Israel's actions are hurting Jews everywhere
The effects of Israel’s crimes against humanity, carried out in the name of the Jewish people, reverberate far beyond the Middle East.
Weeks after vehemently denying involvement in the bombing of Al-Ahli Arab hospital, Israel besieged Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital. The World Health Organization called the health care facility, ideally a space of care and revival, a “death zone.” For thousands of Gazans, it was a last hopeful place of refuge. Now, due to Israel’s Pyrrhic quest to unearth Hamas hideouts, the most vulnerable Gaza residents are dying.
Since Oct. 7, Jewish Americans calling for a ceasefire have been shouting the refrain “Not in our name.” It is a desperate plea to challenge the prevailing narrative in Israel and the U.S., which suggests that the Jewish state must show strength and resilience in the face of an unprecedented massacre.
It is also a practice in self-preservation.
The Israeli government, Israel’s allies and most Israelis themselves allege that pausing — or outright ending — its siege in Gaza would do a disservice to the Jewish people and their eternal fight for security. In truth, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, before the Hamas attack but certainly afterward, has done irrefutable harm to Jews everywhere. By sealing its disproportionate retaliation airtight around the struggle for Jewish freedom, Israel is provoking anti-Semitic wrath globally.
In America, Jews are contemplating whether to wear their kippahs and Magen David necklaces and display their menorahs prominently in their homes this upcoming Hanukkah. For Jews living in certain parts of the country, this fear is not new. During the Trump presidency, the rise of neo-Nazi movements, deadly hate crimes against Jews and less overt, yet still scarring, acts of anti-Semitism pervaded the country.
Jewish Americans are contending today with an even steeper escalation of tension against them, and Israel’s actions are, at least in part, to blame. Its genocidal campaign in Gaza under the pretext of protection is the most blatant atrocity. But beneath the images of ashen victims helpless to unforgiving bombardment, Israel’s obdurate web of oppression receives far less scrutiny.
Israel is imprisoning Arabs for crimes of empathy, such as liking social media posts supporting Palestinians and planning peaceful protests within Israel’s borders. The Red Cross and lawyers representing the incarcerated are largely barred from visiting Israeli prisons. Those who have been inside the jails in the past six weeks report what they describe as torture against Palestinians who were not given due process.
Outside the covert cells, the Israeli government is upgrading its Jewish citizenry to vigilante status, supplying them with military-grade weapons to police the streets for behavior they deem suspicious.
Israeli settlers in the West Bank, who under normal circumstances carry out assaults against Palestinians with near impunity, are not only continuing these violent settlements while Israeli law enforcement pretends to look the other way; IDF soldiers have been emboldened to assist in the pogroms.
Dissent within Israel’s borders is being stifled and the imperial project of the Jewish state is being expanded apace, with no regard for Palestinian rights. As Tamara Newman of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said this week, “The Israeli public are being convinced to fear the minority, who are not the enemy.”
Exactly where all this fits in to the goal of ensuring Jewish safety abroad is to be determined. An all-out lobbying blitz from some of the same U.S.-based organizations that once supported the forced migration of a quarter of a million Palestinians in the 1940s has a majority of Jewish Americans believing that Israeli sovereignty can only be guaranteed by further displacement and killing.
Israel may still have a friend in the United States, but it is stoking the anger of its critics more and more each day. Ridding the world of Hamas, if that was ever the sole objective to begin with, has come at an enormous human toll. Incinerating an entire region for the supposed survival of the Jews will only breed more anti-Semites.
In America, Jews draw the ire and envy of white supremacists. The specter of the Trump administration returning to power, coupled with the Nazi propagandizing of influential figures like Elon Musk and Kanye West, bring to the fore the possibility that the U.S. may become so hostile to Jews that living while Jewish in America is a hazard in and of itself.
Israel should be the safe haven the Jews can flee to, the way some African Americans have moved to their ancestral homeland seeking more equitable treatment. That idyllic escape hatch can imbue Jewish emigrants with a greater sense of identity and purpose, but it cannot erase the pitfalls of nationalism. Israel’s current leadership has far more interest in destroying refuge for its neighbors than it does being Judaism’s nirvana.
Israelis will claim that this war on Gaza is being waged with the memory of the Holocaust trailing not far behind. The Jewish state, they argue, is not afforded the patience to be gun-shy. But massacring thousands of children is no way to honor a vow of “Never Again.” Flexing military might to detrimental effect is no way to repair the perceived disrepute of a Jewish diaspora. Waiting until the pressure reaches a fever pitch to begin negotiations to broker a temporary ceasefire is no way to secure a future for Israelis, much less Jews writ large.
When the project of Zionism was in its infancy, America was strongly against it. From presidents to rabbis to the leader of the Reform movement, there was consensus that a Jewish state in Palestine was a bad idea: for Jews, for Arabs, for the U.S. Even during and after the Holocaust, as support for the relocation of Jews to Palestine swelled, many Americans weren’t convinced. Some of that skepticism was rooted in anti-Semitism; protection for the Jews wasn’t top of mind for politicians who couldn’t be bothered to change U.S. immigration laws to allow Jews to evade extermination in Europe.
Anti-Zionist Jewish leaders at the time, however, acknowledged the conflicting emotions Americans would face (and still face today). It was understood then, if not widely recognized now, that intertwining American Jewish desires with the inevitable deadly conflagration between Arabs and Jews would do little to assuage the incomparable grief of the Holocaust. Moreover, it would force Jews to pick a side, an impossible charge considering the Talmudic doctrine, deeply engrained in Jewish faith, that to save one life is to save an entire world.
The very idea of peoplehood for a religion is specious. For Jews, that classification can feel both necessary and immoral. Shared tragedy has calloused the Jews with a sense of community. And yet, Israel’s founding was made by possible by the cries of religious freedom, which almost always lends itself to religious oppression. A great number of Jews are slow to accept that they are an ethnic group, aware that religion does not carry with it the same level of permanence and recognizability as other races. The issue is especially thorny when solidarity is not only encouraged but demanded.
Pro-Israel advocacy groups and Western governments have implored American Jews to be on the side of Israel, even as it rips up every page of international humanitarian law in the book. It is imperative to resist the urge to express fealty to a Biden government as it preaches the words of righteous self-defense. Israel is doing irreparable damage to a religion it purports to represent, and there is an ever-growing amount of grieving Arab families who won’t forget.
Jews everywhere are worse off for the siege. Their tenuous grip on security is further imperiled each day it continues to be waged in their name.