Opposing Genocide in Palestine is the Most Jewish Thing We Can Do

This post was originally published in The Berkshire Eagle on 10/29/2023.

To the editor: As the twin towers collapsed half-mile from my high school, my Muslim classmate was gathering evacuating students when someone shouted: “You! This was your fault!”

If it feels absurd to hold a high school senior responsible for 9/11, then let’s apply that same principle to Gazans, half of whom are children.

Jews everywhere are experiencing a new collective trauma. Hamas continues to fire rockets into Israel and still holds more than 200 hostages. These horrific attacks triggered an axiom seared into our collective psyche through millennia of persecution — that we are never truly safe anywhere. Many of us have lost loved ones. We are grieving and afraid.

Even so, we must also examine Israel’s response. Indiscriminate bombing in Gaza has already killed thousands. Israel is forcing 1.1 million Gazans to flee their homes while restricting access to food, water, power and safe destinations.

Members of Israel’s ruling coalition intend to fully annex the occupied territories. Israel’s National Security Minister is arming settlers in the West Bank. Israel has forced Palestinians to flee their lands and barred them from returning since 1948. Actions like these meet United Nations definitions of genocide and ethnic cleansing, a fact we resist even as the Holocaust echoes in our collective consciousness.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government benefits from U.S. government support. American Jews and our allies must confront our own complicity, our willingness to prioritize the safety and self-determination of Israelis over that of Palestinians.

As children, we were taught that Jews have faced extinction throughout our history. In fending off that threat, Israel has chosen moral extinction — the death of Judaism as an ethical framework for living. Were we not also taught to love our neighbors as ourselves?

As Israelis go off to war in Gaza and beyond, we will tell ourselves there was no choice. But the children in Gaza never voted for Hamas, never asked to be born under siege in a 25-mile-wide refugee camp, never asked for violence in their names. The violence we wreak now will create lifelong trauma that we will pass onto our children, the same way my father — an engineer in the IDF — passed his onto me.

Throughout our history, the Jewish People have endured persecution through faith and moral tradition. Let us reconnect with our ancestral strength and find an ethical way forward.