I'm a Canadian Jew. I certainly agree that North American Jews tend to be highly irrational about their country's relationship with Israel, but you say that you think White North American Jews have an "irrational persecution complex". On the contrary, it's quite rational. To understand this, we have to take a whirlwind tour of five hundred years of Ashkenazi history.

For those who don't know, the Ashkenazi is the kind of Jew that was found in Europe during the last half of the second millennium. Though there are some remnants here and there, it's worth knowing that Hitler largely succeeded in wiping us out from Europe. That's not an aspect of the Holocaust that gets discussed very often. The remaining Ashkenazim are found mainly in Israel, America, and Canada. But the Holocaust was not really as unique as we are often led to believe. In fact the Holocaust was the largest (by far) of the pogroms — massacres of Jews living in the Pale of Settlement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To reiterate, Hitler successfully obliterated the Pale of Settlement. And remember that these pogroms were government actions. It wasn't some random group of racists, it was the government of the day.

Now this official level of persecution has a history of two thousand years in Europe, going right back to the Roman occupation of Judea. But let's just stick to something a little more contemporary: the mythical Jews that control the world banks. That myth arises from the habit of associating Jews with money. What's interesting is that Jews have a long history in finance because they were legally barred from partaking of most profitable businesses. They were also treated as second class citizens because they were generally shuffled around Europe, often during or after a crusade. Any Christian activism in Europe was usually accompanied by the traditional slaughtering of any Jews that could be found in the vicinity.

But let's try to avoid a litany of the various injustices visited upon the Jews of Europe and pick a starting point for the story of Zionism in North America. I'll go with 1492, a year auspicious in Americana. While Columbus was sailing for the New World, the Jews were getting thrown out of Spain as a consequence of the Inquisition. With all due respect to Monty Python, we saw that coming. Around the same time, Jews were thrown out of Austria, Hungary, and Germany. This brought many Jews to Poland, where some of my ancestors come from. The Jews had something of a golden age in Spain, and Poland became the centre of Jewish culture for a while after that.

It was in Poland that Israel ben Eliezer lived and it was in Poland that he laid the foundations of Hasidic Judaism, which is a ridiculously fundamentalist kind of Judaism that I would find more despicable if I didn't understand the emotional reasoning behind it. Zionism is not a basic tenet of Hasidic Judaism, but Zionism grew out of the Hasidic version of Judaism. Zionism had obvious appeal to a group of people that were murdered by their governments every generation or two, so it has continued to gain traction even to this day when most Jews seem to think that we should have a "Jewish" homeland.

I have some harsh things to say about Zionism, but let's focus on the real point here. The persecution complex that leads to an acceptance of Zionism is not based on some irrational fear. It's based on a two-millennia history of persecution, expulsion, and massacre of the Jewish people by their own governments.

We Jews are currently living in something of a golden age in North America, just as we did in Poland and in Spain before that. We should always remember that the end of such golden ages is usually accompanied by persecution, expulsion, and murder. There is nothing irrational about Jews in North America being sensitive to possible persecution attempts — indeed, it would be irrational not to be vigilant.