"And so it begins"
It began over 80 years ago, just in case you missed it.
Good Americans and westerners don't start off hating Israel. When our hearts are in the right place we start off giving Israel the benefit of the doubt and assuming the situation must be more complicated than it appears, because we're trying our best to be GOOD and not just going to reflexively assume the Jewish state is evil like some kind of neo-Nazi fascist construct. We all grew up learning about the persecution of the Jewish people, watching movies and reading books about it and vowing "never again" like everyone else with conscience.
So for entirely sensible and good-natured reasons we tend to start off viewing anything to do with Israel and, more generally, Jews and Judaism in a sympathetic light.
It's not until we start learning about and paying attention to the history and Israel's recent actions that this view begins to change. We come to understand that Israel is in fact profoundly evil, not because it is full of Jews but because it's a western settler-colonialist project that's inflicting the same kinds of genocide, ethnic cleansing, theft and abuse on the indigenous population of the land that other western settler-colonialist projects like Australia, the US and Canada inflicted in earlier centuries.
And we learn that this evil doesn't just pervade the Israeli government but virtually all of Israeli society: not because of Judaism or Jewishness, but for the same reason hatred and supremacism and racism pervaded the societies of the Jim Crow south and apartheid South Africa.
We suddenly realize that Israelis have been indoctrinated from birth to view the non-Jewish indigenous populations of the region as less than human, because otherwise it would make no moral sense for there to be a state where one ethnic group receives preferential treatment over the others, or for that state to have been dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of the people who live there. This indoctrination is the glue that holds the whole settler-colonialist project together.
We learn that this is what we are seeing when we translate comments Israelis make in Hebrew on social media which look like a page out of Hitler's Mein Kampf, or when we see photos of Israeli soldiers mockingly dressing in the clothing of dead or displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead or displaced Palestinian children, or when we read polls of Jewish Israelis supporting Israel's daily massacres in Gaza and Lebanon. This is just what it looks like when an entire society is indoctrinated from birth into viewing their neighbors as soulless savages.
And we gradually come to understand that just as Jewish Israelis are indoctrinated in a way that warps their perception and their conscience, we ourselves were indoctrinated to see Israel in a sympathetic light. The vast majority of our news media constantly frame Israel as the victim in whatever violence it is involved in, and the vast majority of our politicians constantly frame Israel as a friend and anyone who opposes it as an enemy. This happens for the same reason the American/western political-media class lies to us about EVERY SINGLE western war: because Israel is a crucial component in the western war machine.
And THAT is the premiere reason its 80+ year settler-colonialist project is supported by the western empire.
