A Letter to our Anti-Zionists

Dear Anti-Zionist Jews:

It has taken me a year to write this letter. I’ve agonized over what to say, not finding the words.  I needed to write this letter to clear my head. To clarify my thoughts.  Maybe it will also open a dialogue between us.  I hope it will.

With so much dividing us these days, we also share an overriding commonality.  We are Jews, which means we are family, just 15.8 million, a sliver of a sliver of humanity.  No matter how sharply we may disagree, we cannot disown each other.

We Jews need to stick together.  Family should not demonize their own.  You have been maligned. You feel misunderstood.  You are wondering where you fit within the Jewish community these days.

The Haggadah speaks of a child called rasha.  Usually translated “wicked,” the rasha in fact refers to one who chooses to stand outside the Jewish community, asking, “What does this ceremony mean to you?”  The rasha challenges accepted Jewish norms.  The Haggadah goes on to rebuke the rasha’s perspective, but never excommunicates that child from the community.

We share a common language of Jewish values.  You’ve expressed that your anti-Zionism emerges from your understanding of Tikkun Olam, the directive to repair a broken world.  You’ve reminded us that Judaism abhors the shedding of blood.  Images of broken bodies and broken families and broken buildings clash with Judaism’s emphasis on love of neighbor and compassion for the vulnerable.  You insist “Never Again” is a universal imperative, one that applies not only to the Jews. This is very Jewish.

You also assert that Judaism can thrive without Zionism, that Jews do not need a state of our own, that Diaspora gives us everything we need.  It’s easy to make that statement from the relative comfort and safety of America.  The half of our family that lives in Israel, about 7.5 million of us, the vast majority descended from refugees whose only hope could be found in the Jewish State, begs to differ.

We are Jews, each deserving a place at the family table of the Jewish People.  At the same time, I feel terrible angst about anti-Zionism entering the Jewish mainstream.

In order to help you understand why, here’s my story.

It begins well before most students on today’s college campuses were born, almost thirty years ago, when I first set foot in Israel, in June of 1995.  All Reform Jewish clergy spend a year immersing ourselves in the culture, history, language, and land of Israel.

I arrived believing, like many at the time, that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was around the corner.  Two years earlier, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with PLO leader Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn, with President Bill Clinton between them, nudging them closer than either preferred.  What made this possible was something called the Oslo Process, a series of bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, designed to achieve peace and pave the way for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

This was neither fantasy nor love-fest.  It may seem hard to believe today, but at the time, a majority of Israelis, Palestinians, and Jewish Americans supported the peace process.  A two-state solution had emerged as the only just conclusion to decades of hatred, mistrust, and violence.

It was never intended to inaugurate a warm and loving marriage, but rather to effectuate a “divorce,” if you will, ending a resentful entanglement between estranged partners who nevertheless had concluded that both had legitimate claims to the same small strip of land.

As Rabin memorably wrote after that fateful handshake:  “We don’t make peace with friends.  We make it with enemies.”  

That Palestinians and Israelis remained enemies even throughout the Oslo Process became apparent as I got ready to move to Israel.  Jewish extremists and Islamic fundamentalists used horrifying violence to sow panic and mistrust.

At the time, mass shootings and suicide bombings were not the stuff of everyday headlines.  These were game-changing attacks, carried out by fanatical Zionists and anti-Zionists, who, ironically, shared a common goal: disrupt and destroy the peace process by any means possible.  Apocalyptic religious visions seduced extremists on both sides to choose hate over love, war over peace, conquest over compromise.

And yet, as I arrived in Israel in the summer of 1995, the peace process moved forward:  hobbled, but not incapacitated.

Saturday night, November 4th, I had returned to my apartment after an evening spent playing trivia games and drinking beer with some friends, when the phone rang.  A classmate.  “Turn on the radio,” she said.  “Rabin’s been shot.”  We had classmates at the peace rally in Tel Aviv where the Prime Minister had been speaking to a crowd more than 100,000 strong.  Rabin himself had expressed astonishment at how many Israelis had shown up to support peace with the Palestinians.

Israel’s most idealistic youth turned out in force.  People, it seems to me, a lot like you:  Jews determined not to accept the status quo, willing to be the rasha at the Seder table.  Jews, mostly young, who recognized in Israel’s Palestinian neighbors the faces of suffering human beings.  Jews who detested the fact that, more than a quarter-century after the Six-Day War, the West Bank and Gaza still remained under Israeli control (this being ten years before Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza), with Palestinian mobility, freedom, dignity, and aspirations thwarted.  Jews, full of passion and compassion.  Again, a lot like you.

In 1995–unlike today—it was not unusual to identify as both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, wanting the same thing for both: a safe home to call their own.

That’s why those idealistic youth showed up that electric November night, jumping with their pro-peace banners into the plaza’s fountains with unbridled joy while Rabin sang along to Shir La-Shalom, the beloved “Song for Peace,” as the rally was wrapping up.

At that moment, a 25-year old Jewish law student and religious extremist named Yigal Amir quietly stepped out of the crowd and put two bullets in the back of the Prime Minister at near point-blank range.  Rabin was declared dead an hour and a half later.

In hindsight, many of our hopes and dreams died that night as well.  If you had been there, I believe yours would have, too.

The next day, numb with shock and grief, I found myself standing in line with hundreds of thousands of Israelis, to honor our fallen hero.  I shuffled by his casket as it lay-in-state on the plaza of the Knesset.  I watched his funeral procession from my apartment balcony and could pick out President Clinton’s motorcade.  I remember Rabin’s family members stumbling through the words of the Mourner’s Kaddish.  But the image I will never shake is of a silent man, sitting cross-legged in Jerusalem’s Zion Square, a sign around his neck with one Hebrew word written in blood-red paint:  בושה.  SHAME.   

The rest of my year in Israel went by like a restless night, all of us trying to keep things as normal as possible:  field trips to explore Israelite archaeology; Biblical grammar quizzes; tutoring a 12-year old Jewish Ethiopian immigrant boy whose Hebrew was as rudimentary as mine; singing Reform Jewish camp songs with my classmates Friday mornings on Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem’s pedestrian mall; navigating the sensory assault of the shuk (the outdoor market); figuring out how to argue like an Israeli when someone cut me off in a supermarket checkout line or when the laundromat lost every other sock I owned, only to be rebuffed that “you Americans don’t understand the pressure we Israelis live with every day.”

On February 25th and March 3rd, 1996, loud explosions startled me from a sound sleep.  Within two miles of my apartment, Hamas suicide bombers had carried out twin bombings on Jerusalem public buses, one week apart, murdering 45 people.  A rash of similar attacks followed in swift succession, every couple of weeks or so throughout the winter and spring: on buses, residential streets, near the popular Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv.  The victims included a number of young American students.  I have to be honest – I was scared.  Sad.  Angry.  And homesick.

We rode out the rest of the school year in an uneasy mixture of dread and hope, bound by the commitment that, as Jewish leaders-in-formation, we were all in this together.  None of us left Israel.  Most of us stopped riding the buses.  Many of us leaned into activism, animated by a belief, however naïve it may seem today, that the voices of moderation would prevail, that the momentum toward a just solution to the conflict would override the voices of religious extremism and uncompromising nationalism:  ideologies that make no room for the other, that view the world in binaries: black and white, good and evil, my team or no team.

The school year ended. Following Rabin’s assassination, Israeli society had fractured over the best way forward.  Rabin’s heir apparent, veteran statesman Shimon Peres, pledged to revive the peace process and proceed with Oslo.  His opponent, a charismatic 47-year old, promised to be tough on terrorism and hard-nosed with Arafat.  Until the day of the election it looked like it could go either way.

On May 31st, 1996–the day I arrived back in the US–Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Israel’s next Prime Minister.

There is so much more I could tell you about the last thirty years.  As my Zionism has grown and deepened, so has my appreciation for the challenges with which Israelis live; how, for them, the world’s only Jewish State holds the keys to their past, present and future; how they will willingly lay down their lives and send their children into harm’s way to protect the only place in the world that protected them and their families when the rest of the world showed them the door, forced their conversion, stole their property, and murdered them; how, when their government fails them, they take to the streets to demand better; how, when the global Jewish community fails them, they feel grievously betrayed, because it is their own family turning their backs on them.

I have also seen how the status quo has failed the Palestinians.  I have been to the border of Gaza and inside the West Bank–many times.  I have been to the checkpoints where Palestinian laborers idle in interminable lines, carrying their lunches in see-through plastic bags so as not to arouse suspicion, subjected at times to humiliating inspections, all in order to earn a living wage—because the best-paying jobs are to be found in Israel, not in the territories.

I have seen peace offers come and go, some more promising than others, the best of them rejected by Palestinian leadership; opportunities to re-engage ignored by hardline Israeli governments who apparently have little regard for what Rabin said about making peace with your enemies, not your friends.

I have seen years of terror and years of quiet–quiet enough, at times, to lull us into a false sense of security that the conflict had evaporated (a complacency shattered on October 7th).

Since my year in Jerusalem, a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians has grown up behind fences and walls, erected to save Israeli lives, which, thank God, they have and still do.

But a byproduct of these barriers is that, for twenty years, Palestinians and Israelis have inhabited separate and dissimilar realities, growing up with their own mythologies and prejudices about the other, untempered by human interaction.

Israel has become an economic and technological powerhouse. Palestinians have languished in squalor, victims at least as much of their own autocratic, cynical, and feckless leaders as they are of Israeli repression.  And Hamas persists, unwavering to the end in its jihadist ideology, unbending in its determination to “liberate” Islamic lands from the Jew.

You rightly point to the ugly inequality of Jews and Palestinians living in the West Bank.  Just know that when Hamas talks about “ending the occupation,” they don’t mean IDF-controlled West Bank highways, enclaves, and checkpoints, unchecked Jewish settler violence, or encroachment on Palestinian farms and olive groves; they don’t even mean the blockade of Gaza’s borders which Israel administers jointly with Egypt.

No.  For Hamas, Tel Aviv is “occupied.”  Haifa is “occupied.”  Eilat is “occupied.”  Hamas, like its ideological confederates in Hezbollah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Islamic Regime in Iran, the Houthis, and like-minded movements across the globe, envisions a world that is Judenrein, the word the Nazis used to mean purged of Jews.  Theirs is a zero-sum game.

One cannot understand October 7th or what has followed without first understanding that Hamas has spent the last seventeen years putting every last dollar that could have been used to care for the people of Gaza into building a vast apparatus for asymmetrical warfare:  training tens of thousands of fighters in land-, air-, sea-, and cyber-combat; building a massive, impenetrable fortress beneath Gaza; using its civilians as human shields; all while brainwashing Gaza’s children to become martyrs devoted to the cause of eliminating Israel.

I don’t blame you for not understanding this.  It is incomprehensible that a people can be so filled with hate, so committed to another people’s utter destruction, so callous about human life—in fact not seeing Jewish lives–our lives, yours and mine–as human at all.  It is difficult for our liberal Western sensibilities to comprehend.  The savagery of October 7th–the butchery, the torture, the rapes, the kidnappings, the grotesque glee expressed by perpetrator and spectator alike–is not incidental to Hamas’s aims.  It is part and parcel of a decades-long program to render co-existence with Jews and the Jewish State impossible.

And, truth be told, the Israeli enemies of peace, whose malign intentions became clear following the Rabin murder, have not gone away, either.  A number of them now exercise outsize influence on Israel’s political agenda–including from their seats in the government–fomenting bitter infighting in Israeli society.

You are not wrong to protest the suffering of the Palestinian people.  You are not wrong to protest the Israeli government, or the way it prosecutes war.  Critiquing Israel does not make one a Jewish traitor.  Israelis themselves are quite good at it.  Israeli democracy tolerates an extraordinary degree of dissent and it could be argued that argument is the national pastime.

But I write this letter to implore you to manifest your compassion for the Palestinian people in ways that do not erase the reality of the other half of your Jewish family.  For every one of us, remember that another Jew is marking Rosh Ha-Shanah in Israel today.  Your mirror image.  Your twin.

Back in 2007, the year Hamas violently seized power in Gaza, my teacher, Rabbi Jan Katzew, wrote words that resonate with even greater force today.

“We live in an either/or world,” he observed.

“Either you are for us or against us.  Either you are right or you are wrong.  Either you are good or you are evil….  Either you win or you lose.…  It may be simple to live in an either/or world….  An either/or world is inhabited by two types of people, friends or enemies, citizens or barbarians, members or infidels, brothers or others, people who have the truth and people who do not. In extreme cases, an either/or world is divided between people I would die for or people I would kill, people of God and people without God. We are all witnesses to an either/or world, but we do not have to accept it and live according to its norms.

Judaism offers a different precept, known in the Talmud as “eilu va-eilu.”  The phrase comes from a famous debate between the rival teachers Hillel and Shammai, which had become so intractable that it had to be resolved by a Divine proclamation:  “Eilu va-eilu divrei Elohim chayim,” meaning, “These [opinions] and those [opinions] are both the word of the living God…  even though the law follows Hillel” (Eiruvin 13b).

Our tradition rejects “either/or” and embraces “both/and.”

The enemies of shalom live in an either-or world.  They say you must choose:  you cannot be both a Zionist and a champion of equality and justice for all God’s children.  They say that this little strip of land is big enough for only one people, “mine” or “yours,” not both.

Eilu va-eilu:  there is another way.  You can critique Israel without making common cause with those who seek Israel’s destruction.  You can support Palestinian lives without denying Israeli lives.  You can be a Zionist without being a messianic triumphalist.

Eliu va-eilu:  we need to accept once and for all that there is no reasonable or just outcome to this awful conflict where one nation emerges victorious and the other vanishes into thin air, or where one lives forever hunted and haunted by the other.

Eilu va-eilu; both must live.  That can happen only when Palestinians turn from a vision of Israel’s destruction and choose to build a future alongside the sovereign state of the Jewish People. It can happen only when Jewish religious and national extremism and anti-Arab racism are seen as betrayals of our values and dead ends for Israel’s future.  It can happen only when the champions of both/and prevail over the patrons of either/or.

So I close my letter to you with a plea:

Come out of the makeshift tents on campus.  Come back to the big tent of Jewish communal life.

Stop canceling speakers who affirm Israel’s right to exist, and instead engage in dialogue and debate.

Please!  Get off of social media and participate in face-to-face conversation.

Step away from the fringes, the easy comfort of slogans and moral certitude.  Come rejoin the messy middle:  the place with no easy answers, but where compromise and connection are, God willing, still possible.

It’s a new year.

And our family table has a place set for you. 

I remain, yours,

A proud, pained, and ever-hopeful Zionist

Shanah Tovah

This sermon was delivered on October 3, 2024 – the morning of Rosh HaShanah, at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York.