General Discussion

And I don't think I'm in the minority amongst American Democrats, and definitely not amongst the Australian Left. Here's why:

* There's no such thing as an 'excellent' country. Putting Israel up on a pedestal to worship it from afar does the country no favours.
* When I think about about liberal and progressive oasis's, Israel doesn't come to mind. Nordic countries do, and there's a reason for that apart from the blatantly obvious fact that the Israeli govt has had an extreme RW government for many years, and has been carrying out an illegal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza for many decades.
* Opinion polls of Israelis have consistently shown majority support for Trump, and opposition to Netanyahu isn't opposition to the human rights abuses and indiscriminate attacks on Palestinians and Lebanese, but due to domestic issues. Israelis tend to support military aggression by Israel. Not particularly liberal or progressive.
* An 'excellent' country wouldn't allow settlers from the 'excellent' country to attack and murder Palestinians in the West Bank with impunity. It wouldn't allow them to steal land from Palestinians. Religious nationalism is the exact opposite of progressive or liberal thought.
* Arab Israelis are discriminated against. Do you need some examples? I'm happy to supply them.
* Human rights organisations are targeted by the current 'progressive' Israeli government for criticising Israels treatment of Palestinians.
* Progressive countries don't execute people based on their ethnicity or lack of being an Israeli citizen. Refer to laws being implemented that any Palestinian that kills an Israeli will be hung. It's been written in such a way that it doesn't apply to Israels killing Palestinians.

There's a lot more, but I'm running down my dot point quota. In a minute I'm going to answer yr questions, but first I'm going to point out something and I'm going to draw a broad brush after seeing Americans post on Bluesky and Threads. Americans (not all) tend to have a different idea of what terms like progressive, socialist, liberal, cultural actually mean. I suspect after reading yr post that yr idea of what's progressive and mine are vastly different. You act as though women's rights, religious tolerance, and LGBT rights are all there is to it. And compare it to other countries in the ME. Isn't that a low bar to compare it against? What about equality for all? What about freedom of the media? Universal healthcare? (Israel has that, but most countries do). I don't see any real progressive policies from Netanyahu's govt. He's too busy trying to take away power from the judiciary.

Now for yr questions:

Who is telling you Israel is so bad (if someone is)? Clearly TikTok filled me in. It's not like I did ME studies when I was at uni, and widely read a lot of books. I've still got Alan Dershowitz's 'The Case for Israel' sitting in my bookcase amongst stuff from Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky and Tom Segev.

Are they racist against any race? Can't say I am, but when I was in Japan last year I started to get frustrated with rude Americans and Russians and unfortunately started to judge all of them based on the horrid tourists. That's a nationality thing though, and not a racism thing. (I've bolded the word nationality because Israel is a nation, not a race.)

Are they intolerant of other religions? I'm an atheist. I despise all religions equally.

Are they ridiculously patriarchal and dismissive of the rights of women? If someone is ridiculously patriarchal and dismissive of the rights of women and tells you they're liberal or progressive, they're taking the piss out of you.

Are they violently anti-gay? Uh, no. See above.


Finally, your idea of what's cultural is also a bit off. The US is not culturally close to Israel. It's culturally close to other countries that were ruled by the British and English speaking, like the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc. Then there's the countries that at some point were run by the US like the Phillipines, and have picked up cultural things. Israel is culturally closer to Meditteranean countries and parts of Italy than it is to the US.