Gaza

A beloved friend, a leader in our community, is a committed servant of the Jewish people. She has worked in Jewish fundraising for decades and raised millions of dollars for every imaginable purpose. If you’ve got a job that needs doing yesterday, there is one person, at least, who can deliver the goods. Build an agency? Run a campaign? She is a sparkling combination of talent and will.

She is also a hardline defender of Israel, or at least I thought so until a recent conversation. Jewish professionals with executive responsibilities are frequently pulled in many directions. The machine of solidarity needs to remain intact. Our precarity as a people is an historical given and hostility to toward Jews is a brutal fact. The existence of Israel, its preciousness and value, the level of sacrifice embedded in its creation, is deeply inscribed in the consciousness of the community. And yet the current government of the State has evoked strident criticism, especially among Israelis themselves. It means a delicate balancing act for those in leadership. This has been especially difficult since October 7. Israel’s own violence in Gaza has been unprecedented, but many Jews have tamped down their unease because of the pervasive trauma of Be’eri and the Nova Festival. We are only eighty years away from Chelmno and Majdanek. Eighty years is too early to expect perfect moral clarity from the Jews.

Or at least I thought so until my most recent conversation. My friend began with the familiar themes. We have just now concluded our seasonal memorials for the Holocaust and we are in the middle of the news that Israel will “conquer Gaza.” What that will look like is anybody’s guess. It certainly feels like a radical rearrangement and the unfathomable displacement of millions of Palestinians. Whether this qualifies as a version of political erasure is a controversy that I am not equipped to resolve. But I know that these events will reverberate for a century and stoke millennial hatred for the Jewish State.

My friend was thoughtful, and then still more thoughtful. She affirmed her hostility to Hamas and its savagery. Like me, she knows about jihadist Islam and what it has in mind for Israel. Whatever frustrations may be at heart of its program, she sees Hamas as a malevolent force which manipulated rank-and-file Gaza citizens, turned normal people into drug-fueled assassins, and which must be contested at every turn.

But she felt just the opposite about the great majority of Palestinians. In her view they aren’t willing enemies of Israel, but a people pounded into passivity by their leadership. They deserve the freedom and independence they have sought for decades and should not be punished for the deeds of Hamas. They are as innocent, she said, as the slaughtered kibbutzniks of October 7, and what is happening in Gaza is grotesquely unfair. Her heart goes out to suffering children and it doesn’t matter if they are Israeli Jews or Palestinians.

The surprise for me wasn’t so much the words, but the depth of the sentiment, the genuine grief she expressed. If she meant anything at all, she meant that this can’t go on, and that Israel’s decision to enter Gaza again, conquer what’s left, and send the Palestinians into exile doesn’t represent her dream of Zion.

What’s exceptionally clear is that the current government of the State does not understand that the Jewish world is now split. If my beloved friend feels deeply for Palestinian suffering, the old equations have now been rebalanced.

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