My grandmother fled the Holocaust. Now it’s time for Jews to abandon Israel

Since the October 7 butchery of Jews by Gaza’s reigning death cult, the anti-Zionist left and the antisemitic right have indulged in a masterclass of double standards and selective outrage. Social media algorithms, designed to inflame, flood our feeds with Gazan disaster porn.

The facts of Israel’s bloodshed are staggering.Credit: Getty Images

Instagram influencers are suddenly brave opponents of the Zionist “colonial-settler” state. Many of them know little of the Oslo Accords, of Yitzhak Rabin, of Ehud Olmert’s peace plan, of the savagery of the Second Intifada. They couldn’t tell you who invaded and occupied the West Bank as soon as Israel was created (hint: it wasn’t Israel, and it rhymes with “Blordan”) or who invaded and occupied Gaza (hint: it wasn’t Israel, and it rhymes with “Blegypt”). The online warriors elide the Arab states’ sterling effort at wiping out Israel in 1967 and the attempted do-over in 1973. They denounce Israel’s failure to create a Palestinian state while ignoring the repeated reluctance of Palestinians to condone a two-state solution during periods when a majority of Israelis believed it was not merely desirable but inevitable.

So Jewish Australians have found it head-spinning, since October 7, to be collectively blamed for the plight of Palestinians by anti-Zionists who don’t seem to give two stuffs about actual, real-life Palestinian people – activists who never mention the sinister coercions of Qatar, Iran or Hezbollah; who’ve never campaigned for the right of Palestinian refugees to escape Hamas’ brutality by seeking better lives in neighbouring Arab states; who remain silent about Muslims being crushed in Syria, Chechnya, Yemen and Sudan; who chant catchy slogans whose subtexts they don’t understand about rivers and seas, and globalised intifadas; who pretend that Iranian theocracy and jihadist ideology aren’t a problem in Palestine or the wider Muslim world. Many pro-Palestinian Jews who detest Netanyahu are rendered mute by a tsunami of foggy-headed anti-Zionist righteousness so selective that it smells like an anti-Jewish double standard.

Many Jews also remain wistful about a homeland for the most persecuted group in history. There’s still an allure to the Israel that my grandmother dreamt of when she fled the Holocaust; the Israel envisioned by Zionism’s early pacifist-socialist, hippy-dippy kibbutzniks, of which today’s anti-Zionists are ignorant.

But how far does the Actual Existing Israel have to stray from its founding principles and from the basic moral tenets of Jewishness – and for how long – before we stop making excuses for it?

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank endure lives of systematic dehumanisation under military law. Their Jewish neighbours, most of them in newly illegally built towns, enjoy the full rights of citizenship, sometimes with violent impunity. The settlements are an elaborate, militarised thicket of ethnic discrimination.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza have been crushed to within an inch of their lives, many of them too young to bear any responsibility for the jihadists holding them hostage. The annihilation of Gaza and the open rhetoric from senior Israeli cabinet ministers of ethnically cleansing the territory are not self-defence. Israel is no longer in an emergency, where all bets are off. It is now choosing a strategy. It is now proactively erasing the future of millions of people.

If you suspect that a fair bit of the pro-Gaza hoo-ha is motivated by bias against Israel (and some of it is), read the work of Israel’s own progressive independent media: Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and B’Tselem, and the Israeli historian Lee Mordechai’s website Witnessing the Gaza War. Listen to my recent interview with the world-renowned Israeli genocide expert Professor Amos Goldberg, who wrote “There’s No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It’s Still Genocide.”

The facts of Israel’s bloodshed are staggering. The IDF’s own artificial intelligence system, Habsora, generates bombing targets so fast that a former Israeli intelligence officer described it as a “mass assassination factory”. Targets have been expanded to include non-military sites such as universities, banks, government offices, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks which the army defines as “power targets” (matarot otzem).

A Palestinian woman mourns as she embraces the body of her daughter Mayar Abu Odeh, 8, who was killed in an Israeli army strike on Gaza. Credit: AP

Israel’s rules on killing Palestinian civilians have been so loosened that a former US State Department senior adviser on civilian harm, Larry Lewis, told The New York Times: “The willingness to accept this level of harm to civilians is far beyond what I have seen in operations in the past.”

Renowned American trauma surgeons with experience in other wars have returned from volunteering at Gazan hospitals horrified. One wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “I have worked in other war zones. But what I witnessed … in Gaza was not war – it was annihilation.” Another told the UN Security Council: “As surgeons, we have never seen cruelty like Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

This can’t all be antisemitic lies. The claim that this is a just war, being prudently prosecuted, in which civilian lives are lost only regretfully is, at this stage, laughable.

To be fair, Hamas, as Israel constantly reminds us, is worse. Compared to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, to Hezbollah, to genocidal Jew-haters and to murderous Arab autocrats, Israel is the most moral actor in the Middle East. But it’s still responsible for what it does. If I kidnap a murderer and yank out his fingernails with pliers, I don’t win a morality prize because he’s a murderer, and I’m a mere fingernail-extractor. At some point, my actions need to withstand moral scrutiny on their own. “The terrorists made me do it” is neither an excuse nor a moral blank cheque the Jews of the world are required to honour. You need to innovate. You need to humanise. You need to find moral courage. That’s the Jewish way.

The Israel which my grandmother dreamt of does not exist. What exists is illegal settlement building. What exists is a discriminatory occupation. What exists is a political establishment so eager to undermine Palestinian statehood that it bolstered Hamas. What exists is the jailing of moderates like the Palestinian lawmaker Marwan Barghouti in order to keep Palestinian leadership either moribund or radical. What exists is a state that’s preparing to annex or reoccupy all the lands of the Palestinian people indefinitely. What exists is the obliteration of Gaza.

For thousands of years, Jews have preached fairness, resilience, reason, pacifism. It is the most un-Jewish thing in the world to make somebody a refugee. Hasn’t this Israeli state – this real-world government, not the idealised vision of a Yisra’el in the clouds – proven that justice and peace are not its priorities; that it is unworthy of our support? Israel, the country made to save the Jews, is now the thing that most endangers the Jewish people physically, culturally and morally.

Until Israeli politics can radically reorient itself, it’s time to construct a vision of Jewishness that’s independent of the state that pretends to act on our behalf. It’s time for Jews to reclaim the moral mantle of our ancestors. For the Palestinians, but also for the future of the Jewish people, it’s time for Jews to abandon Israel.

Josh Szeps is the host of the podcast Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.