Here’s the comment in its entirety:

That's a lot of effort being expended to demonstrate that a particular word applies. I'm not going to argue your facts. Instead I want to ask, why is this word so important to apply? The reason this is such an attractive topic is that the word “genocide” in ordinary English has tremendous power. It means, “what the Nazis did” or “mass murder in pursuit of wiping out an ethnicity, religion, or culture.” Yes, it basically means the Holocaust and Rwanda. That’s what it means in ordinary usage in English. As with many words, it has a related technical or legal meaning. The incredible focus on this word is because it has the power of meaning “what the Nazis did,” while still being possible to technically prove genocide without it being like what the Nazis did. As I think you said, in most cases where the technical meaning of the word is met, the ordinary English meaning of the word is not. Normally, except for lawyers and professors, there wouldn’t be much interest in technical legalistic definitions of any word. But the word “genocide” is different. If anti-Israel activists can succeed in getting that tag to stick in a legal context, where the meaning is different, then they can say to the general public “it’s official -- The Israelis are committing genocide. They are Nazis. Even some Israelis are saying it!” I guarantee you that people using your article and the ones you cite aren’t going to be waving your article and shouting “Israel is committing something that is technically genocide under a legalistic definition, though it’s not what you would think of as genocide.” Once they get the word to stick they will flip to treating it according to its ordinary English meaning. It’s all part of tagging Israelis as Nazis, both to demonize them and to undercut the meaning of the Holocaust. Professors and international lawyers have chosen not to select a new word or highlight that they are using the word in a non-mainstream manner. This is sometimes just academic conservatism, but sometimes it is part of an act of advocacy. It is used as a way to catch “OMG” attention. When describing a program of forced adoption of indigenous children in Australia, “genocide” grabs a lot more attention than “forced adoption.” So of course advocates push for the label, because they want to borrow power from the Holocaust analogy. What if you never used the word “genocide” in your essay and instead focused on laying out and assessing facts, making clear that what you are ultimately doing is a moral judgment not a dispassionate semantic analysis. You could substantively say all the same things. But would your essay be as interesting? Certainly it would not be as provocative and attention-getting. For that you need the power of this special word. I am certain that you personally are not playing the terminological bait-and-switch game. You and many others are writing completely in good faith. But I believe you are falling into this trap. In this sense, lawyers and professors are the least qualified people to think through whether something is genocide. They are too steeped in their definitions and academic rigor to see that it's a pointless pursuit (unless you're actually going to court). This type of normal-use vs. sensationalism shift is not limited to the word “genocide”. There are other words that have tremendous power as meaning incredibly evil acts, so that advocates seek to shoehorn their particular issue into the word. Once the word sticks, they have that power in the bag even if a description of the facts or actions wouldn't generate the same outrage. But ultimately it also dilutes the power the word once had.

My response:

Thanks for reading my work, and for your thoughtful response. I think the danger you cite is largely accurate, and I don’t discount the possibility that my writing might be used by people with very different agendas than mine.

I have a number of thoughts about what you wrote, and I’ll start with the first, which is admittedly a bit antagonistic, but I don’t know how else to put this:

If you think that “genocide” may technically be an accurate term to describe what Israel is doing (or has done) in Gaza, but you also think, for whatever reason, that it may be deleterious to use that word, then you either think it isn’t really genocide or your concern for the people against whom this genocide is being committed is meaningfully limited. The fact that the meaning of “genocide,” as a word, is often contested, misunderstood, or even used in bad faith doesn’t change any of that.

I think this is a genocide. Indeed, I think it is, at this point, a clear case of genocide, however much it is obviously a less severe instance of it than the Shoah. And I think one of the ways “genocide” operates is by classifying something as absolutely unjustifiable. There can be no excuse for a genocide. This is especially relevant in this instance, since the Israeli genocide emerged as part of an escalation of a long-running violent conflict involving two parties (which is why it is often characterized by the pro-Israeli side as self-defense). Put differently, Israeli actions (i.e. Israel’s genocide) have rendered secondary all that Hamas did to bring about this moment. That, to a large extent, is one of my main claims, and why I feel it necessary to use this term and not some larger set of descriptors that would accurately name the same thing. Put simply, not even October Seventh (along with the subsequent hostages) justifies what Israel has done since. Accurately naming it a genocide makes this clear.

If this is a genocide, then that simple reality should be our main concern. If this is a genocide, then I’d ask you to ask yourself why you’re focusing on any other related problem. To place some other concern ahead of that, to worry that some people will exploit the messiness of the term as it operates in the larger, often-under-informed society, is to ignore, or at least de-prioritize, the actual violence and suffering that remains ongoing over there. It is to draw our attention away from that in order to question the efficacy of using one word as opposed to another. It is to muddy the waters by pointing out how muddy (and perhaps treacherous) the waters already are, when, if you’re willing to focus on the main and awful thing, it is there to be seen, clear as day.

Again, I’m not saying there’s no merit in your concern, on its own terms, I’m saying those terms shouldn’t be our main concern. It certainly would be better if “genocide”—as a word and a concept—weren’t so contested, misunderstood, and often manipulated. But it would be much better yet if Israel weren’t doing what it is currently doing. I feel that my calling what Israel is doing “genocide” might make a very, very, very small contribution to the effort to identify and stop it. Or, if not that, to create conditions for some sort of Israeli accountability.

The Holocaust is an extreme and thus highly atypical example of genocide. The very understandable Jewish preoccupation with the Holocaust (as, essentially, an illustration of what “genocide” is) has led to a profound misunderstanding of the concept within our own community, and well beyond, since our community has made the study of the Holocaust such a priority (at least in the United States) for nearly everyone. In this regard, we are partially responsible for the inverse of your concern over the way that genocide simply means “what the Nazis did.” In other words, for many in our community and beyond, if Israel isn’t doing what the Nazis did, then it’s not genocide. Then it’s not that bad. Thus there can be a good reason for doing whatever Israel is doing in Gaza, however unsavory “it” may be.

You’re arguing, I think, that we should under-use “genocide” because it’s misunderstood as meaning only the most extreme cases. I’m arguing that we should teach people what it really means, and use it when it accurately applies, in order to identify and stop genocides that fall short of direct mass murder for days or years on end. There was a reason "genocide” was originally defined as it was, and we should advocate for that understanding of the term, along with the kind of international norms that respond to that definition.

I have one additional reason for using this term, one that, I will confess, stems from the implications of what it means for it to be not just accurate but widely accepted as well. I believe that a government convicted of committing genocide is rendered illegitimate. This illegitimacy will operate differently if the “conviction” merely takes place in the court of public opinion, as opposed to in the Hague. But this illegitimacy will exist in either case. And I strongly believe that Netanyahu’s government, along with the Israeli ethnocratic regime that has been in place since 1948, needs to be replaced.

Israel isn’t merely committing genocide, it is committing genocide with impunity. Insisting that this is genocide and not merely some other set of war crimes or even crimes against humanity is, for better or worse, likely necessary in order to change what is politically acceptable and thus possible within Israel itself. Though it will be painful and difficult for Israeli Jews (and perhaps for most Jews everywhere) for Israel to carry the stain of genocide, it will enable and pave the way for a different and ultimately better political reality in Israel. It will enable, perhaps, some sort of process of truth and reconciliation. It will, in the long run, make possible a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

The alternative, as I see it, is a reality in which Ben-Gvir and Smotrich can continue to legitimately hold the levers of power. And that is, I believe, every bit as bad for Israeli Jews as is Hamas maintaining power in Gaza. If and when such people—including, most certainly, Netanyahu himself—are seen as agents of genocide, then they will be shown the door. Whether that it is a door to a jail cell or not is, in the context of my response here, largely beside the point.

1. Our Genocides: Confronting a New Period in Jewish History

- There are now two Jewish genocides: the first, the Holocaust, was committed against us; the second, in Gaza, is being committed by us.

- The vast majority of genocide scholars—including many Israeli and Jewish genocide scholars—have reached the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

- I believe what is happening in Gaza will eventually be viewed by most people as a genocide; therefore, Jews who reject this conclusion will be viewed as genocide deniers.

- We are now in a new period of Jewish history, one marked by the existence of these two genocides.

- The previous period of Jewish history, marked by the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, is over.

- This new period will likely cause a profound fracture within Jewish communities, institutions, and organizations.

2. On the Question of the Victim:

- The discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is distorted by a fixation on claims of victimhood, which are made to assert moral purity and avoid responsibility.

- Being a victim does not make one morally superior.

- One can be a victim and a victimizer at the same time.

- One can be suffering unbearably and still be suffering much less than someone else, including someone whose suffering is caused by you.

- The Jewish over-identification with victimhood has made us blind to our power and our ability to make others, Palestinians especially, victims.

3. Interdependency and Dehumanization

- Israeli and Palestinians are—barring wide-scale ethnic cleansing or continued genocide—in an inescapably interdependent relationship.

- Therefore, the Israeli claim of “no partner” is a fiction.

- Through their dehumanization of Palestinians, Israelis have dehumanized themselves.

4. The Politics of Interdependency

- Israeli and Palestinians are locked in an interdependent, escalating, and destructive dialogue, in which each side’s violence fuels the extremism of the other side.

- In this regard, Hamas led to Netanyahu’s ascent, and vice versa.

- Israel must support, rather than undermine and weaken, Palestinian leaders committed to coexistence.

- Israel is much stronger than the Palestinian side, and thus has a great ability and responsibility to alter the nature of this interdependence.

5. The Dead End of Israeli Militarism

- Israel’s militaristic approach to its conflict with the Palestinians has failed to bring about security or peace.

- There is no military solution to the conflict, only a political one, something many high-ranking Israeli intelligence officers openly acknowledge.

- The militaristic character of Israeli society insulates the larger military strategy from being questioned despite numerous failed operations and the overall failure of this approach. By contrast, individual diplomatic failures are viewed as disqualifying diplomacy in its entirety.

- The only path forward is through negotiations, compromise, and political settlement with the Palestinians.

6. The Only Path

- There are only three possible paths for this conflict: coexistence with equal rights for both peoples, large-scale ethnic cleansing and genocide, or perpetual war that will eventually escalate into genocide.

- Everyone involved in any way in this conflict—including Jews in the diaspora—should ask themselves which path they are supporting.

- Both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism are radically idealistic, and this idealism must now be repurposed to create a peaceful, shared future, because the alternative is more genocidal violence.

7. Wherever We Stand

- The unconditional loyalty at the heart of “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel” has been disastrous for both Israel and American Jews.

- This slogan has enabled Israel’s descent into an apartheid state capable of committing genocide.

- True friendship from American Jews requires pressuring Israel to change its ways, through such things as withholding aid and supporting boycotts.

- Mainstream Jewish organizations have consistently reinforced Israeli impunity by refusing to call for substantive pressure on Israel to halt settlement growth, end the occupation, or face consequences for violating international law.

- Though there are many forces at work behind American support of Israel’s genocide, the American Jewish community has played a central role in making this campaign possible.

8. Anti-Semitism, and Gaza

- Anti-Semitism is real and growing, but it pales against the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

- Jews must actively and openly oppose Israel’s genocide or they will be seen as supporting it.

- Jewish silence or support for Gaza’s destruction represents a crisis for Judaism itself, one that will do more damage to our religion than any of our external enemies.

9. The Truth About Gaza: 2005-2023

- Israel’s 2005 Gaza disengagement, widely described as a generous withdrawal meant to offer Palestinians a chance at self-rule, in fact intensified Israeli control and laid the groundwork for a long-term siege of the territory.

- The disengagement was part of a larger plan to increase Israeli control of the West Bank and prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state.

- From 2005-2023, Israel enforced a situation of “controlled scarcity” in Gaza that kept the population on the edge of subsistence.

- This is the backdrop against which the October 7, 2023 attacks took place.

10. The Genocide Process: Rethinking Context

- Israel’s policies since the 2005 disengagement—blockade, economic strangulation, bureaucratic control, and periodic large-scale assaults—form a continuum that makes the current genocide not an aberration but rather an escalation.

- American Jews must radically rethink our relationship to Israel, abandon denial, and confront our own community’s ethical failures and participation in narratives that obscure Palestinian suffering.

- Palestinian suffering is now an inseparable part of Jewish history, and it demands a moral reckoning and a fundamental shift in how Jews imagine ourselves and others.

11. Against Resignation

- Humanity’s long, nearly uninterrupted history of mass violence and genocide makes it possible for people to resign themselves to contemporary instances of such things.

- We must resist such resignation, commit to the rule of international law, and hold perpetrators accountable, even when they come from among our own people.

- Israel’s genocide—unopposed as it has been by so many Jews—has undermined the point of Holocaust commemoration and disqualified us as stewards of its memory.

12. Who and What Has the Right to Exist

- It is common, following October Seventh, to question Hamas’ very legitimacy, but similar scrutiny should applied to Israeli political parties, which have similarly disqualified themselves through their roles in genocide, ethnic cleansing, and Israel’s apartheid system in the West Bank.

- The long-standing Israeli regime (which exists and operates between the state itself and various individual governments) is based on ethnocratic Jewish supremacy.

- This system—which has led to the widespread dehumanization of Palestinians across Israeli society and thus enabled mass Israeli violence—must be dissolved.

- The question then is not “Does Israel have a right to exist?” It is, rather, “Does this Israeli regime have a right to exist?” The answer is no.

13. Two Years On

- On October 7, 2025, Jewish communities in Israel and the United States will focus on our suffering.

- We should instead be acknowledging what has and is happening in Gaza.

- Israel’s war against Hamas, like so many wars in history, has become a genocide. This is a process common to most genocides.

- Until Jews confront the current reality and reject narratives of our essential victimhood, we will remain on the wrong side of history.

14. The Cease-Fire

- The Trump cease-fire, though a positive development overall, is deeply problematic because it fails to address Israeli culpability for its genocidal destruction of Gaza.

- Though many people in Israel and abroad will view this cease-fire as an ending, we should not look away from Gaza and the West Bank, where conditions of occupation and apartheid will continue.

- It is vital that foreign journalists be allowed access to Gaza in order to learn what happened there over the last two years.

15. On Hostages and Prisoners

- The two-year global Jewish effort to free the Israeli hostages—remarkable in and of itself—took place alongside a simultaneous disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza, a troubling moral inconsistency.

- More than 3,500 Palestinians are currently held under “administrative detention” in Israeli prisons without charges, trials, or access to lawyers. They are thus hostages themselves.

- Only a quarter of Palestinians detained from Gaza have been identified as fighters, meaning that a majority of Palestinian prisoners are likely civilians.

- A society mobilizing itself to free its own hostages while denying or ignoring the thousands it holds captive is a fundamentally corrupt and hypocritical society.

16. The Truth in Dark Times

- Israel’s genocidal campaign was highly popular in Israel and has been supported and enabled by the United States and other Western powers.

- Genocide is currently flourishing across the world, despite the international laws created less than a century ago to prevent it.

- The current figure of 68,000 deaths in Gaza is likely a dramatic undercount. When one takes into consideration indirect deaths caused by destroyed infrastructure and healthcare systems, the true toll in Gaza may be a quarter million people or more.

- It may take some time for final estimates to emerge, but in time they will and they will have to be reckoned with.

17. Israeli Security vs. Palestinian Rights

- Israel’s response to the October Seventh attacks should not be justified by comparing to what “any other country” would do, because October Seventh was not one sovereign state invading another.

- Israel’s prioritization of its own security while dismissing Palestinian rights is unsustainable.

- Israel cannot manage the conflict through military force alone.

- The Israeli prioritization of its security over Palestinian rights requires the dehumanization of Palestinians, which was a necessary condition for the Gaza genocide.

- The tolerance for and support of the Israeli genocide by various western powers will eventually end. When that happens, this genocide will be viewed as belonging to Jews everywhere, due to the inescapable (however unfair) conflation between Israel and Jewishness.

A common assertion made in the immediate aftermath of October Seventh—when it was first becoming clear that Israel’s response to Hamas’ brutal attack would be equally brutal, but would last longer and be executed at a much, much greater scale—was that any other country would do the same.

Any country, attacked as Israel was attacked, would do whatever was necessary to neutralize its attacker and secure its own border.

2.

But the comparison made there—that Israel was simply doing to Gaza and Hamas what, for instance, Spain would do to France and the French army, were France to invade and brutalize Spain’s northern border communities (and take members of these communities hostage)—is inaccurate.

October Seventh was not one sovereign state invading another sovereign state, it was an insurgency, operating in occupied territory, attacking its occupier.

The reality of Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza doesn’t contradict the above claim. The disengagement, as I’ve written about at great length elsewhere, was not the end of Israel’s occupation of Gaza, it was merely a modification of it.

Moreover, the disengagement was undertaken simultaneously (and openly) as part of a larger Israeli effort to expand and deepen its occupation of the West Bank. In other words, the disengagement took place alongside an Israeli effort to make the emergence of a viable Palestinian state less likely.

I don’t say this to justify Hamas’ violence against Israeli civilians. I say it to make clear that Israel wasn’t simply doing what any state would do.

When it comes to Gaza and the West Bank, Israel is not “any other country.” Israel is a country that exists in lieu of another, currently nonexistent, country. Any violence that Israel absorbs or inflicts must be understood in that context.

3.

Israel’s national religion is not Judaism, it’s security. To some extent this is understandable. After all, the people of Israel face very real threats to their security.

Because of this, no one can operate in Israeli politics without speaking and prioritizing the language of security. This is why so many generals and members of Israel’s intelligence community have made their way into politics. It’s why Netanyahu’s brand has long been based on his claim that only he can keep Israelis safe.

4.

But this national religion, this national consensus, rests atop a pair of delusions. First, that Israel can manage and contain this conflict solely through military force. Second, that Israelis can have security while the Palestinians have no rights.

For Israelis, security is the immediate demand and top priority, always. Palestinian rights are viewed, even by the comparatively liberal center-left, as something to be addressed at some point down the road. For the center-right (the political home of most Israelis here in 2025), Palestinian rights aren’t even part of the conversation.

5.

No people will accept having their rights taken from them, to having their rights, at best, deferred, to having their rights treated as something that might be given to them as reward for good behavior.

Because of this, Palestinian violence is entirely predictable under the current conditions. Therefore, Israeli security, as anything but a temporary lull in the violence, is a mirage. Israeli security—true, lasting Israeli security—is only possible through a political settlement.

Unless, of course, one hopes to remove Palestinians from the equation altogether, through wide-scale ethnic cleansing and genocide.

6.

It is here that Israel’s supporters invoke not just the stubbornness of Palestinian violence, but the ideology underpinning it, according to which this isn’t merely the violence of resistance, but rather the violence of elimination. The violence of a people whose ultimate goal is that of turning the tables on the people of Israel. Of replacing Israel, in its entirety, with Palestine.

7.

As I’ve written about elsewhere, there are, without question, maximalist forces among the Palestinian people. Forgetting for a moment that Israel has cultivated such forces—investing in them from their beginning and making them more attractive to the average Palestinian by delegitimizing and undermining more moderate Palestinian leadership in a host of ways for decades—the existence of Palestinian extremists does not change a simple truth: either everyone has the same rights or we have violence. Either the two sides find a way to coexist, or we have endless war.

The Israeli demand for security, when it dismisses Palestinian security, is the demand of the blind.

8.

And yet this is precisely what Israelis have demanded for decades. And this society has only been able to make this demand—earnestly, urgently, and desperately—by internalizing the belief that Palestinians are fundamentally inferior to Israelis.

That it is acceptable for Palestinians to live under occupation and without rights.

That is it reasonable to expect Palestinians to lay down their arms when Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank expands each and every day.

That it is acceptable for Israel to reassert its deterrence by regularly responding to Palestinian violence with disproportionate violence.1

That Palestinian humanity is less real than Israeli humanity.

The amount of self-deception a society must experience in order to convince itself that such an arrangement is acceptable is hard to fathom. This collective self-deception rests atop a profound dehumanization of the Palestinian people as a whole.

9.

All this explains how it is that Israel’s campaign in Gaza—call it what you want, I remain convinced that “genocide” is an accurate term—remained unopposed for so long inside Israel. After all, it was a democratic society, a people’s army, a nation in arms that carried out this campaign for two whole years.2

Because a considerable majority of Israelis agree: our security matters, whereas Palestinian rights—including the right to life—do not.

10.

Israel’s long-running militaristic strategy—designed to assure its people’s security—has made Palestinians among the least secure people on the planet.

Israel has made the average Palestinian in Gaza—who, like any average person anywhere, has very little ability to control his immediate political reality—utterly vulnerable, utterly exposed to death and destruction, utterly unable to ensure even the most basic safety of himself and those closest to him.

11.

A recent, illuminating investigation by the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham shows how all this has played out since October Seventh. Through numerous interviews with Israeli soldiers from across the political spectrum, Abraham reveals how an entire people could have actively participated in a genocide.

The first thing Israeli soldiers did was fail to question the larger militaristic logic underpinning their country’s response. The problem of Hamas was viewed as a security problem, and security problems are to be addressed through military means.

These soldiers then allowed themselves to participate actively in this or that narrowly defined military operation. That these operations may have—to give just one example—required killing 300 Palestinian civilians in order to kill a single “relatively senior Hamas commander” who may have been hiding in the area wasn’t a concern for them.

Abraham writes that:

This mission-oriented framing played a crucial role in enabling ordinary Israelis to participate in genocide . . . By understanding each act of violence as a discrete task, from targeting a Hamas operative to securing a perimeter, soldiers could avoid confronting their role in the mass slaughter of civilians . . . The mission-driven mentality fragments the destruction of a people and place into thousands of isolated acts, each justified on its own terms, none acknowledged as part of a larger campaign of genocide. It allows some of those carrying it out to ignore the overarching intent, even as leaders like Netanyahu . . . articulate it openly.

Of course, one cannot justify participating in an operation that accepts a 300:1 ratio of civilian to terrorist deaths without dehumanizing Palestinians first. Abraham writes that “The soldiers who slaughtered 300 people to kill a single Hamas operative told me they probably would not have done so if one Jewish child had been in the building.”

And in this manner the Israeli military campaign proceeded for over two years. Israel’s security trumping basic Palestinian rights, including the right to live. An entire democratic society joining in this effort, until however many deaths later Donald Trump finally told Netanyahu that it was time to stop.

And as of this writing, Israel has killed well over two hundred Palestinians since the so-called ceasefire went into effect.

12.

It appears the Israeli people have learned nothing over these last two years. They continue to act as if there is a military solution to this conflict, though there is not. Their immediate security remains their only priority. Palestinian rights mean nothing. Palestinian life means nothing. The wholesale dehumanization this thinking requires remains unacknowledged and thus unquestioned.

And so we will see more Palestinian resistance and more disproportionate Israeli retaliation. Israelis will kill Palestinians to ensure their own security, even as all this killing fails to achieve that goal. And because all this has escalated to the point of wide-scale ethnic cleansing and a slow, steady genocide, we will see more of those things as well.

The rest is commentary.

13.

This is going to be my last post for a while. This project was originally written as a book. I posted all its chapters, and then I added another half-dozen posts with my thoughts about the high holidays and more recent developments.

As someone who has written other books, I know that once I’ve finished a book that it’s time for me to stop. Other writers might work differently, but I’m not the kind of person who can continue writing about the same topic over and over again. For that reason, I’m going to resist the urge to use this substack to, as the saying goes, build my brand.

14.

One thing that I would be implying by posting about all this every week indefinitely is that a person somehow needs to be told the same thing repeatedly. But I don’t believe that. This whole situation, in the final account, simply isn’t that complicated, and I say that as someone who has spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to understand it.

Either we acknowledge the basic truth of this situation, this absurd, unjust situation, or we don’t. Either we’re willing to see it or we’re not. If all I’ve written in these posts haven’t yet convinced you, then I don’t know what else to say, except: prepare yourself for a lot more violence, and prepare yourself for a world that will eventually respond to Israel’s incredible violence in a way very different to how it has responded to it so far.

15.

For decades Israel’s violence against Palestinians has largely been tolerated—and often actively supported—by the international community. This tolerance won’t last forever. And since, as I’ve written elsewhere, it is simply not possible to distinguish clearly and completely between Israel and Jewishness, then all Jews, like it or not, ought to think about what this eventual change will mean for us.

If Palestinian well-being doesn’t motivate you, then perhaps your own well-being will.

The title of this entire project is “Our Genocides.” While the second word in that title grabs the most attention, the first is no less important. This genocide belongs to all Jews to one extent or another. That may sound unfair to you, but genocide has little interest in fairness. Jewishness, in its entirety, is now implicated in and inseparable from what the Jewish state is doing. Exactly how, exactly in what sense—those are complicated questions that don’t have simple answers. But the connection is real. Pretending it isn’t will not change that reality.

16.

I wrote these posts out of a clear, unapologetic sense of idealism. Some will discount what I’ve written as such, because, so the argument goes, the current threat renders idealism a luxury we can’t afford in this moment.

But if we’ve learned anything from the last two years and more it’s that if you regularly defer and deprioritize your ideals, then eventually you will find yourself in a position in which you have no access to them whatsoever. You will then eventually have to face the fact that these are not your ideals after all.

17.

If you’re coming to these posts late, I encourage you to go back and read them all from the beginning. And if you think my writing is worth reading, I ask you to share it with others.

In the next week or so, I will post a table of contents of everything I’ve written here, which will include a brief summary of each post.

Thanks for reading, and may better days lie ahead.

Todd Hasak-Lowy

Part One of this series, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

This substack is free. If you’d like to support my work with a one-time donation, you can do so here.

It’s frankly hard to know what to write—or even if to write—in this moment.

The day’s news tracks the flimsy, arguably nonexistent ceasefire, as if anything good, anything lasting, might come of it.

Meanwhile, the main question I keep asking myself: Will Israel face any consequences at all for what it did, for what it continues doing?

The answer—at least in the short term—appears to be no. And so, we are likely to see more of the same going forward.

You know things are bad when The Onion is more accurate, more prescient, than The New York Times.

2.

In a recent article, Martin Shaw—Research Professor at Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI) and author of What is Genocide?—notes that within Israel this genocide (though obviously not categorized as such by almost any Israelis), was nevertheless a “highly popular genocide.”1

He continues:

[T]he vast majority of Jewish Israelis approved. It was also not simply top-down or exclusively statist: the IDF’s civilians in arms played an active part in brutalising and humiliating Palestinian civilians, while extreme-right vigilantes blocked some of the little aid that the state was prepared to allow into Gaza. Israel’s ‘democratic’ claims also played a major role in the wider legitimation of the genocide. Moreover, the USA, Germany, the UK and other Western states participated directly in Israel’s campaign from the start, providing arms, surveillance and diplomatic support. In this sense, it was an internationalized and not purely Israeli affair.2

3.

Shaw returns to this last claim at the very end of his piece, where he writes that “the leaders of all the three major military powers have openly genocidal mentalities,” since “Trump has effectively endorsed Vladimir Putin’s genocidal occupation of parts of Ukraine, already tacitly supported by Xi Jinping whose regime is eliminating Uighur society in Xinjiang.”3

And, of course, the United States, across two administrations, has actively supported and enabled Israel’s campaign in Gaza for over two years.

4.

The final sentence of Shaw’s sobering essay is this: “Israel appears to be prospering in the new age of genocide, but a reckoning beckons once this period has passed.”4

Which raises the obvious question: When might that happen?

Not any time soon.

5.

The big, historical picture looks like this: Almost eighty years after international law was modified to name—in order to prevent—genocide, genocide is flourishing. The most powerful nations in the world are either committing genocide themselves or are directly and openly supporting genocide elsewhere.

The state of Israel, whose very founding and even raison d’être cannot be understood without mentioning the Nazi genocide, is itself committing genocide. The international community shows no signs of taking active steps to stop it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Important international actors, in particular the United States, continues to assist in its execution. The current ceasefire is more likely to slow it down than stop it altogether.

6.

October Seventh pushed Israeli society—which had already moved far to the right in recent decades—even further right.5 As Nathan Thrall—a former director of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli Conflict project—said in a recent interview:

the change for me in the past two years was the realization that mass, large-scale ethnic cleansing was a real possibility. That’s an indication of things getting much, much, much worse. I had discounted that possibility in the absence of a regional war or some kind of really unforeseen cataclysm. Before October 7th, when I heard talk of Israel potentially doing mass ethnic cleansing, I thought, they can’t get away with that in the twenty-first century. I no longer think that . . . things can absolutely get worse.

Maybe I shouldn’t make predictions, but I’ll make one anyway: This is going to worse, possibly much worse, before it gets better.

7.

In the meantime, perhaps the best we can do is speak out and document what has and is happening. Commit to the truth in that way.

Part of me, at a truly morbid level, is waiting for studies that attempt to estimate, as accurately as possible, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 8, 2023.

We all know, more or less, the semi-official figure, which as of this writing sits at around 68,000.

A long-standing pro-Israel talking point is that these numbers—necessarily contaminated by their association with Gaza’s Hamas-run bureaucracy—are inflated.

But they’re almost certainly not. As Nir Hasson wrote in Haaretz in September, 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry

doesn’t just publish headline numbers, but backs them up with detailed lists that include the full name (including those of the father and grandfather) and identity card number of the deceased. The ID numbers are issued by Israel. Thus, if the Israeli government thought the lists were unreliable, the Gaza Health Ministry gave it the tools to refute them. The fact that Israel gave up trying to refute the figures testifies to their reliability.

Moreover, an investigation into the Israeli intelligence database “indicates that at least 83 percent of Palestinians killed in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza were civilians.” This figure has been echoed elsewhere.

If accurate, Israel has killed over 55,000 civilians since October 8, 2023.

8.

And there are many reasons to assume that the true figure is in fact much higher. Sara Roy—one of the world’s leading experts on Gaza, whose work I’ve discussed at length elsewhere—recently wrote, in regards to the 68,000 figure, that

Those are the official statistics, which include only reported deaths compiled by hospitals and morgues and caused by Israeli military action. They are, without question, gross underestimates. Between ten and fifteen thousand additional people are presumed buried under the rubble of their homes—also considered a dramatic undercount, both because wartime conditions impede data collection and because the killing of so many entire families has left no one to report.

Roy is referring, at the end of that quote, to the “2,180 families that have been entirely annihilated.”

In addition to the fact that bodies buried under rubble are not being counted, Neta C. Crawford—professor of International Relations at Oxford—notes that “the public health infrastructure in Gaza necessary for the reporting and analysis” of direct deaths “is badly damaged,” which is also contributing to a likely undercount.

A Gaza Mortality Survey, released in January 2025, also reached the conclusion that the official Ministry of Health data represents a significant undercount. This team—led by Michael Spagat, an expert on mortality in violent conflicts at the University of London—estimated the number of violent deaths at 75,200.

In January 2025, the official figure was only 45,650.

If this survey’s findings are accurate, then the current number of direct deaths is by now well over 100,000.

9.

And none of the above addresses indirect deaths. Roy mentions a July 2024 Lancet piece—which itself quotes a Geneva Declaration Secretariat study—suggesting a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for every direct one in contemporary armed conflict.

Spagat believes that for a time the ratio in Gaza might have been considerably lower, since Gazan society has long been the recipient of considerable, highly coordinated aid efforts. In addition, “Gaza’s social and communal structure,” that is, its robust “family support networks,” might have been expected, initially, to insulate its population from high rates of indirect deaths.

But after two years these mitigating factors no longer exist in Gaza, leading Crawford to this conclusion: “if anything, the deterioration of conditions in Gaza since 2024 suggests that the ratio of indirect to direct deaths will be on the high end.”

Not only this, but due to the absence of housing, the destruction of the healthcare system, and inadequate access to food and water, such additional mortality cannot be stopped anytime soon. As Crawford writers, “The scale of devastation in Gaza likely means that the future indirect death toll will be extremely high, even if the war ended today.”

10.

If—and, yes, this is a big if, so maybe it’s irresponsible of me to write this, but maybe it’s actually more irresponsible for us not to consider the following—if, say, 100,000 Palestinians have already been killed directly, and if indirect deaths outnumber direct deaths at a ratio of only three to one, then Israel is already responsible for 400,000 Palestinians deaths since October 8, 2023.

Maybe that figure is way off. But maybe it’s not. Maybe even that figure is in fact a meaningful undercount. After all, if the ratio of indirect to direct deaths is four to one, well, you can do the math.

11.

These sure sounds like outrageous figures, but why exactly? Because we’re constantly reminded of the much lower, official direct death figure, which all the experts know is inaccurate? Because we’re also constantly told that this figure may be inflated, despite the fact that even Israelis officials regular quote it? Because 250,000 is simply an unthinkable figure? Because it’s unimaginable that we’re living in a world in which Israel is responsible for that much death?

The truth—and on this all the experts are in agreement—we have only the vaguest idea what the actual number is. We have only estimates, estimates being made in incredibly chaotic and dangerous conditions.

There is simply no way to know right now. But I think we’d all agree on this: it’s best we know. And based on all the reading I’ve done about this, I’d be shocked if the figure is anywhere close to 68,000. It is likely much, much higher than that.

12.

If and when conditions in Gaza make it possible for experts to assemble and publish more rigorous mortality estimates, you can be sure that Israel and its supporters will be ready to cast doubt on them. Hamas will be blamed for tampering with the figures. Academics will be accused of left-wing bias.

But it’s time to realize that many people—indeed a significant percentage of our own community—will find high estimates coming from those very qualified to make them to be perfectly plausible.

After all, as of April 2025, more than half of American adults expressed an unfavorable opinion of Israel.

Even 39% of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide.

We are living through an epistemic crisis in general, a time when there is very little agreement on the basic reality in which we live. As such, a couple things seem likely:

First, when the experts’ final mortality numbers begin to emerge, those who don’t want to believe them won’t, and those who want to believe them will. And each group will find the sources necessary to back up their beliefs.

But, second: the latter group—those inclined to believe the worst—may well be bigger than the former group. All this despite two years of efforts by the Israeli hasbara (roughly, PR) machine and its American supporters to convince the public that what Israel is doing is either not that bad or is somehow justifiable in the final account.

I also believe this latter group will be on the side truth.

13.

I have addressed all my posts to American Jews, in order to ask them to confront and accept the truth of this current moment. It sure feels hard to see the exact value of that right now, as impunity rules the day.

But in time—as Martin Shaw writes—this period will pass.

Until then, I encourage you to seek out the truth and share it with others. And to demand that our institutions face this truth as well.

The truth awaiting us will not, I fear, be easy to face.

But this will not make it any less true.

Part One of this series, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

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Bring them home.

These three words gave expression to one of the most remarkable subplots of the last two years. On October Seventh, amidst the larger slaughter, 251 people were taken hostage. Mostly civilians, mostly Jewish Israelis.

Their fellow Israelis, along with Jews around the world, would not let them be forgotten. For two years, Israelis would not allow their government, whose priorities ultimately appeared to lie elsewhere, sacrifice or simply abandon these captives.

There were weekly protests. Yellow ribbons. Dog tags inscribed with their names. Public spaces in Israel were covered with their faces. Each hostage’s individual identity became known by all.

In the diaspora, similar gestures were made. The ribbons, the lawn signs, the rallies. Banners in front of synagogues. I’m told that the faces of the hostages, printed out life-sized on posters, were given seats in the main sanctuary of my childhood temple, these seats devoted solely to them throughout their captivity.

A massive, global effort to fight for their liberation, to prevent them from disappearing forever inside those dark tunnels.

Truly remarkable. One can only wonder what it must be like now to be one of the newly freed hostages. To return to Israel and begin to realize all that was done to bring you safely back home.

2.

In and of itself, what a beautiful effort. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people, working together for the sake of—in the end—twenty-five human beings.

But I will confess—now that the living are back home—that I struggled to embrace this effort in the context of the raw numbers. I saw the single-minded concern for a couple hundred people being expressed alongside disregard for two million people. I understood, of course, that the couple hundred were “ours,” while the two million were “them.” But as their conditions continued to deteriorate, as a thousand or more of them was killed for each one of ours held hostage, I found the continuous, nearly exclusive attention on the hostages deeply troubling.

If the fight for the hostages’ release stemmed in part from the fact that so many of them were civilians, were thus fundamentally innocent, then where was the display of concern for the fifteen or twenty thousand Palestinian children killed? Were they not fundamentally innocent as well?

This I couldn’t square.

3.

But maybe you say, This was war, and terrible things happen in war. Maybe you make the case, once again, All Hamas had to do was surrender and release the hostages, and all their suffering—the hunger, the homelessness, the bombing—would have ended. Hamas brought this onto their own people.

4.

Rather than respond to that argument—which I’ve already done elsewhere—I want to raise a related matter, a highly related matter, one I’ve briefly raised before: there are Palestinian hostages as well. There are, in fact, many more Palestinians hostages. There are, as of this writing, many more Palestinian hostages than there ever were Israeli hostages.

5.

According to a guest essay published in The New York Times on October 15, 2025, “The Other Hostages,” there are more than 11,000 Palestinians currently held in Israeli prisons.

To be clear, not all of these prisoners should be considered hostages. Certainly some are fighters, militants, terrorists, whatever you prefer to call them.

But over 3,500 Palestinians are currently being held under “administrative detention.” No charges have been lodged against them. They will be given no trial.

What should we call these people?

What exactly do you call a person being held captive when that person has been charged with no crime, cannot see a lawyer, and is not allowed to receive visitors? What is the word that describes the status of such a person if not “hostage”?

6.

Perhaps you say, Well, this doesn’t mean they’re not guilty. Surely the Israelis weren’t just grabbing people off the street randomly.

According to the IDF’s own databases, only a quarter of the detainees from Gaza have been identified as fighters.

So who are the rest? Why were they arrested and why are they still being locked up?

7.

It seems overwhelmingly likely that in the weeks and months to come we will hear quite a bit about the horrific experiences of the Israeli hostages, these people who spent two years underground. Little would surprise me here. Abuse, sexual abuse, torture, starvation, you name it. The worst one human being can inflict on another.

But it’s hard to picture their suffering being any greater than what Palestinian prisoners and/or hostages are enduring. Andrew Ross, professor of sociology at NYU and author of the Times guest essay, describes “documented testimony,” in which Palestinians:

said that while incarcerated they have been subject to beatings, torture, rape and extreme deprivation. Men and women spoke about loud music played for hours on end, attacks by dogs, waterboarding, suspension from ceilings and severe sexual and gender-based violence. Some of the prisoners released this week confirmed that they, too, had been exposed to brutal conditions and abuse.

The IDF rejects these allegations, but such things have been documented before, and in great detail.1 And at least 77 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli custody since October Seventh.2

8.

The taking of civilian hostages is a war crime. This is stated explicitly in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Hamas is guilty of this crime. The IDF is also guilty of this crime, and it appears to be guilty of many, many more cases than their Palestinian counterparts. Over ten times more.

9.

There is much more than could be said about all that. As Ross notes, Israel has long used the taking of prisoners as an integral component in its war against the Palestinian people. “Since 1967, an estimated one million Palestinians have been arrested and locked up.”

Surely, some of these prisoners posed a direct and even immediate threat to the Israeli population.

But how many did not?

Issa Amro is a nonviolent Palestinian activist who lives in the West Bank. He unequivocally rejects violent methods. And he has been “arrested more times than he can count.”

How many Palestinians have been arrested simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? How many have been arrested simply because some Israeli soldier—angry, scared, whatever—knew that there would be no consequences—that there could be no consequences—for arresting an innocent Palestinian civilian on a whim?

As Ross writes, “There can be no doubt . . . that Israel’s war on prisoners was the third front in its assault on Gaza and the West Bank.”

My only hesitation with Ross’ characterization of all this is his choice to use the past tense.

10.

A person held in captivity without any rights, without recourse to any process that might lead to their freedom, is a person experiencing absolute powerlessness and thus absolute vulnerability.

A society whose members work together to secure the freedom of one of their own, one who finds themself in the above situation, is a society responding positively and justly to a sense of collective responsibility. These people are right to be outraged by the reality of the hostage, and they are right to do something about it.

But when this same society simultaneously creates a situation of absolute powerlessness and vulnerability for members of another collective, and when this society denies this fact, or remains indifferent to it, then this society—regardless of how tirelessly it advocates for its own hostages—is a corrupt society. It is a society marked by hypocrisy. When the number of helpless hostages its side holds greatly outnumbers those held by the other side, then this society might accurately be viewed as suffering from collective delusion.

And when this society’s diasporic counterparts—in good faith or bad, out of ignorance or with full knowledge of the facts—join them in all this, in placing at the very center of its community the call to liberate its hostages, while at the same time denying or ignoring the reality of the hostages its side holds captive, something is wrong with this community, too. When this diasporic community mobilizes its institutions, including its spiritual centers, for this purpose, then this community, too, is broken, corrupt, and even delusional.

11.

The ultimate reason for this post—and really for all my posts—is this: either you think all lives are equal, or you don’t. Yes, I know that each of us is a member of this or that group, and thus not a member of some other group. As such, it is only natural to value the members of our group over members of the other group, at least a little. I realize as well that when one group—“our” group—is at war with another group—“their” group—that such unequal valuing grows only more lopsided.

But at some point, even during war, you must ask yourself: are these other people human beings or are they not? Does their inherent, innate, inalienable humanity exist, or does it not?

When you find yourself—when we find ourselves—turning the call to release twenty-five innocent people into a sacred, central ritual, while altogether ignoring the captivity of thousands of other innocent people, who we, too, hold in blatant violation of international law, what exactly does that say about us?

What does that say about our own humanity?

Part One of this series, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

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We have a cease-fire.

Overall, this is a positive development. It is certainly an improvement over the last two years.

The steady stream of Palestinian civilians being killed by the IDF will stop. More aid will be allowed in, meaning that the use of starvation and enforced hunger as tools of collective punishment will also stop. The devastated infrastructure of Gaza can now begin to be rebuilt.1

And, of course, the remaining Israeli hostages have been freed, their nightmare—at least the worst of it—now over. Many more Palestinian prisoners, the majority of whom (as I’ve written elsewhere) should be viewed as hostages themselves, will be freed as well.2

It is good that there is a cease-fire. It is good that so many people held in captivity, despite committing no crime, are now free.

2.

There are other things to like about the larger Trump plan, in particular Point 16, which explicitly states that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.”3

But if you zoom out, this plan offers little to get excited about.

3.

This plan frames Hamas as the central problem. According to Point 13, Hamas agrees “to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly or indirectly, in any form.”

As I’ve mentioned multiple times, I do not support or defend Hamas. They are part of the disastrous state of leadership on both sides. They played an active role in bringing us to a situation in which something as basic as a long overdue cease-fire is a cause for celebration.

My complaint here is with the lack of any attention given to the culpability of the Israeli side. No mention is made of any Israeli political parties that should similarly “not have any role in governance” by virtue of all they have done over the last two years. The very legitimacy of Netanyahu’s genocidal government is not addressed.

The Palestinian Authority must reform itself (Points 9 and 19), but no mention is made of the grave threat this Israeli government (like many Israeli governments before it) poses to the safety of every single Palestinian living in Gaza (not to mention the West Bank as well). The architects of the Trump plan support the Israeli leadership carrying on as before.

The demilitarization of Gaza (point 13) is a precondition for next steps. Israel, by contrast, must merely “suspend” its military operations and freeze its “battle lines” (point 3) until conditions are met for the complete staged withdrawal.

4.

One can certainly argue that Israel won this military contest; therefore, the losing side must concede more than the victor.

But this hasn’t been, for the last year at least, a military contest. It has been a campaign of total violence waged against all Palestinians in Gaza. As Omer Bartov—an Israeli-born genocide scholar—writes in a recent essay, “the evidence shows that the very use of the term ‘war’ for what has been happening in Gaza since at least the summer of 2024 is a euphemism for a systematic campaign of demolition.”

That this cease-fire plan altogether ignores Israel’s egregious, genocidal destruction of Gaza shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is an American plan after all, and for many, many years American political leaders and negotiators have shown little interest in treating the Israelis and the Palestinians as equals.

5.

Nowhere in this plan is the West Bank or the occupation mentioned. The “aspiration” of the Palestinian people for statehood is recognized (Point 19), but a close look at the plan’s precise language reveals just how hollow this recognition is:

“While Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”

Even if the Palestinian side holds up its end of the plan—reforming itself, all while a country led by a man wanted by the International Criminal Court is left to self-govern as before—the situation will remain one of “may,” of maybe, of possibly. The “recognition” here is merely the recognition that the Palestinian people aspire to statehood. The fundamental legitimacy of this aspiration is not recognized. This is merely a recognition, by those with real power, that someone else, someone comparatively powerless, wants something.

Such recognition is meaningless.

6.

But none of this should come as a surprise. This is cease-fire plan, not a roadmap to peace. The plan guarantees little beyond ending the immediate violence, returning the hostages, letting in aid, marginalizing Hamas, and commencing the massive task of rebuilding Gaza.

Everything else is speculation. That it’s taken two years to get to this moment, that Israel has literally flattened much of Gaza in the meantime, that the international community has stood by while Netanyahu extended the war for his own reasons rather than prioritize the return of the hostages, all this is a sobering indictment of the current world order, in particular the United States.

That “Donald Trump” and “Nobel Prize” are now appearing in the same sentence in reputable news sources is just one more sign of how truly dark this hour is. Like Biden before him, Trump had the power, from his very first day in office, to end this. He chose not to. He chose instead to continue providing everything the Israelis needed—from the bombs to the diplomatic cover—to continue their wholesale destruction of Gaza.

This war has made a joke of international law. Merely ending it after two years will do nothing to change that.

7.

Who knows exactly what the future will bring, but one outcome strikes me as overwhelmingly likely.

The Israeli people, now that the ordeal of the hostages is finally over, will ignore Gaza. I know this will happen, because for the last two years the Israeli people have ignored everything about Gaza except for the hostages held there. The vast majority of Israeli society is indifferent to what its army has done to Gaza over the last two years.4

As Bartov writes in that same essay, Israeli society is currently riddled with and in some senses defined by its multifaceted denial of what is happening Gaza, along with the conflict more generally. This denial begins with “refusing to see the true cause of the violence,” and extends to include everything from “the denial of the occupation” to “the denial of the context of the 7th October.”

I can see no reason to believe this denial will end now.

8.

It is certainly possible that the remarkable energy devoted to securing the hostages’ release will be repurposed into the kind of mass protest movement Israel saw in the months prior to October Seventh, when hundreds of thousands of people protested against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul. Such a movement might succeed in forcing early elections or an official inquiry into how October Seventh could have happened in the first place.

But there will be no inquiry into what the IDF did in Gaza over the last two years. There will be no mass movement working to stop—let alone reverse—Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Such matters lie outside the Israeli public’s zone of interest.

After two awful years, Israelis will understandably want life to return to normal, to the quotidian concerns of work and family. As before, Israelis will attempt to live as if the conflict doesn’t exist. They will tell themselves there is no partner. They will choose not to think about the occupation. They will choose not to think about the fact that millions of people in their democracy cannot vote, that millions of people in their democracy have no rights at all, that this means they don’t actually live in a democracy.

Israelis will choose not to think about how unjust and untenable and absurd their situation is.

9.

When it comes to the writing of history, beginnings and endings are, to a great extent, constructs, that is, the results of choices made by whoever is doing the narrating. The historian—along with the journalist reporting on the present—decides when to start their story.

October Seventh has overwhelmingly been narrated as a beginning. The beginning of this war, the beginning of the hostages’ nightmare. Whatever came before that day was more or less ignored. As if some relatively peaceful equilibrium was unilaterally upended by Hamas on that day.

But October Seventh was merely the start of a new period in the larger history of the conflict. Consider all the stories already long underway before October Seventh: the story of Palestinian statelessness, the story of Israeli occupation, the story of Israeli settlement expansion, the story of Israeli apartheid, the story of Israel’s brutal relationship to Gaza since the 2005 disengagement, the story of violent Palestinian resistance, and the story of violent, often disproportionate, Israeli retaliation.

Consider the difference between all that and a relatively peaceful equilibrium.

Consider all one must ignore to start the story on October Seventh.

10.

But since October Seventh is widely understood as the beginning, this cease-fire—thanks mainly to the return of the hostages—will be understood as an ending. And we all know that once something ends you are allowed, expected even, to turn your attention elsewhere. There is definitely much else demanding our attention these days, and some of it is truly urgent indeed.

But we shouldn’t look away. Much of what had already started well before October Seventh will continue now that the hostages are back home. If we accept this cease-fire as an ending, then the ongoing conflict will simmer until the next time this or that group of Palestinian militants causes it to boil over. When that happens, much of the world—its attention elsewhere in the interim—will once again narrate the latest Palestinian violence as the sudden, outrageous beginning of something, as if the status quo of occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing weren’t underway all the while.

The cease-fire is only the end of this round of fighting, the end of the Israeli hostages’ captivity. This is all that has ended. Everything else continues. If we forget that, if we let others circulate the fiction of this ending, then the next “beginning” will be mislabeled, too, much as October Seventh has been mislabeled as a beginning over and over and over again during the last two years.

11.

A crime has been committed in Gaza. Quite possibly the “crime of crimes,” that is, genocide. After a crime is committed, the story shouldn’t be brought to an end. As our detective novels and police series tell us, this is actually when the story typically begins. Someone must investigate. The perpetrator must be identified, apprehended, and brought to justice.

Beyond ending the very worst of Palestinian suffering, my main cause for hope stems from the possibility that foreign journalists will be allowed into Gaza for the first time in two years. In truth, Trump’s plan says nothing about this, so who knows if they will actually be given access. But about this, at least, I am guardedly optimistic.

If they are, then the investigation can now begin in earnest. We already know who, in general, is the culprit. We already know what, in general, they have done. But the truth of their crime, the full scale of it, remains unknown, and disputed as such.

We can’t look away from Gaza now, can’t accept this moment as an ending, because the story of this crime is very much ongoing.

It is vital that a fuller, clearer picture of what exactly has happened in and to Gaza since October Seventh emerges. We need expert estimates of deaths. We need official reports from respected international human rights organizations describing in detail all that the people in Gaza experienced and endured during this period. We need brave, moral Israeli reporters—reporters with access to their country’s military operations and political decisions—to expose precisely all their fellow Israelis did.

Such things—along with eventual verdicts from the International Criminal Court—represent the best possibility for this episode receiving the ending, the closure, it deserves.

We are, of course, unlikely to receive such closure any time soon. Trump is, at best, indifferent. The EU is feckless. But public opinion can register the truth, can alter the dynamics of electoral politics at home and abroad, can treat a criminal regime as fundamentally illegitimate.

Such a shift is already underway here in the United States. Efforts to reveal the full truth of Gaza will lend credence to calls for Israel’s isolation, which is necessary if any real change is ever to come.

Don’t look away from Gaza. Don’t let anyone tell you this is over.

If you care about justice, then the story of this “war” is just beginning.

Part One of this series, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

If you think this post is worth reading, please share with your network.

This substack is free. If you’d like to support my work with a one-time donation, you can do so here.

Tuesday will be two years. Two years since October Seventh.

Israelis will mark the day by mourning and commemorating and demanding the hostages’ release. They will call for this war to end. They will attempt, unsuccessfully, to measure and name all they have suffered and all they have lost.

2.

Here in the United States, many American Jews will join them, will stand with Israelis in solidarity, will attempt—through prayer and ritual and song, through somber emails and heartfelt appeals—to mark these two years since the horror, to mark these two years of horror.

There are many people over there who could use our sympathy and compassion. It has been a difficult and terrible two years.

3.

Even so, this should not be the main order of business. Not for them and not for us. Not even on Tuesday itself.

4.

I spent the weekend reading Norman. M. Naimark’s Genocide: A World History.1

I’m trying to get a fuller grasp of this concept. I’m trying to understand what exactly it was that Raphael Lemkin named, and what exactly the international community then adopted and passed into law.

“Genocide,” as a word and as a coherent concept, is only around eighty years old. But Naimark, like so many other scholars of the subject, retroactively identifies genocide as a near-constant in our species’ history. Well before we had a name for it, we did it regularly, and we did it most everywhere. And we’ve never stopped for long.

5.

One of the mains thing I’m learning, as Naimark aptly puts it, is that “War, above all, serves as the seedbed for genocide.”2

Most every genocide he writes about—from those narrated in the Bible to the slaughter in Darfur—is in some way war-related. Genocide is a strand of war, a by-product of it, a final, awful escalation of it. War is an excuse for genocide, an opportunity to undertake it.

War makes genocide possible. War makes it desirable. War transforms one people into the kind of people willing to obliterate another people.

The history of genocide is the history of a complex, protracted process that one group is able to set in motion thanks to the dangerous, deteriorating instability of war.

Israel’s war in Gaza is yet another example of this.

Two years later, on the day itself, we must acknowledge what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians. We must see this war for what it actually is, for how exactly it has been waged and to what ends. We must see what it has become, which is not just a war.

6.

At some point in the future, once journalists have finally been let in, once the scholars and the experts and lawyers and judges have completed their first round of work on the matter (for this is the kind of matter that experts will work on for many, many years to come), we will have a better sense just what to call it.

Who knows, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’ll conclude it’s not quite genocide. Maybe it’s only crimes against humanity, maybe it’s merely war crime after war crime after war crime. But however exactly scholars choose to categorize it, Israel’s actions belong among those set of collective human acts that represent the worst that one people can inflict upon another.

That it has happened in war, that Hamas threatens and kills Israelis doesn’t change that; in fact, this is often how it works. Study Rwanda. Study the former Yugoslavia. Guatemala. East Timor. Genocide is war deformed and unrestrained.

As of this writing, yes, Gaza is comparatively smaller in scale than many other genocides. But keep in mind, it’s ongoing. Even if this ceasefire is agreed upon, many of the conditions will remain.

Moreover, it’s being committed by the very people who self-appointed themselves to teach the rest of the world to never again do such things.

How exactly are we to read the raw numbers against that last damning truth? And how much worse is it that we, of all people, refuse to see what is there in plain sight to see?

7.

Either we acknowledge the violence in Gaza for what it is—a variation on the very worst one group can do to another group in the midst of war—or we continue on blindly, lost in our denial and our determination to view ourselves, yet again, as the unfairly hated, targeted, and victimized protagonist of our centuries-long Jewish drama.

True, we’re not so bad when compared to the worst of the worst. The Khmer Rouge. The Hutus. The Nazis.

But make no mistake, Israelis are on the same path.

They are experimenting with the same recipe. The dehumanization. The starvation. The ethnic cleansing. The extreme privation. The forced exposure to homelessness in the absence of medical care. The extended mobilization of considerable human, economic, and military resources—for two years now—to create this scale of destruction, to produce this alternate reality of indescribable and inescapable mass suffering.

8.

Some of us still say it is not genocide, it is not even those other, arguably lesser things. Some of us blame the Palestinians’ violence. October Seventh. The hostages. The terror. Their dream to eliminate every last one of us.

But war involves awfulness on all sides. That’s what war is. And war becomes genocide when one side finds itself willing and able to escalate until few, if any, restraints remain, until few, if any, members of the other side are considered off limits.

9.

Genocide requires a complete dismissal of the basic humanity of another people, in its entirety. And Israelis have dismissed the Palestinians’ humanity. Israelis have done it over there, and we have justified this over here. And tomorrow we will dismiss the Palestinians’ humanity once again, by claiming that October Seventh and the two years since is really about us, is our story, the Palestinians little more than those villains who fight for Hamas.

I know all this to be true, because even after everything Israel has done, tomorrow, on October Seventh, both in Israel and here in the United States, many of our people will insist on huddling around our own terrible suffering, yet again. Many of our people will look in the mirror and see only our own victimhood, only our own vulnerability. Many of our people will look at ourselves and find a way to deny and ignore and minimize and justify what our side is doing to the Palestinians.

We will say, It’s just a war.

And so we will remain on the wrong side of history, where we will remain until we can confront the truth and find another way of being, as individuals, and as a people.

Part One of this series, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

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One of the few things that just about everyone—at least in the mainstream Jewish and American communities—agrees on since October Seventh is this: Hamas can have no role in any future Palestinian government or self-rule; indeed, there can be no place for Hamas in any future Israel/Palestine, because Hamas is a ruthless terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction.

I was in the middle of gathering sources to show how pervasive this belief is when I realized I couldn’t think of a single time I’ve read or heard someone assert the opposite. That is, I don’t know of anyone—not a pundit, expert, or politician—who is willing to state publicly that Hamas didn’t altogether delegitimize itself on October Seventh.1

2.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to challenge this conventional wisdom.

I think Hamas’ relationship to violence played a meaningful role in the ongoing escalation that led to this moment. As I’ve written elsewhere, I deplore their fundamentalism, maximalism, and extremism.2

3.

But what about the Israeli side of things?

If we give ourselves license to make pronouncements about who can and cannot participate in running some future Palestine or Palestinian governing body, then what happens when we turn our attention to Israeli political parties?

Which of them stands up to similar scrutiny? If we want this contested land to be free from violence, if we want all people between the river and the sea to live in safety and dignity and enjoy full political and human rights, then which Israeli political parties could be part of such a future? Which of them might actually contribute to its creation?

The short answer—if we look at today’s Israeli political landscape—is: not many.

4.

All members of the current Israeli governing coalition—which at various times has included Likud, Religious Zionism, Noam, New Hope, National Unity, Otzma Yehudit, United Torah Judaism, and Shas—have, like Hamas, disqualified themselves.

These parties have been governing during a period in which Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza.3 Surely, if the horrific, indiscriminate, genocidal violence of October Seventh disqualifies Hamas, then the much, much greater indiscriminate, genocidal violence of Israel’s current government disqualifies all the parties that are a part of it.

In addition, these parties are also, right now, overseeing the intense acceleration of the violent ethnic cleansing campaign underway in the West Bank.

If our international political and legal order is to have any meaning, any force, then Israeli political parties overseeing genocide and ethnic cleansing cannot be allowed to have a role in any future Israeli government.

5.

I could continue like this, by next exploring the platforms and histories of various opposition parties in order to see which of them have spoken out against or challenged Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza and creeping annexation of the West Bank. Many such parties are now calling for the war to end, but very few have expressed any concern whatsoever regarding—take your pick—Israel’s genocide, crimes against humanity, or ethnic cleansing.

Voicing such concern—indeed, acknowledging that Palestinians are human beings whose basic human rights are non-negotiable—is simply not part of mainstream Israeli political discourse.

6.

But I won’t bother with this line of inquiry, because there is another criterion that can be used to measure the legitimacy of these other Israeli political parties.

Which parties—whether they call it this or not, and, of course, very, very few do—oppose Israel’s apartheid in the West Bank?4 Which of these parties are not stained by their past participation in a governing coalition that continued funding and expanding the settlement project?

Put differently, which Israeli political parties have not actively contributed to the ongoing entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and the apartheid it has created?

When we ask these questions, then not only are all the parties mentioned in Section 4 above disqualified, but so are numerous ostensibly center and even left-wing parties, such as Yesh Atid and Labor.

Overall, the vast majority of Israeli political parties—some more openly than others, some more enthusiastically than others—support what Oren Yiftachel, a professor of political and legal geography at Ben-Gurion University, calls “ethnocracy.”

7.

What is an ethnocracy? Here’s Yiftachel’s definition:

Such regimes are states that maintain a relatively open government, yet facilitate a nondemocratic seizure of the country and polity by one ethnic group. A key conceptual distinction is elaborated between ethnocratic and democratic regimes. Ethnocracies, despite exhibiting several democratic features, lack a democratic structure. As such, they tend to breach key democratic tenets, such as equal citizenship . . . universal suffrage, and protection against the tyranny of the majority.5

8.

The vast majority of Israeli political parties support their country’s ethnocracy and contribute to reinforcing this arrangement.

Not only that, but ethnocracy appears to grow more extreme over time. One sign of this in the Israeli case: some Israeli political parties are today only tolerated, are only legal, thanks to the evolution of this ethnocracy.

Consider Otzma Yehudit (literally “Jewish Strength” or “Jewish Power”), an openly Jewish supremacist party, one that is part of the current governing coalition, headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security.6

One can debate just how mainstream Otzma Yehudit is, but that is to miss the point.

The point is this: Otzma Yehudit is legally permitted to participate openly in Israeli elections and even be welcomed into the governing coalition. This is analogous to candidates from the Ku Klux Klan Party being allowed to appear on ballots in American elections. That Otzma Yehudit enjoys this legal status is evidence of the way Israeli ethnocracy has grown more extreme over time. Its precursor, Meir Kahane’s Kach party, was outlawed for inciting racism and prevented from participating in the 1988 elections.

Though Oztma Yehudit is perhaps the most extreme case, the Religious Zionist Party, chaired by Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, is also an explicitly Jewish supremacist party. Together with Otzma Yehudit, the two parties control over ten percent of seats in parliament and approximately twenty percent of the governing coalition.

Overall, the fact that such parties are legal requires us to question not just their legitimacy, but the legitimacy of the current Israeli regime as a whole.

9.

In his recent essay,7 “The Question of Israel’s Right to Exist is a Red Herring,” Ian S. Lustick, emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania (whose work I’ve quoted elsewhere), makes a crucial distinction between government, regime, and state. Here’s the difference:

A state is a territorially defined community recognized as such by its membership in the United Nations. A regime is a legal order within a state that specifies what is permitted and what is not permitted by its institutions and how people are chosen to fill the positions and carry out the functions it authorizes. A government is the specific group of individuals who, at any one time, fill those positions and make policy decisions.8

According to Lustick, Israel, since its founding in 1948, has had only a single regime, one that emerged directly from the Zionist movement’s pre-state “economic, political, and military institutions.”

The crucial feature of this regime is this: “It is a legal and ideological order based on fronting as a liberal democracy while dedicated, above all, to implementing and expanding the presence and success of its Jewish inhabitants.”

10.

Lustick devotes considerable space in order to defend his claim that this regime “fronts” as a liberal democracy but in fact functions to advance the interests of Jewish Israelis. On the one hand, most obviously, is the occupation itself; on the other hand, the “scores” of discriminatory laws faced by Palestinian-Israelis living inside Israel proper.

After detailing all that and more, Lustick arrives at his key claim:

For three-quarters of a century, the Israeli regime has shown itself incapable of integrating or reaching a civilized peace with Palestinians, who, even excluding refugees living outside the country, are now equal in number to Jews living in the area ruled by that regime. It is therefore proper to ask whether the regime in Israel any longer deserves to exist.

10.

Note that the question here is not: “Does Israel have a right to exist?”

As Lustick writes, “[R]egimes can become evil without contaminating the states within which they operate. And regimes can be replaced without ending the existence of the states ruled by those regimes.”

The most obvious example of this is the fate of Germany after the Second World War. The Nazi regime came to end, the state of Germany did not. South Africa provides another such example.

11.

One can argue over whether or not this Israeli regime was destined to evolve as it has. Was it ever possible for the tension, even contradiction, inherent in Liberal Zionism to be resolved in favor of the former? That is, was it ever possible for Israel to evolve in such a way that its democratic, liberal, and humanist values would have ultimately prevailed over its Jewish supremacist currents—rather than the other way around?

There are many forks in the road one could revisit in this context. Consider, for instance, the episode of the Jewish Underground in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This underground was made up of violent religious settlers, some of whom were arrested in the process of attempting to blow-up buses ridden by Palestinian Arabs.9 These Israelis were convicted of their crimes but soon released from prison, a decision approved by then Prime Minister, Yizthak Shamir.

What would have been the fate of the Israeli regime had these Jewish terrorists been treated exactly as Palestinian terrorists are treated? What would have happened if Israeli political leaders had responded to this incident as the dire warning that it was? What would have been the fate of the entire settlement project if Israel’s leaders viewed burgeoning Jewish terror in the West Bank as a sign of the literally explosive potential of messianic Zionism?

Had Israel’s leaders, some five decades ago, concluded that the only way to put this genie back in the bottle was to get rid of the West Bank altogether and as quickly as possible, well, who knows, maybe a truly Liberal Zionism would have won the day. Maybe we would now be living in a relatively peaceful, two-state reality.

12.

It’s an interesting hypothetical, but it’s the wrong mental exercise, because that alternative outcome is no longer possible, if it ever was.

If our concern is with the future that will emerge from our actual present, the only question worth contemplating is: Can this Israeli regime, here in 2025, be rehabilitated?

13.

I am highly skeptical it can.

Jewish supremacy in Israel has, simply put, eclipsed Israeli democracy.10 This is true today whether or not it ever could have been otherwise.

The degradation of Israeli democracy is obvious even if we look only at the situation for Jewish Israelis, since the on again, off again judicial reform (or judicial overhaul) effort would, if it ever succeeds, weaken democracy for Jews there.

The full ascendancy of Jewish supremacy is apparent in both the make-up of the Knesset and in the reality of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

Though actual genocide has only been committed by a single Israeli government, the continuity between this campaign and the actions and policies of previous governments—as I’ve shown elsewhere—suggest that the problem here is not one government, but the regime itself.

Genocide, ethnic cleansing,11 and apartheid were not the inevitable destination of this regime, but they are one logical outcome—and the actual outcome—of the meeting between this regime and the Palestinian people.

14.

However strident you may find my argument so far—according to which a majority of Israeli political parties, and the regime of which they’re a part, need to be dissolved—the full implications of my claims are even more far-reaching.

Simply put, the triumph of Jewish supremacy is most evident in Israeli society itself. Throughout Jewish Israeli society, militaristic attitudes and wide-spread dehumanization of the Palestinian people have combined to make the current genocide not just a reality, but a reality that—in the absence of international pressure—the Israeli people are unable and, in many cases, altogether uninterested in stopping.

One can innumerate Hamas’ sins at great length, but the fact remains: throughout most of Israeli society, Jewish life is valued so much more than Palestinian life that the latter has no value at all.12

This is perhaps most evident in Israelis’ by-now astonishing and often exclusive fixation on the hostages. To be sure, the plight of the hostages is utterly horrific, and for this the relevant Hamas leadership (most of whom have already received their extra-judicial sentence by way of Israeli assassinations) should be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court.

But the numbers are the numbers. Since the start of 2025, there have been less than one-hundred hostages in Gaza.13 Again, this is terrible, unconscionable. But how many Palestinian children have been killed this year? How many Palestinians have been made homeless? How many Palestinians are slowly being starved? Indeed, how many Palestinians civilians have been arrested and held on no charges at all, and are, in a very real sense, hostages themselves?14

Make no mistake, there is tremendous internal division within Jewish Israeli society. Many Israeli Jews despise Netanyahu and his government. Many want this war to end. But the number who despise him and want this war to end out of concern for Palestinian well-being is very small indeed.

Israeli society, in 2025, is an expression of Jewish supremacy. If, somehow, the current Israeli regime is brought to an end, as it should be, the larger society will still require rehabilitation. And this will be a long and difficult process.15

15.

I’m not going to end here with any prognostications regarding the likelihood of the changes I’m calling for, because they are obviously not likely at all, especially in the short term. The one country, other than Israel, best equipped to do anything about the status quo, the United States, recently sent its Secretary of State, yarmulke on his gentile head, to pray with Netanyahu at the Western Wall.16

But what seems immutable will, in time, change. And we can expedite this change by calling for it, clearly and unapologetically. By questioning the very legitimacy of what seems to go without saying when it comes to Israel and the conflict.

Each of us, through our words and actions, can contribute to this necessary, urgent transformation. The reality of Jewish supremacy, which currently expresses itself through Jewish domination from the river to the sea, can be acknowledged for what it is, and condemned as such.

Until we call for this change—clearly and unapologetically, and with a refusal to accept the charge that this is tantamount to questioning Israel’s right to exist, that this means with don’t value the safety of Israelis—the suffering and destruction will continue.

The Jewish supremacy that permeates Israeli society isn’t just bad—catastrophically bad—for Palestinians, it is bad for Jews—Jews everywhere—as well.

The sooner we understand this and act accordingly, the better.

Part One of this series, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

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This substack is free. If you’d like to support my work with a one-time donation, you can do so here.

This rabbi is a man who more or less cost himself his job by speaking out, very publicly, against Israel. I don’t recall—on the day of this sermon—how much his topic was Israel and our relationship to it, but I’m sure it figured in there somewhere.

His sermon was, in general, about our values and our actions, and if they are the right values and actions. When it comes to holidays that revolve around self-accounting, these are just about the only topics deserving our attention. Do we value the right things and do our actions reflect our values? That’s pretty much all we should be asking ourselves, as individuals and as a community, this time of year.

This rabbi was very good—in his understated way—of speaking frankly about things we did not want to hear. He addressed our selfishness, our silence in the face of evil, and, I’m sure, our stubborn, unreflective support for a state that requires our principled criticism.

At some point he summed up all he was saying. He did this with a wry smile, but he was utterly serious all the same. He did this by quoting Bob Dylan. Maybe he introduced Dylan as a Jew, maybe not. But this is what my rabbi said:

“You gotta serve somebody.”1

What does this mean?

It means that there is someone or something that ultimately directs our actions. Someone or something to which we subordinate ourselves, whether we acknowledge it or not. Someone or something we obey. Someone or something we worship, even if we are atheists who never step foot in a synagogue.

This thing can be something we’re proud of and something we’re aware of—truth, justice, charity—or it can be something we’d never own up to—greed, attention, pleasure. But we’re all serving some thing, every last one of us.

Dylan doesn’t beat around the bush in his chorus. Here are the two key lines that explain precisely what he’s getting at, just who this “somebody” must be:

Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

It’s ultimately not so complicated. You serve evil or you serve good. All of us do. It is inescapable.

This time of year is a time to ask yourself, as honestly as you can, which it is.

We may like to think we can serve multiple things, even things that appear to exist in tension with each other. But when that’s the case, then one inevitably wins out over the other. If your desire for money finds you dealing dishonestly with your clients, then you’re serving greed, not honesty, even if most of the time you try hard not to lie.

If your desire for a Jewish state finds you supporting Jewish apartheid and Jewish genocide, then you’re serving Jewish supremacy, even if most of the time you try to value democracy and human rights.

We can argue all day about exactly how Israel reached this moment, about how much responsibility for its current actions lies with others, but this Israel is not good.

If you still serve this Israel by apologizing for it, by defending its indefensible acts, by claiming that its violence is necessary thanks to some other greater evil, or by asserting that our religion needs some Israel, even this Israel, no matter what, well, that’s what you’re serving. You’re serving Jewish nationalism. You’re serving an Israel that currently acts in simple, direct conflict with the belief that all human beings—every last one of them—are created in God’s image. You’re serving an Israel that makes a joke of Hillel’s claim—the one he shared standing on one foot—that the essence of Torah is not doing unto your neighbor what is hateful to you.

What are you going to serve this coming year? What are we going to serve in the years to come?

These are the questions of this season.

The rest is commentary.

Shana tova.

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This year American rabbis must speak honestly about what is happening there. They may choose to open by recalling October Seventh, the hostages, and Hamas’ mendacity. But they must then move past these things in order to address all that has happened in Gaza since that dreadful day. Our rabbis must acknowledge the nearly 65,000 dead, the destruction of entire cities, the deliberate starvation, and the daily slaughter at aid distribution centers. There is much else they could mention.1

American rabbis must decide if they will meet the moral demands of this season. Will they summon the courage to speak the word “genocide?” Because according to a near consensus of genocide scholars—whose ranks include many Jews and Israelis—this describes the Jewish State’s action in Gaza.

Rabbis who courageously choose to speak the word “genocide” can tell their congregants that neither war nor self-defense justifies it. That perpetrators of genocide need not devote their efforts toward direct mass murder, it is enough to make life unlivable and prolong such conditions indefinitely. This, too, is genocide.2

But perhaps “genocide,” however accurate, is too much, is simply too explosive. If so, there are other ways to speak the truth this year. If one is reluctant to claim that Israel is aiming to destroy, with intent, the Palestinians of Gaza as a group—which would be genocide—then “crimes against humanity,” the killing of individuals on a large scale, is a comparatively less provocative, but still accurate, alternative.3

“Ethnic cleansing” also describes what Israel is doing. The IDF continues crowding the inhabitants of Gaza (which before the war was already one of the world’s mostly densely populated regions) into smaller and smaller pockets, all while Israel’s ongoing destruction of structures throughout the Strip will make it nearly impossible for this population to live anywhere inside it if and when the fighting finally ends. This is textbook ethnic cleansing.

However much we squirm in our seats, however much some of us storm out indignantly, our rabbis must use such terminology to describe the current Israeli campaign. They must use such language, because these terms make it clear that this war is now, according to international law, illegal. These words will also enable our spiritual leaders to tell us that what Israel is doing is both unjustifiable and immoral.

None of this requires our rabbis to “hate” Israel or identify as anti-Zionists. Our rabbis can, in fact, speak these painful truths out of a deep love for Israel and a sincere concern for the safety and future of its people.

But speak these truth they must.

*

And the above is only half of the daunting task our rabbis face. The other half may be even harder to confront, because the second half isn’t about Israelis, it’s about us, American Jews.

The holiest day on the Jewish calendar is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A day to acknowledge sins. And this year we, American Jews, have much to atone for. The sin of indifference. The sin of dehumanization. The sin of denial. The sin of mistaking our people’s history of victimhood for eternal moral purity. The sin of debasing “never again” with an endless litany of fine print.

Our community, overwhelmingly, has responded to the atrocities in Gaza with a shameful mixture of silence, complicity, and full-throated support. We have vilified those among us who have had the courage to speak out.

*

Each rabbi in this country has a simple, if consequential, question to ask themselves this year: Will I speak these painful truths—even if it fractures my community, even if it costs me my job—or will my legacy be one of moral failure?

The alternative to speaking these truths is, at this point, unconscionable. For we have entered a new period in Jewish history, one ushered in by the following: the two largest Jewish communities in the world, in partnership, have obliterated a society of two million people. One community, in Israel, perpetrated the violence. The other, here in the United States, through passive compliance, through intimidation, silencing, and gaslighting, through donations and lobbying, through prioritizing the threat of anti-Semitism over the deadly reality in Gaza, helped to create a situation in which our country has not merely failed to intervene, but rather provides the bombs and the diplomatic cover, without which this wholesale destruction would not be possible.

All this is the awful legacy “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel.”

Our rabbis must call on us to confront this truth.

*

As uninviting, indeed professionally dangerous, as it may be to speak all these terrible truths, what would it mean for American Judaism if our rabbis look away or, even worse, justify the unjustifiable? What future awaits our people—not to mention the Palestinians—if the holidays come and go without an honest reckoning with all that has happened, with all that happens still?

What is the point of American congregational Judaism, as a whole, if our rabbis can’t or won’t speak the truth on the subject of Gaza this year? If our rabbis choose to bite their tongues—or feel they have no real choice but, at best, to equivocate—then what’s the value of our collective enterprise? If a central aim of our Jewish collective practice is to become better people, is, simply put, to be good people, then what would the unacknowledged sins of silence, denial, and moral cowardice mean for us in this moment, and in the future? What justification is there for a congregation that fails to atone—publicly and as a community—for our role (even our passive role) in what Israel is doing?

None of this requires us to believe that we alone are guilty, not at all. There is plenty of guilt to go around. But Yom Kippur is not a time for blaming others, it is a time to look inward and acknowledge all one has done wrong.

The path ahead will be very different from the one familiar to Jews raised in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Israel’s founding. We believed we found an answer to the former in the form of the latter, but something has gone very, very wrong. Will American rabbis admit this? Will they lead by example, demanding loudly and clearly that Israel’s killing and destruction must end now? Will they pledge to work with their communities to find a way forward in this new ignominious and disorienting period? Or will the new year simply bring more of the same? More reassurance that our people could never do such a thing, that as God’s chosen people, we are, once again, on the right side of history?

Judaism’s original gift to the world was ethical monotheism, the belief in one God who demands morality from all people. But Gaza shows that the sanctity of human life has, for too many of us, become an afterthought. This is the full measure of our current crisis.

Will our rabbis acknowledge this?

The moment of truth approaches.

To read my larger project, “Our Genocides: Confronting a New Period in Jewish History,” from the beginning, click here.

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Near the end of writing this book, I flew to Europe to attend the graduation of my younger daughter, who studied design in the Netherlands. We landed in Paris and drove five hours north. On the way, we passed a sign marking the Battle of Somme from World War I. (Later in the week, we would drive past Dunkirk, site of the famous World War II battle.) Just a few hours into our trip, I was already thinking a thought that had come to me each time I visited her these last four years: Europe is so peaceful now, even though it was twice consumed by war in the previous century.

This notion of past violence buried beneath present tranquility surfaced again in Eindhoven, the city where she studied, a city of a quarter million people near the southeastern corner of the country. Eindhoven was bombed extensively during the Second World War. Though I know the Netherlands has its problems—including right-wing xenophobes at the highest level of government—I envy the place. Its socialized medicine, its reliable trains, its endless bike lanes, its outdoor cafes, its understated, cosmopolitan decorum. Say what you will about capitalist society in 2025, but the Dutch brand of it feels to me to be the best argument for such a system.

A few hours after the graduation ceremony, my family enjoyed a festive meal at the house my daughter has lived in for a few years now. She shares it with five other people, one each from the Netherlands, Italy, France, Denmark, and England. The evening was rich in languages and drink, and as the sky grew dark quite late in the day, I became agitated trying to make sense of that metahistorical thought once more. For here it was most real—or most unreal.

Last fall, my daughter did a mapping project about the block she lives on, a dead-end spur at the edge of the city. Among much else, she learned that during World War II, the SS stationed in Eindhoven made their headquarters in the house right next door. The residents of her house fled, and the structure stood empty until the end of the war.

As I stared beyond her fence at the illuminated golden arches of a nearby McDonald’s, I tried to feel the mayhem this branch of the German war machine brought to Eindhoven, all the violence experienced by this place throughout those terrible years, including the fate of the five hundred or so Jews who once lived here.

But I couldn’t. The past was gone. I felt nothing but an intellectual awareness of how profoundly a place can change in only eighty years. How peace can replace war, the latter leaving behind barely a trace.

2.

Violence comes and violence goes. If you built a digital map of the world, a map showing war and mass killing over time, and played the last few thousand years of human history at a rate of a year a second, it would show conflict flaring up and subsiding nearly everywhere at one time or another. A region—western Europe for instance—would undergo a disastrous stretch, the killing would surge and spread, but then it would subside and finally pass.

At a basic level, this is simply one of the things humans do. We fight, one group killing members of another group. Sometimes such killing rises to a truly massive scale.

It’s not hard to see how ethnic cleansing and genocide happen; such events are as much a part of war as is a battle between soldiers. When did the first tribe, after growing tired of its warriors battling the warriors of a neighboring tribe, finally decide to drive out the other tribe altogether or murder all their children or simply kill every last one of them? How many times and in how many places have such acts been committed? Mass violence seems constant and universal. Indeed, as the scholar Jared Diamond writes, “Genocide has been part of our human and prehuman heritage for millions of years.”1

Over the last two years, I’ve heard more than a few people rehearse this view of history and even human evolution in order to resign themselves to, or actually defend, whatever it is the Israeli military is doing to the inhabitants of Gaza right now. These things happen. This is what our species does. This is a part of war, one outcome of conflict, and the Palestinians have hardly been passive here. In time, the violence will pass, and whatever will be left of the Palestinian people will be whatever remains, wherever they may find themselves.

Such is the way of the world.

3.

I suppose. But then why did we complain when it happened to us? Because ours was the most extreme in recent memory? Because we didn’t have an army? Because this was just a more intense version of the treatment we intermittently received throughout our sojourn in Europe?

If humans solve their problems via genocide, if that’s how it has always been, how it always will be, then why get caught up in the details? After all, the Nazis certainly thought their destruction of Europe’s Jews was necessary, however much we view their reasoning today as absurd.

If you endorse, justify, or resign yourself to any instance of genocide, then that’s all you get to say on the subject. It’s not so much that might makes right then, because once genocide is deemed acceptable, ultimately, there is no right; there is only might. The rest are near fictions we invent so we can sleep at night, so we can tell our children a coherent story about our collective past, and, perhaps, so we can prevent the violence from spilling inside the borders separating our group from the one we are attempting to eradicate.

4.

I wrote this book because such resignation disturbs me. Saddens me. Terrifies me. I don’t want to live in a world ruled by this resignation. I certainly don’t want my religion debased by it. We as humans can do better. We can evolve. We can progress.

After all, humans once enslaved one another. This, too, was more or less universal. Human beings were publicly bought and sold. Such an arrangement—though it continues in many places today in other, less visible forms—has been legally abolished the world over. But it was common not so long ago. Slavery was convenient and not hard to rationalize. It served well those with the power to enslave. But eventually, the world determined that there are other, better ways for humanity to be, that there is some fundamental worth to each person that makes turning them into property an indefensible crime.

Raphael Lemkin named genocide in order to end it. We are capable of abolishing genocide, or at least reducing its stunning frequency,2 but only if we all agree to work toward such a world, and then punish those people, those societies, those states breaking this rule and committing this crime. If we insist on making exceptions, if we call on self-defense, if we simply deny our wrongdoing, if we insist instead that this is something else, then we’ve not only destroyed all those we’ve destroyed; we’ve also made it more likely that others will do the same in the very near future.

And perhaps to us, once again.

5.

The two central collective Jewish projects of my lifetime have been this: commemorate the Holocaust and build a Jewish state. At the most basic level, both were successfully realized. We remember the Holocaust, and the State of Israel exists. But now the acts of the latter—unopposed as they have been by most Jews—have undermined the point of the former, disqualifying us as stewards of the memory of the twentieth century’s darkest undertaking.

Perhaps this is, obscenely, the truest measure of Zionism’s success in realizing Jewish normalization. We now commit genocide, just like everyone else.

Who can say what comes next? We have, for now, forfeited our right to teach the world about how one group of people should and should not treat another group. At the least, we should only offer our many lessons by adding to them one more: everyone, including us, is susceptible to the temptation to destroy another people.

6.

My daughters, adults now, have no illusions about any of this. The Jewish education my wife and I provided them with was odd and uneven and extremely incomplete. A couple of largely forgettable Bat Mitzvahs, some obligatory Sunday school, a number of summers at, yes, an otherwise magical Labor Zionist summer camp, an incredible year in Tel Aviv, and endless hours with their loving and generous Israeli relatives, most of whom now call the United States home.

But one thing we did teach them, however indirectly, was this: if Judaism, if any religion, has any value, it is as a social and spiritual technology for producing and maintaining an ethical community. So they know, they see—this we discuss and at great length—that our religion has faltered and is currently failing, both here and in Israel. They see a defective Judaism all around them.

Who knows what my children will teach their children about our history and our religion, if they’ll even want to pass on this religion at all. But whatever lessons the next generation receives, I expect they will be radically different from those I was given, from those I gave my own children.

If we are to repair all that is broken, all we have broken, all we are breaking right now, they will have to be.

Thank you for reading these posts. This post marks the end of the book, Our Genocides: Confronting a New Period in Jewish History.

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The matter of context—like everything else in this conflict—is a fraught one. Providing context is straightforward enough. Pull back in time, reconstruct a prior event—a chain of prior events—and, in some cases, show how they led into the present. This is, more or less, the practice of historiography. Narrate a linear sequence of events linked by causality. This, in the most general sense, is what I attempted to do in the previous chapter.

But the value of context, of any particular context, the rationale for providing it, for pulling back to this moment as opposed to another, for tracing this thread connecting past to present as opposed to another—this is a separate matter entirely.

2.

The Israeli writer Maya Savir has noted that when it comes to October Seventh and the war in Gaza, we find a parallel struggle between Israelis and Palestinians over context as well.

When the subject is October Seventh, Palestinians and their supporters want context to explain how such extreme acts could be committed. Supporters of Israel are opposed to—not to mention altogether outraged by—the recourse to context there.

Conversely, supporters of Israel want to call on context to explain all Israel has done in Gaza since October Seventh. The other side, to no surprise, finds this similarly inexcusable.

In both cases, Savir challenges the ability of context to mitigate the horror of either side’s violence. She sums up her case like this: “‘When is rape allowed?’ Never. . . . ‘When is it permissible to starve people?’ Never.”1

If Savir is right in both cases, and I believe she is, then why have I bothered to provide any context at all?

3.

The struggle over context is a struggle between the salience of singularity and that of continuity. On the one side, uniquely horrific events: October Seventh and the war in Gaza. On the other side, the lines one can draw connecting those events to what came before. However singular, unprecedented, and indefensible those events may have been, they didn’t just happen.

But if the acts committed by each side are truly unjustifiable, then again, why bother with context? Indeed, doesn’t providing a fuller picture threaten to complicate what isn’t, in the final account, complicated at all? How much does one really need to know to understand that you shouldn’t murder babies, regardless of where their cribs are located?

4.

My interest in reconstructing this bit of context, the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, is to highlight a continuity of a different sort, one that actually reduces the singularity of the Gaza genocide. In other words, the context of Israel’s genocide isn’t only—and perhaps isn’t primarily—the Palestinian attacks of October Seventh. The context is Israel’s own treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza for the last twenty years.

Well before Palestinian militants flooded into Israel to annihilate the communities bordering Gaza, Israel was treating the residents of Gaza, every last one of them, as less than human.

The Israeli war in Gaza, a response to and thus arguably justified by October Seventh, employs a version of the template Israel had already put in place twenty years ago.

If I’m right about this, then October Seventh—which remains unjustifiable—didn’t take place within the context of occupation as normally understood. October Seventh took place within the context of something much more severe. Something existing on a continuum with genocide.

5.

If you’ve read this far, perhaps you are wondering (and perhaps with some indignation at that) why I haven’t paid more attention to Hamas and all its stubborn, indiscriminate violence.

Hamas is not innocent here. Far from it.

But what I have tried to demonstrate by reconstructing the context of disengagement is just how much “our side” has done wrong, how many inexcusable, indefensible acts Israel is responsible for. The impulse to respond to this unsettling truth by, once again, pointing our fingers at Hamas strikes me, with all that context in mind, as puerile. As a denial of one’s continuous agency, a rejection of one’s inescapable responsibility for one’s own actions, a preposterous assertion that this agency and this responsibility somehow belong only to the other side, such that only they have anything to answer for.

6.

I won’t argue with anyone about whether or not Israel had the right “to do what needed to be done” in the immediate aftermath of October Seventh. But that aftermath is long, long over. All that Israel is doing now is, simply put, a choice. And Israel is choosing genocide. Hamas refusing to surrender doesn’t change that.2

As I wrote about in another post, I view Hamas as interwoven with the Israeli regime, however much each side despises and hopes to eliminate the other. Hamas is a manifestation, both cause and effect, of the larger disastrous situation.

If we want the Palestinians to act differently, our side must act differently. If we want a Middle East that speaks something other than the language of violence, we must start speaking those other languages ourselves, and we must commit to speaking them even as the transition from war to peace remains punctuated by violence, which everyone knows it will be.

7.

I think all the above is self-evident, but I’ll add to it one more thing, one that only adds to our side’s responsibility to act differently: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an asymmetrical one, in which Israel’s power—military, economic, diplomatic—vastly exceeds the Palestinians’.

Hamas is a particular expression of and a particular reaction to the particular contours of Israeli suppression, subjugation, and dispossession. Say what you will about all that money and effort Hamas put into building tunnels, but they built them in response to the ubiquity of Israeli drones,3 targeted assassinations, and the full closure of Gaza’s borders with the outside world.

Hamas’ religious ideology enables them to understand their violence—including suicide bombings—as acts of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, and they are glorified as such.4 Hamas uses terrorism—the weapon of the weak—rather than surrender. Call their strategy and tactics foolish, immoral, barbaric—call them what you want, but Hamas is perfectly right about one thing, and they certainly knew this by 2005: the Israelis have no intention of parting with even just 22 percent of Palestine as it existed during the British mandate.5 Hamas understood correctly that Israel had committed to military domination in lieu of pursuing “concessions and compromises.” Hamas refuses to be dominated and resists with the means at their disposable.

Is Hamas then responsible for their own people’s suffering? To a meaningful extent, no question. But with Israel’s larger designs in mind, along with their ability to realize them, it seems hard to argue that surrender would do much to expand the political horizons of the Palestinian people.

A truly terrible state of affairs, and one our side is responsible for in large part.

7.

Gaza in 2025 is not the inevitable outcome of Gaza fifteen or twenty years ago. Things could have developed in any number of ways. But one can nonetheless draw a straight line between them. The almost complete destruction of Gaza today is merely an intensification of the partial destruction of 2009 and 2014 and 2021. The starvation today is merely a crueler version of the forced subsistence diet that marked 2005 to 2023, and today’s version continues to rely on the same elaborate mechanisms of control that have been employed for at least fifteen years now.

To see just how much these mechanism had already been in place for well over a decade before October Seventh, consider this excerpt from Yves Winter’s article, “The Siege of Gaza,” which I drew from repeatedly in my previous post. Here is just part of Winter’s lengthy description of the way various Israeli ministries monitored and controlled the flow of food into Gaza with considerable precision:

Recently declassified Ministry of Defense documents reveal that in 2008, the Israeli Ministry of Health conducted surveys to calculate a “minimal subsistence basket” for Gaza, that is, a basket of consumer products just shy of producing malnutrition. In order to determine what counts as vital goods, Israeli officials devised a procedure for inventory control in Gaza . . . Through a close monitoring of local production, inventories, and imports, Israel ensured that supplies in Gaza remained above a humanitarian minimum but below market demand.6

If such details seem to recall recent news reports on starvation and potential famine in Gaza, that’s no coincidence. The “remarkable bureaucratic undertaking” at the center of Israel’s post-disengagement control of food into Gaza continues today and is informed, as was the case then, by “a repressive logic.”7 All that has changed are the numbers—or degree of suffering—that Israel is aiming for.

It may be some time before we learn precisely what conditions Israel has been attempting to create in Gaza with regards to starvation and even famine. In other words, are children starving to death an intended effect or merely the outcome of Israeli miscalculations and incompetence? The best case scenario—with regard to Israeli culpability—is what was referred to in June, 2025, by the International Crisis Group as “managed starvation,” in which “the bare avoidance of mass death” is seen as a “humanitarian success.”8

And, of course, Israel’s restrictions on caloric intake in Gaza are not taking place in an otherwise stable setting. As the ICG’s report said, “The focus on caloric thresholds obscures simultaneous collapse: sewage contaminating water supplies, summer heat approaching in overcrowded camps, nineteen months of compromised immunity amid a devastated health care system.”

In other words, how many Palestinians are dying, not because of direct Israeli violence, but simply from extended exposure to this cluster of subhuman conditions? How to calculate such a number?

8.

Though current full-blown genocide is a more recent development, there is considerable overlap between 2005 and 2025. This continuity is the ultimate significance of the context I provided in the previous chapter. This is the context we must keep in mind, because such context is not merely “occupation.” Occupation is what to call, for instance, Ramallah in 1986. The situation in Gaza since 2005 is something else entirely. “Open-air prison” begins to name it, but even that is inadequate. Certainly there are such prisons where the inmates are better fed, where they eventually serve out their finite sentence and finally earn their freedom.

9.

All this explains—without ever justifying—that single, unspeakable day and the unimaginable hell of the hostages. As Ian Lustick put it, in an essay published less than a week after October Seventh, “Everyone knows how brutal escaping prisoners can be.”9

I will never attempt to justify October Seventh, but I will, right now, encourage you to consider how you would feel about Israel if you, at the age of nineteen in 2022, were a fourth-generation refugee, if you were unemployed (like most everyone else you know), if your neighborhood (inside your refugee camp) had been bombed multiple times since you were five, if you have multiple relatives who have been killed or imprisoned, if you are poor and stuck in Gaza and often hungry, if you have no rights, no future prospects, nothing. How would you feel about the Israeli people?

What would you do to any of them, given the chance?

Should your disappointment, your frustration, your contempt, your rage, be restricted solely to the Israelis? No, and perhaps it isn’t. Maybe you understand, despite the poor education you’ve likely received, that Hamas’ strategy is so cynical as to beggar the imagination. Maybe you despise the corrupt Palestinian Authority, the indifferent Arab states, Iranian manipulation, whatever. But the Israelis are guarding the gates and doing the bombing and, above all, living on the land your ancestors, driven out by the Israelis, once called their own.

10.

Why do so many of our people withhold the compassion and sympathy this thought experiment requires? How do we not understand—forget about the Palestinians for a moment—that this situation is terribly dangerous for us? How do we not see the dehumanization such dismissal requires and fail to understand that our own people are in the midst of a profound ethical collapse? How do we not understand that these dehumanized “others” will, in time, as they did before, including on October Seventh, get their revenge once again?

11.

Perhaps you’d counter not with a thought experiment of your own, but rather with a different piece of actual, historical context. Perhaps you say: “Oslo” and “Camp David” and that “generous offer.” Perhaps you ask: “What about the fact that Arafat walked away, choosing violence instead of peace?”

Instead of arguing with you about the details of that episode—though I will note, among much else I could note, that during the years of Oslo the Israeli settler population grew from 222,000 to 367,000,10 something the Palestinians certainly noticed, something that must have given them pause regarding Israel’s true commitment to a just settlement, something that certainly made it hard for the Palestinians committed to peace to convince those resigned to war to lay down their arms—I will say, “Yes, Arafat should have made a counteroffer.”

But how to characterize the subsequent abandonment of the peace process by the Israelis? Is that not, too, a failure? Unless you believe that ethnic cleansing and genocide are now the only answer to this conflict, how can the choice to deem peace an impossibility be understood as anything other than a monumental failure?

12.

I wonder if the problem—the problem of Israel and its supporters—is ultimately the relative complexity of our second genocide, with regards to the distribution of good and evil, as compared to our first.

After all, the intellectual challenge of comprehending the Holocaust is less historical than philosophical in nature. How could one group of people—thanks to hatred, fear, dehumanization, fascism, pseudoscience, the need for a scapegoat—do to another group of people what the Nazis did to Europe’s Jews? There is something utterly baffling at the center of the Shoah that simply doesn’t exist here.

Today we have sadism, yes. Dehumanization, yes. An out-of-control, militaristic ethno-nationalism, yes. A massive bureaucracy; a vast state apparatus; a giant, sustained effort of thousands upon thousands; all these people and institutions mobilized to undertake what Israel has done and continues to do. But Hamas, among many other groups, has inflicted meaningful damage, has terrorized Israel for more than thirty years. This case is certainly different. Certainly more complicated than the pure black and white of Nazi and Jew.

But then what was the point of Lemkin’s crusade? Why lower the threshold for genocide below the level of industrial slaughter, below even the threshold marked by direct mass murder of the sort the Hutus visited upon the Tutsis in Rwanda?

Why don’t we call those crimes by one name and whatever Israel is doing by another?

13.

The answer, I contend, can be revealed by considering my context, that line of continuity stretching from 2005 to 2025. Again, 2025 was not inevitable twenty years ago, but the Gaza genocide had already been made possible in crucial ways back then. A country willing and able to imprison the better part of two million people indefinitely, willing and able to malnourish them, to unemploy them, to deny them any coherent legal status whatsoever, to deny them any rights at all, to do all this for years on end and with no clear plan for anything beyond it, merely the occasional “mowing of the lawn” to suppress resistance—surely a country willing and able to do all that for all those many years is not a country that has reached its limit.

All this is a vivid illustration of the proverbial slippery slope, a term that feels so apt in this instance it barely seems metaphorical. The utter disregard of the dignity, the well-being, the humanity, the very future of these people—what remains unthinkable, undoable, when, since the disengagement, all these things have not just been thought, but already done?

14.

In a recent interview, Melanie O’Brien, Professor of International Law and current President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, said, “Genocide is a process, not an event.” She continues:

It does not take place in one day or over a few days. It may be weeks, months, or even years. The process evolves through phases of discrimination and violations of other human rights, eventually escalating to the violation of the right to life, as the target group is killed or subject to conditions of deprivation.”11

Future historians will decide when the Gaza genocide truly began, but it’s clear that the “genocide process” O’Brien speaks of began a long, long time ago.

15.

Israel’s security concerns are real. Israeli suffering is real. The fear is real. Israeli society is saturated with trauma and post-trauma.

But Lemkin’s aim with that word, genocide—his aim and the aim of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948—was to expand this new category so as to place its boundaries at the very start of the process, at the beginning of that slope, where the terribly dangerous slipperiness begins. Because this thing in Gaza, as of today’s writing,12 isn’t yet over. We likely have not reached the full horror of its final depths. We continue each day sliding down into something even worse than the day before.

16.

In the middle of summer 2025, the headlines about Gaza dealt mostly with the new aid distribution sites. Every day brought a new number. Fifty-six. Or forty-four. Or seventeen. Or twenty-five.13 These the number of Palestinians shot or otherwise killed by the Israeli military over four days in late June, 2025.

Why were these people being killed? Even if they were stealing food, even if they were creating chaos, how is it possible that killing, on average, three dozen civilians a day was necessary? Did such slaughter make anyone safer?

As Haaretz reported on June 27, “Conversations with officers and soldiers reveal that commanders ordered troops to shoot at crowds to drive them away or disperse them, even though it was clear they posed no threat.” This long article is filled with enough disturbing details to keep one up all night, so here are just two quotes from the piece, one from a reservist, the other from a soldier:

Gaza doesn’t interest anyone anymore. It’s become a place with its own set of rules. The loss of human life means nothing. It’s not even an “unfortunate incident,” like they used to say.

You know it’s not right. You feel it’s not right – that the commanders here are taking the law into their own hands. But Gaza is a parallel universe. You move on quickly. The truth is, most people don’t even stop to think about it.

17.

Gaza doesn’t interest anyone anymore. Gaza is a parallel universe.

Both were true, with regards to Israel and Gaza, by 2005.

So maybe none of the previous chapter is context at all. Maybe it’s the thing itself. Maybe the singular, unjustifiable war in Gaza began twenty years ago. Maybe the project of Israel’s genocidal self-defense has been underway for two decades, and maybe the only real question is when the Jewish state crossed the invisible threshold between preparing the ground for this crime of crimes and carrying it out in earnest.

18.

Why were we so indifferent to this process for all these many years? Why did we justify, rationalize, or simply ignore it? Why did we elect to ignore not just the truth of 2015 or 2005, but that of 1995, of 1985, of all the years since Israel first conquered the West Bank and Gaza and, instead of using these territories as bargaining chips to create a two-state solution, continued growing the Jewish state, indifferent to all the violence this would require and engender? Why did we accept Israel’s account of all this? Why did our organizations parrot Israel’s talking points? Why did we not notice that Palestinian escalations were consistently met with greater Israeli escalations? Why, therefore, did we not see where this conflict was headed? Why, at a very basic level, did we not want to see what was there to see all along?

19.

We are certainly in a terrible bind now. Maybe somehow two states remain possible, but with half a million settlers in the West Bank—that figure doesn’t include Jewish Israelis living in East Jerusalem—such a prospect seems like a pipe dream.

When you read a book like this, the reader expects that the writer will—at some point—offer some suggestions, a solution, a road map to some better future.

But I’m not a political scientist or a policy wonk. I have no idea what the exact plan or proposal should be. I don’t pretend to know how we might extricate ourselves from this situation. This terrible, terrible situation.14

That being said, I do, in fact, have a very specific suggestion for how we, as American Jews, should proceed: just about everything we’ve been doing for decades now with regards to Israel, we should stop doing.

We should try the exact opposite. Be different. Be utterly different. Stop clinging to our victim identity. Stop invoking the Holocaust at every turn. Stop fixating on anti-Semitism. Stop defending a country that is committing genocide. Stop believing that such defense constitutes being a good friend to Israel. Stop denying that this Israel isn’t and hasn’t been a hell for Palestinians from the moment of its founding, from the moment that our independence became their Nakba.

Stop funding institutions and belonging to organizations that continue pedaling half truths and fairy tales. If you have a rabbi, defend them when they speak the truth. And if they won’t speak the truth, find a new spiritual home.

Yes, Israelis have suffered, too, but facing the truth of all we’ve looked away from doesn’t require us to dismiss that. Our suffering and their suffering are interwined. Accept that Israelis won’t be safe until Palestinians are safe, and act accordingly.

All that would be a start.

20.

I suspect we’ll see a significant contraction of organized, institutional American Jewish life in the decades to come. “Big Tent” Judaism will no longer be feasible. Rabbis who speak the truth will lose congregants on the right. Rabbis who don’t will lose those on the left. Either way, many temples and synagogues will shutter, their financial cushion not big enough to endure these defections.

Many other Jewish organizations—everything from community centers to summer camps—will shut down, too, as the next generation of Jewish parents, disgusted and ashamed by what our people (fair or not) are irrevocably associated with, will elect to remain uninvolved, unaffiliated, and, simply put, un-Jewish.

There is something terribly sad about such a future, but it may be unavoidable. Indeed, it may be necessary.

21.

I want to end this chapter by introducing Sara Roy, whose research I’ve drawn from extensively in previous posts. Roy is both one of us and not. Born in Connecticut in 1955, Roy is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her first language was Yiddish. But her adult life has been spent studying Gaza. She is the author of six books on the topic, along with dozens and dozens of articles. While much of the world—and certainly most of our community—has been turning its gaze from Gaza for a long, long time, Roy has been paying attention to it. Her book on Gaza’s “de-development” was first published in 1995, ten years before the disengagement.

In 2002, Roy published an essay in the Journal of Palestine Studies entitled, “Living with the Holocaust: The Journey of a Child of Holocaust Survivors.” This piece should be required reading for every Jew today. Here’s some of what she said:

Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians is not the moral equivalent of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. But it does not have to be. No, this is not genocide but it is repression, and it is brutal. And it has become frighteningly normal. Occupation is about the domination and dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their property and the destruction of their soul. Occupation aims, at its core, to deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. Occupation is humiliation. It is despair and desperation. And just as there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the Holocaust and the occupation, so there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the occupier and the occupied, no matter how much we as Jews regard ourselves as victims.15

From here, Roy goes straight into two topics that her stubborn opponents want her to address: Palestinian terror and Israeli victimhood. She doesn’t shy away. Notice her use of that word, “context”:

And it is from this context of deprivation and suffocation, now largely forgotten, that the horrific and despicable suicide bombings have emerged and taken the lives of more innocents. Why should innocent Israelis, among them my aunt and her grandchildren, pay the price of occupation? Like the settlements, razed homes, and barricades that preceded them, the suicide bombers have not always been there.

In 2008, Roy delivered a version of this essay as a lecture at Adelaide University in Australia. She added this to her original text:

For Jewish identity is linked, willingly or not, to Palestinian suffering and this suffering is now an irrevocable part of our collective memory and an intimate part of our experience, together with the Holocaust and Israel.

Everything Roy wrote and said above remains true, even though, and especially because, Palestinian suffering in 2025 is so many times greater than it was back then.

22.

Our people have a long history, one we have studied closely and carefully. We thought we knew ourselves. We thought we knew what we were capable of and what we were not. We thought we understood the kind of roles we could play in the human drama and the kinds that were—thanks to either our inherent goodness or our responsibility as the originators of ethnical monotheism—off limits to us.

But we were wrong.

Palestinian suffering is now part of our Jewish legacy, too, part of the Jewish inheritance we will pass on to our children. How will we face it? How will we make sense of it, even as we continue, no doubt, to ponder our own centuries of persecution and the annihilation of European Jewry in the middle of the previous century? How will we rehabilitate our religion so that it might stand, once again, for justice and not the opposite? How will we find the courage and the honesty to stop Palestinian suffering, so that all people might one day live in safety and with the dignity that should be the birthright of every person?

How?

The final part of this project, “Against Resignation,” will be posted on Monday, September, 8th.

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On September 12, 2005, Israel completed its disengagement from the Gaza Strip. The IDF’s longstanding military installations were evacuated. The country’s thirty-five year-old settlement project was terminated.

From the time it was first announced in April 2004, the Gaza disengagement plan has been viewed by Israel’s supporters as a difficult, painful sacrifice; as an act of goodwill; and, most of all, as an opportunity for Palestinians to develop a thriving economy, renounce violence, and build an independent society existing in peace alongside Israel. In other words, disengagement was publicized as the first step in a process that could eventually lead to Palestinian statehood.

According to this perspective, the onus was thus on the Palestinians to take advantage of their great opportunity. As Thomas Friedman put it in the New York Times in early 2005,

The issue for the Palestinians is no longer about how they resist the Israeli occupation in Gaza, but whether they build a decent mini-state there—a Dubai on the Mediterranean. Because if they do, it will fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.

But the Palestinians, these same supporters argue, squandered their chance. Israel’s disengagement was met with rockets and terror. Instead of building Gaza up, Hamas built a massive network of tunnels underground. Instead of transitioning into a peaceful future with Israel, Hamas exploited the disengagement to continue attacking Israel, the Islamist organization more focused on Israel’s destruction than the advancement of its own society.

To be sure, Palestinian violence continued after the disengagement. What follows is not intended to be a defense of Hamas. Nevertheless, the above account of the disengagement is profoundly inaccurate. By 2004, the possibilities available to the Palestinians in Gaza—along with the West Bank—were already limited. The disengagement was designed to restrict them yet further.

Overall, the 2005 disengagement served to increase Israeli repression of the Strip beyond anything seen in the first few decades of its occupation. Not only this, but the Israelis established an elaborate system of control and a complex mechanism of collective punishment that has proven integral to the Gaza genocide.

2.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement initiative followed two key developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first, and more pivotal, was the Second Intifada, which was sparked by the visit of Sharon, not then prime minister, to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif in September, 2000. This uprising marked the final collapse of the Oslo peace process. In contrast to the First Intifada (1987—1993), this uprising was militarized and many times more violent on all sides.

The second development was the so-called Road Map for Peace, crafted by the Quartet on the Middle East (composed of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia). Their plan aimed to reduce the violence of the Second Intifada and jump-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Among its other goals: a halt to Israeli settlement activity, Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, and, ultimately, the establishment of a Palestinian state.

By this time, however, the Israeli political landscape—in response to unprecedented Palestinian violence and the emergence of the belief that “there is no partner”—had shifted to the right. Sharon, who became prime minister in March 2001, was unwilling to participate in the Road Map without significant changes to it, so he set in motion his own plans.

First among these was the construction of the separation barrier in the West Bank, a project the Israeli cabinet approved on April 14, 2002. Rather than building it along the pre-1967 border, this wall, “made up of a series of electronic fences, deep trenches, wide patrol roads, and, in certain places, nine-meter concrete slabs,”1 claimed over 10 percent of the West Bank, bringing this additional territory into Israel proper.2 The separation barrier, “the largest real estate project in Israel’s history,”3 was an example of a newly ambitious Israeli unilateralism designed to change the facts on the ground at an unprecedented scale.

The disengagement from Gaza would be another.

3.

The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are viewed as a single entity according to international law,4 and, thus, often referred to as a unit: the territories, the Palestinian territories, the occupied territories. Despite this, they are discrete geographical areas and viewed quite differently by the Israeli security establishment. The relevant differences between them are such that, by the 1990s, “getting rid of Gaza became an obsession for the Israeli military.”5

In contrast to the West Bank, Gaza holds no religious significance to Jews. This would, in part, explain why the settler community in Gaza was a tiny fraction of the overall settler population, a fact that made the prospect of dismantling the Gaza communities and relocating its residents much less daunting than a similar effort would be in the West Bank. Not only this, but protecting the twenty-one settlements in the Strip was enormously expensive, because the densely overpopulated Strip—perhaps because of its higher percentage of refugees and their descendants—had always been more militant in its resistance to Israeli occupation.

At the cost of removing eight thousand settlers, Israel would be relieved of the task of policing around a million and a half Palestinians. And this would have additional demographic benefits. As one scholar puts it, “By letting go of Gaza’s population . . . Israel would no longer fear that the Palestinian population under its control could offset Israel’s character as a Jewish-majority nation even as it continued to hold on to the occupied territories.”6

Indeed, the disengagement plan explicitly mentioned Israel’s intent to permanently claim significant parts of the West Bank. As stated in the Cabinet Resolution for Disengagement:

In any future permanent status arrangement, there will be no Israeli towns and villages in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, it is clear that in the West Bank, there are areas which will be part of the State of Israel, including major Israeli population centers, cities, towns and villages, security areas and other places of special interest to Israel.

It is hard to know precisely how much land the Sharon government intended to claim as, by 2005, “more than 40 per cent of the West Bank’s territory lay within the bounds of Israeli settlements, although less than 3 per cent of the West Bank” was already “built up.”7 Whatever the exact numbers, the Israelis planned to make many of their West Bank settlements permanent while continuing to expand them. This was clear in the language made public; nevertheless, key figures in the international community, including President George W. Bush, viewed the disengagement plan as an initial step toward a larger deal.8

Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s “closest advisor” and one of the architects of the disengagement plan, “openly admitted that the intention of the Israeli initiative was to ‘pre-empt the peace process,’ as he put it, and thus prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would be presented as having fulfilled all of Israel’s obligations, and there would be no further discussion of ‘the refugees, frontiers, and Jerusalem’. It was on this basis that Israel refused to regard the Gaza disengagement as part of a broader process.”9

Elsewhere, Weissglas was more blunt yet: “The disengagement . . . supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”

As one of the leading experts on Gaza put it, “disengagement from Gaza is the final status.”10

But packaged as a bold and generous withdrawal in exchange for nothing, the disengagement plan was meant to placate the international community. In regards to the Americans especially, it succeeded. Others weren’t so fooled. One Arab commentator described it this way: “slicing off Gaza is just a diplomatic nose job.”11

Because Israel was unwilling, by this stage, in working with the Palestinians toward a final settlement, it should come as no surprise that the disengagement was not coordinated with them, even though the Palestinians would find themselves responsible for maintaining order inside the Strip. This lack of coordination also gave expression to the Israeli side’s almost complete lack of concern with Gaza’s interior: that is, with the human beings who live there.

4.

Prior to its withdrawal, Israel built “two new security fences, one with razor wire and the other with electronic sensors and surveillance cameras” that would “completely surround the Gaza Strip.”12 By September 13, 2005, Israel had left the interior surface of Gaza but had given up little more than that. After dismantling its settlements and military installations inside the Strip, Israel still maintained complete control over “borders, airspace, territorial waters, population registry, the tax system, supply of goods, and others.”13 The inhabitants of Gaza were still “forced to rely on Israel for food, water, electricity, trade, mail delivery, access to fishing, medical care, or contact with the outside world.”14

Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala), one of the central architects of the Oslo Accords and Palestinian prime minister in 2005, characterized the disengagement by saying, “[T]he Sharon Plan is in fact the opposite of the restoration of Palestinian sovereignty over a part of our territory.”15 If one doubts Qureia’s ability to view the situation objectively, consider this description from Jean-Pierre Filiu, who has published a book-length history of Gaza: “In actual fact, Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip had only changed the form of the occupation without altering its fundamentally oppressive nature.”16

5.

I want to pause here to reiterate this crucial truth about the 2005 disengagement: Israel left the interior of the Gaza Strip, but did not otherwise relinquish control of it. The Palestinians, in other words, were not given an independent mini-state with which to begin building a larger future Palestine. By 2005, the very idea of an independent Palestine was no longer, in the eyes of Israel’s political leadership, on the table.

If you still doubt the veracity of this central claim, I will let Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Minister of Defense in 2023, prove it for me.

On October 10, 2023, Gallant said, “We are imposing a complete siege on the city of Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything closed.”17 This was not a step Israel would take only after some initial military campaign made such a siege possible. No operation was necessary for Israel to seal off Gaza, because Israel already controlled its borders.

As Ian Lustick, a political scientist at Penn and an expert on the modern Middle East, puts it, “No state can do those things to another state, but it can do it to a territory it surrounds and dominates.”18

Any claim about Israel, Gaza, Hamas, October Seventh, et cetera, that relies on the notion that Israel handed Gaza over to the Palestinians in 2005 is therefore based on a fiction.

6.

In the absence of coordination, a power vacuum and even a general anarchy, quickly arose inside Gaza. Numerous militant organizations, among them Hamas and Islamic Jihad, made public displays of force, in part by firing rockets into Israel. Just as fast, Israel showed its willingness to respond with much greater violence. “Israel’s reprisal was ferocious. For the first time since 1967, heavy artillery shells were fired into Gaza.”19

Though there had been many economic proposals and development plans made by various international organizations and figures before the disengagement, Israel’s immediate closure of the Strip—which prevented the movement of people and goods across its borders—prevented their implementation. The Gaza economy—already weakened from decades of “de-development”20—had long been interwoven with the Israeli and West Bank economies. Cut off from them, the situation deteriorated.

And things soon got worse.

7.

In January 2006, the Palestinians held legislative elections. Hamas—cynically taking credit for the Israeli withdrawal, even though its leadership had no illusions about Israel’s larger plans—scored a surprising victory. The organization, participating in elections for the first time, won 44 percent of the vote, compared to only 41 percent for the previously ruling Fatah party, the party of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who had replaced Arafat after his death in late 2004.

The United States and Israel, alarmed by Hamas’ ascent, applied pressure with hopes of forcing new elections. These efforts failed and gave way to a new and turbulent status quo characterized by two developments. The first of these was the near collapse of Gaza’s economy. The second was Israel’s increased use of military force in containing the Strip.

8.

Hamas’ rise led Israel to impose regular closures and blockades onto the Strip, effectively isolating Gaza and its economy from both Israel and the West Bank. By the summer of 2006, 79 percent of Gazans were living in poverty.21 Unemployment rose to 41.8 percent. Throughout the Strip, humanitarian aid “replaced labor and commerce.”22 Over time Gaza became “the most aid-dependent region in the world,” with a majority of its population suffering from food insecurity.23 A 2008 World Bank report described Gaza as “a walled hub of humanitarian donations.”24

9.

Israel’s disengagement was motivated by a desire to create a situation in which, legally speaking, “occupation” could no longer be used to describe the country’s relationship to Gaza.25 Occupying powers have certain obligations to the populations they control, and Israel wanted to be freed of such responsibilities.

This change in categorization also had important implications from a military perspective. Legal scholar Noura Erakat explains the new situation like this: “Upon its unilateral disengagement, Israel argued that it no longer occupied the territory and, therefore, could no longer conduct police operations there, making necessary the use of military force as a measure of first resort: in effect, Israel declared war on Gaza.”26 Another scholar describes it this way, “[I]nstead of an occupying power with a set of legal responsibilities, Israel could credibly claim to be an equal belligerent party in an international conflict.”27

In 2007—following the 2006 kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit—Israel’s security cabinet declared Gaza “hostile territory.”28 Israel “in effect recast its relationship with Gaza from occupation to warfare.”29 Large scale Israeli military operations against Gaza quickly became a very regular occurrence.30

10.

It is frankly difficult to categorize or name precisely Israel’s relationship to Gaza and its inhabitants during the post-disengagement period. There is something nearly paradoxical about a reality in which Israel claims it no longer occupies Gaza but still controls the territory in almost every way imaginable. As a result, with regard to international humanitarian law, the status of Gaza is no longer so straightforward.31

And law is not the only field in which scholars struggle to classify this arrangement. As one political scientist, Yves Winter, explains, “[T]he combination of disengagement with closure and periodic shelling has generated a form of control that the existing vocabulary of political theory is poorly equipped to address.”32

In order “to emphasize its asymmetric quality” and the fact that “it is directed not against combatants but against civilians,” Winter eventually lands on the term “siege” to name the situation. He notes, however, that this is not a conventional siege, which would have as its objective “territorial conquest.” Rather, this is a “humanitarian siege laid not for territorial gain but as a mode of control, deprivation, and punishment.”33

11.

The Israeli academics Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir have best articulated the reality faced by the Strip’s civilian population. It is worth quoting them at length:

[T]he inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are no longer subjects of Israel [but] the Gazans are still nonsubjects of the Israeli state, that is, they are still ruled by Israel as its nonsubjects. Their semi-autonomous elected government is incapable either of forming a state or of running it, but this statelessness is precisely the form and effect of their relation to a certain state—Israel—that has deprived them of their own statehood and does everything it can to keep them abandoned, forsaken between a suspended war and a suspended catastrophe. The conditions under which Palestinians live and die, love and work, raise children and pray to God are determined—to an extent unprecedented in the contemporary world—by a series of quite simple acts of state. The ‘disengagement’ constituted the Gaza Strip as a no-man’s-land, whose entire population has become a client of humanitarian agencies. The Strip is excepted from Israeli law and out of range of Israeli sovereign responsibility, but completely within its rule and control, effectively preventing the emergence of any other power that could assume the responsibility of a sovereign government. The Palestinians in Gaza are the abandoned people of the Israeli regime.34

The status of Gaza is unusual not only from a territorial or spatial perspective, but from a temporal one as well. Simply put, after 2005 Gaza existed, more or less, outside of time. As Merav Amir, an Israeli political geographer, puts it, the Strip became “a futureless region,” trapped inside “a protracted stagnation.”35

12.

If the previous section sounds too extreme, too reliant on the research of radical left-wing scholars, I ask you again to consider language from the Israeli political center. The following comes from a 2004 interview with Dov Weissglas, who, as I mentioned earlier, was Ariel Sharon’s right-hand man and a central figure in the disengagement plan. Note here all the ways Weissglas describes—quite explicitly—the plan as one that essentially stops time. He, too, deserves to be quoted at length:

The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure.

I found a device . . . to ensure that there will be no stopwatch here. That there will be no timetable to implement the settlers’ nightmare. I have postponed that nightmare indefinitely. Because what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did. The significance is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely.

[W]e created a status quo vis-a-vis the Palestinians. There was a very difficult package of commitments that Israel was expected to accept. That package is called a political process. It included elements we will never agree to accept and elements we cannot accept at this time. But we succeeded in taking that package and sending it beyond the hills of time.

Though not the main subject of this chapter, it should be noted that American acquiescence to Israeli objectives was vital to the disengagement and all that it enabled. As Sara Roy wrote around that time, “Israel is really in negotiations with the US about how far it can go.”36

And the Americans were willing to let the Israelis go quite far indeed.

13.

This extreme situation in Gaza since the disengagement explains why it has often been referred to as “the largest open-air prison in the world.”37 According to this categorization, “Israel has effectively treated Hamas as the prisoner organization responsible for preventing the inmates—none of whom have been placed on trial, and all of whom have life sentences—from harming Israel or Israelis.”38

Though “open-air prison” may sound hyperbolic, Ian Lustick cautions people from “rejecting” it as “outlandish.” “Consider,” he writes,

that what goes on in Israeli prison cells and yards—such as in Beit She’an, Ashkelon, or Megiddo, where most of the inmates are Palestinians—is controlled not by the wardens but by Palestinian prisoner organizations. Those familiar with the Israeli criminal justice system know this is true, and none would imagine saying that these prisons are not located in Israel. In just this sense, the 140-square-mile prison known as the Gaza Strip, whose internal affairs are dominated by Hamas, is also within Israel.39

14.

And Israel does not treat its prisoners well.

Because Israel controls entry of all items into Gaza, it controls how much Gazans can eat. Different scholars have described the Israeli post-disengagement approach in different ways: “institutionalized impoverishment,”40 “controlled scarcity,”41 and “nutritional warfare.”42 But all these formulations name a governmental policy that deliberately maintains conditions of deprivation for millions of people who live—technically, arguably—beyond its borders.

Israel’s decision to use this brand of collective punishment, officially in order to weaken Hamas,43 is something its leaders speak of openly. Once more, Dov Weissglas chose not to mince words: “It’s like a meeting with a dietician. We have to make them much thinner, but not enough to die.” In 2008, two Israeli ministries—Defense and Health44—worked together to calculate the population’s “basic food needs . . . according to a ‘minimum basket’ allowing ‘nutrition that is sufficient for subsistence without the development of malnutrition.’”45 Thanks to this “drip feed,”46 by 2010, only 19 percent of Gazans qualified as food secure.47

Through an elaborate, bureaucratic process of “inventory control,”48 Israel held the people of Gaza between malnutrition and subsistence for years, as there was an “an ‘upper red line,’ a flow of food that was considered too great, above which even basic humanitarian items could be blocked.”49 And the scope of this state sanctioned collective punishment extended well beyond food, as the Israelis controlled everything from the amount of available medication to income levels to the unemployment rate itself.50

15.

I want to make one thing very clear: all this was absolutely intentional. According to a November 3, 2008 U.S. cable leaked to WikiLeaks, “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to (U.S. embassy economic officers) on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” It was the Israelis’ plan to keep the Gaza economy “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.”

16.

For almost twenty years, Gaza’s timeline was suspended, its inhabitants imprisoned, all while Israel steadily expanded its settlements in the West Bank.

Direct military action kept this system in place. Between 2008 and 2023 Israeli incursions into Gaza killed more than 6,400 Palestinians.51 These intermittent operations came to be known as “mowing the lawn.”

17.

All this is just some of the context in which the attacks of October 7, 2023 took place.

My next post, “The Genocide Process: Rethinking Context,” can be found here.

Part One of this series, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

If you think this substack is worth reading, please share widely.

This substack is free. If you’d like to support my work with a one-time donation, you can do so here.

Anti-Semitism is an old, stubborn, and convenient hatred. Anti-Semitism is real, and it is on the rise. It exists on both the right and the left.

It is important to speak out against and fight it. In times of surging anti-Semitism, it is vital to do so.

2.

Genocide has an even longer history, as it includes all that time before we had a word for it. In fact, genocide appears to have pre-human roots.1 Genocide is stubborn as well. Despite naming it, despite adding it as a crime to international law, genocide continues.

It is important to identify genocide when it is happening, so that it can be opposed. Moreover, fighting an ongoing genocide has unique urgency, as this “crime of crimes” involves human suffering at a scale so vast as to be nearly unimaginable.

3.

It should be possible to speak out and fight against anti-Semitism and genocide simultaneously. We should not have to choose. But, as we are now seeing, when the Jewish state is committing genocide, the matter gets quite complicated. One sign of this complication is the claim that the very sentence “The Jewish state is committing genocide” is itself anti-Semitic.

Why is this matter so complicated, and how are we to respond in the face of this complication?

4.

I can see many reasons for this complication.

On one side, there is a long history of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist language slipping into or simply operating as a stand-in for anti-Semitic speech. The term “Zionist” is sometimes used as code for “Jewish” among anti-Semites. An example of this—old and remote enough to be obvious and uncontroversial today—is the way Soviet repression of dissent throughout the Eastern Bloc in the late 1960s used slogans like “Purge the Party of Zionists” as a way to both scapegoat Jews and simultaneously cloak this anti-Semitism.

On the other side, there is a long history of characterizing good-faith criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, in order to delegitimize this criticism. I believe that condemning the claim “The Jewish state is committing genocide in Gaza” as anti-Semitic—and not, say, as inaccurate—is an example of this. When the State of Israel and its representatives denounce as a “blood libel” a UN report accusing Israel of committing “genocidal acts,” we are seeing an effort to draw attention away from the contents of such a report in order to question the very motives of the people behind it.

5.

An additional layer of complication stems from the very real and even inescapable overlap of Jewishness and Israel. This may also be understood as a conflation, a blurring of the boundaries, between the two. Some examples:

The Jewish star is on the Israeli flag.2

Israel is often referred to—including by its supporters—as “the Jewish state.”

The claim by many Israeli officials that Israel speaks for and represents the Jewish people, wherever they may be.3

The Israeli flag stands on the bema in many synagogues and temples. Prayers for Israel and even the IDF are part of the liturgy in many Jewish houses of worship.

It is common for Jews to state that their Zionism and/or relationship to Israel is an integral part of their Judaism.

And this is a partial list.4

6.

The conflation between Israel and Jewishness makes it difficult—for Jews and non-Jews alike, including those sincerely determined not to mistake one for the other—to distinguish successfully between Jewishness and Israel.

Whatever else one may think about a person who identifies as “anti-Zionist,” many such people are motivated in part by a desire to do away with this conflation, which they attempt to do by rejecting Israel and Zionism more generally as a part of their Jewish identity.

7.

For all these reasons, it will at times be impossible for people of good faith—that is, for people who genuinely oppose anti-Semitism—to agree on who and what they’re fighting against.

This explains, at least in part, why there is currently a controversy over the very definition of anti-Semitism. I say “at least in part” because the more expansive definition of antisemitism appears to assert that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.5 And that very definition is interpreted by some as an effort to silence valid criticism of Israel.

Again, this is a very complicated matter. Acting morally in the face of this complication is made harder yet when one considers that anti-Semitism—which, again, is real and currently on the rise—not only causes fear among Jews, but also stirs up deep-seated Jewish collective trauma. In other words, the reality of anti-Semitism matters to many Jews not because it means they may have to endure slights, microaggressions, and discrimination, but because the long history of anti-Semitism offers many, many examples of this prejudice snowballing into widespread lethal violence. And we are seeing lethal anti-Semitic violence emerging out of anti-Israel sentiment right now in the United States.

8.

So where does that leave us? What is the right thing to do, morally speaking? What kind of words and acts might both combat anti-Semitism and help bring an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

First and foremost, it is necessary for Jews—American Jews—to speak out against and oppose Israeli atrocities. To be seen and known as a Jew who opposes them. This obligation to identify oneself as actively opposed to what Israel is doing may seem unfair to you—too high a bar. After all, there are many Jews for whom Israel is a marginal part of their personal Jewish identity and faith, many Jews who have done nothing to contribute to Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

But in this moment, Jews who fail to define themselves in opposition to Israel’s actions are likely to be defined by them, because it will be assumed, however erroneously, that they support them. Such an assumption is not necessarily—and I would argue is likely not—a result of anti-Semitic beliefs. Rather, this assumption is a natural function of both the conflations I discussed above, which, among other things involves the self-appointed representative of the Jewish people, the state of Israel, destroying Gaza and the very visible and vocal support of (or simply silence regarding) Israel’s actions by establishment or “legacy” Jewish organizations, institutions, and leaders.6

In this moment, Jews simply do not have the luxury of remaining silent. We must actively show where we stand on this matter. One must distance oneself from Israeli actions or be seen as supporting them.

9.

It is also—and I like to believe this is obvious—every Jew’s moral imperative to speak out. “Never again” must apply to all cases, even when the perpetrators of genocidal acts are our fellow Jews. If we make exceptions when our people are guilty, then we ourselves are guilty of hypocrisy.

One sign of anti-Semitism is holding Jews to a double standard. But if we tolerate genocidal acts when Jews commit them, then we ourselves are employing a double standard. Such an approach to Israel’s crimes, when accurately seen by others as the stuff of hypocrisy, may have the function of increasing anti-Semitism yet more.

10.

Second, we must identify and condemn the weaponization of anti-Semitism, which is motivated by efforts to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel or advance unrelated (and, I would argue, dangerous) political aims. The ADL is guilty of the former. The Trump administration—in its attacks on higher education—is guilty of the latter.

If we want people to challenge true anti-Semitism when they see it, we must reject accusations of anti-Semitism when they’re false. Our failure to do this threatens to alienate the very people who should be our allies, as they may come to view us as the veritable boy who cried wolf, and perhaps knowingly at that.

11.

I have to confess that, though I wrote the previous ten sections as thoughtfully and diplomatically as I could, though I still think all I said there, on its own terms, is logical and coherent and worthy of consideration, none of it sits well with me.

In short, speaking of anti-Semitism and Gaza in the same breath, at this moment, strikes me as so misguided as to be deplorable.

12.

Anti-Semitism, right now, is a problem. A growing problem even.

By contrast, Gaza—both what is taking place there and the world’s response to it—is a catastrophe.

The former is largely a threat, a potential threat. The latter is reality, is, in actuality, a massive, sprawling cluster of ongoing war crimes.

The number of Jews killed in this country since October Seventh in response to surging anti-Semitism can, I believe, be counted on one hand. Obviously, even a single such death is a tragedy, but tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed by members of our religion during that time.7

How can one think that anti-Semitism is deserving of equal (let alone more) attention than what is happening in Gaza? Unless one simply supports such destruction, I see no justification for placing them together.

13.

The destruction of Gaza is, first and foremost, an unfathomable catastrophe for the Palestinian people. It will remain an integral element of Palestinian identity for generations.

This genocide is also a catastrophe for one’s faith in the global order, for the very notion of any order devoted to enforcing the rule of international law, along with the shared values informing those laws. The relevant sections of such laws are based in part on the lessons of the Holocaust, which the West by and large (and the United States most certainly) has, in this instance, elected to ignore.

14.

And, of course, Gaza is also a crisis for the Jews, for Judaism itself, because our people have either perpetrated the violence at the center of this catastrophe (Israelis) or, in the diaspora, have overwhelmingly responded to this violence with some combination of silence, indifference, passive compliance, or outright support.

If you doubt this characterization, ask yourself what would happen to a pulpit rabbi if, in their Yom Kippur sermon this fall, they choose as their subject Israel’s genocide. What would happen to a rabbi at, for instance, a typical suburban temple or synagogue, if she—sensitively and compassionately, but unequivocally as well—called out the sin of Israel’s genocide, along with the sin of her congregation’s failure (and her own) to speak out against it?

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that such a sermon—even if it rightly devoted space to Hamas’ sins and the larger complexity of the conflict—might well jeopardize her job. I would love to be wrong about this. It would be a crucial step in the right direction if dozens, even hundreds of rabbis reckoned publicly with what has happened and is happening, and in such a way as to adequately stir the conscience of their congregants.

But I am not optimistic.

I worry that the truth about Gaza is simply too much, too damning, too threatening to the familiar stories we have been telling ourselves for decades about our people and our history to be broached by our own religious leaders, by these representatives and inheritors of humanity’s original experiment with ethical monotheism.

“Never again” has proven to be conditional. The sanctity of all human life has proven to be conditional. If our rabbis can’t or won’t acknowledge this, then what?

15.

In the end, our collective shoulder shrug in the face of Gaza will do more damage to our religion than anything our foes are likely to do.

16.

When I was growing up, most Jews I knew hated all things German. We held animosity toward all Germans, not just Nazis. Did we understand that not every German was a Nazi? Maybe. Did we care? No. All Germans were stained with the sins of those who actually carried out the Shoah.

It turns out that the indiscriminate nature of genocide winds up turning against the perpetrators in the end. All members of the collective that commits such acts will be viewed as guilty, regardless of the degree to which this or that individual was involved.

Israelis—all Israelis—will soon learn this.8 And, due to the conflation I described earlier, diaspora Jews will learn this in time as well. It won’t be fair, but genocide doesn’t bother with fair. There is nothing less fair than genocide, and when such unfairness is released into the world it doesn’t just disappear when the killing finally stops.

People are going to hate us for what Israel did.

17.

There are many things we may be able to do in the future to minimize this unfair hatred. But the smartest and most important thing we can do—and we should be doing this right now—is speak out against and do what we can to stop what Israel is doing. We should do this, first and foremost, to save Palestinian life. But this effort may have the added effect of encouraging the world to remember, in the future, that not all Jews supported this.

In truth, however, it may already be too late. For many Palestinians it is certainly too late. And as far as us being seen as implicated, it may be too late as well.

Whatever the case, of this I’m certain: prioritizing the fight against anti-Semitism, at this moment, is only going to hurt us even more in the long run.

The Jews’ main problem right now is not anti-Semitism. The Jews’ main problem is the fact that the Jewish state is another people’s deadly problem.

The next post, “The Truth About Gaza: 2005-2023,” can be found here.

Part One, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

If you think this substack is worth reading, please share widely.

This substack is free. If you’d like to support my work with a one-time donation, you can do so here.

“Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel” has been the mantra of the mainstream American Jewish community for most of this century.1 Until recently, I used to see signs adorned with this slogan in front of temples and synagogues throughout suburban Chicago, where I live.

2.

The sentence has two halves and each does different work.

“Wherever we stand” implies that we stand in many places. Our community is diverse. We don’t agree on everything.

The second half of this sentence folds this diversity into a larger uniformity, thereby subordinating the former to the latter: “we stand with Israel.”

“We” have many beliefs. But the one thing we share, the one thing we all agree upon is this: we stand with Israel.

3.

This statement not only expresses a particular kind of stance on Israel (one we might call “Zionist” or “pro-Israel,” though both of those understate the full force of what’s at work here), it privileges this stance as the only one deserving of public pronouncement.

In other words, it’s conceivable that the second half of this sentence could declare some other shared Jewish stance. Wherever we stand, we: believe in one God, honor the Sabbath, love our neighbors, welcome the stranger, give to charity, study Torah, et cetera. Instead, standing with Israel is our collective public statement to the community at large.

4.

The choice to display this statement, and often this statement alone, in front of Jewish houses of worship is to give pro-Israel sentiment primacy above everything else that might unite a congregation.

And each remarkable declaration of this sort is almost certainly mirrored inside the sanctuary of the temple or synagogue itself, where the Israeli flag stands on the bema, not far from the Torah. It is mirrored as well in our very liturgy, where the prayer for Israel, or even the IDF, is recited each Shabbat.

5.

This statement also asserts who we are not.

If someone does not “stand with” Israel, they are not part of us. Such people, though they may be Jews, do not belong here. Such Jews are excluded, cast out even.

At places of worship like this, not standing with Israel marks the limit of American Jewish tolerance. One can intermarry, one can be an atheist, one can perhaps even be known as someone who eats a BLT for lunch on Yom Kippur and still be welcome.

But if you don’t stand with Israel, go elsewhere.

6.

All this raises the question: What exactly does it mean to “stand with Israel”?

Certainly it means to support Israel in some general sense. But the particular verb, stand, brings to mind more active support, a choice to be counted along with Israel, to be seen by its side. We stick with Israel through thick and thin.

This phrase also suggests the notion of loyalty, of being a true friend of Israel. But such language—the language of friendship—is theoretically more complex, as it might also open the door to possibilities closed off by the notion of simply always standing with Israel.

For being a good friend to someone can, at times, mean telling them that in this or that instance you can no longer stand with them. You may still love them, you may still care for them deeply, but now you must stand apart from them. If they insist on choosing a certain path, they will have to navigate it alone.

Such a notion of friendship is different than blindly following them wherever their decisions and actions may lead them.

7.

Viewed this way, and considering the mainstream American Jewish relationship to Israel over the last few decades, it’s hard to see our collective standing with Israel as anything but the most thoughtless type of loyalty. For what evidence do we have that our community’s standing with Israel amounts to anything but a robotic readiness to support Israel, no matter what it does?

8.

I initially thought I was analyzing “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel” in order to pose a hypothetical. But it turns out there is nothing hypothetical at all about my question.

Would you still stand with Israel if it were committing genocide?

Surely, had this question been posed twenty years ago, most of us would have answered, “Of course not.”

But we have our answer, and there’s nothing hypothetical about it.

We would, and we did.

Many of us still are.

9.

Not only have many of us stood with Israel as it commits genocide, but we have also gone after most anyone who has attempted to stop it. We call them anti-Semites in order to do this. If these people happen to be Jews, Jews who have the audacity to say, “As Jews, we oppose this,” then we brand them self-hating.

10.

Many of our most powerful organizations, like AIPAC and the ADL, have made it their mandate to pressure the American government to stand with Israel no matter what as well, even as it commits genocide. And they have succeeded across two administrations, one Democratic and one Republican. They have succeeded in turning the debate over Israel’s actions in Gaza into a conversation about rising anti-Semitism in the United States.

11.

The inherent problem with “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel,” however evident now, is nothing new. This phrase conditioned a generation of American Jews to assume that Israel, whatever its minor flaws may be, is ultimately in the right and must be defended from anyone who claims otherwise.

This phrase trained American Jews to look away from the actual truth when it contradicted this assumption. To hold their tongues, to pretend otherwise, to keep silent about what was obvious to anyone willing to look. To live a lie.

12.

Our mindless standing with Israel—unless a particular synagogue had been hoping all along for Israel to become an illiberal, ethno-fascist state willing and able to commit genocide—has proven to be disastrous for Israel, and for American Jews as well.

If the declaration of standing with Israel was made as an expression of friendship—of loving friendship, even—then it’s clear that American Jews have in actuality been very poor friends. What Israel needed, starting decades ago, was what’s known as tough love.

We would have, for instance, used our lobbying might to pressure our government to withhold aid. To not spare Israel at the UN. We would have communicated to our government that Israel must understand that it cannot act with impunity. We would have supported, rather than attacking, political candidates who demonstrated the courage to call on Israel to abide by international law or face very real consequences.

And we would have suspended our missions. We would have withheld the contents of our fundraising coffers, our tourism dollars, and, most importantly, our children. We would have refused to send them to Israel.

13.

Above all, we would have taken a long, hard look at Israel’s occupation, which has existed for fifty-eight out of its seventy-seven years. We would have seen that its very existence—especially in combination with the ever-expanding settlement project—precludes the realization of a two-state solution. We would have seen that the occupation could only continue through the repression of the Palestinians who live there. We would have seen, plainly, to borrow language from Desmond Tutu, that “This vicious system, so totally unjust and immoral, could be maintained only by equally unjust and immoral means.” We would have understood that “Israel proper,” its democracy, and its people could not remain sealed off from this injustice and immorality, that Israeli politics, Israeli society in its entirety would become infected by the cruelty, the callousness, and the dehumanization at the center of any occupation.

14.

Instead, “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel” has meant letting Israel do whatever it wants, whatever its people and its government choose to do. We supported anything and everything, no questions asked. And if others asked question, we went after them.

Our choice to stand with Israel, no matter what, allowed Israel to do things that no other country—certainly no country that claims to be democratic and aligned with Western values—should be allowed to do.

15.

In this way, American Jews obediently and protectively stood with Israel while it devolved into an apartheid state.

Make no mistake, South Africa in 1985 and Israel in 2025 are very different countries. And each country took a very different path toward apartheid. South Africa legislated it, officially and unambiguously, years before the country even became a fully independent republic. By contrast, Israel steadily drifted into what is largely a de facto apartheid, the result of endless decisions and innumerable policies that have produced two entirely separate legal systems in the West Bank: one for Israeli Jews and one for Palestinians, the former enjoying full political rights, the latter with nothing of the sort.

But despite all their differences, both countries created a political, military, and legal arrangement designed to guarantee one group’s superiority over the other, all while keeping these two groups mostly separate.

The word for such an arrangement is apartheid.

To “stand with Israel” unconditionally in the face of this, to leave it to Israel to manage this system when it is clear that Israeli political forces will only make this system more and more permanent, to pay lip service to Israel’s imperfections as if they’re merely cosmetic blemishes on an otherwise healthy democracy is to be party to state-sanctioned oppression.

16.

What was the proper way to “stand with” South Africa in the mid-1980s? Not with its Blacks or its Whites, but with South Africa as a whole? If a person cared about the future of that country, what was the best way to act toward it at that time? What was the right thing to do in order to help South Africa address its central problem: namely, the injustice inherent in apartheid?

The answer, ultimately, was to save South Africa from itself—to prevent the ruling White power from maintaining a status quo that offered them the very real spoils of their superiority. Standing with South Africa meant supporting boycotts and political isolation, all so the White population and its leadership would have no choice but to make the very difficult and very risky decision to change their ways.

17.

Again, South Africa and Israel are far from identical. Palestinians are not oppressed Israelis. They are a separate nation, one that makes explicit claims over the very same land that Israelis do.

But the particular and particularly daunting challenges Israel faces are no excuse for continuing to stand with it in such an irresponsible and willfully ignorant manner. To “stand with Israel” at this point is to provide support to a country that, for decades, has, without any periods of interruption, steadily reinforced a blatantly unjust, immoral, and, according to international law, illegal system.

No amount of Palestinian violence makes the previous sentence untrue.

18.

The history of apartheid’s end is highly complicated, a function of both domestic and international politics, but external pressure played a vital role in forcing the White ruling population to finally abandon it.2 Many white South Africans believed such a transition might well lead to violent Black retaliation against them, but in the end, they were left with no alternative.

Without international pressure—a meaningful portion of it coming from American college campuses—who knows what path South Africa would have taken, especially considering that apartheid’s final decade was its most violent. South Africa in 2025 is hardly a utopia, but all its citizens enjoy the same rights, and the country dismantled apartheid without a bloody civil war.

A difficult change was reluctantly made by those who benefited from an unjust system. And this change took place thanks in large part to the efforts of the international community.

19.

American Jewry, in its unflagging, unreflective determination to “stand with Israel,” has vilified the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement to such an extent that BDS, in the mind of mainstream America, is synonymous with anti-Semitism.

Our community’s blanket condemnation of BDS’ central strategy has been unwise. After all, their tactics are explicitly nonviolent. The language on their website distinguishes between the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper. This same website directly states their opposition to anti-Semitism. Not to mention, whatever excesses may be present in that movement could likely be tempered were large numbers of Jews—insisting on the safety, dignity, and freedom of both Palestinians and Israelis—to join it.

20.

I assume some readers will find my claim that BDS warrants serious consideration, let alone outright support, to be absurd. Such is its self-evident, threatening odiousness in the eyes of the American Jewish mainstream. Such is the success many pro-Israel forces have had in defining it as no different, in the final account, than the terrorists congregated around Israel’s borders.

But doesn’t almost every supporter of Israel this side of Itamar Ben-Gvir wish Israel were on a different path? Had been on a different path for some years now? If we go back to 2015 or 2020 and try something very different, how many other outcomes are actually worse than the current reality? Wasn’t some interruption, some intervention needed? Some interruption and intervention that wasn’t October Seventh?

You may think that BDS is nothing more and nothing less than yet another effort to eliminate Israel. But what if it could have been part of an effort—a partially Jewish-led effort—to save Israel from itself?

Is such a thought really so outrageous?

21.

But my point here is much, much larger than BDS. My point is this:

Which mainstream Jewish organizations this century have openly questioned, let alone rejected, the logic of “wherever we stand”? Which mainstream Jewish organizations this century have officially called on the American government to put substantive pressure on Israel to remain committed to serious negotiations, to halt the settlement project, to work toward ending the occupation (and to suspend military aid in the absence of these things)? Which mainstream Jewish organizations this century have taken a stance that doesn’t, in the final account, merely reinforce Israeli impunity?3

22.

When the history of this genocide is written, one of the central questions scholars will attempt to answer is this: How was it that the United States not only failed to prevent Israel’s actions, but in fact actively supported them?

I suspect many causes will be identified, some of which have little if anything to do with our community. But surely all we stood for, all we prevented others from standing for, will find its place in those pages.

The next post, “Anti-Semitism, and Gaza,” can be found here.

Part One, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

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This substack is free. If you’d like to support my work with a one-time donation, you can do so here.

There are only three paths to choose from when it comes to the future of Israel and Palestine.

2.

The first is coexistence. An arrangement in which both peoples live alongside one another and share this land in some fashion as equals. Maybe there are two states, maybe just one. Regardless, everyone has the same rights.

3.

The second is wide-scale ethnic cleansing or genocide, which leaves only one of these two peoples present in the land in large enough numbers to stake a meaningful claim to it.

4.

The third is forever war, in which neither side concedes its maximalist claims, in which neither side agrees to lay down arms permanently in exchange for this or that necessarily imperfect peace agreement. Down this path, the two sides simply fight on, regularly and intermittently and indefinitely, perhaps with the hope of eventually reaching the destination at the end of the second path, that of ethnic cleansing or genocide.

Or perhaps forever war is chosen with the belief that, at some point, the right war will come along, a war that, without completely eliminating one of the two combatants, will nevertheless function as the final war, the one that brings about peace.

5.

Most of us, I like to believe, would prefer the first path. Were all three options somehow equally available to us, then we’d choose coexistence. We would happily choose to share and, in this way, have less overall, if sharing means peace as well, if it brings with it the absence of war.

6.

This assumption may be more than a bit idealistic as there certainly are people, people on each side, who are willing to live with the consequences of genocide if it leaves them with all the land for themselves, if it finally rids them of their terrifically stubborn and difficult and violent adversary. Nationalism is a powerful force. Grief is a powerful force. Fear is a powerful force. Rage is a powerful force. Dehumanization is a powerful force. There are those on each side who are no longer willing to contemplate coexistence as even a theoretical possibility, meaning the only true options are forever war or genocide. In which case, these people might think, we may as well get it over with already.

7.

It should be said that those willing—eager, even—to make their peace, as it were, with genocide at least subscribe to a coherent, logical resolution of the conflict. Whatever price the remaining people may be forced to pay, within the international community and internally, as a society that has unmade another people as a political entity, at least they would have a state; at least they would have a homeland all their own; at least they would be free of the need to share or coexist; at least they would, at last, have fought their final war.

By contrast, forever war has proven to be no choice at all, because the latest round has indeed involved mass ethnic cleansing and genocide. Of course, even these war crimes, as of this writing, haven’t “solved” the conflict, because the Palestinians still exist, both in Gaza and the West Bank. Moreover, it’s hard to believe—despite all the suffering they’ve endured over the last twenty months—that the Palestinians are ready to abandon their goal of self-determination. If we continue along this path, all we can be sure of is that, sooner or later, there will be more escalation, more radicalization, more people committed to genocide.

The third path—that of forever war—has proven to be little more than the path of genocide, temporarily postponed.

8.

We now have three data points, dating back to the late 1980s, of wide-scale Palestinian resistance, Palestinian insurrection, Palestinian terrorism, call it what you want. In the first, though they famously threw stones, the main tactics they employed—such as general strikes—were classically nonviolent.1 In the second, they blew themselves up on buses and in cafes. In the third, on a single day, they killed more Israelis than were killed in all the awful years of the Second Intifada.

Do we have any reason to believe that their response to the current Israeli response—this Israeli response by far the most violent and destructive response to Palestinian or even Arab violence in the entire history of the conflict—won’t be the worst yet? If somehow, God forbid, a dirty bomb is detonated in the heart of Tel Aviv, will anyone have the right to express surprise? Indeed, if tomorrow, a dozen synagogues in the diaspora are attacked, with hundreds of Jews murdered, is there anyone who can reasonably say that such an escalation was unimaginable?

If the last twenty-two months have taught us anything, it’s that things can always get worse. It’s that there’s no limit on suffering. No ceiling on cruelty. Each side, albeit with access to very different resources and backing, will eventually respond to the latest escalation with one of their own. And things have escalated to the point that path number one, the path of coexistence, appears utterly closed off to us. The first path now seems so inaccessible that to advocate for it in this moment is to open oneself up to accusations of naïve, Pollyannaish idealism, the kind of idealism many view as suicidal more than anything else.

9.

But we would be wise to acknowledge the price being paid—even just by Israelis—as the path of forever war has finally veered into that of genocide. The price of sending generation after generation to fight. The price of its civilian population enduring war after war, the “battlefields” of these wars increasingly extending into all parts of Israel. The collective psychic cost of pressing one’s foot down harder yet onto the neck of this other people after they slip out again and extract their pound of civilian flesh. The collective psychic cost a society necessarily pays once it is ready to starve children in order to achieve its strategic goals, whatever exactly they may be. The cost paid in exchange for being ruled by fundamentalists or fascists or both, leaderships whose politics revolve around little more than a willingness—an eagerness, even—to inflict suffering on the other, regardless of how much suffering is eventually revisited on the very people they claim to represent. The cost of living in a society permanently stuck inside its own maddening, intensifying trauma,2 in which the complete dehumanization of the other is so much the norm it goes largely unnoticed.3

If, in our heart of hearts, we want to move down the first path, if we know that the only future worth working toward is one of coexistence, then how can we wait any longer to commit to it, knowing as we do that we are currently moving further and further away from our desired destination? How can we continue to defer to the warmongers and the generals, to the analysts and the experts, who tell us that the next battle, the next operation, the next surprise attack will make all the difference or is simply unavoidable, a war of no choice? How many wars of no choice must be fought before we come to understand that war is always a choice? What will it take before we summon the courage to fight for a different future, a future without war?

10.

The precise steps off of paths two and three are not simple, let alone easy. Changing our trajectory will be an enormous challenge. The partners4 in this case are unfortunately led by people committed to total war and the eventual elimination of the other side. But we must know, we must believe that just as my side, just as your side, just as every side has become convinced of the need for forever war or something even worse, each side can eventually be convinced of the opposite; can, at the very least, be convinced of the futility of forever war; can be made to see that it does not want to continue committing war crimes. We must believe that we can produce in the other a faith in a different, better future by showing that we believe in it ourselves. And we can begin to show this by moving toward it today; by rejecting war; by deciding, right now, to live toward a different future.

And so, ask yourself: Which path are you choosing? Which path are you advocating for others to choose? Which path do your words and actions (and dollars) lead us down? If you find yourself, upon reflection, subscribing to paths two or three, why is that? Why might you feel it is still necessary to defer, or even reject, a commitment to coexistence? Has your anger, your fear, your sense of righteousness, your belief in the essential, immutable mendacity of the other caused you to believe that we are stuck in a zero-sum game? Have you come to believe that only the other side has anything to answer to, that all the blame lies with them? What would it take—instead of telling yourself the same story day after day, the story in which we’re the blameless victim and the others are the villainous victimizer—to imagine a story of reconciliation and, eventually, peace? In that story, with that other future in mind, how do your actions in the present change?

And if you’ve resigned yourself to this genocide, or whatever you insist on calling all that Israel is doing, why is that? Are you truly ready to accept that as the current, necessary step? Will you still be willing to stand by it once the rest of the world settles on “genocide” as the name for what Israel is currently doing in Gaza? Do you in fact believe that ethnic cleansing is okay under certain circumstances?

11.

There’s one more thing to remember here, especially if you find yourself quick to dismiss what you might consider the naïve, wishful thinking of the previous section. In addition to their desire for the land, the projects of Jewish and Palestinian nationalism have one thing in common: their radical idealism. Zionism turned an idea into a reality. The Palestinian people, in the face of dispossession and decades of statelessness, still cling to their dream of Palestine. In this regard, neither collective was or is fueled by simple pragmatism. This kind of idealism, this belief in a very different collective future, can and must be applied to these two people’s shared future. Unless you want more genocide, these two people’s future will be shared. So again, ask yourself, what kind of future are you contributing to?

The next post, “Wherever We Stand,” can be found here.

Part One, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

If you think this substack is worth reading, please share widely.

This substack is free. If you’d like to support my work with a one-time donation, you can do so here.

To explain my full case against Israeli militarism,1 I want to focus on just one branch entrusted with the implementation of Israel’s militaristic strategy: its intelligence community. I want to do this in part because two somewhat recent works—Dror Moreh’s 2012 documentary The Gatekeepers and Ronen Bergman’s 2018 book Rise and Kill First—provide extensive details of the men who have led this community. And both works illustrate all three aspects of my critique.

2.

Bergman’s critically acclaimed, impressively researched, and often gripping book details the history of Israel’s targeted assassination program. His narrative begins in 1907 and ends just a couple of years before its publication in 2018.

Bergman’s history is eye opening, though by the end, it was eye opening in ways Bergman could not have intended.

The vast majority of its 631 pages narrate, in astounding detail, a seemingly endless series of operations: the selection of a “target,” the gathering of intelligence, the planning of an operation, and the actual (often successful) assassination attempt. Though Bergman narrates a number of failed operations, some of which are botched with horrible consequences, he mostly offers the reader—from a tactical perspective—dozens of ingenious plans carried out with daring expertise.

But after a few hundred pages of this, Bergman’s account starts to feel pornographic, much in the way a pornographic film, while occasionally attempting to represent the vast realm of nonsexual interpersonal relations, ultimately (and unambiguously) reveals its true colors by visiting that realm only long enough to set yet another sex scene in motion.

Well before the end, I found Bergman’s approach baffling.

3.

After reading around 400 pages of Bergman’s journalistic pornography, I started to wonder: Didn’t any of the many brilliant, devoted, and patriotic men entrusted with the responsibility of protecting Israel’s citizens, men who worked closely with the country’s political leaders (and, in some instances, became Israel’s political leaders) ever question the wisdom of the targeted assassination program as a whole?

For the first 628 pages, Bergman hardly addresses the matter. He got unprecedented access to the details of this program, and he passes them on to his readers. Larger considerations appear not to interest him.

4.

Bergman finally address this question in the book’s last three pages. Here he discusses the final chapter of Meir Dagan’s life. Dagan was one of the greatest spymasters in Israeli history, and thus a man who was responsible, directly and indirectly, for many, many deaths.

But near the end of his life—he died of cancer in 2016 at the age of 71—Dagan came to realize, or at least became willing to speak publicly about the fact that, in Bergman’s words, the “majority” of Israel’s “leaders have elevated and sanctified the tactical method of combating terror and existential threats at the expense of the true vision, statesmanship, and genuine desire to reach a political solution that is necessary for peace to be attained.”

Then Bergman essentially pulls the rug out from under his own project: “In many respects the study of Israel’s intelligence community as recounted in this book has been one of a long string of impressive tactical successes, but also disastrous strategic failures.”2

But about these failures Bergman has nothing to say. To an extent, this is understandable, and not only because he didn’t set out to explore them. Rather, there is, in a sense, almost nothing to narrate down that path, at least nothing terribly concrete. The strategic failure embodied in and caused by Israel’s unflagging reliance on targeted assassination, by its habit of addressing its security problems by murdering key Palestinians, is expressed by the pure absence of other kinds of efforts, other tactics.

In other words, Rise and Kill First is haunted by an alternate, phantom history in which Israel’s best and brightest strive to end the conflict once and for all through diplomacy, compromise, and a concerted effort to avoid violence whenever possible.

5.

One meets many of the same figures from Israel’s security apparatus who appear in Rise and Kill First in The Gatekeepers. Dror Moreh’s documentary is built from interviews with six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service.3

As an explanatory piece, Moreh’s film is much stronger than Bergman’s, as he allows these men to tell the viewer directly what they think about all they have done. And one of their main conclusions is this: there is no military solution to the conflict, only a political one.

For all their ingenuity and expertise, for all the resources and latitude they’ve been given, Israel’s security operatives believe they have failed. And they failed because they’ve been asked to fix something that cannot be fixed with the tools at their disposal.

As Avi Ditcher, head of the Shin Bet from 2000 to 2005, says, “You don’t reach, you don’t create peace through military means.”4 Elsewhere, Avraham Shalom, Shin Bet head from 1981 to 1986, dismisses the approach of his agency as it first emerged in the late 1960s when he says, “There was no strategy there, just tactics.”5

And the final words of the entire film are given to Ami Ayalon, who headed the agency from 1995 to 2000. Ayalon denounces not just his agency, but his country’s entire conception of its own security: “The tragedy of Israel’s security debate is that we don’t understand that there is a situation, a very frustrating situation, in which we win every battle but lose the war.”6 Ayalon is referring to the fact that an endless series of successful operations can nevertheless fail to bring about a better, safer future.

6.

Israel’s security debate, with its fixation on “security” as something that can be won through force, has become its own self-replicating discourse.

Uri Ben-Eliezer—the expert on militarism I introduced in my previous post—puts it like this in his description of the situation in the mid-2010:

Israelis remain convinced that the use of force is the only effective option. Israeli discourse centers on such concepts as the “destruction of rockets,” the “elimination of terror,” the “rehabilitation of our deterrence,” and the “picture of victory,” which deflect attention from the underlying political problem and the nonmilitary path to its resolution.

Ben-Eliezer ends this section of his book with an ominous conclusion: “Naturally, such a view often has pathological consequences.”7

7.

A standard justification of Israel’s consistent reliance on military means asserts that violence is necessary to address an immediate external threat. An attack is imminent or a group has formed, a group that exists solely to perpetrate violence against Israelis.

This way of thinking about Israeli violence is not inaccurate, but it is very incomplete.

Israeli violence both responds to a certain set of conditions and alters those conditions as well and not only—one might say “hopefully” from a particular perspective—by “neutralizing” the threat. Israeli violence, especially in the absence of Israeli diplomacy and Israeli peace-making efforts, encourages more violence and discourages Palestinian moderation.

In other words, Israeli violence does not exist outside some larger situation but rather operates as an integral element of it. One of the main ways Israeli violence shapes the ever-evolving situation is by increasing violence on all sides.

8.

Not only has Israel’s long-running militarism failed to bring about security, let alone peace; it has made things worse. Because that’s how violence works. As Mark Kurlansky puts it in his book Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea: violence is a virus that infects and takes over.

Elsewhere, Kurlansky makes a similar point in a slightly different way: violence doesn’t resolve. It always leads to more violence.8

These two truths about violence go a long way toward explaining the overall trajectory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A country that relies exclusively on military strategy will attempt to solve its problems through violence. And violence invites counterviolence. The more violence is employed, the more inaccessible diplomatic options become. The single-minded pursuit of a militaristic policy reinforces the apparent need for such a strategy, because it looks to be the only strategy available.

9.

Bergman’s Rise and Kill First demonstrates the futility of violence quite clearly. He traces a multi-decade trajectory marked by the following: the category of “target” expanding until it includes leaders who are viewed internationally as first and foremost political (as opposed to military) figures; the increasing willingness to undertake operations that may kill people other than the target; and the steady deterioration (despite the first two trends) of Israel’s security.

And, of course, Bergman’s book ends a half dozen years before October Seventh, which signaled a new period in the history of the conflict, a period in which all the elements listed above have accelerated or intensified.

As the Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim puts it, “If the history of this century-old conflict teaches us anything, it is that violence only breeds more violence.”9

10.

The conclusions reached by these intelligence experts are nothing new. Back in the 1950s, Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, said the following:

The question of peace must not for a moment disappear from our calculations . . . We must restrain our reactions. And there is always the question: has it really been proved that reprisal raids solve the security problem they are meant to deal with?10

Throughout much of that decade, Sharett struggled against David Ben-Gurion and the army’s chief of staff, Moshe Dayan—both of whom consistently advocated for a militaristic strategy—over the fundamental nature of Israel’s approach to their conflict with the Arabs.

Sharett ultimately lost this struggle in a decisive fashion.

11.

Ben-Eliezer opens War Over Peace: One Hundred Years of Israel’s Militaristic Nationalism with a lengthy quote from Sharett, one worth reproducing in its entirety. These reflections, made in 1957, give voice to the way basic features of Israeli society and culture have, from the earliest years of the state, made the pursuit of peace unlikely at best.

What I saw above all was a failure to understand the psychological essence of the problem. The question of peace will not be resolved on the basis of interest alone, nor that of logic. First and foremost, this is a question of will. This is the question of whether a psychological infrastructure has been created that promotes peace or, at least, whether factors in the psychological background that block the path to peace have been removed.11

Peace is something that must be envisioned and prioritized in order to be realized. And it is difficult to do those things while resorting to violence with such frequency that it appears to have become an automatic response for an entire nation.

12.

Bergman illustrates the inherent contradiction between working for peace and waging war quite clearly in his account of the early stages of the secret Oslo negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

As he tells it, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin

instructed Unit 8200,12 which eavesdropped on Palestinian communications, to report anything they heard about the discussion directly and solely to him. Officially, this was for operational security—any leak that got to the various Palestinian factions could derail the talks. Unofficially, Rabin wasn’t entirely certain that men who’d spent years trying to kill Arafat and his minions, who ran agencies that had invested enormous effort in the war on Palestinian terrorism, could make the mental adjustment necessary to see a former enemy as a partner in peace.13

This moment in Rise and Kill First raises a couple of massive questions, both of which seem to provide their own answers. Doesn’t attempting to murder one’s adversaries preclude the possibility of making peace with them? Doesn’t a decades-long program of murdering Palestinian leaders—who in the most general sense are, like their Israeli counterparts, involved in both political and military efforts—work directly against and make less likely the emergence of diplomatic initiatives that might lead to a peaceful solution to the conflict?

I can think of no clearer expression of a militaristic strategy than killing the other side’s leaders rather than negotiating with them.

13.

I have intentionally set up a rejoinder: we don’t negotiate with terrorists.

My point here is not to make a detailed case for why, let alone how, Israel should negotiate with Hamas’ leadership.14 My point, instead, is that Israel must negotiate with someone from among the Palestinians. And it must do that because there is no military solution to Israel’s problems with the Palestinian people.

Unless you want to undertake large-scale ethnic cleansing, or genocide.

14.

It is at this point that Israel’s defenders and apologists point to all the many times Palestinians rejected offers of peace.

The first of these was in 1947, when the Arabs did not accept the UN partition plan. Had they accepted this, Israel’s defenders say, then there would be a Palestine today. Not only that, it would cover more territory than just the West Bank and Gaza.

There is some legitimacy to this claim. At the very least, we would certainly be living in a different, possibly more peaceful Middle East had the partition plan been accepted by all involved.

Back in 1947, the Arabs had not reconciled themselves to a Jewish political presence in Palestine. The Palestinians have suffered immensely for their reluctance to come to terms with the absolute determination of the Zionist project.

Of course, it is possible to debate the fairness of the partition plan, according to which the Jews (who made up only 37 percent of the population) would receive over 56 percent of British Mandate Palestine, leaving the Palestinians with under 44 percent. Moreover, while the new state of Palestine would be 99 percent Arab, Israel would be only 55 percent Jewish.15

But I won’t push this argument. A large portion of the new Jewish state would have been desert. Its population would have increased considerably with the lifting of British immigration laws, which had meaningfully limited the growth of the Jewish population during the mandate period.

So let’s concede that one. Let’s call it a missed opportunity for the Palestinians.

Of course, the new Israeli state ultimately took advantage of the chaos of war by driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, preventing them from returning, and claiming more territory than was promised to them in the UN plan.

15.

When was the Palestinians’ next “missed opportunity”? For approximately the following quarter century, the conflict was Arab-Israeli, that is, a conflict between the State of Israel and various Arab states.

There were no opportunities to be had in the 1950s or for most of the 1960s. The PLO wasn’t even formed until 1964.

The next opportunity was in 1967, following the Six-Day War. During this war, Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Desert. The country’s territory holdings grew threefold.

There was, at this time, talk among the Israeli leadership of offering most or perhaps even all of this territory in return for a full and final peace settlement. But Israel did not pursue this possibility.

In other words, it was Israel that missed this opportunity.

16.

What became the Oslo Accords began in 1993 with secret talks between Israeli academics and Palestinian leaders. Oslo was largely viewed as dead by 2001.

There have been occasional negotiations since then. For instance, Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas met dozens of times from 2006 to 2008. Even the Netanyahu government held negotiations with Abbas and the Palestinian Authority in 2010 and 2011, and again in 2013-2014.

Clearly, nothing came from these efforts. There may have been opportunities missed during this time, including on the Palestinian side.

17.

There has certainly been at least one additional missed opportunity on the Israeli side. I’m speaking here of the Arab Peace (or Saudi) Initiative. Endorsed by the Arab League in 2002 (and again in 2007 and 2017), this plan calls for normalization of relations by the Arab world with Israel in return for, among other things, a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. No Israeli government has even responded to it officially.16

But without going into any more details, we can already conclude that throughout the seventy-seven years of Israel’s history, the country has been in direct negotiations with the Palestinians for less than twenty years. For the rest of its history, which includes the last ten years, Israel has conducted its relationship with the Palestinians through other, often violent, means.

And throughout those years of negotiations, with few interruptions, Israel continued using these other means as well. To give a sense of just how regularly Israel continued employing violence, consider this: Bergman devotes approximately two hundred pages to the years 1993 through 2011, the years when Israel was negotiating directly with the Palestinians, and these pages are filled with the details of innumerable targeted assassination operations.

Of course, the Palestinians were busy giving the Israelis targets to consider throughout these years. The question, then, is this: How does one shift from war to peace? How does one begin to reduce the infection that is violence?

This is something the Israeli side—the stronger side—is no longer trying to figure out.

18.

Why was less than twenty years enough time for negotiations to be disqualified in the eyes of most Israelis, when decades of war and military conflict have not brought Israelis security? Why, in other words, does no amount of military failure disqualify military strategy as such?17

Discussing the failed 2006 Second Lebanon War, Ben-Eliezer says the following: “As usual, the main conclusion drawn from the unsuccessful war was that the IDF must improve its preparations for the next round—a typical instrumental militaristic deduction.”18

This is one sign of living in a genuinely militaristic society: military methods are perceived as self-evidently necessary and inherently valid. Diplomatic efforts, by contrast, are viewed as terribly risky. And when a particular diplomatic effort fails, then the entire strategy is disqualified as fundamentally unsound.

19.

The underlying cause of Palestinian violence is Palestinian nationalism. Without destroying the Palestinian people as such, no amount of violence, no amount of killing that will remove this cause.

Unless, of course, violence is applied toward mass ethnic cleansing and genocide.

And yes, it is true that inherent to Palestinian nationalist aspirations is a desire to claim the entire land. But obviously, this is the case with Zionist aspirations as well, something plainly clear according to the actual reality on the ground here in 2025.

The only way to reconcile these competing claims—unless, again, one wants to attempt ethnic cleansing and/or genocide—is through negotiations, compromise, and a political settlement.

In other words, Israeli safety requires Palestinian safety, and the former’s safety cannot be reached by killing Palestinians. As Avi Shlaim puts it, “[S]ecurity is not a zero-sum game. . . . [I]t cannot be achieved by purely military means.”19

20.

One of the few things I imagine most people agree on—even if they’re hesitant to admit it—with regard to Israeli society and perhaps even the Jewish people is that a great intelligence can be found there. Everyone claims to reject stereotypes, but I suspect that all groups—when speaking only with their members—are willing to admit they harbor some positive stereotypes about their own.

When it comes to my group, well, we proudly acknowledge that we are a sharp bunch. Measure it in doctors, professors, Nobel Prizes, whatever: we are smart, or at least we like to think we are.

In the case of Israel, this conclusion is supported most obviously by the remarkable size and value of its high-tech sector. The concentration of brain power to be found there is astounding.

Of course, this is not the only place such intelligence is concentrated within Israel. Israel’s actual intelligence community is no less formidable, as it screens for, attracts, and invests in many of the country’s youngest and brightest. Once upon a time, the elite units of the IDF were commandos. Today, Unit 8200 is no less prestigious.

And it is no surprise that many of its members go on to have lucrative careers in high-tech, as this Israeli industry is most certainly a leader in, among much else, surveillance technology.

21.

All of which is to say there can be no doubt that Israeli society includes at least one clear continuity with diasporic Jewish communities throughout our history: the systematic cultivation of the intellectual development of the brightest among us. Viewed this way, an eighteen year-old recruit to Unit 8200 is the direct descendant of the young, promising yeshivah student whose shtetl community—however impoverished—selected him for a life of study.

The shameful tragedy of Israeli society is that just about none of this cleverness has been devoted to peacemaking. To diplomacy. To, simply put, figuring out how to create a reality in which Israelis and Palestinians can coexist and live in peace together. Without question, creating such a reality is no small challenge, but surely this great Israeli intelligence is capable of achieving such a thing.

22.

It doesn’t take a genius to know what a peaceful arrangement, in general, would look like: two independent states, Israel and Palestine, side by side, the borders drawn more or less according to the pre-1967 borders.

That such an arrangement may no longer be feasible—thanks in large part to the vast network of Israeli settlements, thanks in large part to its leaders’ insistence on forever increasing and asserting its military superiority—suggests how a very intelligent society can also be very foolish for decades on end.

23.

Of course, it is quite possible that more than a few Israeli geniuses have concluded that another way to achieve security is to remove Palestinians from the equation altogether.

And who knows? Maybe they’re right. But the cost of such a peace—how to measure that?

24.

I won’t repeat here all I wrote in my early post on dehumanization. But it does feel worthwhile to pause here to consider what endless war has done to the people of Israel. In addition to what all this war has meant for Palestinians, in addition to the fact that it hasn’t brought security to its own people, Israel’s endless war has, unquestionably, claimed something fundamental and precious from their own humanity.

Chris Hedges writes that war “dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it . . . War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us.”20

So what does war do to a society, to a people, when it is a near-constant reality for decades on end? And what has it done to us—to our very religion, to our own humanity— to have endorsed and enabled Israel’s addiction to war all this time?

25.

On the final page of his study War Over Peace, Ben-Eliezer writes, “Israel exists in a state of perpetual conflict and war. It may be that Israel on its own cannot end this situation.”21

He doesn’t elaborate on who else could help Israel extricate itself from this conflict, but it seems clear to me that American Jews can and must play a meaningful role here.

At this point, we American Jews are, whether or not we like it, enmeshed in Israel’s violence. We are made less safe by it. As a collective, we are viewed as supporting the Israeli side in an increasingly asymmetrical war. And it is our fellow Jews who are being killed and doing the killing, the latter in unprecedented numbers. For these reasons and more, it is our responsibility to work to get the Israeli people to embrace the project of pursuing peace once and for all. The ways in which our community has elected to “stand with Israel” for decades, as I’ll discuss in a future post, have only pushed peace further away.

For better or for worse, our response to the crisis of Israel will say more about our values as a community than anything else we may devote ourselves to in the coming years. Ben-Eliezer echoes this notion in the final sentence of his book:

“It is worth recalling the words of Martin Buber, who said after the establishment of the State of Israel that a solution to the problem will come when Israel’s leaders realize that the ‘Arab question’—that is, the question of the conflict, its essence, and its end—is a quintessentially Jewish question.”22

---

The next post, “The Only Path,” can be found here.

Part One, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

If you think this substack is worth reading, please share widely.

This substack is free. If you’d like to support my work with a one-time donation, you can do so here.

- Sara Roy, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

Sara Roy is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She is one of the world’s leading experts on the Gaza Strip. Her books include The Gaza Strip: A Demographic, Economic, Social and Legal Survey, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development, and Unsilencing Gaza. She is the child of Holocaust survivors.

Peace is good, and war is bad.

How old is a person when they first come to know this? And is this truth taught or simply intuited?

However this knowledge reaches a young person, it is likely learned, recognized, and internalized with little ambiguity.

Peace is good, and war is bad.

2.

This truth almost certainly connects to and expands upon the commandment not to kill.

Killing is bad. War is killing. Therefore, war is bad.

Peace is not killing. Therefore, peace is good.

3.

It feels strange to attempt to reconstruct how this truth emerges and becomes an important part of one’s worldview. The truth is so basic, so self-evident, that there should be no need to rehearse it.

But just as obvious, especially in this moment, is the fact that peace has been dismissed, disregarded, abandoned, and all but forgotten.

The goodness of peace in and of itself has not proven adequate. The purity of this goodness has somehow failed to secure the place of peace—even as an abstract goal—in our lives.

Who still speaks of peace? Who still calls for it? Who still has the audacity to insist on its goodness in order to argue that we abandon the pursuit of peace at our own peril?

4.

How did this happen? How did we reach a moment in which peace is viewed as a luxury, as something only the naïve and foolish would try to pursue? What has been the cost—to our community here in the United States, to Israel, to our people, to our religion—of turning our backs on peace as we have?

5.

In 1926, Mohandas Gandhi wrote,

That which distinguishes man from all other animals is his capacity to be nonviolent. And he fulfills his mission only to the extent that he is nonviolent and no more. He has no doubt many other gifts. But if they do not subserve the main purpose—the development of the spirit of nonviolence—they but drag him down lower than the brute, a status from which he has only just emerged.1

6.

Humans—not only Jews or Israelis—are hastily developing other gifts at this moment. They are—we are—currently developing a gift that will increase our intelligence to an extent that even the innovators themselves cannot foresee.

Will these omniscient supermachines remind us that peace is good and war is bad, or does this truth exist outside of, or perhaps somehow prior to, what we call AI? And if so, is this truth, due to its simplicity, somehow more vulnerable yet in the face of our great, computerized intelligence?

7.

We know this intelligence will be enlisted in and mobilized for war, because it already has been. Such is the fate of all technology. Something is invented or discovered—the gun, the plane, nuclear fission—and almost instantly, it is folded into the baroque arsenal.2

Artificial intelligence will be no different, though its effects may be.

8.

Israel is leading the way here, as its killing in Gaza was accelerated in part by the use of artificial intelligence in the selection of bombing targets there. This created what one former intelligence officer described as a “mass assassination factory.”3

9.

In 1930, a British reporter asked Gandhi, “What do you think of modern civilization?”

Gandhi answered, “That would be a good idea.”

Gandhi was making a distinction here, however implicitly and ironically. This modern era, so remarkably intelligent, so sophisticated, was not the stuff of civilization.

He believed that modern society was organized around the wrong values. Back in 1926, he wrote,

We must either let the Law of Love rule us through and through or not at all. Love among ourselves based on hatred of others breaks down under the slightest pressure. The fact is such love is never real love. It is an armed peace.4

10.

Love, like peace, has no place today in the realm of public political discourse. Love is a private, personal matter. An organizing value in that sphere alone. Love is cordoned off from larger concerns.

Such a development is certainly related to the larger disaster of peace’s marginalization, of peace being eclipsed by war.

11.

We don’t much remember the year 1926 anymore. Nothing of great importance happened during those twelve months, certainly not in comparison to all the many monumental events that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century alone.

But it is worthwhile recalling what we did and didn’t know in 1926. The Great War had already passed, and it had been so named because of its singularity, its magnitude, its unrivaled and unprecedented qualities.

We called it the Great War, at least in part, with the hopes that naming it that would teach us something. But Gandhi, over a decade before a much greater war would once again consume “modern civilization,” already understood that we had not learned the necessary lesson.

“And so it will be,” he wrote,

in this great movement in the West against war. War will only be stopped when the conscience of mankind has become sufficiently elevated to recognize the undisputed supremacy of the Law of Love in all walks of life. Some say this will never come to pass. I shall retain faith till the end of my earthly existence that it shall come to pass.5

12.

It is too easy for me to imagine how these words from Gandhi will be dismissed. How I will be dismissed as well. Who seriously talks of peace, let alone love, in this moment? What kind of unrealistic fool writes about peace when the topic is Israel in 2025?

My own hesitations about the words you’re reading are themselves one way to understand how we’ve arrived at this current moment. This is what becomes possible when no one any longer speaks of peace, when no one seems to recall, let alone care, that you should love your neighbor as yourself.

13.

On April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was murdered, Martin Luther King Jr., spoke at Riverside Church in New York. His topic was the war in Vietnam. Though his opposition to the war was hardly a secret, this was his first high-profile speech on the topic.

While detailing his many reasons for breaking his silence, for “bringing Vietnam into my field of moral vision,” King said the following: “I knew I could never raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

The media savaged King for this speech. Many of his closest, most trusted, and most loyal advisers criticized him as well. This speech was one of the reasons why King, universally venerated today, was so unpopular at the time of his death.6

In response to criticism about this speech from a close friend and adviser, King said, “Well, it was probably politically unwise, but I will not agree that I was morally unwise . . . I think I have a role to play which may be unpopular.”7

14.

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

The directness of King’s words here are remarkable. After all, much of his case against the war could have been made without this accusation. The civil rights movement had achieved, in 1964 and again in 1965, its historic legislative victories thanks to the bold, persistent championing of their cause by President Lyndon Johnson, with whom King spoke regularly. Yet here was King, calling Johnson’s government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.

He didn’t have to, but he did.

15.

Which government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today?

Violence can be measured in many ways, but the surest measure must be in the physical destruction of people and things.

Russia is one possible answer.

Israel is another.

Israel may be the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.

And if that is not true, then this certainly is: Israel is one of the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today.8

16.

Defenders of Israel will likely rush, if they can even be made to concede that Israel purveys prodigious amounts of violence, to assert that Israel has no choice, that Israeli violence is the least bad of a number of uninviting options.

There is much to be said regarding the matter of choices and options, but before considering those, I ask Israel’s defenders to consider what it means—not in terms of Palestinian lives, not with regard to international opinion or geopolitical strategy, not even with regard to the immediate safety of Israelis themselves, but rather with regard to Israeli society itself—for this country to be as violent as it is.

What does it mean for the Jewish state, this state of Jews; what does it mean for Jews everywhere; what does it mean for Jewishness, for even Judaism itself, when Israel is among the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today?

What exactly is the price of that?

17.

And however unpleasant it may be, I ask you to consider the above questions only after translating violence into its most concrete expression: killing.

The Jews of Israel9 are killing more people than Jews have ever killed, certainly since Biblical times, if not throughout our entire history. Again, you may believe this to be the best of a number of very bad options, but even if we accept your larger truth, the fact remains: the State of Israel defends itself by killing tens of thousands of civilians. By violently ending tens of thousands of noncombatant lives.

This truth will not only remain a part of our history forever, it is, I would argue, far and away the single most important fact about the Jewish people at this very moment. Not that we were attacked on October Seventh. Not that increasing numbers hate us. No, the headline of the Jews right now is the body count for which the Jews of Israel are directly responsible.

And, of course, American Jews have done little to slow this killing. Our most powerful organizations and institutions have instead supported and defended it, shunning those—Jews and non-Jews alike—who have dared to speak out against it, who believe that this killing must stop.

18.

The cost of Israel purveying so much violence—perhaps more than any other country on earth—is obviously greatest for the objects of this violence: the Palestinians in Gaza, and, increasingly, in the West Bank as well. Their suffering—combined with their fundamental, irrefutable humanity—should be enough to bring us pause.

But the case I’m making here, in which I’m asking my people to reconsider the path we’re on, likely won’t be convincing if I depend on our compassion for the Palestinians.

The Palestinians brought this on themselves.

They started this.

No one made them do what they did on October Seventh.

They could end this right now if they released the hostages.

They have never accepted Israel’s right to exist.

This lack of compassion is one more measure of the disastrous state of our people at present.

19.

The story of Jewish violence is a long one. It begins not long after the story of the Jews begins at all, with Abraham’s readiness to murder his son as a sacrifice to God. It transforms, in disturbing and complex fashion, when God prevents Abraham from completing this sacrifice but rewards him for his willingness to do so with a reaffirmation of God’s covenant with him.

This covenant includes a promise of the land over which Israelis and Palestinians today fight: “I will bestow my blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore; and your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes.”10

20.

I could continue like this, chronicling the encounter between our people and violence in the biblical period. Simeon and Levi killing the recently circumcised, defenseless Schemites to avenge the rape of their sister. Moses killing an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew. The slaying of the firstborn. There are many, many such encounters.

But instead I will rush ahead to acknowledge a widely accepted truth: the relationship between Jews and violence, for much of Jewish history, is that of Jews as the victims of violence.

21.

Jewish victimhood climaxes with the Shoah. Almost all of Israel’s founders and original elites, immigrants from Europe, were born into a world that had been erased a few years before 1948. These people were attracted to the Jewish national project thanks to a shared belief that the Jews needed to live and to be differently. And this shared belief emerged many decades before the destruction of Europe’s Jews.

So the Shoah’s relationship to Zionism was not one of cause and effect. For Zionists in 1948, the Shoah was a source of vindication, however bitterly traumatic.

22.

I make the above points in order to suggest that it should come as no surprise that the Zionist project involved more than just an effort to acquire political power. This effort was accompanied and meaningfully assisted by the accumulation and use of military force.

There is a long history here, one tracing precisely when and how and why members of the Zionist Yishuv resorted to force in the early decades of the twentieth century: the extent to which this violence was initially defensive, when it took on a more offensive character, at whom (the Arabs and/or the British) it was aimed, how it shaped and was shaped by the violence of the emerging Palestinian national movement. And on and on.

The eminent Israeli historian Anita Shapira wrote a long book on this topic. The well-known Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi addresses these matters in his work as well. This historiography is worth reading.11

But I am going to resist the temptation to get too into the weeds here in order to argue the following: Israel is a militarist county and has been so for its entire existence. And I’ll add to this one more claim: Whatever the argument may have been for Israeli militarism decades ago, unless one believes in ethnic cleansing or genocide, this strategy has proven itself to be a dead end.

23.

I use militarism in a very particular sense, borrowing the Israeli sociologist Uri Ben-Eliezer’s definition of the term: “the tendency of a society to solve political problems by military means and to legitimize and normalize this approach.”12

It is easy—tempting, even—to use this description in order to cast judgment since, by and large, militarism does not have positive connotations. But I’m using it here as a straightforward description of how Israel has approached and continues to approach its conflicts with its adversaries.

Israel is a militaristic country. There have been periods when it has been less so, or less exclusively so, most obviously during the period of the Oslo Accords. Being militaristic, after all, is not a binary matter but rather one of degrees.

If one is willing to look at the historical record, along with current events as they unfold, it is undeniable that Israel has often been and most certainly is at present a country that attempts to solve its political problems through military means.

24.

Ben-Eliezer, who has written at least two books on the subject of Israeli militarism, describes the origin and solidification of this phenomenon as follows:

[D]uring the two decades beginning in 1936 the idea of a military solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict was gradually legitimized first within the Yishuv . . . then within the new state and crystallized as a value, a formula, and an ideology.

According to Ben-Eliezer, over time, the political and the military in Israel were “interwoven,” producing a “militaristic view of reality.” Such a worldview “not only enshrined” a military solution “as a value in its own right but was also considered legitimate, desirable, and indeed, the best option.”13

25.

Ben-Eliezer is quite explicit that he doesn’t view Israeli militarism as bloodlust or a love for war. Nevertheless, he does argue that the decades-long prioritization of this strategy has shaped and even prolonged Israel’s conflict.

Israeli nationalism . . . has become, together with militaristic ideology, a significant factor in the . . . protracted conflict between Israel and its neighbors, in a way that, over a period of almost one hundred years, led many times to war . . . militarist nationalism . . . can be seen not only as one of the causes of Israel’s wars but also as a phenomenon that prevented the possibility of peace when the chance for a change emerged.”14

26.

I want to acknowledge something that should be obvious: Israel has and continues to experience very real threats to its security. My argument is not that Israel should always avoid military tactics. Rather, in keeping with Ben-Eliezer’s scholarship, I want to advance a critique of militarism as a default, self-evident strategy, which is precisely what militarism has been and continues to be in Israel. My critique rests on three claims:

First, a military strategy doesn’t and can’t address the underlying cause of the threats to Israeli security. Military tactics can only reduce temporarily its immediate symptoms.

Second, over time, a militaristic strategy actually makes these symptoms worse.

Third, the consistent application of military tactics precludes the effective use of political and diplomatic strategies.

Overall, violence doesn’t just lead to more violence; it pushes peace further away as well.

This is the first of two posts on the subject of violence and militarism. The second—“The Dead End of Israeli Militarism”—can be found here.

Part One, “Our Genocides,” can be found here.

If you think this substack is worth reading, please share widely.

This substack is free. If you’d like to support my work with a one-time donation, you can do so here.

Israelis and Palestinians—barring ethnic cleansing and genocide of a sort even worse than what is currently underway—are partners. They live and die together in this land. They co-occupy, in the most literal sense, this territory. They interact regularly with one another. They are partners, inescapably. As such, the only question is: What kind of partners will they be? In what ways will they interact?

Since the emergence of the “no partner” mantra, the answer to this question has been: ongoing occupation, punctuated infrequently, but consistently, by more acute violence. Since October Seventh the answer has been: profound, savage, ruthless, and genocidal violence.

This, too, has been a type of dialogue, as, to take but one example, the Israeli destruction of Gaza is seen as a “response” to the Palestinian attacks of October Seventh. All these acts of violence, however one names and compares them, are communications between the two sides. One can argue endlessly about what exact message Hamas attempted to send to Israel on October Seventh, about what exactly Hamas thought it was responding to, but make no mistake, a response was made and a message was sent.

The same can be said about the subsequent Israeli campaign.

2.

This is a partnership. It has been and will likely remain one, and even in this very moment, when the interactions are violent and hateful, traumatized and traumatizing, the Israeli-Palestinian partnership remains in effect.

Is another kind of dialogue possible? I’m not speaking here, not yet anyway, of peaceful coexistence. Of negotiations toward a final settlement that both sides might view as equitable and fair, or at least viable and acceptable. I merely want to assert that they must interact as partners, however reluctantly, and as such it must be preferable to do this with words and not via acts of violence.

Of all the many failures of the international community, especially the United States, especially within my own community, when it comes to this conflict, it is our failure or refusal to name the basic, inescapable reality of this partnership that has been among the most harmful.

3.

I have seen, many times, Americans on all sides replicating this denial of partnership.

In February, 2024, I was at Stanford University to give a talk. In the center of campus was a sizeable structure promoting the Palestinian cause. Beneath a cluster of canopy tents strung together were flags and pictures, posters and placards. Some students sat inside behind tables, promoting their view of Gaza and the conflict.

On the other side of a main sidewalk was a smaller structure. This one had Israeli flags instead of Palestinians ones, along with its own collection of posters and placards. Inside were other students doing much the same as those across the way.

The day I was there, the atmosphere was, considering all the many strident, self-righteous messages on display, quite calm, almost sedate. Frankly, everyone looked a little bored.

But I was troubled all the same.

Because if you’re a young person, there are few places on Earth, here in mid-2020s, better to be than Stanford University. There are few young people more fortunate than the students at Stanford University. Every day you study and socialize with people who are on track to run the world in a couple of decades. You are taught by some of the greatest minds anywhere. The average student at Stanford has, in a sense, won the human lottery.

Not to mention, no one at Stanford is being taken captive or bombed in the middle of the night.

But even there, each side sat apart from the other, refusing to talk.1

If we can’t model dialogue here, why should we expect Israelis and Palestinians to try it there?

4.

If one doubts the fundamental, inescapable reality of the Israeli-Palestinian partnership, ask yourself the following: is it coincidence that the two sides have simultaneously grown more extreme, more rejectionist, more violent, and more ruthless, with one another?

To illustrate the dynamics of this increasingly violent dialogue, here are two observations from Uri Ben-Eliezer, an Israeli sociologist, about the Second Intifada, which erupted as Oslo collapsed in the early 2000s: “The harsher Israel’s response to the Palestinians, the more militant the Palestinians became and the more they volunteered to be shahids.” “The IDF became even less restrained in its actions against the Palestinian uprising; yet this only led to a parallel increase in the intensity of the Palestinian terror attacks.”2

Ben-Eliezer makes clear that violent escalation leads to more of the same.

5.

My immediate interest here is not to establish who has been or who currently is the most extreme, violent, ruthless, etc. In the context of this chapter, that is a secondary concern, because my point here is that with regards to their own side, their own people, and especially their own leadership, each side is as extreme, violent, and ruthless as it’s ever been. This is not coincidence. Just the opposite, they have done this to each other. Ever-escalating violence is the form of their dialogue.

The self-perpetuating nature of this dialogic descent is among the first truths we should take from recent events. And without keeping this truth in mind, it is pointless to argue about who initiated the latest round of escalations, who escalated more intensely, or who descended with greater speed down into the nightmarish abyss in which both peoples now find themselves.

As such, a most pressing question is: How can we change the trajectory of this back-and-forth?

6.

This ineluctable partnership is expressed in the fact that Israeli and Palestinian attitudes, according to many polls, tend to mirror one another.

To give just one example, a September 2024 poll found that 85% of Palestinians believe that “their recent years of suffering in Gaza justify October 7,” while 84% of Israelis believe that “October 7 justifies the war.”

This finding articulates a negative, destructive mirroring. And there are plenty of other examples in regards to victimization more generally and each side’s belief in the genocidal intent of the other side.

7.

It seems quite possible then that this collective interdependency could be leveraged to improve the situation. In other words, were one side to find the courage to believe in and act on the possibility of coexistence, then the other side might well be moved in that direction as well.

8.

The interdependency between, the inescapable partnership of, Israelis and Palestinians can be seen most clearly by looking at their current leadership. Consider all they have in common:

Hamas

• maximalist

• fundamentalist

• anti-democratic

• extremist

• genocidal

Netanyahu Government

• maximalist

• fundamentalist

• anti-democratic

• extremist

• genocidal

Because this is an asymmetrical conflict, these similarities aren’t expressed in the same way. To take the most horrifying example, Hamas kills babies in their cribs at close range, whereas Netanyahu’s government does the same, but from the air or through starvation. The method used by Hamas is more direct and thus leaves no questions as to intent. But the sheer number of babies killed by Israel since October Seventh, along with the ubiquity of genocidal rhetoric in the Israeli political mainstream, should make it clear that both sides are intentionally killing babies.3

9.

The similarities between these leaderships are not coincidental. They have made one another. The more extreme the Israeli government becomes, the more Hamas commits to its maximalist agenda. And vice versa.

The fact that Netanyahu was literally funding Hamas is merely a grotesque, concrete expression of their deep interdependency.

10.

Netanyahu was supporting Hamas for a very simple strategic reason, to weaken the Palestinian Authority and thus make the establishment of an independent Palestinian state less likely. He explicitly said as much, back in 2019:

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

11.

Netanyahu’s general strategy is nothing new, and it is a strategy that has been adopted by Israeli leadership across the political spectrum.

When the First Intifada erupted in late 1987, very quickly “many Israeli staff officers believed that the rise of fundamentalism in Gaza could be exploited to weaken the power of the PLO.”4

One form this “rise of fundamentalism in Gaza” took was Hamas, which was founded in Gaza in 1987. In other words, from Hamas’ very beginning, Israel supported it.

12.

This long-running Israeli strategy aims to weaken Palestinian political strength, regardless of how it manifests. Gaza is isolated from the West Bank in order to prevent the territories from functioning as a single, unified political entity. Islamist organizations are backed in order to prevent the PLO—and later the Palestinian Authority—from solidifying their position as the main representative of the Palestinian people.

Divide and rule.

13.

Israel’s strategy emerges from a simple, but illusory, belief: The Palestinians’ goal of independence can be frustrated forever.

Related to this belief is another: Israel, and Israel alone, can forever rule all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

The former belief was thought to enable the latter.

Israel does indeed rule over all this land, but because the Palestinian people refuse to give up on their goal of independence, this rule is characterized by repression and violence. Rather than give up on their desire to rule all the land, however, Israel’s leaders continue trying to bring about the final defeat of Palestinian nationalism by using old methods that proved futile not long after they were first employed. For already in the early months of the First Intifada, back in 1988, “the Muslim movement turned on the very people,” that is, on the Israeli forces, “who believed themselves so clever in fostering it.”5

14.

Israeli leaders, however short-sighted they may be, are not simpletons. They understand that reaching a peaceful settlement would require reliable, capable, and trustworthy counterparts on the Palestinian side. Were Israeli leaders committed to reaching such a compromise, this would inform the ways in which they attempt to shape the character of Palestinian leadership in its entirety. Rather than attempting to divide and weaken Palestinian leaders, no matter who they are, the Israeli side would invest resources—political, financial, diplomatic, and military—into strengthening those Palestinian leaders and organizations demonstrating the greatest potential to function as viable partners.

In other words, Israel’s leaders are fully aware that their relationship to Palestinian leadership isn’t, shouldn’t, and, in practice, can’t ever be passive. If Israel wanted worthy Palestinian leadership, it would work to strengthen and cultivate such people, even if it had to do this surreptitiously at first.

But Israeli leaders have rarely wanted this, and so they have not. More than this, they have absolutely denied that such work could be part of a coherent Israeli political strategy, could be one of their central responsibilities. Israeli leaders pretend publicly as if they have no more control over Palestinian politics than they do the weather, even as, to give just one example, they actively attempt to weaken the Palestinian Authority.

Are there exceptions to this? Absolutely. When Rabin shook Arafat’s hand, he was communicating that Arafat was now a legitimate partner and not a despicable adversary. Oslo was a brief period when Israeli leaders understood that it was in their own interest to support the other side. But that period was exceptional. Israel’s default strategy, both before and after Olso, has been to undermine Palestinian leadership.

So why do Israelis have no partner? Because neither do the Palestinians.

15.

None of which is to argue that the Palestinians are without responsibility for this state of affairs. They have made their choices, and many of them have been bad. They, too, played a role in the collapse of Oslo.

As the Israeli writer David Grossman wrote, back in 1998, when Oslo was still alive, Palestinians, like their Israeli counterparts, suffer from “the curse of self-destruction, the curse of the fear of peace.” Palestinians, like Israelis, are “enslaved by . . . our proficiency for war and our overly developed talent for enmity.”6

Any society that, for whatever reason, supports its members blowing themselves up on public buses is a society that has chosen a dark and cynical path.

But violent resistance of some sort in the face of occupation is predictable. If Palestinians are responsible for their actions, then Israelis are as well. And Israel has chosen occupation.

16.

It is at this point that supporters of Israel ask why Palestinian resistance must be so violent. Terrorist organizations cannot be negotiated with. Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?

Issa Amro is a nonviolent Palestinian activist, who has been organizing against and resisting Israeli repression for over twenty years. Amro, who cites Gandhi as a central influence, realizes that violence may be efficient in the short term, but he reject its nonetheless. “Gandhi said, in effect,” Amro writes, “if you want to achieve liberation through violence you will achieve it quicker than through non-violence, but you should know that violence will then become a part of your society.”

In response to his organizing and activism, Amro has been arrested dozens of times, beaten, evicted from his home, and shot in the legs three times. As a retired Israeli general told US officials in a leaked cable from 2010, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.”

17.

Anyone who wants coexistence in Israel-Palestine should be supporting people like Amro and condemning Israelis for retaliating against him as they have. It’s in our interest to strengthen Palestinian Amros, in order to give Palestinians a real choice in how to wage their struggle for independence.

18.

If you think someone like Amro is too marginal to be taken seriously, consider then the case of Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti is currently serving more than five life sentences for his role in lethal violence perpetrated during the Second Intifada. But since then he has renounced violence and made it clear, again and again, that he supports a two-state solution. He has even told his people, in Arabic, to employ “peaceful popular resistance of the occupation.” Secular, widely respected as being free from corruption, Barghouti has shown himself to be the most popular Palestinian leader for some time. According to polls, he would easily win a free election held among Palestinians.

Would Barghouti truly be able to bring about a peaceful settlement? Would he not only resist violence himself, but could he also persuade other, less moderate Palestinians to do the same? It is impossible to know the answer to these questions. What is clear is that the current Israeli government—along with every Israeli government since 2002, when Barghouti was imprisoned—prefers not to find out.

19.

Looking at the conflict through a lens of interdependence relieves each side from exclusive responsibility for the current state of affairs. In other words, it can’t be just one side’s fault when the very notion of one side completely distinct from the other is an illusion.

That being said, this is an asymmetrical conflict. The Israeli half of the relationship is stronger in almost every way imaginable. More money, more weapons, more outside support. Not to mention, Israel is occupying Palestinian territory and not vice versa. Put differently, Israel is an independent state. Palestine, as a political entity, doesn’t currently exist.

So yes, both people and their leaders play an active role in the evolution of the conflict, but the Israeli side is much better equipped to change its current trajectory.

20.

Interdependency tell us that the question is not: Are you for or against Hamas, or for or against Netanyahu? The question is: Are you for or against Hamasanyahu? They are a package deal, a two-headed beast that ultimately acts as one, each half feeding the other and in this way strengthening the monster as a whole.

21.

It’s easy enough to see this when framed as I just framed it, but it’s harder to maintain this perspective throughout the endless cycles of retaliation and escalation. In the immediate aftermath of October Seventh, one could be forgiven for viewing Hamas as the main culprit. But October Seventh is Netanyahu’s responsibility as well, and not only in the immediate sense that his military failed so spectacularly in its duty to secure the country’s border and protect its citizens that day.

Netanyahu, through his rejectionist policies, through his categorical abandonment of the peace process, through his ardent support of the settlement project, increased Hamas’ legitimacy. Netanyahu, through his regular wars in Gaza, increased the appetite for revenge there. Netanyahu, through his readiness to welcome the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Betzalel Smotrich not merely into his coalition but into his cabinet, clearly communicated to Hamas that the conflict had unambiguously entered a period of absolute zero-sum politics.

There will be no compromise, no settlement, not even any discussion of one any longer, this is what Netanyahu told Hamas, which was willing to respond in kind.

22.

I have to say, though, that directing my condemnation toward Netanyahu and his government may serve to draw attention away from the dire state of Israeli politics as a whole. And not just right now but over the last couple of decades, at least. Because how far does one have to go toward the left of the Israeli political spectrum in order to find a political party that, even implicitly, appears to acknowledge the impossibility of achieving a better Israeli future without also bettering that of the Palestinians? I’m not sure of the exact answer, but I know one must go very, very far, well past any party that has any chance of leading the country in any kind of near future.

In other words, the problem is much, much bigger than Bibi. It runs much, much deeper.

23.

The attacks of October Seventh will forever remain unjustifiable, but when viewed as a response to the cynical policies of the Netanyahu government, they no longer appear so illogical. October Seventh was an attempt, and a horribly successful one at that, to upset the status quo crafted by Netanyahu. If Hamas was recklessly wagering that their extremist partner would overreact, they have been proven correct.

True, Hamas is today even more reviled by those who reviled it on October 6^th. More than this, Palestinian society in Gaza has been destroyed. Alongside that tragedy, Israel is well on its way to becoming a pariah state, and its traumatized society is at war with itself.

This is one way interdependency can express itself.

24.

If interdependency is destined to remain the one constant between Israelis and Palestinians, then we should work for the best interdependency possible. We should support organizations that work for coexistence, that engage in dialogue, and that recognize the humanity of the other. Any group, any politician who speaks of such things as a luxury, as things that must be deferred for now, is part of the problem.

And when it comes to the Israeli side of the problem, including its policy of avoiding the hard—and, yes, risky—work of coexistence, the country’s long-running and excessive reliance on military might deserves much of the blame.

My next two posts are on the role Israeli militarism has played in the conflict.

The first of these, “Violence and the Jewish State,” can be found here.

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