The lowest rungs in hell are reserved for those who are neutral in a moral issue. So says Dante.
Over the past almost two year of this horrifyingly brutal conflict in the Middle East, Jews everywhere have struggled with wrenching conflict, both within themselves and between themselves. In my view, which those who read these pages know to be liberal and humanist, an initial and I confess mindless rage against Hamas had to give way, really over a period of weeks, to perhaps a month, first to a more nuanced view, and ultimately to a growing rage not against Hamas alone, but towards the Israeli right wing government which continued what was, I believe, an increasingly insupportable conduct of the war.
Some Jewish voices, even prominent ones such as Senator Schumer tried hard to pull Israel sensibilities from the brink, and numerous relatively smaller groups, such as “Not in our Name“, J-street, and Peace Now tried hard to shift the narrative from Israeli’s outrage at October 7 to the growing outrage at the increasingly brutal, indiscriminate and what started to appear criminal conduct of the Israeli military as guided by its right wing government.
I don’t need to tell you that, everyone knows it. Everyone also knows that there has been relative sparse protest from truly mainstream Jewish voices and organizations, granted with some exceptions.
Every attempt at criticism of Israel with teeth has prompted accusations of antisemitism, as if the Israeli right horrors where mainstream Judaism and indiscriminate destruction and starvation Jewish Values. They are not.
I have a particularly personal window on this controversy, as I have a step brother with who I was once very close but who has grown increasingly right wing and Right wing Zionist over the years. We continue to write, but it is clear there is no real communication. He sends me right wing pro-Israeli, and right wing republican propaganda (he calls them articles), and I try to respond with some reasoned perspective.
I know I will never convince him, however in the beginning of 2024, the election year and the first full year of the conflict, the situation had deteriorated in Gaza so much that I felt compelled to speak to him directly about a situation which had begun to divide us on an issue serious to Jews. No Jew wants to see Israel unsafe, but no Jew can tolerate Israel becoming, frankly, like Nazis. I know that word is a third rail, and causes some to react with their own rage enough to disregard anything else you say, and perhaps is not completely fair and accurate, but it points a direction which must be understood, in my view.
The issue of Israel, its right to exist, whether that right also depends on the rights of a equally viable state of Palestine and all the manifestations and consequences there of are complicated in one way, but very straightforward in another.
I know Jews all over the world are in pain and rage, and I know much of the world now hates Israel with justification, and is starting to hate Jews, perhaps also with some. I doubt whether there is anything I can say which will change one single mind. But to repeat, the Lowest rungs in hell are reserved for those neutral in a moral issue, so while I kept this argument essentially between myself and my Jewish brother for these does of months, I feel compelled to make it public now.
It is long, complex, a bit rambling (well, a lot rambling), and probably deserves an abstract or ‘executive summary’, but for me the tortured examination of the depth of the issues which I had to fight to explore in myself and articulate was in part the whole point. So here goes:
“Dear Ron, (January of 2024)
Over the last two months since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas I have found it increasingly difficult to respond to your many posts.
In almost every other subject over which we interact, we each have clearly delineated and 180 degree opposite positions, and we agree, virtually axiomatically, to completely disagree. The goals, values, beliefs and desires we each hold are, essentially, diametrically opposed, we each hold the other to be totally wrong, and we want completely opposite outcomes. And we agree to that. The most obvious example might be presidential politics, in which you like Trump and think he was a great president, while I think did the worst damage to the country of any enemy we have had. You think Biden is one of the worst presidents, whereas I think he ranks among our greatest. And so on, we could trace the same opposite impressions over virtually everything we discuss from politics, to social norms, to the pandemic, etc.
And, in a way, we sort of “like” to argue. “Like” might not be the right word, but, let us say we both feel, I think, some sort of delicious righteousness in vigorously opposing each other. Perhaps it’s biblical – Cain and Abel may be too homicidal an image, it might be more like Jacob and Esau, but between brothers there is always a simmering opposition, which perhaps helps each better define themselves. I sometimes find myself more articulate about my positions after “debunking” yours, and, since you think you are the debunker, I suspect you gain some sense of clarity from countering me.
In the case of the present war, however, we actually share, in some sense, a common goal. I also would like Israel continue to survive, to thrive, to grow in international stature, and be safe, respected and prosperous. I would like Judaism to be regarded as an essentially moral force, as an ethical model, and if I don’t necessarily think it has served as a “light unto the nations”, I wish for it to be regarded widely as an admirable moral code. I wish that the ancient creed of antisemitism and contempt for Jews, and racial hatred in general, would remain discredited and contemptable and unpopular among mainstream and civilized people. It became discredited briefly, after the second war drew direct line from racial hatred to mass murder. For a civilized time, now passing, it was simply morally unacceptable, at least to a very large segment of civilized society, to express anti-Semitic tropes.
On October 7, I would submit, at least for the first few days, the vast majority of the vocal Western world, at least in so far as it was expressed in the press, felt and articulated revulsion and outrage for the attack by Hamas on mainland Israel. Most understood that it fit into a millennial’s long history of attacks on the Jewish people. Most, in the mainstream, at least, understood that Israel had the right to protect itself, to respond with force, to retaliate, and to take a military action to defend itself and deter the attackers. The President was widely supported when he moved formidable military assets into the region to deter those who would take advantage of the situation to further harm Israel. He did that at some considerable cost to his own political standing, as he knew that some in his base viewed Israel, in the long run, as the occupier, but he has always been a supporter of Israel, and believed it enough to publicly fly to Israel and literally embrace Israel’s leader. And, at least at the very beginning, he received widespread support in most of the media and mainstream commentary.
(I will continue without the italics, it is still the same letter)
What has happened in the subsequent months, however, both the way that Israel has conducted the war, and the kinds of near daily comments both by the Israeli government, and by those mouth pieces for the Israeli right which you have sent me, have succeeded in transforming that initial outpouring of revulsion for Hamas and sympathy for Israel, completely around, in many cases. The vastly larger number of civilian casualties, the appearance of indiscriminate use of force, and the seeming contempt for the lives and rights of Palestinians, in Gaza but also in the West Bank with the settlers, has led to an increasing contempt for Israeli policy. And this has led, increasingly, to allow a tolerance for an antisemitism which observers find, if still repugnant, at least increasingly understandable. This saddens me. Deeply. But I confess I start to view both the antipathy toward the present Israeli government, and the subsequent creeping anti-Semitism, as a predictable outcome of the positions which you and the Israeli right, and your “ Jewish chosen people” opinion leaders have held. And I am sad to see that value, which I think you and I both share, that Israel prosper, thrive and remain a moral guide, as being inevitably, perhaps permanently, and I am so sorry to have to say, understandably compromised and degraded by those positions you, and they, hold and articulate.
Let me attempt to further articulate and elucidate the reasoning.
When Israel first proclaimed its statehood, adjacent to a newly designated Palestinian state, and Israel accepted the partition but the Arabs did not, it seemed easy to hold forth an opinion on Israeli moral superiority, relative to their neighbors. It was argued, at least by the Jews and the United states government, that the Jews had right on their side because they had accepted their Arab neighbors with open arms and the neighbors responded with clenched fists and weapons.
I believe if one goes into a fair amount of documented history of the opinions and communications of the Zionist founders, the notion of open armed Jews does not bear scrutiny, however I will hold off arguing that point and refer you to more learned reviews by Israelis themselves, such as Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall. Even if it could be accepted that this narrative were , initially, accurate, however, it is no longer really compelling. In a post Oslo world, it seems clear to me, and I think to many in the world, including our own government and all European governments, the rest of the world, to say nothing of the Arab states, that the burden of refusal and rejection has shifted, that it is no longer the Arabs who refuse reconciliation, but rather the responsibility for the obstruction and rejection of another people falls disproportionately, though of course not exclusively, on Israel. And specifically, on the Israeli right wing. This coalition, powered largely by the settlers, who have governed through Netanyahu for many decades, have consistently refused the open hand offered by Arafat on the White House lawn, and have killed not only Palestinians but even their own Prime Minister to prevent it’s being a meaningful reconciliation. You can pretend that Israel has extended a hand of peace and been rejected, but I don’t think there are many fair-minded persons who accept that as a true characterization.
Let’s look at the initial assertion of moral superiority for the Israeli acceptance of partition in the first place. Those who argue for Israel’s moral high ground have held the narrative that the Jewish people, having finally returned to their traditional homeland, after unimaginable suffering and cataclysm – most recently the horrors of the second world war – proclaimed their state asking for peace and welcoming their neighbors, but that it was the Arab hatred and intransigence and refusal to accept their new neighbors in peace and friendship which has led to the decades of strife which Israel sought to avoid, wishing only to live in peace. It is therefore implied and characterized that the refusal of the Arab population and surrounding states to accept the new Jewish neighbor was inherently “EVIL”, that such a refusal could have only reflected “anti-Semitism,” a true evil of which the most recent example, the unprovoked murder of millions including children was clearly, and by any sane and decent person’s standards, a monumental EVIL.
But I think it bears closer examination whether the reluctance to accept the interposition of a uniquely non-Arab state into territory which had been primarily Arab for centuries is, in and of itself evil. It was certainly not generous. A generous spirit might have accepted the influx of these Jewish immigrants from a clearly hostile outer world, recently decimated, into a land mass which, if you counted all of the Arab world clearly could have accommodated them. But the fact that the immigrants wanted to establish their own culture and dis-invite those already living there tended to invoke resentment and active resistance. Was that resistance “evil”? Perhaps. But perhaps not. After all, European Christians killed European Jews, so why, it can be imagined as a fair position, should Asian Muslims have to pay for it?
I personally believe that a compelling argument clearly exists for the right of the Jewish people to return to their homeland. I think I can well reason and well articulate that right. There are Biblical, historical, moral, legal and practical bases for the argument for the right of the Jewish people to establish in a portion of the legal Palestinian mandate a Jewish state. I believe I could argue this convincingly, and apparently so could many others, since the United Nations, ultimately charged with making the decision on the question, did accept and codify this right of return of a large Jewish people to the territory of Palestine to establish a state. But, just as the Balfour declaration clearly and explicitly spelled out, such a right of return depends also in the fair and just treatment of the Arab population who were already living there. That was the deal both as articulated by the British when they held the land, and by the UN when given the decision.
I can see that the original refusal of the Arabs to accept partition put them at a moral disadvantage. However automatically branding those who resisted it as ‘evil’ has some moral drawbacks. One might understand that someone who had lived on a land as an equal neighbor for some generations might not be so keen to give up sovereignty to outsiders because some so-called international body ordained it. And those who, like many of the commentators you support, deny an equal and reciprocal consideration for the Palestinian Arabs, while condemning the original Palestinian Arabs consideration for them undercuts the same demand for recognition of Israel as legitimate that they, the Jewish commentators, take as axiomatic.
Orthodox Jews, especially the ultra-orthodox, as are the settlers, insist as the basis of their claim to the whole of Palestine, that “God gave them the land”. While I recognize that this narrative may have kept the Jewish people surviving over the millennia, and seemingly miraculously to regain their ancient homeland, from the outside, from the world’s perspective, I hope you can see that real estate promises reportedly made by a small ethnicity’s tribal deity to their war lord, which sustained their courage in battle three thousand years ago do not automatically constitute compelling legal tender in a more modern era.
Native Americans believe that the land cannot be owned, but I suspect you would not judge yourself evil for using whatever power you possessed, even force, to keep a Native American tribe of families from removing from you the benefits of ownership of what you consider “your” land. It might theoretically be shown, for example, that the Aztec God Queztoquatal had promised the entire North American continent to his people. I don’t know if that is true, but if, for the sake of argument, it were – one might still hesitate to brand it evil if the people of your neighborhood resisted and resented the imposition by the Mexican Army of an Aztec Homeland in your neighborhood of Los Angeles. You might resent and resist and oppose with all force necessary, even though Mexico did, in fact, hold the land for hundreds of years, and even if the rest of the world agreed, in, say, an imaginary United Nations declaration, to give the land to them. The insistence of the newly returned Aztec population that they were happy to share and live in peace with their hosts in Beverly Hills, might not assuage your resentment and resistance. We would not brand your resistance as EVIL.
We brand the horrific anti-Semitism of National Socialism as one of the great evils of history, and rightfully so. It was. There is no conceivable way to justify the systematic slaughter of millions of non-combatants for the purposes of racial purification. Short of accepting the underlying Nazi belief, that some groups are so inherently superior to others that they have the right to destroy them, to make an imagined racially pure world better, which is in itself an evil proposition, the “Holocaust”, as we have come to refer the part of the second world war which was directed against Jews, was inherently purely evil.
Although you want to brand it such, however, the impulse to resist the imposition of foreign dominance and ethnic division over the land where there had been none for two thousand years is not inherently “evil”. The creation of a Jewish State on land which had not been under control may have been, and I think was, justified by a whole set of circumstances, however it was of necessity done at the expense of a population who lived there and had their own identity and their own claims to the land. And when two people have claims to the same land, some fair and sustainable agreement needs to be made to accommodate both of their rights.
Israel’s claim to have been the only ones willing to make the accommodation may have been true during the initial phases of its existence, (a close view of the history shows that not to be true), however even if such a claim had at one time been true, that claim has clearly no longer been true since 1993, since Oslo, since the Palestinians, after Egypt and Jordan, had clearly and publicly accepted the state of Israel with the understanding that Palestinian autonomy would ensue.
That did not happen, and the fault for its failure is almost universally, and I believe accurately attributed to the Israeli right wing. Almost immediately the Israelis started to invade in force and continue the occupation of the territory commonly considered to be the basis of a Palestinian state with increasing settlements, widely considered, and I believe correctly considered to be illegal. An Israeli Jew murdered Rabin. Doesn’t the Torah forbid murder?
An Israeli Jew mass murdered Palestinians at worship. And the Israeli government approved of, permitted or ignored the continual encroachment on Palestinian land.
Adding insult to injury, you and your right wing commentators, implicitly as well as explicitly denied the very existence of the Palestinian people. What was initially considered immoral, the refusal of Arabs to accept the existence of the Jewish state, calling it, for example, the “Zionist entity”, was mirrored in the rhetoric and actions of the Israeli right, so that ultimately there is little to distinguish the moral legitimacy of them and those on the Arab side, increasingly a minority, who denied that right to Israel. Hamas, in doing so, was becoming increasingly in the minority as a party who denied Israel’s existence as the PLA and numerous surrounding states explicitly accepted Israel. However the opposite happened on the Israeli side with increasingly loud, and powerful voices opposed and denied the existence of Palestinian sovereignty and railed increasingly against the legitimate aspirations of the people to have, just as do the Jews, their own land.
You deny the existence of Palestine. Your argument is that the name was given by the Romans to offset the hegemony of the Jews. Fair enough. I guess that means that there was a Palestine since the days of the Roman Empire. Actually before. The first use of the term was the Greek historian Herodotus. There was a Palestine for 2500 years. And Palestinians. There was Palestine, and there were Palestinians before there was a Europe, a Germany, a France, a Russia. There was a Palestine, and Palestinians almost two thousand years before there was a USA, or Americans. Palestinians lived in Palestine through empires, through the Ottomans, and the Balfour Declaration in which England looked with favor upon the establishment of a Jewish state, the statement read:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non – Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
“in Palestine”
You like to claim that there was no nation of Palestine, but clearly the British government, and history recognize that there is a Palestine. You like to claim that the people of Palestine are not Palestinians but just ‘plain ol’ Arabs’, but they could just as easily say the European Jews who flooded the area were just Europeans. You don’t get to define the identity of other groups.
So, you might rightfully ask, why was Jordan not compelled to create an independent Palestinian state when it controlled the land?
And you would be right. Jordan should have done so. The Hashemite Monarchy of Jordan inappropriately occupied the land of Palestine. Palestine should have been born in the land which Jordan held after 1948. It is a flaw in the Arab claim to moral superiority that they did not to so. That is a point. However, when the 1967 war concluded with Israel having pushed the Jordanians off Palestinian land, they should have given it, as it was originally meant to be given, and as it was awarded by the same Partition agreement which had created a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.
But rather than go on ad infinitum about the history and the agreements, perhaps it is best to skip ahead to the day the Israeli government and representatives of the PLO sat down to discuss forging an agreement. They agreed then to let the past be past, and to start at the present moment, that there were two distinct national identities living within the land encompassed by Israel and the disputed territories, and it would be in the interests of peace and justice to work out an arrangement which was mutually acceptable and beneficial. The skeleton of such an agreement was developed and signed on the White House Lawn by the respective leaders of the two entities. This was the OSLO agreement.
You observe that a later attempt to make peace, in 2000, was rebuffed by Yasir Arafat. That statement is disputed, and some Israeli writer have observed that what was billed as an “absolute no” on Arafat’s part was in fact a qualified yes, but I will leave that argument aside. What is clear is that in the years between the Oslo agreement and the Camp David meeting, it has been Israel, far more than the Palestinians, who subverted the peace promised by that agreement. The murder of the prime minister who offered his hand in peace, the mass murder of Muslims at prayer, compounded with the relentless settlement activity, worsened by moronically provocative political stunts such as Sharon’s traipsing through the Palestinian holy places, all indicated to many western observers that the Israeli government had never been acting in good faith. Never acting in good faith when it indicated willingness to recognize the rights of the Palestinians, reciprocal to their own, that they have a sovereign, free and autonomous state. Rather Israel maintained an increasingly obtrusive and oppressive presence on lands viewed, Ron, by virtually the entire world except a vocal right wing Jewish segment to be morally and legally Palestinian land.
So where does that leave us? Does this occupation justify the horrific attacks on civilians of October 7th? Of course not. That was an ugly, brutal, murderous and insupportable action. It did not fall within the boundaries of acceptable protest and no one should say it should. Such an action needs to be retaliated against, deterred, punished and prevented, in so far as possible, from occurring again. Israel has, like any nation, the right, and the duty to defend itself.
However a reasoned evaluation, and one not blinded by emotion, would recognize, as the Secretary General of the United Nations stated, to much Jewish outrage, but accurately, that this horrendous attack, while not excused by, did in fact occur against the backdrop of over half a century of usurpation, occupation and tyranny, one maintained by a continued use of overwhelmingly asymmetric military might, and considered by most of the world including the UN and every government of the US to be illegal.
One central tenant to the outrage against Hamas’ actions is that they are born out of an intractable refusal to accept the acceptance of a Jewish state. A fair examination of the Israeli position over the last 30 years, however, has been similarly intransigent in its refusal to accept a Palestinian state. Such intransigence is couched in the myth that the Israelis would make peace if only there were Palestinians willing to do so. But the facts show this to be self-servingly inaccurate – a lie- and the policy of the right-wing government to prop up Hamas so as to render the PLA less potent just exposes that lie.
So here is the rub. We can say that Israel “has the right to defend itself”. But it does not have the right to suppress the rights and aspirations of millions of the non-Jewish population who lived in those lands for multiple generations. And when Israel uses continued military means to maintain such suppression, it can only expect that ultimately it will receive a military response. And if that military response is horrifically barbaric, as was the attack on Oct 7, then perhaps that should serve as an opportunity for the Jewish state to show its moral superiority, and show itself to truly be “a light unto the nations”.
Israel has, sadly, not done so. Israel has responded in a manner which is widely believed to be similarly barbaric. It is believed so, by essentially the entire rest of the world, even the present (Biden) administration which sacrificed most of its base to literally hug Netanyahu, and send the naval assets needed to protect Israel from what would have been thousands more casualties.
The immorality of Israel’s response is not, solely, or even primarily in the ferocity and indiscriminateness of its response. It has been pointed out that our response in the second world war included bombing of population center in which the factories of war were inevitably placed. The immorality is more primarily in Israel’s avowed and now increased refusal to address the underlying, and I believe, immoral situation which lay the ground in which the seeds of Hamas’ brutality were allowed to grow. A better ground could have led to the growth of a far more accommodating and peace-loving Palestinian government, but Netanyahu, his settlers and the Israeli right refused to allow it.
So now, Hama’s avowed refusal to tolerate a Jewish State, and its overly barbaric and indiscriminate and intentionally ugly use of force is echoed by Israel’s avowed refusal to tolerate a Palestinian state, and its barbaric, indiscriminate, use of force – leaving out the sexual violation, of course – is pretty symmetrical. There is not all that much moral difference between the two.
Israel could have responded differently. It could have insisted on the right to defend and deter, to punish and prevent, while at the same time recognizing and affirming that the rage and frustration which lead to Hamas must be addressed, and – when Hamas has been defeated- a new rebirth of a process by which the Palestinian people would have their aspirations to a fair and just national reconciliation would occur. Had that been the Israeli position, then I believe the excessive balance of casualties inevitable in an asymmetric conflict would have been more readily accepted.
As it is now, and I am speaking as a Jew who would love not to have to say this, Israel has squandered its moral high ground, and is now, from Oslo on, and especially now, the aggressor, and the balance of good and evil – to the extent that those exist – is shifting steadily toward the Israelis being one of the evils. Hamas is “evil”. So is the current Israeli government. Hamas represents the Palestinians in Gaza. The current Israeli right represents the majority (slim that it is) of the Israelis. Israel has shifted steadily toward being the evil. Or, shall we say, an equal partner in the evil.
It gives me no joy to say that, and I think there are still roughly half of the Jewish state and Jewish population who would have it otherwise. I hope that this war, when it is over, so thoroughly and permanently discredits Israel’s right wing and current government that the other side prevails. But I am not I the least optimistic about it.
Which brings us to “anti-Semitism”. You have long held that to oppose Israeli right wing foreign and domestic policy was inherently anti-Semitic, and I have maintained that one can read the parashot, celebrate the holidays, light the candles and consider oneself a Jew and still oppose Israeli policy. One can support and embrace Judaism as a religion, and still believe that, at least post Oslo, the fault for rejecting and making impossible the opening to peace, is preponderantly on the Israeli side.
The rhetoric you continue to send, however, forces one to blur the lines between being anti – Israeli right wing (which I proudly am), and anti-Semitic – a label I would prefer not to have to accept. You send me the thoughts of people you support, who speak not for Israel, but for their own version of Judaism, and whom I find clearly odious.
Dennis Praeger, for example, has nothing to do with the Israeli government, he is an American Jewish opinion leader. When he says that October 7 happened because “the Jews are ‘chosen’”, it is hard not to grow a bit more anti-Semitic. “Chosen”? Really? It couldn’t be because the Palestinian aspirations have been systematically squelched by an increasingly repressive government who pretends to want peace and practices nothing but violent suppression. It couldn’t be that the Israeli right has consistently made meaningless the efforts of those Palestinians, and those Israelis, who would struggle peacefully for lasting and mutually advantageous peace. It couldn’t be that this climate, one in which accommodation is increasingly shown to be fruitless, leaving only violence as a tactic. It couldn’t be any of these reasons – it has to be that the “Jews are Chosen”.
Do you know that Palestinians in the occupied territories are subject to indefinite detention without trial? No different than apartheid. That lands are arbitrarily taken in a manner viewed by the entire world, and the united states as illegal. That the Palestinian authority who attempted to find some common ground with Israel, accepted its existence within a public handshake and was systematically undercut. That those who want peace in Israel, including a Prime Minister, are murdered. That Gaza is systematically deprived of access to the world. It couldn’t be any of those. It has to be that the “Jews are Chosen”?
It is this kind of tribal hubris, the notion that only Israel has any ‘right’ on its side, and that any challenge of this right makes you an anti-Semite in line with the Nazis, which leads one, sadly, toward a distaste for the moral sense of the Jews. The attack, as horrific as it was, also shows that the status quo ante is unacceptable to a huge population which is kept under tyrannical conditions. Everyone else in the world sees that. The refusal of what you consider to be observant Jews to recognize that is a moral failure, a failure which it becomes increasingly hard to label “Israeli Right” and detach from Jews as a culture. This failure is not uniquely associated with Jews – certainly Hamas shares it – but it hardly argues for the ‘light unto the nations’ status that you claim, and therefore leads in its hypocrisy to distaste for Jewish moral standing.
And, although I trust it comes from a small minority – at least I hope that your Greenfield character doesn’t speak for many – the blatant religious bigotry of many of your commentators towards Islam, a rhetoric which I regard as the moral equivalent of Der Sturmer, especially coming from a representative of a people who should, more than anyone, know how horrid can be the consequences of ethnic hatred is truly abhorrent and renders a little less credible your complaints of anti-Semitism.
So, what could be done? What could be done to turn around what I fear could become and inevitable and pervasive antipathy both for Israel, and for Jews. An antipathy which will become widely spread and believed to be justifiable. After Auschwitz, any hint of anti-Semitism was intolerable. As things are going now, absent a real change in policy and practice, the intolerance for anti-Semitism which the Jews enjoyed for over a half century will morph into a common, and accepted as justifiable renewed anti-Semitism. How can Israel, and how can worldwide Jews stop that?
The answer comes from within Judaism itself. The notion of Teshuva and Tzedakah. That one turns way from one’s evil ways, looks within and sees the flaw, resolves to right the flaw, and to make amends. The same process which Jews undergo every single year during the High Holidays would go a long distance toward making any moral objective observer say, well maybe there is something to Judaism after all.
First – to resolve not only to neutralize Hamas, and the violent rejectionism it represents, but also to resolve and affirm explicitly and publicly that Israeli policy also manifests a violent rejectionism. That the rejection of Palestinian autonomy is also immoral. And that the dissolution of the Hamas terrorism, and it must come, must also entail the dissolution of the right wing colonial/imperialistic urge to take over the land, west bank and Gaza, which is clearly recognized by EVERY OTHER ENTITY IN THE WORLD except the Israeli right and their sympathizers, as a just and appropriate Palestinian national homeland.
This resolution must come with the recognition that the decades of occupation have, while perhaps unwisely pursued as some sort of misguided security guarantee, must be amended for, and Israel must explicitly and publicly resolve to join with many other nations to rebuild both Gaza and the West Bank to be viable and sustainable and livable territories.
Israel must work actively and explicitly to support both those Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs who want to make an accommodated Peace together, and actively and explicitly reject those who, like Hamas and the Israeli Settlers alike, think that using force to expel the other is an acceptable, actionable, or moral goal.
Finally, Israel must explicitly and publicly acknowledge that sincere efforts (and they must be sincere, robust and verifiable) to create and support a viable and just state of Palestine to live peacefully and in cooperation with the Jewish state of Israel has to also be connected with the resolution of the long antipathy with the Arab states, and that – having come to terms with a viable and acceptable and safe Palestinian state – that Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Gulf States, and perhaps, sometime in the mid-century even Iran, to be a region of cooperation and mutual regard.
If all this were to happen, Israel, and the Jewish people could rightly reclaim the mantle of a moral force, and original moral force, and fulfill its biblical mandate to be a light unto the nations.
At present, however, all this is all a pipe dream. Most likely the Israeli right will have its way, will destroy Gaza, kill a hundred thousand civilians, and rule over its ruins in such a way as to eradicate forever any chance of Israel’s moral standing being regained. And, eventually, probably in the time it takes the orphaned babies of today to grow up under tyranny to become the resentful hatred filled willing suicide bombers of twenty some years from now.
And when they rise up against Israel, there will be few to stand with Israel, and most to stand against it.
And, if God Forbid, it goes that horrible way, as it appears to be going now, I cannot say which side I would stand with.
Just thought you might find important the thoughts of someone outside your circle who also thinks about these things.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rick”
I wrote that letter in early 2024. I am so sad that it is as relevant now as then.