A Moral Stain

For the sake of our people’s soul and future, global Jewish leadership must oppose what the Netanyahu/Smotrich/Ben-Gvir government is doing in Gaza.

The other day, a non-Jewish friend shared his surprise that the concept of ‘never again’ is defined by his Jewish acquaintances in two wildly disparate ways.

One group draws the lesson from 20^th century calamity that the Jewish people need to rely on strength. With enemies on all sides, they believe ‘never again’ requires Israel (and the Jewish people broadly) to hit those who seek to hit us first and harder.

This group says take every threat seriously. Fight to win, or die. For them, Israel’s no-holds-barred approach to Hamas and Gaza is the only way to deal with a modern-day existential threat to the Jewish people.

For the other group, ‘never again’ means something else entirely: what happened to the Jewish people ​must never happen to any people ever again. Pointing to core ethical teachings in Jewish tradition, they say that, in particular, the Jewish people simply must not do to another people what was done to us.

The argument raging in the Jewish community over Gaza reflects this split.

Hard-line nationalists believe, as Bibi Netanyahu says, that Israel will always have to live by the sword. Last week, I debated Einat Wilf, a leading voice from this camp, and she argued that the Palestinian people need to be beaten into submission by any means necessary until they give up their claims to land that is now Israel. (I’ll share the debate when it goes online in the coming weeks.)

Some, like Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotrich, don’t bother to hide their aspirations with a smile, talking of “total destruction” and of “concentrating” 2.3 million Gazans into ever-narrowing strips of land until they are so desperate that they “will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

My camp believes, as dissidents in the UK Jewish Board of Deputies wrote last month in an open letter in the Financial Times, that “Israel’s soul is being ripped out” by its extremist government and that silence in the face of the Gaza calamity is “seen as support for policies and actions that run contrary to our Jewish values.”

The argument today has a parallel in early Zionist debates a century ago. One side, articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in his essay the “Iron Wall​,” held that the Jewish people would only get what they needed and deserved through force. Then, it was the establishment arguing the other side – for diplomacy, compromise and an approach grounded in humanistic values.

Let me be very clear: I and those like me who oppose the continued war in Gaza have no doubt about the evil that Hamas represents. More than terrorists, those who committed the October 7^th atrocities, took babies hostage and sacrificed their own people without care are evil incarnate. All who planned, carried out and enabled the October 7^th massacre need to be held to account. Hamas itself can have no role in a future Palestinian state.

But the Israeli government’s number one priority today should not be the elusive pursuit of “total victory.” Rather it must be the return of the 59 remaining hostages (21-24 of whom may still be alive after 19 months in nightmarish captivity) who were the victims of not just Hamas but the failures of their own government leading into October 7.

This war must be stopped now with an agreement that brings the hostages home, ends the fighting, and surges aid to the people of Gaza.

Then, Israel should join forces with its Arab neighbors and countries around the world to begin building a future for Palestinians that provides freedom, hope and self-determination in a state of their own next to Israel. Only when the Palestinian people can see a path to freedom ​and a future can Hamas be defeated.

None of that will happen with a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. It can, in the post-Netanyahu era​ that ​will likely begin late next year after elections. A new government with new leadership and the proper priorities can still save the country and the soul of the Jewish people.

For now, those whose identity is rooted in Jewish ethics that value all human life equally and teach us to treat all people with respect and dignity must step forward and loudly oppose what is happening in Gaza.

Call it what you will. I won’t debate the labels.

I just know that what is happening today in Gaza is wrong.

It violates the core principle on which I was raised – that precisely because Jewish people have suffered oppression so often at the hands of others, we must never treat others the way we were treated ourselves.

To deliberately starve civilians – women, children, the elderly – is immoral. To use water, fuel, food as tools of war is unconscionable.

Members of my family perished in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. My father devoted his life before and during the war to the rescue of Jews from Europe and, after the war, to telling the story of the failure of the Jewish community globally to act.

The generations that follow us will be right to ask where we were as Gaza was leveled, why we did not speak out and why we did not do what we could to stop it.

The Netanyahu plan is bound to harm Israel’s interests – the country won’t be any safer, it will be more isolated in the world and it will lose the support of ever-growing numbers of Jews around the world.

Even more significantly, flattening Gaza and displacing more than two million people will be a moral stain not just on the state of Israel but on the Jewish people. A stain that will not be easily erased.