A Full Circle, Shattered

When I first heard about the final hostage release deal — that all twenty men would finally, finally be coming home — I followed every update with near-manic intensity. I happened to be in Orlando again, the same place I was on October 7, 2023. In the same bed where I had watched Noa and Avinatan ripped from each other, I now watched him return. Thin, pale, and haunted by two years chained to a cage in isolation, but alive. I wanted that symmetry to mean something — a kind of cosmic closure. For a fleeting moment, it did. But the relief vanished almost immediately, drowned out by the same anxiety and grief that have lingered for two years. No symbolic victory can erase what we’ve endured since that morning — not just politically or militarily, but morally and communally. Two years ago, the State of Israel failed its citizens when Hamas rampaged through the South. In the time since, we — the Jewish people — have failed ourselves.

Jews have always been a fractious nation. From the sectarian violence of the Second Temple period to the Hasmonean civil wars to the modern splits between religious denominations, our history is littered with internal strife. Yet at the root of nearly every Jewish conflict, ancient or modern, lies the same question: what actions do we take to keep us safe?

Since October 7, that question has once again defined — and divided — us.

The massacre reignited old fears, confirming what so many of us had quietly known: that Jewish security, even in the 21st century, is conditional. The celebration of our dead in the streets, the moral inversions that painted the victims as aggressors, the rapid resurgence of antisemitism on campuses and online — all of it made clear how precarious Jewish existence remains. But instead of pulling us together, fear has split us apart.

One camp has doubled down on the belief that Jewish safety can only be guaranteed by Jewish power. They see October 7 as proof that strength, not sympathy, is our only defense. They speak in the language of security, deterrence, and survival.

Another camp — often young, often progressive — has gone in the opposite direction. Confronted with a world that equates Jewish nationalism with colonialism, they’ve decided that the safest thing to do is to seek acceptance from the outside. They march alongside those who deny Israel’s right to exist, convinced that distancing themselves from Jewish sovereignty is an act of moral courage. That by being a “good Jew” they will, perhaps, be protected.

Both positions are, in some ways, understandable. Both are also self-defeating.

The former, in its zeal to defend, has begun to mirror the hatred it claims to oppose — dismissing all criticism as treachery, painting entire peoples as enemies, embracing the language of vengeance as if it were justice. The latter, in its eagerness to be accepted, has confused self-critique with self-erasure — offering perceived ‘moral purity’ in exchange for a world’s fleeting approval. Allowing an existential war to be painted with North American binaries of “oppressor” and “oppressed” or “indigenous” versus “colonial power,” informed by TikTok and little else.

And somewhere between those poles, the fabric of Jewish peoplehood is tearing. We can no longer disagree without despising one another. Words like “Zionist” and “diaspora” have become ideological minefields. Recently I was accused of being a “leftist” for using the phrase “Bring Them Home.” Families are fracturing; lifelong friendships are dissolving. Every debate turns existential. Every conversation feels like a loyalty test.

We’ve reached a place where Jewish antizionists and Jewish ultranationalists can agree on only one thing: that the other side represents a mortal threat to the future of the Jewish people.

But the deeper tragedy is that, in fighting over what it means to protect Jewish life, we’ve begun to desecrate Jewish values. In the name of safety, some of us have adopted the very frameworks of hatred — the dehumanization, the suspicion, the zero-sum brutality — that have been used against us for centuries. We’ve internalized the logic of our historical enemies, convinced that righteousness or a sense of ideological purity demands it.

History offers a warning here. During the final siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, while Roman legions waited outside the walls, Jews inside the city burned each other’s food stores and murdered one another in ideological purges. The Temple did not fall because of Rome alone. It fell because we were too consumed by our own certainty to recognize that survival required solidarity.

The same danger faces us now. The external threats are real — antisemitism is surging, Israel remains under fire — but the internal fracture may prove just as fatal. Because the greatest casualty of October 7 has not been Israel’s image abroad or even the physical safety of Jews worldwide. It has been our ability to see one another as part of the same story. We’ve mistaken moral disagreement for betrayal, fear for clarity, ideological purity for virtue. We are a people defined by exile, but today, our exile is from each other.

Until we rediscover how to argue without annihilating — how to hold our differences without losing our shared identity — no amount of power, no number of Iron Domes, will make us safe.

Because safety without our shared heritage is not safety. And survival without peoplehood is not survival.