> Would you be comfortable leaving all your family to go to another country?

I already did that (several times, in fact, Poland, Canada, Romania). I eventually returned to the country where I was born but it was for very practical reasons family hardly figured in to it. I have a lot of family but we're not all that close.

> It's not like I can necessarily leave, other countries usually don't just allow anyone to move there and become a citizen. I'm lucky in that I work in high tech and can probably get a job working in most countries, but many people aren't so lucky.

True, there are all kinds of obstacles to emigration. But I figure that being an educated person there are at least some options. Not all places are equally easy to get into though.

> I do genuinely think a Jewish state needs to exist, because while I don't particularly care about being Jewish, much of the world most emphatically does care that I am and has tried to kill the Jewish people throughout most of history, and antisemitism definitely appears to be on the rise.

I think so too. But: does it need to exist where it currently exists? Does it need to exist in the way it currently exists? Does the Jewish state need to behave like it currently does?

Those are all open questions to me and not all of them have easy answers. There are all kinds of arguments thrown around to answer each of these and I have problems with almost every one of those arguments, including the argument of 'now it is so so it should stay so' (the argument by default).

> Almost any country I move to will be doing deeds that I don't love. It's not like the US or any other country has exactly clean hands.

True, but at least that would not intimately affect your personal identity. By living in Israel and effectively refusing to vote with your feet you are fractionally responsible for what your government does (just like I am responsible for mine). That's all good if your government is doing good stuff but if they start murdering people with very little effort at discriminating combatants from citizens then that can cause all kinds of problems for people who have some degree of personal ethics. Just like the Arab world kills Israelis the Israelis seem - from my perspective at least - to have very little restraint when it comes to killing Arabs/Palestinians. What is happening in Gaza right now is utterly disproportional and merely a reflection of how much the Israeli government values Palestinian lives. Ironically it will only cause more Israeli lives lost, a detail that they seem to have forgotten in their zeal for revenge. It won't make anybody safer, that's for sure and any gains on that front will be temporary. It may be good for the votes within Israel though, but in the best case it will result in the symptom to be treated, the root causes remain utterly unaddressed.

> If I and others like me leave, while it wouldn't cause Israel to disappear as you said, it will only push Israel to being even more extreme as the populace will be ever more extreme. The population of Israel is rising, but it's largely driven by the religious population, not by secular leftists.

I'm aware of that. And given that religious zealots do not care much for reality that would be a real problem, but it would be their problem, not yours. And I suspect that if enough people turned their backs on the current state of affairs that it would send a powerful message. Note that religion is the only reason Israel is where it is today, and that the location was known from day #1 to be problematic, even before the official recognition of the state of Israel there was growing strife between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews. I've read myself silly about this conflict and my main take-aways are:

- The parties with the biggest stake in the outcome were not consulted.

- Israel was established only by breaking promises made to Arabs already living there (the argument that it wasn't that many of them doesn't really matter to me).

- Israel has been continuously at war pretty much since a scant few years after its founding, either 'hot' wars or low key continuous streams of attacks and this likely will not ever stop, it simply comes as a price of the location chosen.

- Israel was mostly established as a result of the Holocaust: the Western countries, especially the USA felt that they had failed the Jews in pretty much every way possible and to assuage some of this guilt effectively gave away a lot of land that wasn't theirs to give and on top of that gained a powerful ally in a place that they knew was not overly friendly to the West. Zionism had been slowly but surely working towards the establishment of a Jewish state for a long time and the aftermath of WWII is what sealed it, not exactly something that the then inhabitants of the region had much of anything to do with. It would have been far more justified to take a chunk of Germany instead, but obviously that didn't happen and on top of that the Zionists really wanted 'the Holy Land' to be Israel.

- Without the continuous backing of the United States both in the UN (the large number of vetos) and in various deeds and subsidies Israel would likely not have managed to survive or survive in its present form. It's such a precarious situation that should the USA ever turn inward - of which there is substantial risk - or become distracted enough then Israel could suffer tremendously. I don't think it is safe to count on the USA for stability on the time-frame of centuries, it is itself still a young country and it has substantial inner fractions.

The religious population of Israel - the outgoing part of it, anyway - is spoiling it for everybody else and the militant Arabs are spoiling it for everybody else as well. As long as either one of these groups has a way of getting at the other this won't stop. Until then personal decisions - even very hard ones - are the only way to affect the outcome for you and your family and I totally understand that this may not be a feasible option for you. But for me it would be: I'd rather have my kids grow up in safety than in a place where two sets of unhinged religious fanatics are going to duke it out for the foreseeable future and if the family ties are that strong that simply translates into a budget for a lot of traveling. Again, I can only speak for myself.