A Jewish reality check: annihilating Gaza is not a Zionist idea.

So, as our family and our people remain trapped in Gaza as hostages, such is the case today with our ability to speak about Gaza as Jewish Americans.

As leaders of diaspora Jewry, with real empathy for the Palestinian cause, we lack agency. Mainstream institutions squabble over denouncing suffering in Gaza. Our donors issue control over Jewish organizations’ ideological stances. We refuse to engage publicly in rhetoric that condemns the Israeli government. If the American Jewish community cannot circumvent the institutions that govern what we can and cannot express, we will lose ownership over defining what Zionism really means, and further a perception that Jewish people support the displacement of two million Palestinians.

We have to confront our deep insecurity about criticizing Israel. We have spent years beating around the bush. We’ve whispered to ourselves about creeping settlements in the West Bank, home demolitions, raids as jeopardizing a two-state solution. But we never acknowledged on a broad enough scale that the Zionism that Herzl wrote about, a secular Jew who sought a political solution to fight antisemitism, is different than what has transpired in the last twenty years.

Since the collapse of the peace process and the subsequent fall of the Israeli left, a different ideology has emerged. A modern revisionist Zionism related to military power and ongoing occupation has become something almost entirely separate. Under Netanyahu, who by nature of a flawed coalition system, must answer to even more radical parties and politicians, Israel’s identity has shifted. When Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and other politicians who brand themselves as Jewish supremacists are given control of the government to do as they please, that is not a Zionist institution anymore. Jewish safety and Jewish supremacy are two remarkably different concepts.

We have yet to commit ourselves to the language, the narrative, and most of all, the institutional framework that can transcribe what Israel’s protesters yell on the streets to what a deeply traumatized and rightfully fearful community can accept. And it is something that requires subtly– the fears expressed by Jews who associate protesting as hate speech are legitimate – the proximity to the Holocaust and intergenerational trauma cannot be ignored. But so is the raw emotion of those who protest Israel’s actions in Gaza.

I think that translation can only come from young, Jewish people in America. Distinct enough from the front lines to see it from a broad enough view. Invested enough that the stakes are clear: Zionism is about Jewish survival. Despite its flaws, it gave Jewish civilization new life after the Holocaust and centuries of persecution.

This war, this government is not an unavoidable consequence of Zionism. It is a drastic, specific chain reaction from the election of the most extreme coalition in Israel’s history to their proposal to reject democracy through Judicial reform to Hamas understanding what response an attack during this government would elicit.

To do right by our hostages means to accept that the Israeli government has gone rogue. To accept that Netanyahu will prolong the war to avoid legal troubles, reject deals to bring the hostages home, and implement what has become a policy of starvation. This is essential to establish the fundamental truth that the Israeli public or Jews in America are not accomplices alongside this goal. And so say emphatically that this war in Gaza is not a Zionist idea. Because the Zionism I believe in is about self-determination, and that same self-determination extends to Palestinians too.

I believe there already exists a practical coalition of Jewish people who recognize the unacceptable conduct taking place in Gaza but don’t feel that their awareness of another people’s suffering contradicts their Zionist identity. I believe these people are spread between institutions, families, schools, and movements who make it difficult to coalesce and organize. Make no mistake, they are talking to each other outside of formal spaces wondering, hoping others feel similarly. They are speaking about it at shabbat dinners. They are thinking about it as they drive to work each day. We, the pragmatic but deeply outraged Zionists are the people with the best chance of convincing our own peers to reject the destruction of Gaza.