The War in Gaza and the Yom Kippur Confessional: Response to Yossi Klein Halevy
The War in Gaza and the Yom Kippur Confessional – A Response to Yossi Klein Halevy
The trendiest targets of opprobrium in the Western world today are the State of Israel and the Jewish people. European countries are intensifying efforts to reward Hamas by establishing a 22nd sovereign Arab state in territory from which Israel was viciously attacked, major western media outlets enthusiastically lap up the most libelous and blatantly false accusations levelled by Hamas against Israel, anti-Semitic attacks are at frighteningly high levels, and Jews all around the world, including the United States, need armed guards at their synagogues and community centers.
The response of Jews over the centuries to this type of unbridled hatred, as well as to more subtle forms, has always included those who sought to set themselves apart from the target of the attacks, either by opting out completely from the Jewish people, or by seeking to distance themselves from negative traits or actions attributed to the Jews.
One of the latest and well publicized examples of this behavior is the actress Hannah Enbinder. In her acceptance speech at the Emmys, and against the backdrop of a letter signed by over 4000 actors and filmmakers pledging to boycott Israel, Enbinder stated, “I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel… this sort of ethno-nationalist state.”
Enbinder’s, “no not me” comments brought to mind the sanctimonious musings in these pages earlier this month of Yossi Klein Halevy (“Our season of reckoning: Israel’s moral crossroads in Gaza”). Klein Halevy is part of a coterie of Jews, particularly, in academics, who, like Enbinder, are more concerned with their social and professional standing than with actually bringing about a just and moral result. Klein Halevy seems to deem inapplicable to himself the essential teaching of where we are to direct our thoughts of penitence and reflection during the High Holy Day period. When we recite ten times on Yom Kippur the confessional prayer, “We have trespassed, we have betrayed, we have stolen, we have maligned “, we beat our own chests, not the chest of the person standing next to us.
Reading Klein Halevy’s self-righteous call for a reckoning by others is essentially the same as watching any one of Piers Morgan’s podcasts obsessing critically about Israel, or a speech by any number of European leaders. First the lip service. Sure, Israel had a right to defend itself on October 7th, but then it got carried away, lost its moral compass and has done terrible things. Sure, Hamas meticulously put into place a plan to destroy the State of Israel, dedicated virtually every inch and every structure in Gaza to that goal, slaughtered Jewish babies, raped, tormented and humiliated Jewish women. But Israel has Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir. So, what we need now as thinking and moral Jews is some healthy ambivalence – “conflicting certainties.” Part of the focus of a thinking, moral Jew this High Holiday season should be to focus on the scornful nature of Israel’s democratically elected government.
But it’s not just the government that is the target of Klein Halevy’s tormented slings and arrows. It is also the IDF. They may not actually be the moral force that its defenders assert. Halevy Klein laments, ‘Something has gone very wrong in Gaza”, “standards and behaviors have been affected (though we don’t now yet to what extent”. He ponders, without any proof or support, whether “recklessness” is being tolerated, “has this war produced more instances of war crimes than our previous conflicts?”
There are clearly established doctrines under both international and US military law, providing that civilian areas lose their sanctuary from attack if they are used for military purposes. As Klein Halevy well knows, every type of civilian structure in Gaza is used by Hamas for military purposes, all with deadly effect. Homes, kindergartens, mosques and hospitals are used by Hamas to store weapons, fire rockets, provide targeting support and sanctuary to Hamas. Nevertheless, Israel has achieved, at the horrific cost of life and limb of many Israeli soldiers, the lowest percentage of civilian deaths in recorded military history.
Similarly, international law provides that food and other essential supplies may be blocked from an enemy in an armed conflict where there is “serious reason to believe that such supplies will be diverted to the enemy’s armed forces or their supporters or their entry would otherwise give a definite military advantage to the enemy.” That was a certainty in Gaza, with Hamas dominating every aspect of society and all UN agencies and offices employing members of Hamas. But Israel is not allowed to do what every other country can. Ultimately, Israel has allowed entry of food, water and electricity to an enemy that launched an openly declared war of genocide against the Jewish people, even though UN aid trucks have served as the main source of income to pay new terror recruits, those who hide in tunnels and piers in areas that the IDF has evacuated multiple times and that attack Israeli soldiers with deadly consequences, including four young Israeli soldiers killed the day after Klein Halevy challenged the morality of the IDF.
A February 2025 review by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council concluded that Hamas garnered 4 billion shekels from UN food trucks. By the UN’s own acknowledgment, during an 11-week period under review this past spring and summer, 88% of more than 2600 of its humanitarian aid trucks were, in the UN’s sanitized language “intercepted”. Still, Klein wants us to be morally panged about Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
In the 2021 book, “People Love Dead Jews,” Dara Horn explored the paradox in society where there is widespread fascination with, and seeming empathy for, dead Jews, but little respect for live ones if they exercise any modicum of agency or power. This disturbing phenomenon has been on heightened display over much of the past two years, and, in particular, over the past few weeks and months.
Over 100 years ago, Mendel Beilis, a factory clerk in Tzarist Russia, was a victim of the old blood libel that accused Jews of murdering Christian children and using their blood to bake matzos. It evoked widespread international condemnation in the media, among political and religious leaders and in intellectual circles. But today, the state of the Jewish people is under international attack from those same groups, and accused of blood on a national scale.
What, per Klein Halevy, should be the Jewish response to all of this? We should be morally ambivalent; we should occupy the space somewhere in between those who accuse Israel of genocide and those who describe Israel as the most moral army in the world.
Klein Halevy’s bio still tells us that “his first book, ‘Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist’, told the story of his teenage attraction to, and subsequent disillusionment with Jewish militancy. The New York Times called it ‘a book of burning importance.'” This has been Klein Halevy’s brand for thirty years. It is the source of his livelihood and professional associations. Judges in courtrooms are not the only people who pass judgment and need to stay clear of all forms of bribes in judgment, especially when throwing stones at others.
Since Halevy Klein is so morally panged by the conduct of others, he might also ponder what value, other than is own self aggrandizement and promotion, is advanced by giving expression to his struggles over Israel’s perceived shortcomings? Are justice and morality advanced, or greatly set back? Is the world safer, or a far more dangerous place? Might more genuine innocents be protected, or horrifically harmed and endangered?
If relevant, Klein Halevy can lecture any children of his fighting for the Jewish people inside Gaza that he has moral pangs about their conduct and thinks they should put their lives at further risk by going beyond the requirements of international law and what Judaism demands.
The IDF is not an impersonal, faceless organization. The fighting force in Gaza these past two years has relied heavily on hundreds of thousands of reservists, young, and no longer young, men who have left their wives and young children, three, four and five times, for months at a time. They have no desire to fight in Gaza, they don’t want to be warriors and have no interest or desire to cause harm to any innocent people. But they keep showing up, not in spite of the stated military objectives of Israel government, but, in large measure, because of them. They could opt out, but they do not. They know it is their continued volunteerism that is preventing a repetition of the unspeakable horrors of October 7.
And they are, indeed, the most moral fighting force in the world. They deserve, and have earned, our unbridled support, not our ambivalence. This Yom Kippur., we should not be pondering whether the IDF hasn’t measured up or fallen short of impossible and suicidal standards. Rather, the hearts and minds of Jews around the world should include thanks and deep appreciation for these brave and dedicated young men, and prayers for their safety and success in their sacred mission.