Is Israel Still Jewish? Moral Clarity in a World of Confusion

I landed back in London late last night, on a packed El Al flight from Tel Aviv. My son, just recently bar mitzvahed, had joined me on a solidarity trip to Israel. We went to listen, to bear witness, to try to understand. We met families still reeling from October 7, soldiers preparing for reserve duty, and teenagers trying to piece together a normal adolescence amid rockets and alerts. The pain on the Israeli side is not theoretical—it is raw, present, and permanent.

As we disembarked, two young Israelis—idealistic, thoughtful—approached me. One said, “We’re losing our way. Israel is no longer acting Jewish.” The other, more forcefully: “What we’re doing in Gaza is genocide.” They weren’t angry. They were broken. Their moral pain was sincere. But their confusion was deep.

Because Judaism is not a suicide pact.

Ours is a tradition rooted in compassion. The Torah commands us no less than 36 times to love the stranger, for we were strangers in Egypt. We are taught to care for the widow, the orphan, the vulnerable. The prophets call us to justice, mercy, and humility. And yet, we are also commanded to defend life. “He who rises to kill you,” says the Talmud, “rise early to kill him first.” That, too, is Torah.

What is happening in Gaza is not genocide. It is tragic. It is brutal. But it is not genocide. Genocide is the deliberate annihilation of a people. Israel is fighting not against Palestinians, but against Hamas—an organization that pledges the destruction of the Jewish state, that celebrates October 7 as a model to repeat, and that embeds itself cynically within civilian populations, using schools and hospitals as human shields.

To allow Hamas to remain intact would not be compassion. It would be moral abdication. It would ensure that every Israeli family lives in fear, every Jewish child under the shadow of the next massacre. And it would doom Palestinian civilians to a future still ruled by fanatics who care more about martyrdom than medicine.

That is not the foundation of peace. That is the breeding ground of endless war.

And yet, the international conversation is increasingly unmoored from these realities. Enter Greta Thunberg. Her activism once awakened a generation to climate urgency. But her recent attempt to sail a “selfie boat” to Gaza with a token delivery of aid reveals the danger of moral symbolism without substance. Stopped by Israeli forces and sent home, she called the interception “kidnapping.” But one must ask: is this truly about Gaza’s civilians—or about Greta’s brand?

In a world addicted to virtue-signaling, it’s easier to pose for a photo than to wrestle with nuance. It’s easier to chant slogans than to ask why Gaza’s hospitals are doubling as weapons depots. It’s easier to judge Israel than to acknowledge that Hamas has chosen war, not peace, every time it’s had the chance.

Even far from Gaza, the same confusion reigns. In Los Angeles, protests have erupted in response to federal immigration raids. The streets of Compton, East LA, and Koreatown are tense. Hundreds have been detained. Communities feel abandoned or scapegoated. The impulse to protest is deeply human—and, in many ways, deeply Jewish. We stand with the stranger. But when protest turns into lawlessness, when public safety is dismissed in favor of ideological absolutism, we lose something vital: the balance between compassion and order.

The world today is suffering from a crisis of moral clarity. We have elevated empathy over ethics, compassion over coherence. But Jewish tradition insists on both. The prophets of Israel didn’t only weep; they warned. They didn’t only comfort; they confronted.

Rabbi Sacks once said: “The test of a civilization is how it responds to moral challenge.” In Gaza, Israel faces such a challenge. And the world’s response—simplistic, performative, often blind—fails that test.

To my two Israeli acquaintances, I say this: Israel is still Jewish—deeply, painfully so. Jewish enough to mourn the innocent in Gaza even as it fights to destroy the murderers who brought this war upon us all. Jewish enough to restrain itself more than any army in the world, even as it is vilified. Jewish enough to remain human in inhuman times.

There is no joy in this war. Only grief and grim necessity. But if we abandon moral clarity in favor of performative outrage, we do not become more righteous—we become more lost.

So let us keep our hearts open to suffering on both sides. But let us also keep our minds clear. Because to be truly Jewish is not to choose between compassion and courage. It is to insist on both. Sometimes, it means standing firm—not because we hate what is in front of us, but because we love what is behind us: our children, our people, and the fragile hope for peace.