This was drafted before the latest cease-fire announcement but I don’t feel like letting anyone off the hook. Nothing I’ve said before changed anything, so let me try again.
I’ve no doubt that Netanyahu and his coalition partners perform the prescribed Jewish ceremonies and celebrate the essential holidays in some form. Nor do I question their genealogical heritage from the Biblical Hebrews. But I question whether that’s enough to make one Jewish. To me, the practice of Judaism is an ethic of decency. The rules of ethics and living together, embodied in the Torah, are central to Judaism.
Perhaps Israel is no worse than the warring armies that have slaughtered civilians for centuries. Hamas deserves no mercy for the brutality of its October 7 attack. Nevertheless, collective punishment of innocent civilians for the crimes of warring groups is unacceptable. Americans have condemned indiscriminate tactics police here have used against minorities.
Israel is capable of careful investigation and individual prosecution but the hard-liners want more. Instead of treating Muslims in their midst as the Torah commands, hard-liners have been compounding the violation of the Biblical injunction by trying to remove Palestinians from their homes in Gaza and the West Bank for decades, using force, bulldozers, expropriation, and murder, techniques which we, American Jews included, have treated as ethnic cleansing wherever they’ve been used. Even Israel’s Supreme Court objected – for which Netanyahu tried to destroy Israel’s judicial system.
In those ways, Netanyahu and his hardline supporters have violated the ancient biblical injunction not to wrong the “stranger [who] resides with you in your land.” Leviticus continues:
The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt[i]
What commandment for living on earth could be more central to legitimate Jewish behavior. We celebrate the Exodus annually and with it we pray for good people everywhere, for we “were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
A large percentage of American Jews oppose Israel’s policies toward its neighbors and some national organizations of American Jewry do as well.[ii] Historically Jewish leaders were very explicit that it was crucial for Israel to find peaceful ways of working with its neighbors. As the great Justice Louis Brandeis, distinguished member of the U.S. Supreme Court and a leader of world Zionism put it, if the land of Israel is not acquired peacefully “it will not be worth having.”[iii]
In the very process of violating the biblical injunction to treat our neighbors as ourselves, the hard-liners have proven its worth, worsening the divide between Israelis and Palestinians, increasing the danger to Muslims, Israel, world Jewry, and surrendering the opportunity to demonstrate the value of common adherence to the biblical command to treat our neighbors as ourselves.
Plus there is another great moral cost here at home – in dividing the opposition to Mr. Trump for the sake of Netanyahu’s immoral behavior, we are increasing Trump’s power to destroy America.
I want to see Israel survive. And I want to see America survive. But to do that both countries must behave responsibly.
[i] Leviticus 19:33-34 (Jewish Publication Society, The Torah, 1967).
[ii] J Street; RAC: Religious Action Center; URJ: Union for Reform Judaism; and polling data.
[iii] Stephen E. Gottlieb, Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics 34 (New York: NYU Press, 2016).
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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