When Israel acts shamefully, we Jews must be willing to be ashamed of it

A few weeks ago I signed a statement from members of the Jewish community calling for an end to the Israel-Gaza war, and an end to the “humanitarian crisis” unfolding under the Netanyahu-led government.

The statement was meant to be published as a paid advertisement in The Australian Jewish News, but I found out last week the editor was not willing to run it as it was written.

I have avoided signing statements on this war until now. Here in Australia, there has been fierce conflict over how we respond to the horror of Hamas’ terror of October 7 and the subsequent decimation of Gaza and its people. What date to mark the beginning of “it all”? What label for what kind of trauma is being inflicted, and for what reason? I have kept a notebook of alternating news reports of the same event to observe this dissonance at how we describe what we are witnessing.

Protesters demanding an end to the war in Tel Aviv, Israel, hold pictures of Palestinian children killed during Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, May 17.Credit: AP

But this week, driving my children to school, I heard British plastic surgeon Dr Victoria Rose, who works at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. Every 40 minutes, she said, a child dies there. The children dying are between 1 and 11 and many are dying because they are so malnourished their bodies cannot fight the infections from their burns and wounds. The hospital is running out of the disinfectant they need to operate. These are unequivocal accounts of a humanitarian crisis that can and must be stopped.

There have been times since October 7 that I have felt dizzy trying to find my sense of what is true about this war. I know my personal experiences of concrete antisemitism over the years, words said to me, to my children – “Jewish pig”, “gas your family” – swastikas sent to my child in a school group chat. And there is no doubt that those who wield such words to me will find community in opposition to Israel. To diagnose what exactly is behind denial or minimisation of the atrocities of October 7 is less concrete, but at the very least perverse.

Palestinians struggle to get food aid in Jabalia, northern Gaza Strip, on May 19.Credit: AP

But I find my feet again when I hear of these children. When I think of how their deaths will not contribute to the return of the hostages. When I think of the IDF soldier recently jailed for refusing to return to service, Captain Ron Feiner, who has served 270 days since October 7, who said:

“I’m horrified by the never-ending war in Gaza, by the abandonment of the hostages, by the continued killing of innocent people, and by the complete lack of political vision … I must resist in every way I can to bring this war to an end.” He is among 300 such soldiers who have refused to serve.

I have a love for Jewish tradition’s ethical grandeur, its long struggle for dignity in exile, and its rich intellectual inheritance. And it is precisely because of this love that I must speak of Jewish ethical responsibility.

A rabbi in my community used these words when I challenged his opposition to protests earlier this week: “Israel, like any nation, is not without flaws”.

In the face of the destruction of more than 400 Palestinian villages, the permanent exile of more than 700,000 people, and the ongoing mass death inflicted in Gaza, this response is pallid. Like describing apartheid in South Africa as a “zoning issue”.

My moral clarity comes instead from the words of a Holocaust survivor protesting in Israel: “I don’t think we can remember our suffering without acknowledging the suffering of Gaza ... It occupies the same place in my heart.”

The rabbi offered more: “Walk with your head high”.

But what if dignity requires that we sometimes must bow our heads? What if the radically Jewish act, at the same time the most truly human act, is to listen more carefully – especially to those whose cries we are most reluctant to hear? To hear of the shrapnel and infections and malnutrition of the Gazan children.

How can we treat one people’s trauma as sacred and another’s as all but non-existent? Justice that operates with such distorted vision is not justice, after all. It is tribalism in moral dress. Ethically speaking, love that cannot feel shame is not love – it is vanity; and nationalism that cannot feel shame is not love of country; it is mere jingoism.

What to do, too, with the conflation of the identity of the Jewish people with the state of Israel? This is not only a definitional error; it is a theological and moral one of huge significance. Judaism long survived without sovereignty, and even when sovereignty returned, the emergence of Israel did not annul the prophetic tradition that long taught us to hold power accountable, to speak truth to it, and to mourn when justice is denied – even by our own. Maybe especially by our own.

Jewish tradition has never required uniformity of judgment. But it has required a reverence for truth. And above all, it has demanded that we never mistake power for righteousness, or the survival of the state for the flourishing of the soul. As the statement I signed says, “what is happening in Gaza is so catastrophic to Palestinians and Israeli hostages, that any constraint against open criticism is no longer tenable”.

When I think about the possibility of being called a traitor for those words or my words here, I think of this: one measure of our capacity to love Israel truly is our willingness to be ashamed of it when it acts shamefully – not because we hate it, but because we long for it to be better than it has become, for it to act in ways consistent with what is best in our religious and philosophical traditions.

This is not disloyalty. When we speak of “covenant” – the solemn bond between Jewish people and God – we should remind ourselves it includes the possibility of rebuke. Spoken not from outside, but from the beating heart of a people still struggling to be worthy of its deepest moral vision.

Nicola Redhouse is a freelance writer and the author of Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind.

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