Recent events in the Middle East – and over the decades preceding October 7th and the Israeli war in Gaza – have given me pause to consider a dense thicket of ideas as I try to understand conflicting viewpoints. It’s a controversy that many people come to from a deeply personal place; but I’m not one of them, and in considering so deep and fraught an issue as Israel/Palestine, affecting so many people, the personal only goes so far. Which is, in fact, the main point of this post – but I’ll get back to that in a moment.
For what it’s worth, my own background, while secular, predisposed me to form an attachment to Israel as a Jewish homeland. First there was the Holocaust, and then there was a safe and historic place for Jews to form a country for the first time. At least, it made sense at the time. Simply put, the world owed the Jews. But it didn’t owe them the right to become oppressors.
My first visit to the Middle East, in 1977 – which included a trek down to Sharm El-Sheikh on the Sinai Peninsula, then under Israeli control – did little to dispel the idea of Israel as a geographic form of Jewish justice. It wasn’t until I returned in 1999 with a Middle East relief NGO, and traveled to Gaza and the West Bank, that I began to re-assess that heroic narrative. Since then, I’ve recoiled at my earlier idea of Israel as a little social-democratic paradise, mainly for two related reasons.
First, I have seen how Israel fails to function as a fully democratic state, let alone a domestically humanitarian one with a strong socialist component. (Does anyone really believe there can be a “Jewish democracy,” or any genuine democracy in which one religion is privileged over others?)
Second, I’m appalled by Israel’s current leadership and the semi-permanent rightwing majority that emerged with the influx of Russian and other émigrés. Even Israeli human rights groups call the war in Gaza a “genocide,” although some Americans, including many of our politicians, lack the moral clarity to condemn it. And that’s not to mention the ongoing terror campaign against Palestinians by settlers in the West Bank.
As for Gaza, if there were a better word than “genocide,” I’d use it. But words are blunt instruments of meaning (see: all previous posts!) and “ethnic cleansing” isn’t forceful enough. Words always fail us; but if the Israeli campaign in Gaza isn’t genocide, it’s genocide-adjacent. Granted, the Palestinians are not being systematically gassed like the Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, or dying in comparable numbers. But the facts on the ground are horrific.
It's also true that Israel is a nominal democracy, with a parliamentary system that is structurally far superior to our own; that Palestinian leadership has been weak and corrupt; and that the surrounding Arab states have done nothing to advance peace. But Israel isn’t a pariah state in the world because the world hates Jews; it’s because of Israel’s behavior, which shames democratic and Jewish values, or at least any that I adhere to. And far too many Americans who know better wrap any criticism of Israel in the false cloak of antisemitism.
I don’t need to belabor these points. I’m not an expert on the subject; but then, it’s not ultimately about expertise. It’s not about historical rights or claims that elevate one population over another in a shared space based on the distant past. As Michelle Goldberg writes in The New York Times, “the Bible is not a land deed.” It’s about humanity – something that neither the current Israeli regime nor the Trump Administration, Hezbollah, or Hamas gives a fig about.
All of this troubles me, as it should. It also troubles me that some American Jews, including at least a few of my close friends, see the Middle East through a different lens, one that is genuine and lifelong: a lens of personal attachment and Jewish entitlement. But in my view, it isn’t a moral entitlement. Faith does not create rights vis à vis non-believers or other-believers. Of course, Israelis have a right to a democratic homeland in their current location – never mind whether it was a wise choice in the first place. But that in no way cancels the right of Palestinians to the same, or excuses a military campaign that has laid waste to Gaza and caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths.
The historical arguments of my pro-Israel friends sound to me like rationalizations, products of that narrower lens. I can only compare their predicament to my own experience (and theirs) of living in a country that twice elected – let me put this diplomatically – a fascist monster.
I have always loved my country, as most people do, through identity and familiarity, personal history, and life-formation. But I take no pride in the accident of having been born American. I certainly never thought that we as a people were morally superior to any other nation. But I love America less now, because moral clarity is more important to me than patriotism. It’s deeply painful – similar to the sort of pain that American Jews must feel who are deeply emotionally connected to Israel but abhor its conduct.
We all have attachments to place, but patriotism is only as worthy as its object. It begs questions. Morality (by definition, I would argue) runs deeper: morality isn’t about our feelings. It’s about how we deal with everyone, everywhere, and about giving them their due; our emotions and our spiritual beliefs, though we may share them with others, are essentially our own.
I love America less now because I despise our leaders and am ashamed of my fellow citizens for having elected them; there’s no other way to put it. I still love America and Americans in many ways, but it will never be the same love as before. Trump is a betrayal of everything good about America. A bell has rung that cannot be unrung. I can’t or pretend it hasn’t happened or isn’t catastrophic.
My pro-Israel friends seem unwilling to suffer the loss of love, through moral scrutiny, that I have suffered. But I can’t imagine not experiencing that suffering. I can’t imagine accepting what America has become and waiting for it to pass without passing judgment on it. Morality isn’t about what feels good or confirming or identity-enriching; it’s almost the opposite of that. As an ethical narcissist, a secular humanist, a rootless cosmopolitan, and I suppose above all as a Jew, I prefer to follow my conscience and to suffer.