Thank you for sharing such a raw and powerful expression. Your words carry deep emotional and moral weight, and they come from a place of profound conviction. They reflect the anguish of witnessing enormous suffering in Gaza, and the frustration at what feels like global inaction or complicity. These are not light matters—and they deserve serious reflection, not defensiveness or deflection.
As a Jew, I want to speak to you not in opposition, but in deep conversation—because these moments ask us not only for clarity but for compassion. And compassion must stretch in more than one direction.
I carry the grief too. I grieve for the families in Gaza. I grieve for the destruction. But I also carry a different kind of weight: the burden of being Jewish in a time when once again, Jewish identity is equated with the worst imaginable crimes. I carry the echoes of history—the blood libels, the propaganda posters, the accusations that Jews, by nature or faith, are responsible for harm, manipulation, control. Today, those old tropes are dressed in new language: ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide. And while there must always be room to critique Israeli policy—harshly and truthfully—the collapsing of Israel into a singular evil often leaves no space for Jewish fear, Jewish complexity, or Jewish trauma.
You speak of genocide. That word should never be used lightly. It invokes the darkest acts humanity can commit. But many, including international legal scholars, argue that the situation in Gaza, however horrific, does not meet the legal standard of genocide—which requires a clear intent to destroy a people as such. The Israeli government says its target is Hamas, an armed group that launched an attack on October 7 that left 1,200 people dead, hundreds raped, burned, kidnapped. The war that followed has been brutal. Many of us wish it had not happened. Many of us believe the current government is corrupt and destructive. But believing it is genocide—that Israel is trying to exterminate the Palestinian people—requires ignoring a mountain of counter-evidence: the warnings to civilians, the attempts (however flawed) to allow aid in, the internal dissent within Israel itself, and the many Jews who oppose the war and defend Israel’s right to exist.
You reject the idea of a Jewish ethnoreligious state. I understand why. It feels exclusionary, unjust. But I ask you to consider this: Israel was born not only from the ashes of the Holocaust, but also from the flames of expulsion, humiliation, and violence faced by Jews across the Middle East and North Africa. Over 850,000 Jews were driven out of Arab and Muslim lands in the 20th century—many with nothing but the clothes they wore. Today, roughly 70% of Jews in Israel descend from these communities. They cannot “go back.” There is no return. Their synagogues were torched, their cemeteries destroyed, their histories erased. For them, and for us all, Israel is not a colonial project—it is home. It is refuge.
And that refuge must be defended—not out of blind nationalism, but because there is no other. It is the only Jewish-majority country in the world. And while the world tells us that Israel is a failed state of oppression, the truth on the ground tells a more complex story. Within Israel’s borders, Arab Muslims, Christians, Druze, and even ancient groups like the Samaritans not only live—they grow. Their populations increase steadily, their children attend universities, serve in Knesset, become doctors, lawyers, artists. In fact, the Christian population in Israel is the only one in the region that is growing. In neighboring countries—Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon—minorities are vanishing under persecution or war. Where are the mass protests for them?
So while we must always interrogate Israel’s actions and policies, let’s also remember: Israel is not the worst of the Middle East—it is, in many ways, the exception. And rather than burying our heads in guilt that is not ours to carry, we can feel something else—a complicated but earned pride. Pride that in a region where minorities are hunted, we have built a country, flawed but resilient, where minorities grow. Pride that we have welcomed waves of refugees, from Ethiopia to Russia to Iraq to Yemen, and made a fractured people into a society. And pride that we still argue, still protest, still demand more from ourselves—that is not apartheid, that is democracy in anguish.
You call Zionism colonialism. But Jews did not come to Palestine as colonists of empire. They came as refugees, as dreamers, as survivors. Many bought land legally. Many lived alongside Arabs in peace. And yes, there was displacement and war—wars fought in 1948, 1967, and again and again—wars in which Jewish survival was not guaranteed. That doesn't erase Palestinian suffering. It doesn’t justify injustice. But it complicates the story—and to call all Jews in Israel colonists, conquerors, or foreign invaders is to erase the deep historical and spiritual connection Jews have had to that land for thousands of years.
And finally, you reject divine right. I do too, in many ways. I don’t believe land belongs to anyone because God said so. But I also know that for many people—Muslims, Christians, Jews—faith isn’t just a private belief. It’s a part of their history, identity, and longing. And for Jews, the idea of returning to Zion wasn’t a slogan. It was a 2,000-year prayer.
None of this is to deny the suffering in Gaza. It is horrifying. It should shake us. It should demand response, and restraint, and accountability. But I ask—gently—that in your moral outrage, you don’t lose sight of the complexity, the trauma, the context. And that when the world chants in accusation, you leave some space for Jewish pain too.
Because we all want a future without war, without displacement, without walls. But we won’t get there if we deny each other’s stories.
I truly appreciate your thoughtful response. This is the kind of conversation that honors the richness of our past while making space to challenge our narratives—an act that, to me, celebrates the collective beauty of Jewish intelligence and love.
To address an overarching point in your comment: my primary intention in writing the essay was to make space for Jewish suffering—a nuanced, multidimensional ache that I feel is often missing from our current cultural discourse.
The Netanyahu regime, through its enfeebled and authoritarian flailing, failed to protect the Israeli people from the monstrous attack of October 7. That failure is not the fault of the Jewish people, or even the Israeli people—who, as you rightly point out, are far more multicultural than many acknowledge. It is the failure of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and the rest of this corrupt and inept government. I have tried to make that distinction as clear as possible.
I have also tried to make clear that I, too, carry the weight of Jewish grief. I, too, know the terror of being Jewish when the eyes of the world are once again on our collective back. These, to me, are the central themes of my piece.
I have never understood the semantic contortions required to avoid calling the targeted killing of Gazans a genocide. Does using that word somehow diminish the pain Jews have endured—from the Holocaust to the pogroms my family fled in Ukraine barely a century ago? These are not ancient tropes; they are lived histories. And what is happening now—lives being wantonly and enthusiastically erased by a government whose own Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been imprisoned for inciting violence against Palestinians, and who once hung a portrait of the Jewish terrorist and mass murderer Baruch Goldstein in his home—demands the clarity of language.
I believe figures like Ben-Gvir weaponize Jewish suffering to achieve what they claim is a greater Jewish good—the expulsion of anyone his ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit party deems an enemy of the Jewish state. If that rhetoric doesn’t sound hauntingly familiar, it is only our willful ignorance to blame.
Yes. The Israeli military has at times warned civilians of imminent strikes. Yes. There have also been attempts at rendering aid to the embattled Gazan people. But the deaths continue to mount. Children are burned alive in their homes, in the refugee camps where they seek shelter, in hospitals where they lie wounded. And while figures like Ben-Gvir use our suffering to frighten Israelis into submission, Netanyahu uses the chaos and ineptitude of his cabinet as cover for their crimes.
It strikes me as deeply contradictory that Netanyahu’s government need only attempt to thwart a mass killing by aerial strike to be spared the label of genocide, while no degree of Gazan suffering—no threshold of their destruction—seems sufficient to override that token effort. Humanitarian aid need only wait at the border. It doesn’t have to be delivered. Warnings need only be issued. They don’t need to be heard. Is this really enough? Are these symbolic gestures what legal scholars believe shield Netanyahu and his cronies from charges of genocide?
This campaign to deny Gazans even the dignity of the proper language to describe their own extermination is unconscionable. The only thing more important than remembering Jewish suffering is the moral imperative to name and condemn the suffering of others. Otherwise, our memory is hollow.
Again, this is the work of an authoritarian, right-wing government—not the Israeli people. I have tried to make that distinction clear.
Further, just as the ethnoreligious regimes of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others rest on exclusionary principles, so too does the far right in Israel who seek the same ends and are equally guilty of dismantling democratic ideals. It is not the State of Israel itself that is at fault. I believe that distinction is evident in my work.
The history of the Jewish people in the Levant is rich and complex. The founding of Israel is no less so. I have never, and will never, call for the destruction of Israel, and nowhere in my work is there any call to “send anyone back.” Israel is home to countless people whose ideals center on personal and religious freedom, who reject ethnonationalism in favor of equity, and who protest this indifferent and murderous regime daily. But this does not excuse Israel’s past or present treatment of Palestinians.
A conscious reckoning with that past is what allows democratic societies to grow. It is what raises the flag each morning in the hope of repairing the failures of yesterday. So yes. It is essential to criticize the acts of terror committed by some of Israel’s founding fathers—such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his Irgun paramilitary organization. The history of Israel is complex, but the answer to that complexity is not silence. It is to resist efforts by the far right to whitewash ethnoreligious motivations by cloaking them as protections.
If Israel is to remain a refuge for displaced Jews, as it has been for millennia, it must also evolve into a democracy unshackled from its fear—a place capable of imagining a truly multicultural future.
I have also never called Zionism colonialism. In fact, I haven’t labeled Zionism at all. As defined by Herzl and executed by Ben-Gurion, Zionism is a completed project: the founding of the State of Israel, the realization of Jewish self-determination, and the preservation of our language and culture. But what has followed has often disfigured that vision. Illegal settlements—now openly supported by Netanyahu—tear at the fabric of Israeli democracy. Efforts to neuter the Supreme Court in the name of Jewish nationalism are nothing short of a totalitarian coup against Jewish ideals themselves.
Nor have I ever called Israelis conquerors. Jews have lived in the Levant for thousands of years. But we were a minority before Israel’s founding, and our expanding presence created immense displacement. You’re right—we did not come as conquerors. But even as refugees, there is within much of the Israeli Jewish consciousness a denial of the displacement we caused, as if our suffering were sufficient reason to cause the suffering of others.
Many democratic nations are only now beginning to reckon with their own “first peoples.” And while our Jewish ancestors—who crossed the perils of Europe, Africa, Asia, and beyond—joined the Jewish first people of Palestine in their Aliyah, we must not ignore the impact this had on the Muslim majority we encountered.
There is no prayer—no matter how solemnly recited across generations—that can restore a displaced person’s home. Grief transferred is still grief. In fact, it is often compounded.
As for the prayer you mention: like many Jews, I know it well. I recited it this year at Passover with some of my oldest and dearest friends. L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim. “Next year in Jerusalem.” And yet, for me—as for many Jews around the world—Jerusalem has always been among us. I’ve always found it tragically ironic that diasporic Jews, gathered in celebration of our survival and unity, would wish for another place, as if the beauty of our own communities and families weren’t already sacred.
I love being Jewish, and I think I love it most because it is alive with understanding, questioning, and communion. That is our gift to the world. I appreciate your careful reading of my work and hope that the depth of my response honors the thoughtfulness of yours.
Thank you for sharing such a raw and powerful expression. Your words carry deep emotional and moral weight, and they come from a place of profound conviction. They reflect the anguish of witnessing enormous suffering in Gaza, and the frustration at what feels like global inaction or complicity. These are not light matters—and they deserve serious reflection, not defensiveness or deflection.
As a Jew, I want to speak to you not in opposition, but in deep conversation—because these moments ask us not only for clarity but for compassion. And compassion must stretch in more than one direction.
I carry the grief too. I grieve for the families in Gaza. I grieve for the destruction. But I also carry a different kind of weight: the burden of being Jewish in a time when once again, Jewish identity is equated with the worst imaginable crimes. I carry the echoes of history—the blood libels, the propaganda posters, the accusations that Jews, by nature or faith, are responsible for harm, manipulation, control. Today, those old tropes are dressed in new language: ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide. And while there must always be room to critique Israeli policy—harshly and truthfully—the collapsing of Israel into a singular evil often leaves no space for Jewish fear, Jewish complexity, or Jewish trauma.
You speak of genocide. That word should never be used lightly. It invokes the darkest acts humanity can commit. But many, including international legal scholars, argue that the situation in Gaza, however horrific, does not meet the legal standard of genocide—which requires a clear intent to destroy a people as such. The Israeli government says its target is Hamas, an armed group that launched an attack on October 7 that left 1,200 people dead, hundreds raped, burned, kidnapped. The war that followed has been brutal. Many of us wish it had not happened. Many of us believe the current government is corrupt and destructive. But believing it is genocide—that Israel is trying to exterminate the Palestinian people—requires ignoring a mountain of counter-evidence: the warnings to civilians, the attempts (however flawed) to allow aid in, the internal dissent within Israel itself, and the many Jews who oppose the war and defend Israel’s right to exist.
You reject the idea of a Jewish ethnoreligious state. I understand why. It feels exclusionary, unjust. But I ask you to consider this: Israel was born not only from the ashes of the Holocaust, but also from the flames of expulsion, humiliation, and violence faced by Jews across the Middle East and North Africa. Over 850,000 Jews were driven out of Arab and Muslim lands in the 20th century—many with nothing but the clothes they wore. Today, roughly 70% of Jews in Israel descend from these communities. They cannot “go back.” There is no return. Their synagogues were torched, their cemeteries destroyed, their histories erased. For them, and for us all, Israel is not a colonial project—it is home. It is refuge.
And that refuge must be defended—not out of blind nationalism, but because there is no other. It is the only Jewish-majority country in the world. And while the world tells us that Israel is a failed state of oppression, the truth on the ground tells a more complex story. Within Israel’s borders, Arab Muslims, Christians, Druze, and even ancient groups like the Samaritans not only live—they grow. Their populations increase steadily, their children attend universities, serve in Knesset, become doctors, lawyers, artists. In fact, the Christian population in Israel is the only one in the region that is growing. In neighboring countries—Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon—minorities are vanishing under persecution or war. Where are the mass protests for them?
So while we must always interrogate Israel’s actions and policies, let’s also remember: Israel is not the worst of the Middle East—it is, in many ways, the exception. And rather than burying our heads in guilt that is not ours to carry, we can feel something else—a complicated but earned pride. Pride that in a region where minorities are hunted, we have built a country, flawed but resilient, where minorities grow. Pride that we have welcomed waves of refugees, from Ethiopia to Russia to Iraq to Yemen, and made a fractured people into a society. And pride that we still argue, still protest, still demand more from ourselves—that is not apartheid, that is democracy in anguish.
You call Zionism colonialism. But Jews did not come to Palestine as colonists of empire. They came as refugees, as dreamers, as survivors. Many bought land legally. Many lived alongside Arabs in peace. And yes, there was displacement and war—wars fought in 1948, 1967, and again and again—wars in which Jewish survival was not guaranteed. That doesn't erase Palestinian suffering. It doesn’t justify injustice. But it complicates the story—and to call all Jews in Israel colonists, conquerors, or foreign invaders is to erase the deep historical and spiritual connection Jews have had to that land for thousands of years.
And finally, you reject divine right. I do too, in many ways. I don’t believe land belongs to anyone because God said so. But I also know that for many people—Muslims, Christians, Jews—faith isn’t just a private belief. It’s a part of their history, identity, and longing. And for Jews, the idea of returning to Zion wasn’t a slogan. It was a 2,000-year prayer.
None of this is to deny the suffering in Gaza. It is horrifying. It should shake us. It should demand response, and restraint, and accountability. But I ask—gently—that in your moral outrage, you don’t lose sight of the complexity, the trauma, the context. And that when the world chants in accusation, you leave some space for Jewish pain too.
Because we all want a future without war, without displacement, without walls. But we won’t get there if we deny each other’s stories.
I truly appreciate your thoughtful response. This is the kind of conversation that honors the richness of our past while making space to challenge our narratives—an act that, to me, celebrates the collective beauty of Jewish intelligence and love.
To address an overarching point in your comment: my primary intention in writing the essay was to make space for Jewish suffering—a nuanced, multidimensional ache that I feel is often missing from our current cultural discourse.
The Netanyahu regime, through its enfeebled and authoritarian flailing, failed to protect the Israeli people from the monstrous attack of October 7. That failure is not the fault of the Jewish people, or even the Israeli people—who, as you rightly point out, are far more multicultural than many acknowledge. It is the failure of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and the rest of this corrupt and inept government. I have tried to make that distinction as clear as possible.
I have also tried to make clear that I, too, carry the weight of Jewish grief. I, too, know the terror of being Jewish when the eyes of the world are once again on our collective back. These, to me, are the central themes of my piece.
I have never understood the semantic contortions required to avoid calling the targeted killing of Gazans a genocide. Does using that word somehow diminish the pain Jews have endured—from the Holocaust to the pogroms my family fled in Ukraine barely a century ago? These are not ancient tropes; they are lived histories. And what is happening now—lives being wantonly and enthusiastically erased by a government whose own Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been imprisoned for inciting violence against Palestinians, and who once hung a portrait of the Jewish terrorist and mass murderer Baruch Goldstein in his home—demands the clarity of language.
I believe figures like Ben-Gvir weaponize Jewish suffering to achieve what they claim is a greater Jewish good—the expulsion of anyone his ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit party deems an enemy of the Jewish state. If that rhetoric doesn’t sound hauntingly familiar, it is only our willful ignorance to blame.
Yes. The Israeli military has at times warned civilians of imminent strikes. Yes. There have also been attempts at rendering aid to the embattled Gazan people. But the deaths continue to mount. Children are burned alive in their homes, in the refugee camps where they seek shelter, in hospitals where they lie wounded. And while figures like Ben-Gvir use our suffering to frighten Israelis into submission, Netanyahu uses the chaos and ineptitude of his cabinet as cover for their crimes.
It strikes me as deeply contradictory that Netanyahu’s government need only attempt to thwart a mass killing by aerial strike to be spared the label of genocide, while no degree of Gazan suffering—no threshold of their destruction—seems sufficient to override that token effort. Humanitarian aid need only wait at the border. It doesn’t have to be delivered. Warnings need only be issued. They don’t need to be heard. Is this really enough? Are these symbolic gestures what legal scholars believe shield Netanyahu and his cronies from charges of genocide?
This campaign to deny Gazans even the dignity of the proper language to describe their own extermination is unconscionable. The only thing more important than remembering Jewish suffering is the moral imperative to name and condemn the suffering of others. Otherwise, our memory is hollow.
Again, this is the work of an authoritarian, right-wing government—not the Israeli people. I have tried to make that distinction clear.
Further, just as the ethnoreligious regimes of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others rest on exclusionary principles, so too does the far right in Israel who seek the same ends and are equally guilty of dismantling democratic ideals. It is not the State of Israel itself that is at fault. I believe that distinction is evident in my work.
The history of the Jewish people in the Levant is rich and complex. The founding of Israel is no less so. I have never, and will never, call for the destruction of Israel, and nowhere in my work is there any call to “send anyone back.” Israel is home to countless people whose ideals center on personal and religious freedom, who reject ethnonationalism in favor of equity, and who protest this indifferent and murderous regime daily. But this does not excuse Israel’s past or present treatment of Palestinians.
A conscious reckoning with that past is what allows democratic societies to grow. It is what raises the flag each morning in the hope of repairing the failures of yesterday. So yes. It is essential to criticize the acts of terror committed by some of Israel’s founding fathers—such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his Irgun paramilitary organization. The history of Israel is complex, but the answer to that complexity is not silence. It is to resist efforts by the far right to whitewash ethnoreligious motivations by cloaking them as protections.
If Israel is to remain a refuge for displaced Jews, as it has been for millennia, it must also evolve into a democracy unshackled from its fear—a place capable of imagining a truly multicultural future.
I have also never called Zionism colonialism. In fact, I haven’t labeled Zionism at all. As defined by Herzl and executed by Ben-Gurion, Zionism is a completed project: the founding of the State of Israel, the realization of Jewish self-determination, and the preservation of our language and culture. But what has followed has often disfigured that vision. Illegal settlements—now openly supported by Netanyahu—tear at the fabric of Israeli democracy. Efforts to neuter the Supreme Court in the name of Jewish nationalism are nothing short of a totalitarian coup against Jewish ideals themselves.
Nor have I ever called Israelis conquerors. Jews have lived in the Levant for thousands of years. But we were a minority before Israel’s founding, and our expanding presence created immense displacement. You’re right—we did not come as conquerors. But even as refugees, there is within much of the Israeli Jewish consciousness a denial of the displacement we caused, as if our suffering were sufficient reason to cause the suffering of others.
Many democratic nations are only now beginning to reckon with their own “first peoples.” And while our Jewish ancestors—who crossed the perils of Europe, Africa, Asia, and beyond—joined the Jewish first people of Palestine in their Aliyah, we must not ignore the impact this had on the Muslim majority we encountered.
There is no prayer—no matter how solemnly recited across generations—that can restore a displaced person’s home. Grief transferred is still grief. In fact, it is often compounded.
As for the prayer you mention: like many Jews, I know it well. I recited it this year at Passover with some of my oldest and dearest friends. L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim. “Next year in Jerusalem.” And yet, for me—as for many Jews around the world—Jerusalem has always been among us. I’ve always found it tragically ironic that diasporic Jews, gathered in celebration of our survival and unity, would wish for another place, as if the beauty of our own communities and families weren’t already sacred.
I love being Jewish, and I think I love it most because it is alive with understanding, questioning, and communion. That is our gift to the world. I appreciate your careful reading of my work and hope that the depth of my response honors the thoughtfulness of yours.
Beautifully said.