I Am a Zionist. I Oppose the War in Gaza.

I'm sure I'm not alone

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The Liberal Jew

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I Am a Zionist. I Oppose the War in Gaza.

On the first anniversary of the Black Sabbath, I wrote about the strengths and weaknesses that we all confronted over the last year. One of the things I vowed to do better is to express my own Judaism more unapologetically, including with my own fellow Zionists. I have had this article in draft status for a while, and I really debated hitting the “post” button on it. But I know that I am not alone in my thoughts below. So here goes…

The Israeli-Hamas War is now the longest open war that Israel has fought in my lifetime. From my experience as a Western observer, the cycle normally goes as follows: a group of terrorists makes an offensive move on Israel → Israel declares war → the world condemns Israel every day they’re at war → the war ends in a few months → the western news media moves on, and the general public forgets about Israel/Palestine until the next war starts, thus beginning the cycle all over again.

When this particular war broke out, I knew to expect a repeat of the cycle above. But because of a variety of factors, the length of it being one of them, it’s become truly next-level. For the first few weeks after October 7th, I told myself, Israel’s wars always end in a few months. They would never fight a war longer than necessary. That was obviously just my brain attempting to protect me from trauma. When an Israeli friend predicted the war would likely go on for at least a year—because it would take at least that amount of time to dismantle Hamas—my first thought was “I cannot deal with the media coverage of this conflict and the accompanying responses from stupid people for over a year.” Well, here we are. We’re still dealing with it.

For the first few months, it all made sense—after all, Israel had suffered the worst attack since its founding, and they couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. When they did successfully negotiate for the return of over 100 hostages in November 2023, it looked like things were moving in the right direction. Since then, I think that most of us can agree (if in hindsight) that Israel continued its ground invasion of Gaza without a well-thought-out plan. In short, Bibi exploited the panic and the trauma of the worst day for Jews since 1945 to convince his allies that “destroying Hamas” was a realistic goal of the war.

Can Hamas really be eliminated under the current plan (asking this seriously, not rhetorically)? Even if the IDF kills all of the active fighters, there is now an entire generation of children (half of Gaza’s population is under 18) who just watched Israel flatten their entire territory. The IDF took precautions to minimize civilian deaths and to keep them alive. Is there some kind of major intervention planned post-war to convince Gazans not to hate the Zionist entity anymore, and thus not want to replace the dead militants? Is that all part of the Build Back Gaza Better plan?

When the news broke of the discovery of the six hostages—one being American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents spoke at the DNC—who endured 11 months of hell only to be executed by their captors, that was the point for me that this war became impossible to justify. Clearly, Hamas is not close to being destroyed if they were still able to shoot their abductees in the head after 11 months of war. Its continuation was going to bring nothing but grief and trauma to add on to the carnage of October 7th. Securing the release of the hostages needed to be the main focus from Day 1. But getting the hostages back was never Bibi’s priority, and we all know it.

Since it began, the effects of this war have felt like weights that I have carried around with me 24/7. I watched other American Jews take down their mezuzot and omit their outdoor Chanukah decorations out of fear of what outsiders might do. I watched my alma mater, a place I once loved, spiral downward into a cesspool of antisemitism and hate. I have watched all kinds of news outlets, both mainstream and fringe, report copious misinformation to their audiences of millions because they believe as “journalists,” they have a duty to “speak for the oppressed.” I have seen Israel, a tiny country representing our minuscule religious minority, become the center of this bizarre global morality play in which the Jews are the “white oppressors” and the Arabs the “marginalized POC.”

This war began because of Hamas’s actions and Israel’s security failures on October 7th. It’s not Israel’s fault that Western audiences and media outlets are over-focusing on this conflict. It’s not Israel’s fault that antisemitism has exploded in the West. But it’s the continuation with no exit strategy that enables it all to fester. The longer this war continues, the worse all of what I’ve described above becomes. It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is.

None of what I’ve gone through compares in scale to what many Israelis experienced and continue to experience as the multiple wars on Israel’s borders drag on. I fully acknowledge that watching increased antisemitism and dealing with online trolls pales in comparison to being displaced from home or seeing loved ones murdered.

I have heard Israelis say, both to me individually and to large audiences, that what we are experiencing in the diaspora is collateral damage from a war that Hamas started, so we all “just need to deal with it” while Israel fights it. I don’t take any of it personally—I can imagine there’s frustration in hearing the complaints of fellow Jews who have never experienced war directly. But I would also like to point out: we diaspora Jews did not choose Netanyahu to run Israel, yet we are all living with the consequences of his government’s decision-making. It would be nice—and I don’t say this to be mean, just honest—if more Jews living in Israel acknowledged this fact.

Often, when I write about this conflict, the anti-Israel types try to shame me for “not caring about Palestinians enough.” I hope one thing is clear: I express my anger and fear about the war because it’s Israel and Jews I care about most. It is my belief that an indefinite continuation of the Israel-Hamas War undermines us fundamentally as a people.

I’ve heard Golda Meir quoted a lot in the last year. One of her most famous lines is, “if we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, or being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.” But we are loath to acknowledge that the Israel of Golda Meir has gone the way of the USA of FDR. Those days of selfless leadership are gone, and they’re never coming back. Narcissism is now the overarching theme throughout the West, and it’s seeped into our ability to select our leaders. We now put people in democratically elected positions who will happily keep a war going—a war that endangers the lives of millions, many of their own people—if it means they get to stay in power and avoid prison.

Thus was the genius of the Hamas psychopaths who carried out the atrocities of October 7th. They created an impossible situation for Israel, the world’s Jews, and for liberals like me. Israel’s survival will ensure that Hamas does not win the ground war. But as of now, Hamas appears to have won a significant PR battle, which we may call Operation Destroy the Global Left.

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