Boruch – the achronim completely ignore that meiri; it’s a daas yochid; I didn’t mention it because we don’t pasken like him.
I never said giving tzedaka to goyim is a bedieved, i said that it’s an ends to a means and not lishma or altruism.
Avi – the lives of the Jews in arab countries were still exponentially better than their ashkenazi counterparts. Blood libels were everywhere in Europe, but only happened in the 1500s in the ottoman empire – “suleiman the magnificent” issued a firma, a legal ban on blood libels in that time, as did another muslim ruler in the mid 1800s at the behest of moses montefiore. Then they became very popular…. Guess when? In the 20th century. Thank you Zionism.
Being a jew in galus was and is no picnic, but jews flourished in the arab lands, with free access to professions, markets, freedom of movement, yeshivos, and they had shuls.. I don’t know the details of your claims, but they had beautiful shuls, and their example is copied by sefardi jews in America, sometimes to a fault.
If not for zionism, we could have easily immigrated to Arab lands, had the zionists not stoked a fiery hatred of us prior. We didn’t need their help. If not for zionism, said the chazon ish, jews would jave davened and done teshuva and been saved from the holocaust like the yerushalmis who prevented rommel from attacking eretz yisroel with their teshuva and fasting. Instead they relied on kochi veotzem yadi and we know what happened afterwards.
The state is not just “imperfect” it is rotten at the core, the mamzer of the union between nationalism and jewish identitarianism