also my obligation to identify with the persecution of others – especially if it is being done in the name of my ethnic identity.
When on the receiving end of Zionist-based arguments, I believe it is important to respond fully by putting the violence in the necessary historical context of a long history of Western colonialism and imperialism, rather than an exception to this story.
This is the only way to really understand why there are no two equal sides to the conflict, which is an issue of oppression and resistance to that oppression.
http://mg.co.za/article/2014-07-30-a-se ... ng-points/