America’s Jews Cannot Remain Silent
I am an Israeli-American Jew. I served as an officer in the Israeli army and have family in Israel. Israel’s security and prosperity are important to me.
Both my parents are Holocaust survivors. My father and grandmother survived a labor camp; my grandfather did not. My mother and her immediate family survived the infamous Death Marches, where most people died of starvation, exhaustion, or disease. My parents rarely spoke about what they endured. Their perennial refusal to waste food told the story of the prolonged hunger and malnutrition they had lived through. I learned the details of my mother’s plight by watching the testimony my uncle recorded for the Shoah Foundation. That DVD has sat on my desk ever since I received it.
The Holocaust is seared into the psyche of every Israeli and every Jew. The indifference of the West, and the lackluster response of the United States and its Jewish leadership to evidence of the genocide of jews in Europe are moral stains that cannot be erased. “Never again” is a promise born of that failure to act in time. It manifests in the strong support of American Jews for Israel, and by extension, the Israeli government. This near-reflexive Jewish support, which transcends party lines, has been crucial to Israel’s safety and prosperity.
But “Never again” rings hollow when applied solely to persecution of Jews. Indeed, many prominent Jewish moral voices, including Elie Wiesel, Menachem Z. Rosensaft, and Steven Spielberg, have decried atrocities beyond the Jewish community, from the Balkans to Darfur. Yet, when it comes to the unfolding events in Gaza, the US Jewish community is torn, and much of its leadership remains silent.
The torment and hesitation are understandable. The barbarity and scale of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre revived memories of past pogroms, horrors that the Jewish state was meant to prevent. The fate of the hostages is front and center on everyone’s mind. Meanwhile, protests in support of the Palestinian cause, which erupted following the Hamas attack and the war that followed, were perceived by many jews as having antisemitic undertones, which further muffled any criticism of Israel’s actions from within the Jewish community.
Hamas is a fanatic, cruel, brutal enemy. But should Israel’s response entail the dehumanization of Gaza’s entire civilian population, children included? Should Gaza be “totally destroyed”, “flattened”, and “wiped out”, as Israeli politicians have repeatedly demanded? Should 70 percent of its buildings be systematically demolished and its residents starved, not as a byproduct of war, but as a tool of war, an intentional policy fiercely advocated by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli Minister of National Security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister?
Many friends of the Israeli people, and a significant portion of Israelis, believe that these actions undermine Israel’s interests and safety, and are willing to criticize the Israeli government. But beyond its strategic folly, the conduct in Gaza reflects a profound moral failing. Watching the starvation of Gazans under the control of the Israeli army, the army I served in, is unbearable. If the only lesson we draw from the Holocaust is that Jewish lives must be protected, we have learned nothing at all. We should have learned that it is immoral to ignore the dehumanization of any people and the atrocities that always follow. Not even when those atrocities are committed by our own. Especially then.
Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a Holocaust refugee, famously warned at the 1963 March on Washington that “The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”
The American Jewish community, and those entrusted with its leadership and moral authority, can no longer remain silent. Not again.
