As we approach the High Holy Days, we enter a season of teshuvah, of looking honestly at ourselves, taking responsibility and asking what must change. Yet there is a temptation, on days like these, to decide very quickly what Jews are supposed to think and how we should respond. An announcement is made about Israel, statements appear within hours and lines are drawn around the communal boundary.
The Government’s announcement of measures against Israeli settlements in the West Bank has provoked strong reactions across British Jewry. There is a fear that the measures will do little to advance peace, may strengthen extremists and could contribute to an atmosphere in which hostility towards Israel spills too easily into hostility towards Jews. We should take those fears seriously.
They are not, though, the only Jewish response. Our community holds a genuine diversity of views on sanctions, settlements and the actions of both the British and Israeli governments. Jewish leadership has a responsibility to make that diversity visible, not to place those who disagree beyond the communal boundary.
We stand for Israel’s security and future, Palestinian freedom and dignity, and the right of both peoples to national self-determination. We reject BDS, including attempts to introduce it by the back door. We oppose occupation, settlement expansion, Palestinian dispossession and settler violence. For us, these are part of the same commitment: that Israelis and Palestinians might live in security, freedom and peace.
Sanctions are a clumsy tool. They can have unintended consequences and strengthen the very extremists they seek to constrain. Measures directed at settlements and those who profit from them may not be the right response. We should be able to debate that seriously, but the debate cannot become a way of looking away from what brought us here.
On the ground, settlements continue to expand, Palestinians are being dispossessed and settler violence takes place with the protection, encouragement or indifference of the state. Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrates violence and vengeance. Bezalel Smotrich denies Palestinian identity and imagines a future built upon displacement. The possibility of Palestinian self-determination is being deliberately closed down.
None of this is peripheral. It shapes Israel’s future, its democracy and security, the prospects for peace and the Judaism invoked in defence of its actions. Love of Israel cannot require us to reach only for qualifications and euphemisms when confronting what is being done in its name.
We remain unequivocal about Hamas’s murder and kidnapping, antisemitism and the targeting of Israelis and Jews. Our Judaism requires us to name all of this clearly. The sanctity of human life does not depend upon whose life it is, and suffering does not become less urgent because acknowledging it is politically uncomfortable.
There are Jewish and Israeli voices helping us to hold these commitments together. Fania Oz-Salzberger, Yuval Noah Harari, Mickey Gitzin, Daniel Sokatch, Magen Inon and Maoz Inon, among many others, have spent years expressing a love of Israel rooted in the struggle for democracy, peace and Palestinian rights.
Rabbi Gilad Kariv, a Progressive rabbi in the Knesset, embodies that struggle from within Israel. He argues that Israel’s growing international isolation is substantially the consequence of a government which has encouraged settler extremism and dispossession. His voice matters because he refuses to surrender Zionism, Judaism or Israel’s future to those who would empty them of moral responsibility.
Holding an Israeli government accountable for its actions does not cause antisemitism. Antisemites cause antisemitism. They may seize upon Israel, Zionism or the actions of an Israeli government as an excuse, but responsibility for their hatred remains theirs. Palestinian rights and international accountability cannot be made contingent upon the good behaviour of antisemites.
The vulnerability of British Jews must not be ignored. Antisemitism is real, dangerous and sometimes deadly. Jewish schools require guards, synagogues are attacked and Jewish people are frightened to identify themselves in public. Policies directed at Israel can affect Jews far beyond it, whatever their stated intention, and language about Israel can carry antisemitic assumptions. We must confront that without equivocation.
But measures directed at Israeli settlements are not the same as an attack on Jews. We should take care not to collapse the distinction between them.
In a recent conversation with Ezra Klein, Yuval Noah Harari reflected on how difficult it has become to look at the suffering of the other. Almost immediately, we reach for a justification or comparison, or demand that another suffering be acknowledged first.
We recognise that instinct because it lives in all of us. Attention moves away from what is being done and towards the offence caused by those objecting to it; away from the actions which brought international pressure and towards the pressure itself. Israel is often judged unfairly, and sanctions may prove counterproductive, but inaction is not neutral. It too is a political and moral choice.
These sanctions are almost certainly not a perfect mechanism. If we reject them, we must offer more than condemnation. We must say how settlement expansion will be opposed, what consequences should follow settler violence and dispossession, and how we will support Israelis and Palestinians working for democracy, dignity and peace.
The High Holy Days do not ask us first to account for the failures of other people. They ask us to examine our own deeds, our own community and the choices made in our name. Before the justification and the counteraccusation, before we reach for the argument that makes the actions of the Israeli government easier to live with, can we remain for a moment with that responsibility?
To ask these questions is not to withdraw our love or solidarity. It is part of teshuvah. If our Judaism cannot ask this of us, particularly at this time of year, then what is it for?
- Rabbi Josh Levy and Rabbi Charley Baginsky are Co-Leads of The Movement for Progressive Judaism.