In Ruth Marcus’s April 5 op-ed, “The unbearable loneliness of Israel,” which drew on reporting on a trip with her synagogue to Israel, she quoted an Israel Defense Forces soldier as lamenting “the existential loneliness of Israel.”
While Ms. Marcus did ask whether the current conflict is “the bitter fruit of years of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians and mistaken policies in the disputed territories,” she did not make space in this op-ed to discuss the history of Palestine, including the terrorism inflicted on Palestinians by the early Zionists in incidents such as the Deir Yassin massacre, which caused more than 750,000 people to flee their homes.
In the eyes of more and more Jewish Americans, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is a clear violation of Jewish moral and ethical values — and of the larger democratic values that are meant to tie our nations together. As Harvard University professor Noah Feldman argued in his book “To Be a Jew Today,” “many progressive American Jews find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no realistic prospect of liberal rights.”
Sadly, too many American synagogues display Israeli flags on their pulpits and seem to place the state of Israel in the position of a virtual object of worship, a form of paganism much like the golden calf in the Bible. This is not Judaism, which is a religion of universal values dedicated to the long Jewish moral and ethical tradition. And venerating Israel as the ultimate home for Jews and Judaism ignores the vibrancy and strength of Jewish life around the world. Jewish Americans are not, as Zionism proclaims, “in exile,” but are, and always have been, very much at home.
Israel’s “existential loneliness” must be discussed alongside the sense of isolation and despair felt by millions of Palestinians who have been displaced from their homes and face an Israeli government that speaks of annexing the West Bank and expelling its Palestinian residents.
Allan C. Brownfeld, Alexandria
The writer is editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
It is appropriate for Ashkenazi Jews — those of European descent — to use the Holocaust and the Yiddish term yahrzeit to understand, mourn and assign meaning to Oct. 7, as Ruth Marcus did in her April 5 op-ed. And indeed it is powerful to point out that this was the greatest loss of Jews since the Holocaust.
However, for the estimated 50 percent or more of Israeli Jews who stem from Middle Eastern societies — immigrants and their descendants from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Iran — references to the Holocaust can be jarring. We are mourning, too, just not necessarily with Yiddish. The context of the conflict between Hamas and Israel includes the centuries-long history of Jewish residence in Muslim societies. In Muslim societies, Jews were oppressed, but the Holocaust, the Crusades, the expulsion from Spain, the regular assaults on shtetls all originated in Christian Europe. There were attacks in the Near East, but nothing comparable to the regular violence Jews in Europe were subject to. Since this history dates from the emergence of Islam, and since Jews were spread across multiple Middle Eastern and European societies, many read it as reflecting stable differences in attitudes toward Jews in Muslim- and Christian-dominated societies.
Why is this relevant here? Because responding to Palestinian action from the context of European history, when there is an indigenous history that is in many ways more appropriate, affects Jews’ perceptions of Palestinians and responses toward them.
Ms. Marcus did not blame Palestinians for the Holocaust, she did not directly conflate Oct. 7 with the Holocaust, and she resisted the dehumanization and punitive stances that she heard from some Israeli Jews. But many Israeli Jews do respond to Palestinians’ actions much more directly through the lens of the Holocaust, often conflating Palestinian action with that of Nazis. This ultimately enables the kind of punitive stances Ms. Marcus resisted in her op-ed. Using Middle Eastern Jewish history as a frame does not generate easy answers, and there are lively debates about the history itself and its implications for contemporary co-existence. But the frame does insist on evaluating the actions of Palestinians and their Arab allies within their own complex context, rather than from a European experience of persistent antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust matters. But analysts should take care to incorporate the local history as well.
Aziza Khazzoom, Bloomington
The writer is an associate professor in the Middle Eastern languages and cultures department and a Jewish studies program faculty member at Indiana University at Bloomington.
I am an elderly, nonobservant Jew who has always felt pride and joy at Israel’s existence, but also regret at the way the Palestinians were treated in the West Bank and unhappiness as right-wing Israeli politicians stubbornly refused to contemplate a two-state solution. I understand that over the past 50 years, the lack of responsible, moderate Palestinian leadership has been at least equally — if not more — responsible for this stalemate.
Ruth Marcus’s op-ed clearly illustrated the fear that many Israelis feel now as outsiders ask them to negotiate with, and tolerate the continued existence of, Hamas, an entity that is determined to annihilate their nation, and that shows total disregard for the laws of war or basic standards of humanity in conflict. The lack of support for Israel in the wider world is magnified by what seems to be disdain many in the United States show Israel, long a reliable ally.
The release of all hostages should be the paramount guide at this point. But then what happens next in Gaza, the West Bank or Israel itself? Are we to believe that more killings can help? Will the death of Hamas leaders defeat its ideology?
If Saudi Arabia and the leaders of other “moderate” Arab states are ready to recognize Israel and help to solidify peace, it certainly seems worthwhile to at least try this approach and form an Israeli government that is willing to do so.
Barry H. Epstein, Silver Spring
The international rule of law
Ruth Marcus, a distinguished analyst of the U.S. Supreme Court, succumbed to the same double standards she decried in her April 3 op-ed, “The ICJ wages lawfare on Israel,” when she suggested that “the [International Court of Justice] is allowing itself to be used as a geopolitical weapon in the Israel-Gaza war.”
The undisputed evil of Hamas’s crimes in no way absolves Israel’s actions of judicial scrutiny. It might be, as Ms. Marcus indicates, that those actions are more appropriately categorized as war crimes or other violations of international law than as genocide. But these are questions for the judicial institutions that form part of the “international rules-based order” that U.S. government officials and allies regularly trumpet. The ICJ adjudicates disputes between states under the Genocide Convention, which Israel has ratified. A separate court in The Hague, the International Criminal Court, is probing whether any individuals have committed grave crimes. That’s not lawfare. It’s just law.
James A. Goldston, New York, N.Y.
The writer is executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.
A peace proposal that isn’t
Regarding King Abdullah II, Emmanuel Macron and Abdel Fatah El-Sisi’s April 9 op-ed, “Three nations, one message: A permanent Gaza cease-fire now”:
The leaders of Jordan, France and Egypt have the prominence and authority to urge a resolution of the Israel-Hamas war. How disappointing that their call for a cease-fire and long list of demands of Israel failed to name Hamas as the key source of this conflict and honestly address the steps needed for the war’s resolution.
Indeed, their missive never once mentioned Hamas. The perfunctory reference to Oct. 7 depicted that day as something that has “befallen” Israel, rather than the premeditated atrocity that it was. The proposal from these leaders tied the fate of Israeli hostages, who were viciously ripped from their home and lives and have been held for over six months by Hamas with no word as to their health or whether they are even still alive, to that of Palestinian security detainees in Israeli prisons, ignoring their radically different circumstances.
We all want a future of hope, peace and security for Israelis and Gazans, but this call to action ignored that it is vitally necessary to recognize the threat that the terrorist organization Hamas poses to Israel and to allow Israel to act to contain that threat. After the massacre, it should have been clear to everyone that Israel cannot live with Hamas — which from its beginnings has called and worked for Israel’s destruction and has promised to repeat the horrors of Oct. 7 — still in power next door.
The call by these three heads of state failed to provide a real solution or alternative to the threat posed by Hamas to Israel and the Gazan civilians it has failed to provide for and so callously endangered with the Oct. 7 attack. Any approach that fails to take that unendurable state of affairs into account should not be taken seriously.
Jonathan A. Greenblatt, New York
The writer is chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League.
