This war is a call to action for religious Jews on the left
Chalk artist Elana Colombo on November 7, 2023 draws the Star of David around the blood of Paul Kessler, a Jewish man who died following an altercation during pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrations the previous day in Thousand Oaks, California. Photo by David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images
Rabbi Shai Held November 10, 2023
This essay is excerpted from a speech delivered at the Palo Alto JCC’s Z3 Conference on Nov. 5, 2023. It has been edited and reprinted with permission.
It is, to put it mildly, a difficult and painful time to be a Jew.
We are facing an explosion of virulent antisemitism around the world. There is agony, outrage, worry and fear. And many of us find ourselves forced to reevaluate who our friends are.
Until Oct. 7 and its aftermath, I was more closely aligned with the left than anything else. On many issues of domestic policy both here and in Israel, I remain aligned with it.
But for me at least, something fundamental has broken.
We know about Christian nationalism and white supremacy on the right. They are every bit as appalling and unforgivable today as they were four weeks ago.
But while the attacks near Gaza were still unfolding, a variety of left-wing activist groups began celebrating the supposedly “heroic resistance” of Hamas.
It is a particularly hard time to be a left-leaning Jew, and a religious one. But our work has never been more important. As Israel battles Hamas for its future, we must confront the moral rot in our universities and progressive spaces. But we must simultaneously confront the extremist elements within our religious communities, and reckon with what sort of Jewish people we want to become.
Support of terrorism
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the rhetoric of decolonization was used in many supposedly progressive spaces to justify the dehumanization of Jews. In the most extreme cases, even Israeli children were labeled “occupiers” and hence deemed fair game.
The moral rot is staggering.
The campus left’s embrace of Hamas, a religious fundamentalist group that is routinely violent and discriminatory against both women and LGBTQ persons, not to mention political dissidents, would be funny were it not so utterly obscene.
It is clear to anyone with even the barest bit of knowledge that calling for “Freedom for Palestine” while supporting Hamas is as repugnant as it is absurd. You don’t support freedom by venerating those who despise and systematically suppress their own people.
There is also a tremendous amount of implicit anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bigotry in claims that occupation drives people to do horrific things. The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto never attempted to slaughter the babies of their tormentors; many oppressed groups resist their occupiers without parading around with women they have just assaulted and humiliated.
We have also heard a great many intellectuals argue that Hamas is simply resisting Israeli occupation by making use of whatever means are available to it.
There is something perverse about both parts of this — both the claim that Hamas is resisting Israeli occupation and that it is simply doing what desperate people do.
Hamas has never made a secret of the fact that the “occupation” it wants to end began not in 1967 but in 1948. Hamas leaders themselves will tell you that; they say it all the time.
Many on the left — far more than many of us previously thought — undoubtedly agree.
The end of the occupation
There has also been a stubborn and insistent refusal to reckon with how utterly murderous and genocidal radical Islam is.
Let’s leave aside the out-and-out antisemites for a moment. What makes people who see themselves as “good guys” refuse to condemn — and at times even embrace — a radical fundamentalist movement like Hamas?
One reason, I think, is that people resist uncertainty and ambiguity. It is much easier to live in a world in which one side is good and the other evil than it is to embrace complexity. But if you stubbornly insist on reducing every conflict to “the colonizer and the colonized,” you end up saying nothing useful about real-world problems that require nuanced thinking and analysis.
The fact is that in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, there are heroes and villains on both sides. No amount of posturing and preening can change that.
I’ve also been struck by the journalists, pundits and college students — including many Jewish ones — who get the impression that any army that kills any civilian has committed a war crime. Intention is irrelevant: Murdering an infant in cold blood is equivalent to unintentionally killing an infant when hunting a terrorist.
Just war theory, with all its limits, is about living in a world that is morally ambiguous, a world in which one is sometimes faced only with bad choices and worse ones. Listening to and reading many of the folks on the far left, I’ve been tempted to excoriate them for their moral and intellectual laziness. But under that laziness lies something many of us can actually relate to — a fear of encountering the world as fundamentally tragic.
It’s crucial to emphasize: The fact that Israel is fighting a just war does not free it from following the laws of war.
But the language of war crimes must not be tossed around promiscuously to describe every death we regard as horrific and tragic. In the context of war, I fear, those who merely condemn “all killing” doom themselves to irrelevance.
The temptation to ignore — or forget — what radical Islam really is, what Israel is really fighting here, seems to have ensnared many Israeli leaders, too. They honestly came to believe that Hamas’ leadership would be content with building their own theocratic statelet in Gaza. And now, horrifically, we all know better.
Nothing justifies supporting Hamas. But we also have to confront the fact that living in abject poverty, under humiliating occupation, radicalizes people. It is hard, and it may be impossible, to de-radicalize people who are without hope.
Hamas is not just a movement, it’s a set of ideas. And you simply cannot defeat an ideology using tanks and warplanes. You can kill the leadership and you can weaken Hamas’ ability to do evil — but an ideology is much harder to defeat.
The idea that you can subject a people with national aspirations to indefinite occupation and subjugation is a fantasy — and an immoral one at that.
Occupation devastates the occupied and rots the soul of the occupier. That is not less true now that it was a month ago, even if the possibility of a real solution currently seems further away than ever.
What comes next for Jews
Hamas likely saw the deep and acrimonious divisions in Israeli society and concluded that Israel was vulnerable to attack in unprecedented ways. And there may well have been some truth to that.
But Hamas badly underestimated the profound solidarity that most Israelis still feel with one another even amid deep social divides, and it totally underestimated the resilience of the Israeli people. It will pay dearly for that underestimation and that miscalculation.
But it’s not only Israelis. Jews around the world have rallied to defend Israel, to support it, to donate unprecedented sums to help it endure this horrible moment. Amid all our sorrow and our pain, I think the Jewish community has a lot to be proud of.
Zionism is not dead. The state of Israel will recover, even if the very real wounds of Oct. 7 and its aftermath never quite heal.
In the coming months and years, Israel will have to ask itself what kind of society it wants to be, and with what kind of leaders. It will have to ask hard questions about extreme inequality and the anger and disillusionment that come with it.
And Israel will need to have an accounting of its far right, especially its religious far right. The racism that runs so deep in many quarters, the refusal to see or affirm the humanity of Palestinians, the unabashed militarism and the valorization of violence among the hilltop youth and their enablers all needs to be confronted and repaired.
Unconscionably, since Oct. 7, extremist settlers have unleashed a relentless wave of violence against Palestinians who are just going about their day. They have chased entire Palestinian communities from their homes, and have paid no price at all.
It is long past time for the Israeli government to bring this insanity to an end. It is morally abhorrent and religiously repugnant. And it also has the potential, obviously, to cause the West Bank to completely explode.
It would be an egregious mistake to conflate the larger Religious Zionist world with the extremists in its midst. And yet, if ever there was a time when moderate religious Zionists must speak up and make their voices heard, it is now, when the pyromaniacs are working hard to start a massive conflagration in the West Bank.
Our Sages warn us that Torah can be a double-edged sword. “If we merit and are worthy,” they promise, “Torah can become a healing potion, an elixir of life. But if we do not merit and are unworthy,” they warn, “Torah can become a deadly poison.”
Judaism can be a source of love and care and goodness and decency and a commitment to justice; it can and must be rescued from those who do evil in its name.
When it comes to dealing with our own violent extremists, the future of Israel and to no small degree the future of Torah itself are on the line.
Israel’s situation right now is grave, and it may well be that American Jewry’s is too, at least in some ways.
But we can work, without naivete or wishful thinking, for a brighter future for both peoples who are so fiercely attached to the same glorious, impossible piece of land. We can reach out to our people and Israel and let them know that they are loved by us and front of mind for us. We can lobby public officials and ensure that the hostages are not forgotten. We can support Israelis on the front lines, as well as first responders and therapists and trauma centers. We can tell the truth about Hamas. And we can commit to helping build a better, more humane, more thoroughly democratic Israel.
One could argue that there are good reasons to despair. But Jewish thinkers tell us that despair is not a luxury we are permitted. Despite the darkness that threatens to envelop us in moments like these, we may not — we must not — give up.
You can watch Rabbi Held’s full speech at the 2023 Z3 Conference here:
To contact the author, email [email protected].
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