My neighborhood still sports some “We Stand With Israel” lawn signs. This confounds me.
I grew up Jewish, my mother escaped from Nazi Germany. Israel was a bright shining light. Embodying the hopes and dreams of a people who’d suffered ages of persecution, culminating in a mass genocide. “Never again,” we said.
Did that apply only for Jews?
A recent article in the American Humanist Association magazine discusses “Contemporary Humanistic Judaism.” A movement basically excising all supernatural superstition, including God. Reconceiving Judaism as grounded in a people’s history and culture, with an ethical philosophy springing from that.
“A sense of purpose in life comes from positive affirmations of human dignity, reinforced by . . . emphasis on human power, knowledge, and responsibility.” Further: “a diasporic minority experience encourages sympathy for other minorities and advocacy for human rights.”
Yet the article is silent about the crucial ethical challenge unfolding today specifically involving Jews.
Two powerful forces mess up people’s moral thinking: religion and tribalism. Which of course go hand-in-hand, a deadly combination. Regarding the latter, I recall the 1990s Balkan conflict. Serb crimes seemed obvious. Yet I was struck that no Serb voice ever denounced them. Tribalism.
Hamas’s October 7 atrocity was horrendous, killing about 1200. Israel has a right to defend itself. But that does not justify indiscriminate assault upon a civilian population, killing over 50,000 and counting, mostly women and children, while plunging millions more into destitute misery, their homes mostly bombed to rubble, with humanitarian aid largely blocked (and often itself attacked).
Israel’s claims of trying to minimize civilian harms smack of Kremlin lies. It’s increasingly clear that civilian harm is the really the point of the thing. Israelis venting hatred upon Palestinians, not just in Gaza, but the West Bank too. Treating them as sub-human vermin — just as Nazis saw Jews.
Claims that all this is mere collateral damage in a war against Hamas ring ever more hollow. The very name “Hamas” becoming like a bogeyman. Is Israel truly combating it? The war’s horror is one gigantic recruiting poster for Hamas, radicalizing a generation of Palestinians to mirror Israelis’ hatred. A futile endless game of whack-a-mole. This is insane.
Not all Israelis back it; but the nation as a whole seems all-in. Epitomizing the anti-reason consequences of out-of-control tribalism mated with irrational religious fervor. A big part is belief that God decreed Jews must have all this land. Well, a few millennia back, he did tell them to take it all, killing or enslaving the existing populations. That story was fictional, but today’s reprise is all too real.
That Jews were themselves comparable victims of a “never again” genocide just decades ago makes it especially grotesque. What did they learn?
“A diasporic minority experience encourages sympathy for other minorities and advocacy for human rights.”
Another piece in the same magazine cites the Sermon on the Mount — “much kinder, more compassionate, more humane. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are the poor.”
Oops, sorry, that guy’s not in the Jewish Bible. (Though he was a Jew.)
Israel was indeed once a bright shining light, standing for values congruent with humanistic generosity of spirit. But alas that humanist project has gone completely off the rails, betraying every rationalist principle it might once have embodied.
No ethical person can abide this. If you think it’s God’s work, you need a different God. Those of Jewish heritage, like me, given our ancestral history, should have a special moral responsibility here. We must finally renounce the monster that Israel has become.