To describe Benjamin Netanyahu’s
government as a “nightmare” for liberal American Jews would be to badly
understate the case. Its behavior is likely worse than any of us previously
could have imagined. Netanyahu and his extremist Cabinet have put Israel in
what Rabbi Jill Jacobs told me is “the worst position it’s ever been, morally
and ethically.” Even Jacobs, who heads T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights
organization, may be understating the case. This government is
responsible for what is quite possibly the worst self-inflicted catastrophe for
the Jewish people in their entire history.
With the counted dead numbering
over 60, 000 in Gaza—a figure that includes neither those missing and likely
buried under rubble nor the increasing number succumbing to starvation and
war-induced disease—Jacobs argued in The Forward that “this war long ago
ceased being a war to neutralize Hamas, return the hostages, and protect
Israelis, and became a war of revenge and of settlement that serves primarily to hold the government coalition together and keep Netanyahu out of prison.”
Israel’s behavior is under attack
from almost every corner imaginable, but especially from Jews. In recent days, two Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, judged their country’s behavior in Gaza
to fit the legal definition of “genocide.” This came shortly after a
well-respected Israeli-born professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at
Brown University, Omar Bartov, made the same case in a 3,700-word New York Times op-ed.
For decades the darling of the
mainstream media, Israel is in the news these days primarily for its policies
deliberately causing the starvation of Gaza’s population, bombing its hospitals, and killing those searching desperately for food with sniper fire. Each day’s
news cycle brings another report of a hundred or so Gazans killed by Israel (journalists
are forbidden by Israel to enter Gaza, so reporting is necessarily sketchy).
At the same time, West Bank
settlers are carrying on a campaign of terror against Arab residents with
the implicit and often explicit support of the government and the army. This
week, Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist who helped make
the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was apparently murdered on
video by a famously violent Israeli settler. The settler was immediately released on
house arrest with only trivial charges leveled against him. Hathaleen is one of 1,009 Palestinians who have been killed,
with more than 7,000 injured, in the West Bank since October 2023. Few if
any of the settler-terrorists who perpetrated these crimes have been arrested,
much less seriously punished.
What’s more, Netanyahu, Israel’s
longest-serving prime minister and the man who’s asleep-at-the-switch
leadership helped ensure the success of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist
attack against Israel, which led to its catastrophic response, has adopted the
Trumpian tactic of gaslighting truth tellers, denying observable reality, and
blaming deep-state leftists and alleged traitors for raising any questions,
even going on MAGA manosphere bro podcasts to make his case.
Netanyahu argues for U.S.-Israeli control
of food distribution in Gaza because, as he said back in March, after breaking
off ceasefire talks, “Hamas is currently taking control of all supplies and
goods entering Gaza.” In fact, as the Times reported, the Israeli
military never found any proof that Hamas had systematically done so
when Israel was allowing the U.N. to distribute food and medicine. He also
insists that when “Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of
starvation in Gaza,” this is “a bold-faced lie. There is no policy of
starvation in Gaza. And there is no starvation in Gaza.”
Now Netanyahu is reported to be threatening to annex parts of Gaza
unless Hamas meets his demands. In this regard, as in so many others, he is
being led by the nose by the far-right ministers in his government who hold the
key to his political survival (and therefore are keeping him out of
jail). For instance, his National Security Minister Itmar Ben-Gvir recently declared, “The only way to win the war and bring back the
hostages is to completely stop the ‘humanitarian’ aid, conquer the entire Gaza
Strip, and encourage voluntary migration.” Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu
congratulated the prime minister for “racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out.”
A certain segment of anti-Zionist
Jews have protested Israel’s actions owing
in part to their ideological opposition to the existence of a Jewish state
itself. Today, however, the composition of those protests has changed
dramatically. On July 28, for instance, Jacob was joined by what she termed “a
minyan of T’ruah rabbis wearing tallitot and holding sacks of flour and rice [who] blocked Second Avenue in New York City, in front of the Israeli consulate.
Holding signs that read ‘Food –> Gaza’ and posters with images of starving
Gazan children.” They were arrested as “hundreds of American Jews and Israeli
Americans cried out ‘Let Gaza Live!’ [with] chants of ‘That’s My Rabbi’ from the
assembled crowd, and we were so moved by the support, giving us strength to
keep being a loud moral voice.”
Earlier in the day, in Washington,
27 rabbis affiliated with the advocacy group Jews for Food Aid for People in
Gaza entered Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office holding banners that
read “Rabbis say: Protect Life!” and “Rabbis say: Stop the Blockade.” Over 1,000 rabbis have now signed an open letter demanding that Israel “stop using
starvation as a weapon of war.”
No doubt even more significantly,
the Union for Reform Judaism, representing the largest organization of
Jews in North America, together with the Central Conference of American
Rabbis and the American Conference of Cantors, issued what are likely
the strongest condemnations of Israel in their respective histories, insisting
that Israel’s policy of “denying basic humanitarian aid crosses a moral line. Blocking
food, water, medicine, and power—especially for children—is indefensible.”
Other signs of a fundamental change
abound. A recent poll of Jewish New Yorkers found Zohran Mamdani
leading Andrew Cuomo by a margin of 43–26 despite a nearly full-court press of legacy
Jewish organizations slamming the Muslim-born candidate for his support for
boycotting Israel, reluctance to condemn the use of the “globalize the
intifada” slogan, and willingness to allow the International Criminal Court to
arrest Netanyahu on war crimes charges when he next travels to New York, the
city with the largest Jewish population of any on earth. Another poll found that 60 percent of New York City
Democratic voters say they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate who, like
Mamdani, declines to travel to Israel. This despite the fact that a friendly
trip to Israel has been an all-but mandatory mitzvah for pretty much every
ambitious New York City–based candidate for nearly 60 years.
The political trends are
unmistakable. Roughly 70 percent of American Jews reliably vote Democratic, and
in a recent Gallup poll, a mere 8 percent of the self-identified Democrats
expressed support for Israel in the war. On Wednesday evening, a majority of Senate
Democrats voted in favor of Bernie Sanders’s bill urging the government to withhold certain offensive
weapons being used in the war in Gaza, nearly double the number that did so
as recently as April. This once unimaginable vote count is consistent
with changes throughout the body politic. Nationally, a majority of Americans now disapproves of Israel for the
first time ever, a political trend that can only increase as Israel allows starvation conditions in Gaza
to worsen.
The future is, as always, unwritten. But as
Jonathan Jacoby, who heads the Nexus Project, an American nonprofit
organization dedicated to combating antisemitism, avers, “This is more than a
crisis in the relationship between Israel and American Jews. It’s a
turning point. And nobody really knows in which direction we’re headed.”