Ongoing Struggling With Israel, Gaza, And Antisemitism
Each week, I struggle with the events in Israel, Gaza, and around the globe. And when I say struggle, I really mean it: Struggle with how we got here, struggle with what we do next; struggle with how we make sense of the complex human phenomena of war, hate, and bloodshed. I don’t think there are easy answers. I think we’re fooling ourselves if we feel certain about how to proceed. But proceed we must, and I lay out thoughts about where I am right now, recognizing it is an evolving situation with evolving facts on the ground.
I see two issues confronting the Jewish community, which are obviously connected: the first is the war between Israel and Hamas, and the second is made up of the reverberations of antisemitism across the world including Philadelphia.
I offer the following expansions upon my previous reflections:
The massacre Hamas unleashed against Israeli civilians, including non-Jewish Arab Bedouins, and citizens of 15 other countries, on October 7 was the most devastating day for world Jewry since the Holocaust. The number of civilians killed, the barbaric manner in which they were killed, and the fact of Israeli hostages being taken, from children, to teenagers, to the elderly, haunts us. We are shaken to our core.
Global sympathy for Israelis and for Jews, to the extent it existed at all — there were those who immediately celebrated the Hamas attack as an exemplar of noble resistance and “decolonization” — was short lived. Once Israel launched its counterattack in Gaza to prevent the capacity of Hamas to carry out attacks like this in the future, global public sentiment rapidly shifted, as I detail further below.
I can genuinely respect multiple stances on the war Israel and Hamas are waging right now. I struggle deeply with the loss of innocent life, especially of children. It is heartbreaking. I wish war were not a feature of human life. I wish no nation ever had to pick up arms to defend itself or to prevent future massacres.
Heartbreakingly, given that the reality of human existence right now is that nations do carry out devastating attacks on one another, I do see Israel’s offensive in Gaza as a valid exercise of a country’s right to defend itself—something most any country would do if it had, on its border, a regime who had declared a desire to annihilate it and then carried out the most significant assault towards that desire to date. I don’t see many countries who would lay down their arms in response to those circumstances but rather would prosecute this war exactly as Israel is doing, in response to an enemy that embeds itself within a civilian population.
That said, I also recognize reasonable people can disagree about the nature of exactly how Israel ought to work to secure its existence and its safety when it also seeks to limit the death toll: to its own civilians and soldiers and to Palestinian civilians, while working to free the hostages.
I can respect the perspective of those who think the cost of this war, in lives lost, Israeli and Palestinian, is simply too high, even if Israel does have a valid interest in defending itself. That, rather, Israel, should shore up its defenses, build up international support, and work through another means to defang Hamas. Ultimately, I’m not sure I see the likelihood of success under such a path, but given how painful it is to contemplate the loss of life inflicted as a result of this war initiated by Hamas, I can understand it.
What I reject are those calling for a ceasefire not only because they want to see a cessation of the loss of innocent life — something we all want — but because they see Israel as an unjust enterprise since its foundation and are using this moment as an opportunity to pour gasoline on the fire of the energy to take down the “Zionist regime.”
Generally speaking, of course a ceasefire is desirable. But would a ceasefire result in Hamas freeing the hostages? Would it result in Hamas forswearing ever carrying out something like this again? In surrendering the perpetrators of these acts? I don’t see many of those calling for a ceasefire expressing concern for Israel’s long-term security and charting out any alternative pathway for Israelis to feel secure in their homes or in their identities. I see many of them chanting, “From the river to the see, Palestine will be free,” which is concomitant with the desire to see the eradication of Israel as a Jewish state, one that has served as a home and a refuge for Jews for three quarters of a century now, one which is the only home many of its citizens have ever known, and one which served as the culmination of thousands of years of yearning for a return to an ancestral homeland, a yearning exacerbated by the widespread — and sometimes murderous — oppression they experienced in the diaspora.
Palestinian lives matter, too. They are as sacred as Jewish lives are; as all of our lives are. I wish Hamas felt that level of concern for its citizens, but it embeds itself, and launches rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians, from its own civilian populations—from schools, from mosques, from hospitals, which is in and of itself a violation of international law. I cannot say with 100% certainty that Israel always pursues each attack with an appropriate degree of proportionality—the requirement that, even amidst war, nations follow the laws of war that require that no attacks be launched that lead to disproportionate civilian deaths relative to the military interest being pursued. There are surely actors within the Israeli government and within the Israeli military whose values aren’t perfectly aligned with where we are as observers from 6000 miles away, and Israel is surely not immune from criticism. It is hard to know in the fog of war which Israeli measures in Gaza are justifiable according to the laws of war and which are not. And further still we witness vigilante murders taking place in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. That needs to be condemned at the highest levels of government, and prevented by the IDF.
Still, the level of vitriol that has been directed at Israel since this war began, vitriol which has bled into antipathy towards Jews generally in addition to Israeli Jews and to “Zionists,” has been unfathomable. A few examples:
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Hamas is not a terrorist organization but a liberation group waging a battle to protect its land, and the influential Yeni Akit daily newspaper published an op-ed calling on the Turkish government to strip Turkey’s Jews of their citizenship.
International terrorist organizations, from Al-Qaeda to ISIS, since the October 7 massacre, have called for global attacks, not against Israelis, not against Zionists (often used as code for Jews) but simply against Jews.
Even dining is not immune from antisemitism: a boycotting of “Zionist” restaurants has been organized by the Philly Palestine Coalition, which includes all restaurants that sell Israeli food, that are owned by “Zionists” (as determined by the Philly Palestine Coalition), and that “raised money for the Zionist state.”
It is possible for individuals to criticize Israel without being antisemitic. Israel has a fallible government like all other governments around the world, and governments are best served by healthy democracies that include the right to free speech and to dissent from prevailing opinions. Many people with deep love for the State of Israel criticize certain of its practices, as I have done in this column, and even those who don’t “love” Israel can criticize it without it veering into antisemitism.
Still, the level of rabid anti-Israel sentiment, especially when paired with the global history of antisemitism—the way in which so many so quickly rally to the cause of anti-Israel expressions—suggests the ways that anti-Jewish sentiment consciously and unconsciously fuels the flames of anti-Israel passions.
The nature of anti-Jewish hate has long morphed, depending on circumstances. One moment it targets Jews as a communist threat to democratic values; in the next Jews are the ultimate capitalists, wielding their money to pray on the underclasses. Unfortunately two common threads throughout the history of anti-Jewishness (a term I prefer to antisemitism because of confusion around what “semitism” is) are (1) the myth of Jews’ unique predilection for wielding power and control, and (2) the myth of Jews as “bloodthirsty,” dating back centuries to the origins of the “blood libel,” a conspiracy whose details I won’t dignify with description.
We see these tropes showing up now and informing the widespread antipathy to Israel, bleeding into antipathy to Jews.
Again, I highlight this not to seek to discredit all criticisms of Israel. It can absolutely be valid to criticize the choices of Israel’s government as it is to criticize the government of every country on earth. Every country on earth has fallible actors holding office. Some make more dangerous choices than others—that is no doubt true. Israel is not immune from theoretically being one of those. I obviously don’t think that it is worthy of the pariah status the international community has cast upon it, even while I think Prime Minister Netanyahu has in many cases taken it wildly in the wrong direction, but I think Israel can be worthy of criticism.
It is the scale, volume, and speed of the criticism that has me concerned, because I see in it conscious and unconscious sentiments of anti-Jewishness that make it that rabid criticism of Israel all too easy, and that thereby directs hatred and antipathy to all Jews.
Unfortunately from my perspective, many Jews—especially in younger generations—fuel these sentiments, because they give cover to those who are not Jewish but who express fierce anti-Israel sentiment, when these Jews, too, join in with protests that are explicitly anti-Zionist. When a significant percentage of the young Jewish population are anti-Zionist, they allow anti-Israel protestors, some of whom are consciously and unconsciously motivated by antisemitism, to point to Jewish protestors alongside them and say, “see—I’m not antisemitic.” We don’t accept that line of argumentation in other walks of life, and we shouldn’t accept it with respect to antisemitism.
Of course, these young anti-Zionist protestors have all the right in the world to express their beliefs. They are motivated by the courage of their convictions; so be it. I wish they would take into account, in a more nuanced way, the case for Israel as the culmination of years of yearning to return home and and years of working to protect Jews from antisemitic threats around the world, and as a fact of existence for nearly ten million people after 75 years of statehood, as well as the way their beliefs are sometimes used as propaganda by those who do not harbor good feelings for Jews. But the poor intentions of others shouldn’t suppress one’s freedom of expression.
That said, this latest bout of antisemitism has increased the need for Jews of all political persuasions to be sensitive to it, and I hope we’re able to work together to defeat antisemitism just as we should to defeat anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment, which is also on the rise in the United States. This is a classic moment for Hillel’s teaching in Pirkei Avot that “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am solely for myself, what kind of person am I? And if not now, then when?”
This teaching gives me the fuel to summarize my reflections as follows: we do have to work to protect Jewish lives and livelihoods and identities; we also have to work to protect Arabs and Muslims, who like us, desire ultimate peace, and to chart a pathway forward that allows Palestinians to envision a future of freedom, autonomy, and dignity alongside Israelis; and we have to start doing so now, if we haven’t been already. We’ll continue to discuss together what that looks like, understanding there may be disagreement along the way; that we learn from one another as we chart the best pathway forward.
With love for you all, and in a struggle to discern how best to respond to the moments that confront us,
