So you're basically saying it made sense at the time (and perhaps it still does) but it also created a mess with the Palestinians? I can agree with that.
Yet here we are, what are we going to do now? Going back in history to prevent the holocaust and many other atrocities towards Jews before (and even after) is not possible. Preventing Zionism is not possible. For some reason the intellectual elite seems to be convinced the only possible way out of this is the elimination of Israel - how come? I can understand why Palestinians or the Iranians would want that, I don't understand the huge support in the West for this type of thinking though.
Even among those who see its behavior as a driver of the conflicts it is embroiled in -- even among those who may see Israel as an oppressor -- there doesn't seem to be anything like a coalition around any specific plan for its outright elimination, let alone one that could get traction.
There are some substantial academic criticisms of Israel's behavior or even status as a colonizing oppressor and I think what happens is that when those enter the popular discourse, they get conscripted into simple sympathies and boiled down side-taking (which mostly feeds the conflict dynamic).
One thing I think systems thinkers (hackers, academics, intellectual elites, whatever) do tend to understand is this:
As long as Israel exists in a form where outgroup rights & dignity & lives are disposable, it will be contributing to the conflict.
That's a dynamic-descriptive statement, not a singular prescription. It implies several possible paths: Israel could be dissolved/replaced, Israel could grow into accepting the responsibility of materially valuing outgroup rights & dignity & lives itself even when it's inconveniently in tension with other immediate pressures, Israel could cede some control (and territory) to a larger system that will take on that responsibility for it, or we could accept the status quo.
It's a bit less common to hold that understanding at the same time as another systems reality:
As long as Israel and its ingroup are under existential threat, judging outgroup rights & dignity to be disposable will have broader internal appeal, consolidating the power of those who choose that as their pitch or hold it as part of a fundamental worldview.
This probably is the location of the mistake you have a feeling some in the West are making. When we use rhetoric or steer towards policy whose end seems like Israel's dissolution, we're not just dealing with a question about whether our sympathies are most appropriately placed with Israeli/Jewish people or dispossessed Palestinians, we are exerting force on a lever of the conflict system and the likely outcome is an equal and opposite reaction or a transfer of angular momentum into the circular conflict rotation. It encourages Israeli perspectives like "we're right to aggressively do whatever it takes to fend for ourselves because nobody else is really on our side." It might even tells actor like Hamas that their plan works, that they really can drive a wedge between Israel and the rest of the world by merely provoking Israel into treating tens of thousands Palestinian civilians as collateral damage (basically turning people Hamas hadn't converted into actual soldiers yet into a kind of conscript after the fact, to say nothing of the survivors that might be radicalized).
Why do we do it? I don't know. Maybe thinking in terms of sympathies instead of systems does require more effort. Maybe human nature to simplify. Maybe many of us have the luxury of little actual skin in the game, so we can choose sympathies and symbolic values over the substance and mechanics of the system (though on the other hand, skin in the game also often makes sympathy more immediate).
I kinda hope that in the software era / information age that modestly trains more people to think about some specific systems at least, maybe we can figure out how to do better, but OTOH all the decreased friction of discourse has had mixed results.
Not everyone agrees on how to do it - the Iranians and their axis are trying to do it by violence. Western sympathizers don't outright support violence but don't outright condemn it either (oppressed people can't commit terror etc, minimizing what happened on October 7th etc) and at the same time they are trying to create the conditions for Israel to not be able to defend itself: attempts for arms embargo, economic and diplomatic isolation and as mentioned above creating an atmosphere that tolerates the violent destruction of Israel. All this is meant to allow the 'Right of Return', where descendants of Palestinians refugees from 76 years ago (!) are still refugees in places like Lebanon, Syria and even Jordan, and to the best of my knowledge are the only people who are kept in an eternal status of refugees so they can return a century later to their 'original' homes.
And using the term intellectual elite is inaccurate but its not wrong - a Harvard professor for gender studies or oriental studies is much more likely to support the plan I outlined above than any other type of solution. So not all intellectuals, but way more than you'd expect.
