This is the reason why wars become self perpetuating; once war begins, noone really cares how it started, only that your friends and family and comrades are dying and you want revenge, it really becomes that simple of an equation. I dare say a lot of the jewish people who side with Israel do so out of a gut reaction of a sensation of being attacked rather than pondering the nuances of settler colonialism. In that sense, the war hawks in America are so eager to drag the US and NATO into a war with China because they know that once started, the war becomes self sustaining and difficult to extinguish.The most compelling criticisms of both specific policies and actions of the Israeli government, and the Zionist project of which they are an expression, come from Jewish persons themselves. We are fortunate that there are many Jewish persons who combine a high level of historical knowledge, personal experience, and a strong sense of empathy and morality, often informed by their faith, such that they are effective critics of Israeli policy and advocates for the rights and welfare of Palestinian peoples. I am thinking of persons such as Noam Chomsky, Illan Pappe, Naomi Klein.
We are taught that it is the strength of the argument that matters, not whom the argument is coming from. I've been listening to the War Nerd podcast for many years now, and only recently learned that one of the co-hosts, Mark Ames, is Jewish, which casts his criticism of Israeli actions over the years in a different light. Perhaps it shouldn't make a difference, but it does. In the western cultural-historical environment where legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy are typically buried beneath allegations of anti-Semitism (and where such anti-Semitism does assuredly still exist), such persons as I described above, who can mostly shrug off allegations of anti-Semitism, are treasures beyond value.
One can look at polling numbers and other measures of aggregate Israeli and Jewish sentiments, the drift in the politics of Israeli society, and talk meaningfully about where those trends come from, how they have evolved over time, what the implications are, etc. But we should never fall prey to the temptation of easy, simple collective judgements and an inability to distinguish between persons, for that is a path that leads to the atrocities that we have witnessed and continue to witness throughout the world today.
Compare the reactions between the CPC and the Israeli government at accusations of genocide: the CPC invited islamic governments and foreign observed to Xinjiang to see for themselves the results of deradicalisation and offered transparency and cooperation in joint terrorism. The response of the spokepeople of the Chinese foreign ministry has been calm, reasoned, and factual because being a 5,000 year old civilisation, their responses tend to be for the historical record as opposed to the Sisyphean task of convincing a western audience already anxious over the rise of China. The behaviour and reaction of the Israeli government has been to mobilise their non state actors to silence opposition eg the Sanhedrin humiliation ritual against Musk.