like, i think that some people think that we were doing our own thing in europe and studying the torah, and noticed how central the “holy land” is and decided to go conquer it out of religious fervor
and why for a lot of them it doesn’t click that we are descendants of the israelites. because they’re seeing things through a lens of non-levantine christianity: to them, christianity is a religion that reads the bible, so is judaism, and the ancient israelites are characters in that book. basically fictional. who knows what happened to them?
relating that to a real place, then, seems as insane as a bunch of twilight fans going to conquer forks. sure, forks is real, but it’s not that forks. the spiritual jerusalem is not the real jerusalem.
the non-levantine christian relationship to the bible is fundamentally different from ours. for them it is a religious book, that forms the basis of religious belief and practice. for us, it’s that… and it’s also a record of our cultural myths and legends, our understanding of our ancestors’ stories, and our guidebook of who we are as a people. we believe that in order to know who we are we have to know where we came from, and the torah can tell us that.
and perhaps more to the point, the jewish story entwines with the land of israel even after the events of the torah: through mishna and talmud and the kabbalists and the communities that stayed there and the communities that moved there, even before zionism.
and this is why the mass migration of the jewish world to israel/palestine in the 20th century was not just push factors (pogroms, antisemitism, violence, government mandates, no home to go back to) and the pull factors were not just the idea of protection through statehood; it was also that culture and ancestral connection. which the torah anchors, yes, but it wasn’t created out of thin air just by people reading the torah.
and of course, none of this justifies the nakba or the occupation. ancestral connection to a land doesn’t give you the right to displace families from individual parcels of land they own or have been living on for generations.
to come back to those push factors: the reason some people can’t conceptualize the idea that antisemitism was the main driver of the establishment of israel is because, since they’re looking at the whole thing as if it’s christianity, they hear discussion of antisemitism as if it’s evangelical christians talking about how “christians are persecuted” in the US — impossible to take seriously, and not a real problem
if someone said that european or american christians should do a modern crusade because christians are persecuted… well. that’s how zionism looks to a lot of people i think
this is also why people think the “promised to them 3000 years ago” joke is funny. to them they’re dunking on our weird bible cosplay
and for us, while we do have a concept of the spiritual jerusalem, when we talk about jerusalem in liturgy we are still talking about the literal jerusalem. the literal jerusalem hasn’t been replaced by the spiritual one. the law hasn’t been replaced by jesus. jew hasn’t been replaced by “jew and gentile.” the old testament hasn’t been replaced by the new one.
jerusalem in liturgy may sometimes be synechdoche that refers to the messianic age; but that messianic age is still understood to involve temple sacrifices in a literal future jerusalem, traditionally. i can’t tell you how many jews throughout history thought any of these messianic prophecies would come to pass (i can tell you that the majority don’t, nowadays), and i think realistically our ancestors were thinking about the imagined jerusalem of the past and future and not the nitty gritty real one when they prayed these prayers… but it still did mean the real one.
and meanwhile there were jews in the real one. living there, getting kicked out, moving back in, getting kicked out again, and on and on. building a synagogue there. praying at the western wall there.
the crusades, then, were fundamentally a category error. european christians did not have the relationship with the real land of israel that reading the bible made them think they did. thus: a lot of people now believe that jews (in particular, ashkenazi jews) do not have the relationship with the real land of israel that we think we do. and this is why so many of them struggle to understand zionism. to the extent they do understand that there’s more to it than religious fundamentalism, that there are material factors at play too, they tend to see it through the lens of european colonization of the americas and manifest destiny, which fits even less well. but that’s a post for another day.
interestingly, some of the earliest forms of proto-zionism predate jewish proto-zionism by around 300 years. given that, i can understand the way people view all of this in a christian light. but: i don’t think zionism would have formed as a jewish politial ideology nor caught on in the jewish world, and certainly not moved hundreds of thousands of people from their countries of residence, if not for all of these things i discussed in this post: ancestry, self-understanding, founding myths of peoplehood, relationships with the jews already in palestine, and most of all the material conditions of the pogroms, the holocaust, and the expulsion from swana.
basically: the relationship jews have with torah and the land of israel and jerusalem is not the same as what the majority of christians have with the bible, the holy land, and the spiritual jerusalem. if you try to understand zionism through a christian framework, you’ll miss a lot of things, and you’ll make some category errors. you may also end up telling very stupid jokes
