Silence is Complicity

Maybe it's time to put some of the energy we expend arguing over words in Israel-Palestine discourse – antisemitism, genocide, intifada – into discussing what's actually happening.

At times, debate about Israel resembles an English class.

We argue over the “trees” that are the words we use in the debate, but I fear we lose sight of the “forest” – the morality, the actual right and wrong of what’s going on in Gaza and on the West Bank.

If there’s one American Jewish writer and thinker who bravely challenges the Jewish community’s thinking on these issues, it’s Peter Beinart. I have my disagreements with Peter, but I’m really looking forward to discussing all these issues when he joins Word on the Street LIVE on Wednesday this week here on Substack at 4 pm Eastern.

Let’s start with the debate over defining the word “antisemitism.”

Those of us on the receiving end understand antisemitism intuitively. Our families have scars over centuries to show for it.

I wrote last week about how expanding the definition of antisemitism to include antizionism or criticism of Israel can actually fuel rather than quell the fires of antisemitism. I won’t repeat the whole argument.

This week, debate continued to rage around the vote by National Education Association teachers to recommend ending partnerships with the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL’s aggressive efforts to limit the terms of debate on Israel-related issues – particularly in schools – has antagonized many, including some teachers who would like to stop working with the ADL and refrain from using their materials (even enormously valuable ones on Holocaust and anti-hate education).

In the wake of the initial vote, the ADL charged the union not just with antisemitism but with supporting terror: “A group of pro-Hamas activists inside NEA” has a problem with the ADL’s “belief in the right of Israel to exist,” said the ADL in its initial email.

Then, at the ADL’s request, Jewish community leaders leapt into action. Nearly 400 Jewish organizations signed a letter within hours expressing “deep concerns about the growing level of antisemitic activity within teachers’ unions,” calling it “just the latest example of open hostility toward Jewish educators, students and families coming from national and local teachers’ unions and their members.”

The entire episode came to a quick end when union leadership rejected the Assembly’s recommendation and issued a very reasonable official statement – but not before the Jewish community had demonstrated how well it can mobilize when it wants to express opposition to something.

Meanwhile in Gaza this week, hundreds more Palestinians were killed, many of them children, most in and around so-called humanitarian centers where inadequate amounts of food are handed out.

As intense as the pressure is from some pro-Israel activists to define criticism of Israel as antisemitic, so too pro-Palestinian activists press hard to put clear labels on what Israel is doing in Gaza, often without any acknowledgement of Hamas responsibility for the suffering.

In a powerful New York Times op-ed, Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American professor of Holocuast and genocide studies at Brown University addressed the question of whether what Israel is doing amounts to “genocide” in a thought-provoking op-ed entitled, “Never Again: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I know it when I see it.”

While I personally don’t use the word “genocide” to describe what is happening in Gaza, Bartov – raised in a Zionist home and a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces – has penned an article that should be mandatory reading for Jewish organizations and leaders considering their words.

Also mandatory reading should be the expose in the New York Times chronicling the ways in which Prime Minister Netanyahu prolonged the war in Gaza for personal political reasons.

I don’t need a label for what’s happening in Gaza. I just know that my personal moral red lines have been crossed – all the more so because this could have ended, the hostages could be home and so much death and suffering could have been prevented, if not for the political interests of the Prime Minister.

Of course, it’s not just Gaza: this past week, violent settlers on the West Bank killed a Palestinian-American citizen, Sayfollah “Saif” Musallet, shot another young Palestinian and then prevented emergency vehicles from reaching the victims in time to save them.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the past 21 months on the West Bank, tens of thousands displaced.

I was deeply heartened to read, in the wake of the Musallet killing, the statement organized by “Smol Emuni,” a relatively new movement of progressive religious Jews. It says in part:

“We… declare that these actions are contrary to the morality of the Torah. We call on all spiritual and communal leaders to denounce these actions, and not remain silent in their presence….

It is our Jewish and moral obligation to speak out against these actions and to protect innocent people.

As one of the organizers of the Smol Emuni statement said in explaining why they are doing what they are doing: “Silence in today’s circumstances is complicity.”

My sentiments exactly. A few months ago, I wrote:

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…

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.

My message to the American Jewish institutional leadership remains: Can’t we bring a fraction of the energy we muster to counter progressive activists at the NEA to addressing the horror this extreme Israeli government and the far right is perpetrating in Gaza and the West Bank?

If we don’t stop the pursuit of a messianic agenda​ by an extremist fringe, ​not only is the state of Israel at risk​ and the safety of Jews globally endangered​, the very soul of the Jewish people is at stake.