(I tried to screencap all of this thread from the source, but Threads mysteriously removed the 13th and 14th posts, so I had to rely on Danaâs stories).
You all already know my stance:
Both Jews and Palestinians are not going anywhere and that any solution requires actually building bridges between these two groups not advocating for totalitarian eliminationist ideologies that seek the destruction of one of these two populations.
And that most of what I see these days passing for "peace activism" is the latter... calls for more war, more death, for cycles of violence to continue, only advocacy for a different side to be "winning".
Anyway, if you want to understand the realpolitik that's going on in the Jewish community both in diaspora and in Israel...
This thread is a good place to start...
There is something deeply dishonest about the way the world discusses Jews, Israel, and this conflict. The conversation begins from premises that already assume Jewish power is uniquely suspect, Jewish fear is exaggerated, and Jewish self-defense must constantly justify itself in ways no other people on earth are expected to.
There are roughly 15 million Jews in the world. That is it. Fewer Jews exist today than existed before the Holocaust.
Meanwhile there are nearly 2 billion Muslims globally and dozens of Muslim-majority states. Jews are told endlessly that they are paranoid, tribal, dramatic, or "weaponizing antisemitism," while simultaneously watching mobs chant for intifada, celebrate October 7th, vandalize synagogues, attack visibly Jewish people in the street, and excuse it all as anti-colonial resistance. At a certain point, Jews are no longer obligated to pretend they are imagining what is directly in front of them.
People love speaking about this issue as though it began in 1948, as though Jews simply arrived one day from Europe and invented a state at the expense of peaceful natives. That framing erases almost the entire Jewish historical experience. Jews were expelled, massacred, subordinated, forcibly converted, ghettoized, humiliated, or exterminated across Europe, North Africa, the Levant, and the broader Middle East for centuries. Entire Jewish civilizations vanished. Salonica. Baghdad. Aleppo.
Communities that existed for hundreds or thousands of years either fled or were destroyed. Then Europeans annihilated six million Jews while much of the world either participated, looked away, or shut its doors.
And after all of that, Jews are lectured about the dangers of sovereignty.
The reality is that Israel did not emerge in a vacuum. Israel emerged because Jewish minority existence failed repeatedly across civilizations.
That does not mean every host nation was equally evil or every period equally violent. It means Jews learned through accumulated historical experience that dependence on the tolerance of others is not a survivable long- term strategy.
And this is where the conversation becomes especially dishonest: people constantly reduce the conflict to territory and economics while refusing to grapple with ideology, theology, and civilizational attitudes toward Jews.
Yes, not every Muslim is an extremist.
Not every Palestinian wants violence. That is obvious and does not need to be repeated every thirty seconds like a nervous ritual disclaimer. The point is not that every Muslim secretly wants to murder Jews. The point is that enough people do, enough institutions tolerate it, enough clerics preach it, enough states fund it, and enough crowds celebrate it that Jews are entirely rational to take it seriously.
People act as though Jews are irrational for noticing patterns that are stated openly.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem met with Hitler in 1941. Nazi propaganda was translated into Arabic and broadcast throughout the region. Islamist and Arab nationalist movements absorbed aspects of European antisemitic thought and fused them with older religious hostilities and modern revolutionary ideology. That does not mean Islam "is Nazism." It means there are ideological continuities that people are terrified to discuss honestly because they fear sounding prejudiced.
But reality does not disappear because people become uncomfortable naming it.
When organizations like Hamas explicitly invoke hadith about killing Jews behind rocks and trees, Jews are expected to sit there and be told it is merely âcontextual,â âsymbolic,â or âmisunderstood.â Yet these same groups operationalize those texts politically and militarily. They are not obscure medieval manuscripts buried in a library somewhere.
They are quoted in charters, sermons, television broadcasts, classrooms, and militant rhetoric.
And then Western observers say: "Well, most Muslims don't interpret it that way."
But from a Jewish survival perspective, that is not the relevant question.
The relevant question is whether enough people interpret it that way to create an existential danger.
Jews are a tiny minority population.
Even a tiny fraction of 2 billion people radicalized around eliminationist ideology creates numbers that are difficult for any minority population to safely ignore. This is part of why Israelis think the way they do. They do not have the luxury of assuming every threat is rhetorical until proven otherwise. Jewish history is filled with examples where people said "they don't really mean it," right up until they did.
And there is another uncomfortable truth people refuse to acknowledge: many revolutionary Islamist movements are not merely fighting over borders or checkpoints. They are driven by theological and eschatological worldviews. Some of these leaders genuinely believe they are participating in sacred history. Martyrdom is not metaphorical to them. Jihad is not always metaphorical to them. The destruction or humiliation of Israel is not simply a policy preference. It is woven into a cosmic narrative.
Western secular people constantly underestimate this because they assume everyone is fundamentally motivated by material conditions. They think if living standards improve, the hatred disappears. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes ideology itself is the engine.
This does not mean Palestinians are uniquely evil or incapable of peace. It means the conflict cannot be honestly understood if every religious or ideological dimension is dismissed as mere reaction to occupation.
And still, despite all this, Jews are expected to maintain perfect moral composure at all times while people who openly celebrate violence against them are framed as misunderstood revolutionaries.
A man throws a Molotov cocktail at an elderly Jewish woman while shouting "Free Palestine," and somehow Jews are still expected to wonder whether antisemitism is "really" involved. Synagogues are surrounded by mobs. Jewish students are harassed. Hostages are mocked online.
October 7th footage circulates with celebration. And the burden somehow remains on Jews to prove they are not overreacting.
No other tiny minority on earth is expected to normalize this level of hostility indefinitely while being told that serious self-defense measures are morally suspicious.
That does not mean every Israeli policy is correct. It does not mean Palestinian civilians deserve suffering. It does not mean Muslims as a whole are reducible to extremists.
But Jews are under no obligation to gaslight themselves about the existence of ideologies and movements that openly articulate anti-Jewish hatred and repeatedly act upon it.
The irony is that Jews are often accused of tribalism precisely when they refuse to return to the powerless condition history repeatedly punished them for inhabiting.
Israel exists because Jews decided they would no longer entrust their survival entirely to the conscience of others.
And after everything that happened to the Jewish people across centuries, it is very difficult to argue that this instinct emerged from nowhere.
Once again, I know I'm a broken record but actually resolving this conflict means building bridges and understanding between all the inhabitants of the land, including Jews and Israelis.
The minimization of Jewish history, and concerns, which are informed by very material and real threats both past and present, sends a message that one is not seriously or thoughtfully engaging in efforts at conflict resolution.
No Jewish person with any kind of real institutional power who could work meaningfully to resolve the conflict (from all over the political spectrum) is going to buy "trust me bro, you'll be fine as a minority again without political sovereignty and your rights and safety will be secure in an Arab majority state." Too much actual history says otherwise. And refusing to engage with that lived reality and this dimension of realpolitik inherently means that one is not driving at real solutions.
And obviously there is realpolitik in the reverse and issues with Israeli policy and violence exacerbating conditions that perpetuate cycles of violence as well. But as I'm not Palestinian and immersed in Palestinian community, I'm not going to speak with authority on it.
Honestly I've found it so depressing how much energy has been poured into "activism" that is absolutely going to perpetuate the conflict for decades to come. And anyone I know who has spent even an iota of time doing actual coalition building work in this space since Oslo, both Jews and Palestinians, knows it and is feeling the same.
