Feel completely disconnected

[u/PattonSmithWood]

How do fellow, non-religious, anti Zionist Jews in this sub reconcile their anti Zionist views with their Jewish identity when 80/90% of contemporary Jews across the world are staunch Zionists.

I feel at a complete loss in terms of my identity. Extended family and relatives are 90% Zionists, they take literal pleasure in any and all harm to Palestinians. They are gleeful and boastful of the current genocide (and they proudly label it as such). They marginalise, shut down, bad mouth any relative who believes in Palestinian dignity, self determination and sovereignty. They call us self hating Jews and turncoats.

My values and some close family are completely, polar, opposite. We are more in harmony with the views of some prominent Jewish scholars and identities such as Norman Finkelstein, Gabor Mate, Miko Peled, Noam Chomsky, Avi Shlaim, Gideon Levy etc

I'm proud to be a Jew with faith in universal values of humanity. Although I am not an observant Jew, and am pretty much secular and atheist, I find myself increasingly aligning with some teachings of Torah Jews, specially their teachings about diaspora being essential to Judaism and spiritual Israel only being reinstated by the mashiach and not a group of atheists.

I know this is a bit of a rant, but I feel so out of place amidst contemporary Jews.

Would love to hear any experiences navigating this identity crisis.

[u/sudo_apt-get_intrnet]

For me I ended up needing to figure out what being Jewish meant to me and only then how that can logically conclude in anti-zionism; if you start trying to retrofit antizionism onto a Judaism based on Zionistic ideals you're going to have a bad time.

Growing up a huge chunk of the narrative around Judaism was about safety; we need to be safe from another Holocaust, another Pogrom, another Antiochus, another Haman. We value education -- not wealth -- because it can't be taken from us when we're expelled/need to flee. We have a complex series of passing down religious traditions so they can survive scattered after another country kicks us out. We don't make waves so as not to be seen and therefore despised.

Zionism was marked as a solution to this problem of safety. "If we have a state, we won't need a go-bag anymore!" "If we have a state, we won't need to worry about massacres anymore!" Etc etc.

The problem is not only did it attempt to achieve its goals through horrifically evil means, and not only did it fail to achieve its goals (considering the number of attacks even random Israeli civilians need to deal with), but it also went completely against most actual tenants/values of being Jewish -- both religious and otherwise.

Being Jewish has been about being in the Diaspora for 2000 years. Our entire culture and identity is based around being a distributed web of constantly shifting groups and practices -- of picking up enough of the local looks, genetics, and customs to survive while still maintaining enough of that separation to help our fellow Jew no matter where they are. Zionism took that from us but we can take it back.