“For anybody who destroys a single life, it is counted as if he destroyed an entire world … .”— Talmud Sanhedrin 4:9
This aphorism stands out for me from all others in my long Jewish education when contemplating Israel’s daily bombing of Gazan neighborhoods while survivors starve and thousands of aid trucks are kept out, a scenario entirely inconceivable from the perspective of the Judaism I grew up with.
Jews are in a worldwide struggle today between those for whom Judaism is a religion of universal human values and those for whom it’s a tribal military cult built to serve Israel’s government, whatever it does, dishonoring values of freedom and resistance to tyranny that echo across history.
The latter’s support is free of moral content. Israel’s actions are not subject to moral examination but are presumed to define morality.
Past crimes against us are endlessly used to justify new crimes by us.
The organized diaspora Jewish community and American government aid maintain Israel’s intransigence and indifference toward the Palestinians.
By contrast, one of the Jewish Torah’s three commands to love is to love the ‘other.’ A Judaism that treasures Jewish lives and devalues Arab lives is no longer Judaism.
What today’s Israel needs is not more support but an intervention, a clear voice from both U.S. Jewry and our government for traditional Jewish morality in treatment of the ‘other.’
Jewish values on which generations were raised grew out of the tradition and history of liberation from slavery, centered on the obligation of tikkun olam (repairing the world) and being a ‘light to nations.’
Today’s Israeli state has rather become more like the empires Israel historically defined itself against, its priority subjugation of millions of faceless Arab ‘strangers,’ like ancient Rome endlessly demonizing its enemies as ‘terrorists.’
The price we pay over time for continued support of Israeli policies of a kind few diaspora Jews would countenance practiced by any other state against any other people is erosion of our own values and what we can credibly pass on to our children.
Israel has completely failed to balance understandable efforts to militarily constrain Hamas against the mass killing and starvation of Palestinians, resulting in war crimes Israel is embodying as much as any power in recent history and which the United States finances and supports diplomatically.
Israel’s apologists highlight the horrific Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis as justification, depending on listeners to forget decades-long military occupation of the West Bank and corresponding blockade of Gaza, unequivocal acts of war to which most of us would support resistance anywhere else.
How should Palestinians respond to unending oppression by an unrelenting, vastly stronger power? Is there no point beyond which endless subjugation justifies violence? Everyone may answer this differently. But it’s not as simple as Israel’s advocates chorus: ‘Nothing justifies terrorism.’ Neither Jewish nor American history (nor any other) indefinitely forswears violence regardless of provocation.
When a vastly stronger power seizes your environment, subjects you to military occupation, arbitrary arrest, long-term imprisonment without trial, home demolition and random violence for the indefinite future, what do you do?
That’s the West Bank. Gaza, under blockade 16 years, is worse, with permanent entrapment in one of the most crowded places on Earth and impoverishment by a 16-year blockade.
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Denying human rights to West Bank residents for decades helped Israel take the next step in dehumanization, indiscriminately bombing Gazans.
What choice do Palestinians have beyond meekly accepting permanent subjugation in their own land oractive resistance?
Israel’s absolute right to exist gives it no right to subjugate, let alone massacre, Palestinians. Yet the U.S. government has effectively supported oppression of Palestine’s Arabs for decades and, most terribly, finances and supports today’s massacres.
By not paying attention to what our own government does, we never see the Great Satan in the mirror.
Steve Koppman of Oakland is co-author of “A Treasury of American-Jewish Folklore.”