Gaza: Not in My Name

I was born in the Fifties between the founding of Israel and the Six Day War in 1967. That puts me in the sweet spot for old-school Zionism: the flags, the hero worship, the uniforms, the folk dancing.

I’ve confessed elsewhere that I know all the songs, especially the anthems of self-defense. The soundtrack of my youth is not “Meet the Beatles,” but “Hey Daroma le-Eilat.” That’s a salute to the beauties of the Land of Israel, fueled by the thought of territorial expansion. I come from a Labor Zionist family and my grandmother’s brother was the founder of a kibbutz. Many of my relatives worked for the State of Israel. For American Jews, we were the real thing.

I will also confess that I’m a sort of new-school Zionist, committed to the cause, but not blind to the cost. I never felt lied to or bamboozled by jingoism. Plenty of people signed on to the program, but there were loyal dissenters who saw the complexities. Many smart commentators thought that the war of 1967 created a problem that could not be solved. What do you do with conquered territory that is already home to a multitude of Palestinians? Israel has yet to answer that question in a way that does justice to competing nationalisms.

But whatever the course of my own Zionist journey, we have reached a point of catastrophic suffering. There are people who claim that hunger in Gaza is an invention of the media, a public relations triumph engineered by the evil lords of Hamas. Every image is supposed to be a fiction, with bony children shoved toward the cameras while well-fed Gazans stand just out-of-frame.

I believe that Hamas is a sewer of evil, but I do not believe that hunger in Gaza is a fiction. It is the deliberate attempt on the part of the Israeli government to cause a level of suffering that extinguishes hope. It follows the pattern of mass civilian casualties and nourishes the dream of population transfer. It has been named and condemned by reputable agencies which operate on the Israeli side of the line. After twenty-two months of temperate response, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights have used the term “genocide.” These are not the lunatic ravings of a bleeding-heart fringe, but the considered judgments of real authorities. And they require that we join them in moral outrage.

I hope it goes without saying that Hamas is culpable. I believe that the terrorists who killed over a thousand Israelis are guilty of a crime that requires retribution. Pacifism plays no part in my politics. Neither does a rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. Israel is the product of an ancient dream and the nationalist projects of the nineteenth century. It has the same claim to nationhood as Italy or Germany.

But it is also clear that Israelis have crossed the line. Parts of the society are alive to this truth. Israeli military authorities disclosed last week that there has been no pattern of food theft by Hamas. Some rank and file conscripts are now refusing to serve. What we are looking at is stark and brutal and inhumane, the calculation of a morally vacant Prime Minister that by ghettoizing Gaza, he will hold his coalition intact and avoid the reckoning of a commission of inquiry. He also hopes to stay out of jail. If this requires the sacrifice of the remaining hostages, that is the price of his Machiavellian venality. We should always remember that there have been opportunities for negotiation. Benjamin Netanyahu has turned away all of them.

The reputational consequences have been disastrous. Whatever the horrors of October 7, there is a new consensus that Israel has failed, that the dismemberment of Gaza has reached the point of excess, and that you cannot obliterate a community of civilians. Why didn’t Gazans disempower Hamas? For the same reason that Israelis have failed to bring down Netanyahu: it is hard to turn out an incumbent power.

American voters are now turning away from Israel. Evangelical voters are turning away from Israel. Macron has declared his support for Palestinian statehood and Keir Starmer in England is less than five minutes away. Perhaps most astonishing, many American Jews are now breaking for Palestine. They don’t want to be associated with Israeli militance, and they are unnerved by the use of Jewish rhetoric and symbology to suppress the ambitions of the Palestinian people. I believe that if you dug beneath the surface, it would be clear that we have reached a point of separation. What is left to accomplish militarily in Gaza? The general judgment is nothing at all.

I have no illusions about a statement like this one. I have signed the so-called Arthur Greene Letter which calls for an end to warfare by starvation. Over a thousand rabbis have done the same. But open letters like this one are pointless gestures. Israelis have ritually rejected the advice of Americans, especially American rabbis with opinions.

To all of this, I say no matter. I do not act to recruit followers or disciples, and I fully expect that American pleadings will fall on deaf ears. Zealous Israelis are practiced refuseniks and they do not want to be told that their belligerence shames us. But I do not want to be associated with their aggression. Not on my watch. Not in my name.