It seems the majority of the world's Jews still remain either silent on Israel's extermination of the Palestinian people, or support it. The reason for that isn't because Jews are intrinsically evil, but rather because of the Zionist conditioning many of us have experienced.

In this conditioning, we received a traumatic, unfiltered education about the Holocaust from an early age. We were also commonly taught that another Holocaust could happen to us again if we weren't eternally on the defensive. This warped our minds to be paranoid and suspicious of the world around us and to have an "us vs. them" mentality.

We were also taught

-that our survival as a people depends on Israel's existence and well-being,

-that Israel is a sacred land, chosen for us by God(!!) that we must fiercely defend no matter what the circumstances (and of course avoid criticizing it),

-that Israel is the same as Judaism, and -more than any belief in God, moral code, knowledge of Jewish scriptures or adherence to Jewish laws or customs, that unconditionally loving and defending Israel is our core duty as Jews.

In short: the basis of our "religious" education was less spirituality than Holocaust trauma and Israeli nationalism.

Over my lifetime, Israel has clearly become more and more of a brazenly aggressive and immoral country, though it has provoked wars and regularly committed human rights abuses against the Palestinians since its inception. Growing up in Israel's patron state, the U.S.A., I and my young Jewish peers were mostly unaware of these facts growing up, as they were commonly suppressed in U.S. media and certainly not discussed in our community. Not only that, we were also taught many lies about Israel. Just some of these lies were that Israel was established in uninhabited desert, that our biological roots are in “the Holy Land”, that Israel is a country of peace and justice, that it is "the only democracy in the Middle East", that its enemies are simply evil and anti-semitic with no justification for their actions, and that, as mentioned above, Israel's existence is crucial for the survival of our people. We were also continually told that Israel's existence makes the world a safer place for Jews.

These falsehoods are deeply embedded in the psyche of Zionist Jews. To a varying degree among different Jews, they form the foundation of our identity. To find out that so much of what we thought we were are actually lies is not just painful, but destabilizing. And now that Israel's clear genocide (or, if you incorrectly believe that the word "genocide" is only appropriate in describing the Holocaust, then kindly pick your favorite term: "mass murder", "extermination", "slaughter", etc), is clear for the entire world to see, we Jews raised in Zionism find ourselves in an increasingly uncomfortable position when dealing with the rest of the world, who condemn Israel’s horrendous actions for what they are. Suddenly, what we were taught about Israel is not just fiction, but the foundation of an insane, cruel, murderous state. And it's not just about Israel; it's about ourselves too. If Israel is actually this, then who and what are WE? It only makes sense that many Jews are experiencing cognitive dissonance over these two conflicting versions of reality. They may feel disoriented, vulnerable, lost, or empty. None of these are good feelings.

But that is no excuse to hold onto lies and justification of 8 months(!) of cruel, barbaric murder. It is not valid to continue looking away, or denying reality and insisting that the death count is not real, that the dead or soon-to-be-dead Palestinians “voted for Hamas” and thus deserve to be wiped out, that the dead Palestinian kids in the photos and videos are just dolls, etc. just because you are experiencing psychological pain and discomfort right now.

Please, Jewish people, WAKE UP. Even if you are so craven and unattached to humanity that you only care about yourselves, you are not helping yourselves with your silence and support of this genocide. You are not helping the Jewish people. For your own self-interest in the long term — and I hate to even speak this way when there are currently an estimated 200,000 dead Palestinians who we should be thinking about and atoning for, instead of ourselves — you need to speak out against this genocide. You need to speak out against Israel bombing another Unrwa school housing over 6,000 immiserated, displaced Palestinians. You need to speak out against Israel burning alive refugee families sleeping in tents and beheading their children. You need to speak out against Israel purposely starving an entire generation of innocent children to death. You need to speak out against Israel destroying every single university in Palestine, and nearly every hospital, thus destroying the entire educational and health care infrastructures of that society. You need to speak out against Israel whoring out the Holocaust victims, defiling their blessed memory, to justify its current genocide of Palestinians. You need to break free of your Zionist brainwashing and take responsibility as citizens of this troubled, interconnected, fragile world. You need to be investigating anti-genocide, pro-peace, pro-justice communities such as Jewish Voice for Peace or The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. You need to be screaming “NOT IN OUR NAME!” Because the Israel that you knew growing up never existed.

But there are other things that really, truly exist: decency, morality, truth. That is the side you should be on.