On November 2 I had the pleasure to engage in a public conversation with journalist/author Peter Beinart in a program co-sponsored by Jewish Currents and my congregation Tzedek Chicago, We explored a wide range of issues arising from the current moral-political moment in Israel Palestine.
I was particularly grateful to interrogate the issues raised by Peter in his recent book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning:”
• Is the Jewish community currently facing an unbridgeable ethical divide?
• Is it possible to make community with Jews whom we believe support – or remain silent over – the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza?
• Does Peter identify as a Zionist now? What is his opinion of the growing movement for antizionist Judaism?
I appreciated Peter’s honesty and willingness to engage over these issues – and many others. The entire program is available on the video recording above.
As if there wasn’t enough drama over the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race, last week saw the release of “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future,” a statement from an ad hoc group calling itself “The Jewish Majority,” condemning Mamdani for voicing political convictions that “delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility toward Judaism and Jews.” By the end of the week, the call had garnered over 1,000 signatures from rabbis, cantors and rabbinical students from NYC and around the US.
Notably, the statement only mentions Mamdani once. The rest of the six-paragraph letter is devoted to defending the state of “Israel’s right to exist in peace and security” and promoting Zionism as central to Judaism and Jewish identity. It’s centerpiece is a long and pointed quote from a recent sermon by Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue, in which he warned that Mamdani “poses a danger to the New York Jewish community”:
Zionism, Israel, Jewish self-determination—these are not political preferences or partisan talking points. They are constituent building blocks and inseparable strands of my Jewish identity. To accept me as a Jew but to ask me to check my concern for the people and state of Israel at the door is a nonsensical proposition and an offensive one, no different than asking me to reject God, Torah, mitzvot, or any other pillar of my faith.
Given the timing of the letter, “The Jewish Majority” statement is clearly an effort to stem Mamdani’s surging lead – and his popularity with young leftist Jews in NYC. But on a deeper level, the fundamental goal of the letter is made all-too plain: it seeks to combat the growing “political normalization of anti-Zionism.”
From what I can tell, Mamdani has never explicitly referred to himself as an “anti-Zionist.” What he has said, over and over again in response to the incessant gotcha question “does Israel have the right to exist as a Jewish state?” is that he “believes Israel has the right to exist as a state with equal rights.” Of course, the words “a state with equal rights” is enough to make him an anti-Zionist – because the only way Israel can exist as a Jewish state is by denying equal rights to Palestinians.
For me, this is the real significance of this statement – it shines a hard light on the deep moral hypocrisy of a Jewish communal establishment that is threatened by anti-Zionism: a political position that is rooted in human rights and equal rights for all. Indeed, if you listen to Mamdani’s words carefully, he takes pains to point this out: he refers to Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide because he agrees with the opinions of international bodies such as ICJ as well as scores of otherhuman rightsobservers. He openly says he would not welcome Netanyahu in NYC because the ICC has put a warrant out for his arrest as a war criminal.
These are not hateful or inciteful positions. What is remarkable – and galling to the Jewish communal establishment – is that Mamdani is not paying a political price for expressing them. Quite the contrary: he is the one who comes off as eminently principled and reasonable, while apoplectic Jewish leaders are having an increasingly difficult time explaining why a genocidal, apartheid nation-state is a “building block” of their Jewish identity. True to form, this clergy group is simply trotting out familiar talking points, fully expecting their morality and veracity to be self-evident.
Contrary to the claims of the statement’s signers, the increasing normalization of anti-Zionism does not “delegitimize Jewish identity and community.” As the rabbi of an openly anti-Zionist Jewish congregation, I can attest that increasing numbers of Jews are identifying as such out of genuine Jewish conscience: from a deep attachment to Jewish ethical values that mandate the pursuit of justice and hold that all human beings are equally created in the divine image.
Recent surveys certainly bear this out: according to an October 2025 Washington Post poll, of American Jews, 61% believe Israel has committed war crimes and 4 out of 10 say the country is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians, views that would certainly track with an anti-Zionist identity. As Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel has observed, “the catastrophic failure of Zionist Judaism” has marked “an opening for anti-Zionist Jews to step into greater influence, (to) make our case for something new.” By all accounts, the time has come for a Judaism that rejects the fusion of toxic ethno-nationalism with Judaism.
I’m also struck by another note of desperation from this ad-hoc group of Jewish clergy: they purport to speak for the Jewish majority as if that alone confers legitimacy. They of all people should know dissent is a sacred, cherished aspect of Jewish tradition. They of all people should know that in Talmudic debate, both majority and minority views are given equal weight and consideration. They of all people should know of the Torah’s sacred injunction “Do not go after the majority to do evil” (Exodus 23:2). And any student of history, Jewish or not, should know that the majority is not always right, whether it be the majority of Southern Whites who supported slavery and Jim Crow in the US, apartheid in South Africa or the injustices of Zionism today.
The real moral question here, it seems to me, is not “who is in the majority?” but rather “who is on the right side of history?”
It is the morning after. While the ink has dried on Trump’s 20 point “peace plan,” it has become brutally clear that the nightmare for Gazans is far from over.
Yes, the return of Palestinian and Israeli captives has been an occasion for genuine joy and celebration. Yes, Israel has ended its relentless genocidal bombing of Gaza. Yes, Palestinians are returning en masse to their homes. But this nightmare is far from over.
Israel is by no means finished. Despite the plan’s requirement that “Israeli forces will withdraw to (an) agreed-upon line,” the military has restricted Palestinians’ access to 70% of Gaza, either by declaring large areas as no-go zones or by issuing forced displacement orders, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Gazan health ministry reported that since Saturday – the first full day of the ceasefire – Israel has already killed 23 Palestinians and wounded 122.
Israel is also ramping up its support of rival Gazan militias to increase the violence on the ground. On October 12, one such group tortured and murdered the beloved Palestinian journalist Saleh Al-Jaafrawi. As Al-Jazeera reporter Eman Murtaja recently wrote: “The message of Saleh’s assassination is clear: Anyone who continues to critically report on what is going on in Gaza, on Israel’s continuing destructive presence and the betrayal of its allies on the ground will be captured, tortured and killed.”
Meanwhile as Gazans continue to stream back to their homes, it has become tragically apparent that the overwhelming majority of them have no homes to return to. Scores of buildings have been reduced to rubble. Palestinians are arriving home to unlivable, broken shards of concrete, many of which still entomb dead loved ones. At the same time Israel’s forced starvation of Gazans continues to claim lives. As of October 12, at least 463 people, including 157 children, have died from starvation as Israel continues to block aid from entering the Gaza Strip. Nearly one in four children suffers from severe acute malnutrition.
It is difficult to overstate the depths of the annihilation that Israel has inflicted on Gaza over the past two years. As journalist Branko Marcetic has rightly termed it, “Israel’s Gaza war is one of history’s worst crimes”:
What we have watched, what we are continuing to watch, is the obliteration of a society of two million people. Every facet of modern civilization, as well as the most elementary things needed for even a state of basic subsistence for a human community, has been deliberately and almost completely destroyed by the Israeli military in Gaza. And now we are watching the gradual but accelerating mass die-off of the people who once lived there, through a combination of starvation, disease, and murder.
Though the political elites are rapturously describing a neo-liberal, neo-colonial post-war Gaza coastal resort, the hard truth is that the Gaza Strip is now a toxic moonscape and mass graveyard. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Israel’s relentless bombardment of populated areas has contaminated soil and groundwater for the long term, both through the bombardment of munitions and hazardous materials (such as asbestos, industrial chemicals and fuel) that have been released into the surrounding air, soil and groundwater from collapsed buildings. As of July 2024, UNEP estimated that Israel’s bombing had left 40 million tons of debris and hazardous material in Gaza, with much of the rubble containing human remains. It has been estimated that clearing this war rubble will take 15 years and could cost up to 40 to 50 billion dollars.
In addition to the toxicity of the environment, there also remains enormous amounts of unexploded ordnance throughout the Gaza Strip. An estimated 70,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on Gaza since October 2023 – the equivalent of roughly six Hiroshima bombings on an area less than half the size of Hiroshima but with six times its population. This past January, the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) estimated that between 5% and 10% of the munitions fired on Gaza have not yet exploded. According to the UNMAS, it could take 14 years to clear Gaza of all unexploded ordnance.
As I noted above, Israel is still restricting food aid from entering Gaza. According to the World Health Programme, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are still facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution and death. Over 1 million more are facing emergency levels of food insecurity. Acute malnutrition is projected to continue worsening rapidly, with at least 132,000 children aged under 5 at risk of death through to June 2026.
But even if food supplies were let in by Israel tomorrow, food alone will not save the starving population of Gaza. Starving people cannot simply become healthier by feeding themselves. A condition known as “refeeding syndrome” occurs when starving people who are desperate for food are simply given food supplies. Rapid eating can be catastrophic to the heart, lungs, nerves, and blood, resulting in arrhythmias, respiratory failure, and death. In order to nurse the malnourished back to health, a skilled, multidisciplinary team and routine laboratory testing are required. It has been estimated that without medical specialists and infrastructure accompanying aid, thousands will possibly die from refeeding syndrome.
In addition to starvation, deadly infectious diseases continue to spiral out of control in Gaza. The WHO has warned that the challenge of life-saving medicines reaching Palestinians in Gaza is currently dire:
Whether meningitis… diarrhea, respiratory illnesses, we’re talking about a mammoth amount of work,” Hanan Balkhy, regional director for the United Nations’ health body, told AFP in Cairo. A ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas has raised hopes of life-saving aid and healthcare finally reaching Palestinians in Gaza after two years of war, but Balkhy warned the challenges are “unimaginable.”
In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Bereshit, we read that after Cain kills Abel, God exclaims, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!” This is not the first time we will read that bloodshed literally pollutes the earth – and that this pollution must be expiated and atoned for.
Israel – and those who have aided and abetted its genocidal onslaught – has polluted the ground of Gaza in a myriad of ways, and the blood of its people continues to cry out to us even now. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking a ceasefire brokered by craven politicians and real estate oligarchs has ended the genocide. Now more than ever, we must respond to the voice that cries out to us from the ground of Gaza.
On Yom Kippur, we say the hard truths out loud. On Yom Kippur, we proclaim together as a community: chatanu, we have sinned. We have failed. We have not lived up to our promises of the past year.
I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced these words more brutally than I do this year. In last year’s Rosh Hashanah sermon, I ended with these words: “A year from now, when we are back here, we will have to have an answer. We can’t find ourselves just asking the same question. We must be ready to answer: what did we do in the last year to bring this genocide to an end?”
We have failed. It is now one year later and Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza is continuing toward its second year mark. As I speak these words, the Israeli military is literally leveling the entire northern region of Gaza to the ground. Earlier today, Israel issued its final warning for Palestinians in Gaza City to evacuate, saying everyone who remains will be considered a “terrorist.” Many are refusing to leave, many are unable to leave.
It is horrifying to even say these words out loud: on this Yom Kippur, the day when we plead to be written into the Book of Life, Israel is systematically erasing Gaza from the map – and the people of Gaza along with it.
I’ll be honest with you: I’ve struggled mightily over what I could possibly say tonight that would be worthy of Yom Kippur. I could discuss the geo-political causes that have been prolonging this genocide. I could discuss craven US politicians and corporate gangsters who are planning to carve up Gaza for their own profit. I could spend my time excoriating the Jewish establishment for supporting this genocide – and too many Jewish communal leaders for their silence. But frankly, none of it would be particularly new. None of it feels worthy of the grief pervadingthis sacred moment of Yom Kippur.
I also don’t want to spend this sermon describing the specific litany of the atrocities being inflicted on the people of Gaza – to reduce them to trapped, powerless victims. We’re all too familiar with the horrors of the past two years. Like so many of you, I’ve been scrolling daily through unbearable pictures and videos live streaming Gazan’s agony, their erasure. There’s something obscene about the casual way we’ve been viewing these horrors on our mobile devices, right alongside memes and texts and emails as we go about our daily business.
And yet at the same time, I know we must bear witness. We owe it in particular to the courageous young Gazans reporting on their own erasure from the ground even as Israel maintains a total media blackout. We cannot and must not look away. This has been our sacred responsibility to the people of Gaza. It is precisely through this bearing witness that we affirm their essential humanity.
As I thought about what I could possibly say to you tonight, I kept returning the same basic truth: if these days are to have any meaning for us at all, it is Yom Kippur’s sacred challenge to publicly affirm our accountability to the Palestinian people – as Jews and as human beings of conscience. We cannot let ourselves become complicit in their erasure. If we are truly serious about Yom Kippur, we must vow that solidarity is our sacred obligation.
When I think about Jewish accountability to the Palestinian people, I must mention our profound debt to Prof. Marc Ellis, of blessed memory, the great Jewish scholar, writer and theologian, who was an important teacher to me and a friend to our congregation from our earliest days. I quoted Marc in my very first sermon at Tzedek Chicago and many more times over the years. He was a prolific writer, but more importantly he was a courageous writer. Among other things, he wrote a great deal about what he called “revolutionary forgiveness” and the imperative for a collective Jewish confession to the Palestinian people. As he put it:
Revolutionary forgiveness in Israel-Palestine begins with a confession by the Jewish people. The confession is simple. What we as Jews have done to the Palestinian people is wrong. What we are doing to the Palestinian people today is wrong. With that confession, we agree to begin to walk the path with Palestinians towards justice and equality. As that path begins to be walked, the memories of each people, broken by history, remain. But as that path is walked, new memories begin to be created. As those memories of justice and equality are created, they begin to dominate the history of both peoples until in the end an injury against one is an injury against all. Revolutionary forgiveness; confession, justice at the center.
Marc died last year, far too young, as Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people was raging in full force. I yearn to talk to him now about this confession. I so want to ask him if he would still, in this terrible moment, be writing about mutual, revolutionary forgiveness? I want to ask: is forgiveness even possible any more? Or is what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people truly unforgivable? And if that is the case, is there really any future at all? Can there ever be any hope for real justice in Palestine/Israel?
For the past two years I’ve been in touch with my friend Rachel Betarie, an antizionist Israeli Jew and activist and former director of the organization Zochrot. Over the months, her words to me have become progressively more despairing as she’s described how it feels to live in Israel at this terrifying moment, in a country where the majority of its citizens support the genocide.
Recently, Rachel told that she was part of a new working group organized by Zochrot, as she put it, “of activists in Palestine, colonized and Anti-Zionist colonizers, who have been meeting since April to think, re-imagine, and suggest concrete processes through which the right of return for Palestinian refugees from Gaza could be realized after the genocide.” She went on to write:
It is not easy to imagine a better, more just future at a time when the ground is crumbling under our feet. Some of us have families in Gaza and most of us have deep ties there. All of us see our future here in Palestine, between the river and the sea. The question arose again and again in our meetings: Is it even relevant to talk about the future right now? Isn’t this just escapism? Still, we chose to trust each other – a work in progress – and our deeply held values, and extract some ideas from our process of learning and discussing. With every meeting it became clearer to what extent the Nakba, and the ongoing system of settler colonialism – not October 7, 2023 – was and still remains the root of the problems we face today, and that return is the core of every future solution that has a chance to bring any stability, justice and peace to our communities, and that entails dismantling of the Zionist colonial regime.
Through this work, we came to the conclusion that return from Gaza must begin – not at some distant point in the future. Our discussions did not only focus on the design of return but also raised questions of community, of collective and individual healing, and of how social processes of repair can accompany physical return. With our hearts shattered daily by the horrors of the genocide, and with fear and hopelessness engulfing us, envisioning this still possible future is in itself a remedy.
I’m so inspired by their effort, their determination to come together, Israelis and Palestinians – or as Rachel put it, colonized and colonizers – even in this unbearably tragic moment, to vision a future of reparation and return. They know full well that they are a tiny minority in Israeli society, a small island of hope amidst an ocean of trauma and fury. And yet they are determined to keep this vision alive despite it all.
As I think further about how we might envision the future this Yom Kippur, particularly here in the diaspora, I keep returning to one basic truth: Palestinian voices must be centered in our observance. Quite frankly, I don’t know how we can do the work of teshuvah, of repentance and return if we don’t hear their stories directly, open up fully to their voices and honor their experience.
As I said earlier, as we gather tonight for Yom Kippur, Israel is erasing the entire northern region of Gaza City, the most populous, built-up region of the Gaza Strip. According to reports, the scale of these demolitions are unprecedented. Over the past few weeks, the Israeli military has been systematically destroying every high-rise building in Gaza City. Satellite pictures show that the most populous region of Gaza has been reduced to a lunar landscape. Israel has already done this to large swathes of the Gaza Strip, including the city of Rafah in the south and the town of Beit Hanoun in the north.
These words, however, are mere reportage. I believe it’s critical that we hear the story of this erasure from those who are most directly impacted. And so I’d like to share with you two extended testimonies for this Yom Kippur, our day of reckoning. The first is the voice of Taher Herzallah, who comes from Gaza City and works as the Director of Organizing for American Muslims for Palestine. These are the words that Taher recently posted his Facebook page:
Gaza has fallen.
I’m not a sensationalist, nor am I someone who likes to shatter people’s hopes. But what we are witnessing today is the complete and utter annihilation of a people. It really feels like the end of Gaza City, and I don’t say this lightly, especially since I have family members and friends in Gaza who follow me on this page. This is the city where my father was born and where my family has lived for centuries.
Many of my relatives held out for two years under the worst conditions human beings can live under. But for more than 700 days, they’ve endured and found ways to survive in Gaza City.
No longer.
They’ve decided to leave Gaza City for the first time since this all started. It is just no longer possible to live there. With Israel’s systematic destruction of many of the major residential high rises in the city this week, the message is unequivocal: all of Gaza City will be leveled to the ground, the way Rafah and Jabalya and Khan Younis and Beit Hanoun were.
The images of displacement today broke something inside of me. People, looking back at Gaza with tears in their eyes, are moving south into another uncertain reality. Death and suffering are still a high likelihood as “safe zones” don’t truly exist. They know a return to Gaza is unlikely and they will be stuck in a cycle of displacement and suffering for years to come. But what choice do people have?
Some people refuse to leave Gaza. Not only out of stubbornness but also because they don’t have the means to leave. With the lack of aid organizations or large-scale efforts to facilitate the transfer of the population to another area, everyone in Gaza is left alone to figure out how to move their families to safer zones.
I have family members in Gaza who have gone back and forth from Gaza City to Deir El Balah 3 or 4 times to find a small plot of land to set up their tents. Finding an apartment or a built structure to live in is an absolutely hopeless endeavor. The best-case scenario now is to find a small plot of land large enough to erect a tent. With 2 million people squeezed into a small area on the Gaza coast, even that has become nearly impossible…
The stories we are hearing out of Gaza are heartbreaking and soul-crushing. A 10-year-old child in Gaza City was asked what his hopes are for ending this war. His response: “I only hope for one thing–to find my dad’s body and to bury him.” This is the extent of the boy’s hopes and dreams. To find consolation in burying the body of his father, who was killed at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site.
Other people have similar stories. They refuse to leave Gaza City, not because they don’t think it’s dangerous, but because they have loved ones buried under the rubble that they have not retrieved and can’t fathom moving on in life without burying them. The psychological and physical trauma of this genocide is so severe that people know that carrying that trauma will be the end of them anyway, and would rather die in Gaza City than endure years of more suffering…
To my family reading this: I am sorry. I have failed you. I don’t know what else to say. I hope you forgive me.
For the rest of us: whatever happens next will be very difficult. So prepare accordingly.
The next Palestinian voice I’d like to share with you is that of Asem Alnabih, an engineer and PhD student and spokesman for the Gaza municipality, who recently evacuated from the Shujayea region of Gaza City. Shujayea is one of the largest neighborhoods in Gaza and once had up to 100,000 residents. It is also a historically significant neighborhood, located in the southern quarter of Gaza’s Old City. Shujayea dates back to the 13th century and is named after Shuja’ al-Din Uthman al-Kurdi, a Muslim commander who died fighting the Crusaders. In the Ottoman period, it was the only mixed quarter in the Old City, where Muslims, Christians and Jews once lived together.
I remember Shujayea well when I visited Gaza in 2017 as a staff member for the American Friends Service Committee. It’s residents were clearly proud of their home, of its history, its deep sense of community and especially of its resilience. Although Shujayea was heavily bombed by Israel in its 2009 and 2014 assaults, residents rebuilt their homes each time.
Here is Asem Alnabih’s testimony, which he wrote in an article for Al-Jazeera:
My neighbourhood in east Gaza, Shujayea, is gone! The streets that once echoed with the laughter of children, the calls of vendors, and the familiar rhythms of daily life now lie in silence, smothered by dust and destruction. What was once a vibrant community, full of stories and memories, has been erased in a matter of moments.
A few days ago, my brother Mohammed went back to Shujayea to check on our family home. When he came back he told my father that nothing remained except for a few broken walls and scattered columns. A few hours later, we were shocked to learn that my father himself had braved extreme danger to see it with his own eyes. In a place where every step can mean death, he chose to walk through the ruins of our past.
This was the house my grandfather and father had built with years of effort, the house that carried my dad’s dreams and bore the marks of his sweat and sacrifice. It was where he raised his children, where we celebrated weddings and birthdays, where countless family memories were made. And now, it is nothing but rubble.
But our family’s loss is not just this one house. My father’s destroyed home is now added to my own burned apartment, my sister Nour’s bombed apartment, my sister Heba’s demolished home, and my sister Somaia’s two apartments – one reduced to rubble and the other burned. To this list are added my uncle Hassan’s destroyed building, my uncle Ziad’s building, my uncle Zahir’s home, my aunt Umm Musab’s apartment, my aunt Faten’s apartment, and the completely destroyed homes of my aunts Sabah, Amal, and Mona. And these are only the losses within our immediate family. All around us, countless relatives, friends, and neighbours have seen their homes obliterated, their memories buried under the debris.
This is not simply about the staggering material value of what we have lost. Yes, the homes were filled with furniture, personal belongings, and cherished possessions, but the destruction goes far deeper than material things. What has been taken from us is irreplaceable. A house can be rebuilt, but the sense of belonging that comes from walking familiar streets, from living in the same neighbourhood where generations of your family have grown up – that cannot be reconstructed with bricks and cement.
Shujayea was more than just buildings. It was a community stitched together by relationships, shared histories, and the memories of ordinary lives. It held the neighbourhood bakery where we bought fresh bread at dawn, the small corner shop where neighbours gathered to chat, the ancient Ibn Othman mosque that echoed with prayers during Ramadan. These were the spaces where children played, where families celebrated, and where neighbours supported each other through good times and bad.
When a neighbourhood like Shujayea is erased, it is not only walls that fall; it is a whole way of life. The destruction severs ties between neighbours, scatters families across shelters and refugee camps, and leaves a deep wound that no reconstruction project can truly heal. A rebuilt house may have four walls and a roof, but it will not be the same home that once carried generations of stories.
The pain of this loss is not unique to my family. Across Gaza, entire neighbourhoods have been flattened. Each pile of rubble hides the history of a family, the laughter of children, the wisdom of elders, and the love of a community that once thrived there. Each destroyed home is a silent witness to the human cost of this war, costs that cannot be measured in money or damage assessment.
What we have lost is not just property, but identity. A home is where a person’s life unfolds, where milestones are celebrated, where griefs are shared, where bonds are formed. To see so many homes destroyed is to see an entire people uprooted from the places that defined them. It is a calculated erasure, not only of lives, but of memory, heritage, and belonging.
Rebuilding will not bring back what was taken. The new buildings, if they ever come, will stand on top of the graves of our memories. They will not bring back my father’s years of hard work, nor the sense of comfort and security that once came with having a home. They will not resurrect the neighbourhood we knew, the one full of warmth, familiarity, and life.
The destruction of Shujayea is a wound that will remain open for generations. It is not simply a matter of humanitarian aid or reconstruction funds. This is about the deliberate dismantling of a community’s heart and soul. No amount of concrete can rebuild trust, restore memories, or bring back the neighbours who have been killed.
Shujayea is gone. And with it, a part of us has been buried. Yet even as we grieve, we hold on to the stories, to the love that once filled our homes, to the hope that someday justice will prevail. Because while they can destroy our houses, they cannot destroy the bonds we carry in our hearts, nor the memories that no bulldozer or bomb can erase.
On Yom Kippur, we say the hard truths out loud. And this Yom Kippur we must vow to hear them directly from the voices of those who would otherwise be silenced. Those whose lives would otherwise be erased. We cannot even imagine atonement if these voices are not with us during this most sacred observance.
On this evening of Kol Nidre, we admit publicly that we will fail to live up to the vows we make in the coming year. Does that mean we should adjust our vows to be more realistic, more achievable? Does it mean we should not make them at all? I personally find that prospect unbearable. On Yom Kippur, we are obliged to strive for our highest selves, even as we know we will not fully succeed.
So tonight, let us hold tight to these vows. Let us vow that our movement will end this genocide in the coming year. Let us vow that the armies will withdraw, that Gaza will be rebuilt, that the dead will be given dignified burials, that the dispossessed will find home and shelter.
And further, let us vow that Israel will be held accountable for its crimes, that the refugees will return, that reparations will be paid. Let us vow that Palestine will be free, that all will be liberated from the river to the sea.
Yom Kippur demands that we make such vows, as unreal as they may seem to us now. Because as Asem reminds us, “even as we grieve, we hold on to the stories, to the love that once filled our homes, to the hope that someday justice will prevail. Because while they can destroy our houses, they cannot destroy the bonds we carry in our hearts, nor the memories that no bulldozer or bomb can erase.”
On Yom Kippur we vow these vows because we know that as long as we hold on to these stories, to these memories, to this love, then nothing and no one can ever truly be erased. And the hope for justice will never die.
Ken Yehi Ratzon – May it be God’s will. V’chen Yehi Retzoneinu – And may it be our’s.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed a significant surge in Jewish protest over Israel’s starvation/genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. On July 28, two Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, released a comprehensive report that reached the “unequivocal conclusion” that “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” A week earlier Omer Bartov, a noted Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote a widely distributed op-ed for the New York Times entitled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know it When I See It.” Even Jeremy Ben – Ami, the president of the liberal Israel advocacy organization J Street, waded ever-so-gently into the fray with this delicately worded statement: “(While) I am unlikely to use the term (genocide) myself…I cannot and will not argue against those using the term.”
There has also been an increase in rabbis (many of whom consider themselves to be “liberal Zionists”) publicly stepping up and speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. On July 28, eleven mainstream rabbis protested by blocking traffic in front of the Israeli consulate in midtown Manhattan, with eight taking arrest. One Jewish communal figure noted, “The protests we’ve typically seen at the Israeli Consulate in places like that are from the further left of the community.”
A day later, in Washington DC a group of 27 rabbis affiliated with the advocacy group Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza entered Senate Majority leader John Thune’s office, displaying banners reading “Rabbis say: Protect Life!” and “Rabbis say: Stop the Blockade.” Then this past Monday, hundreds gathered (and more than 40 protesters took arrest) in front of the Trump International Hotel in New York City at a protest organized by IfNotNow under the banner “Stop Starving Gaza.” Among the speakers were Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T’ruah, Ruth Messinger, former head of American Jewish World Service and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. Needless to say, none of them were previously known for taking a stand against Israel in such a dramatic and public manner.
I must admit I have a great deal of cognitive dissonance over these developments. First and foremost, I will say that it is a welcome development that ranks of Jewish leaders in the movement to end the genocide against Palestinians is broadening. In the end, when otherwise mainstream American Jewish leaders are willing to call out this genocidal behavior for what it is, it only further isolates Israel. When lives are literally being taken by Israel in massive numbers on the daily, this is truly an “all hands on deck” moment. Those of us who have been on the front lines of the movement since 2023 can ill afford to cynically dismiss their participation.
At the same time however, I can’t help but feel cynical over the kudos given to these leaders (many of whom have been silent or equivocal on the genocide until now) for their “bravery” while scores of Palestinians have been organizing, leading protests and crying out in a myriad of different ways for years. Palestinian witness has been insidiously discounted during this genocide just as the Palestinian people have been denied the “permission to narrate” their oppression for over 70 years. I can’t help but grieve the sad irony that any strategic success resulting from this new resurgence will come from the further decentering – and dehumanizing – of Palestinian voices.
Moreover in this moment, when the images of starving Palestinian children are spurring so many Jewish leaders into action, it’s worth asking whether this protest movement can be sustained and transformed into one that brings true justice and lasting for Palestinians.
I’m not convinced. I couldn’t help but note that in their speeches, many of these liberal Zionist rabbis and Jewish leaders lay the blame for this genocide firmly on the policies of Netanyahu and the current government. A recent op-ed in the Forward by Rabbi Jill Jacobs summed up this attitude perfectly:
(Our) own fear must not distract us from the reality that the biggest threat to Israel, and indeed to Judaism itself, is coming from Israel’s governing coalition. Israel is increasingly becoming an autocratic and theocratic state. This is the moment for American Jews — including both leaders and ordinary Jewish community members — to raise their voice.
It has become a common trope in the “liberal Zionist” world to personalize this genocide as “Netanyahu’s war.” In fact, the biggest threat to Israel and Judaism is not Israel’s current governing coalition – it comes from a Jewish ethno-national nation state that was established and is maintained through the dispossession of Palestinians for the sole reason that they are not Jewish. Indeed, Israel is not “becoming” an autocratic and theocratic state – it has long been one.
I was also struck by Jacob’s misleading claim that “the vast majority of Israelis want the war to end.” While this is true, it is overwhelmingly due to Jewish Israelis desire for the return of the hostages – not their concern for Palestinian human rights. A more telling poll, which was released this past Tuesday, found that a vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 percent – say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population. And according to a poll from last May, 82 percent of Jewish Israeli respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza’s residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.
These polls indicate that this is not a problem of the current government. It is not Netanyahu. It is not an issue of bad policy. It is, in fact, Zionism itself. The real problem is that the entire enterprise of Zionist Judaism has infected Jewish life, as Jewish Currents editor Arielle Angel recently and powerfully wrote, “with a voracious rot.”
So yes, it is welcome that increasing numbers of liberal Jewish leaders are finally speaking out against Israel’s carnage in Gaza – but I feel compelled to ask: what will it take to get them to finally break with the Zionist enterprise? When the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is complete? When Israel annexes the West Bank (which the Knesset approved 71-13 in a recent symbolic vote)? When an even more extremist government is elected into power by an increasingly extremist Israeli populace?
If ever there was a moment for Jewish anti-Zionists to proudly show up and be counted, this is it. There could be no more terrifying demonstration of the end game of Zionism than the genocidal violence Israel has been unleashing on Gaza.
It grieves me to my soul that these words are still relevant in August 2025. May the Jewish people and their leaders find the courage of their convictions to call out a genocidal ideology that has caused – and continues to cause – such untold suffering to the Palestinian people in the name of Jewish supremacy. And may this day come soon.
5 month old Gazan baby Sinwar Ashour, starving to death (photo: BBC)
This is what it has come to: Israel is forcibly starving Palestinians. And when Palestinians go to the places Israel has designated as food distribution sites, they shoot them to death.
I will repeat that: Israel is forcibly starving Palestinians. And when Palestinians go to the places Israel has designated as food distribution sites, they shoot them to death.
Health authorities in Gaza said that 19 people died of starvation yesterday, including at least one infant.
Also yesterday, Israel killed 115 Palestinians – 92 of whom were shot while seeking food from the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Aid Foundation” in Zikim, in Northern Gaza. Israeli troops opened fire and massacred at least 79 Palestinians as they gathered to wait for 25 aid trucks from the UN World Food Program.
One of those killed was Raed Sindy, who was killed while attempting to access aid for his family. His brother Ahmed said, “They go out just trying to stave off their hunger and the hunger of their children, but they come back wrapped in shrouds.”
And this was just Sunday. Identical massacres and reports of death by starvation have been occurring regularly for months. We know this.
We know this because it has been happening in plain view of the world. Although this news has been all but pushed aside in the mainstream media, it is readily available on Al-Jazeera and alternative news sites and through social media.
Most importantly, we know this because Palestinians themselves have been telling us: reporting on their own genocide every day, in real time. Every day, I scroll through my mobile device and see videos of decapitated babies, corpses pulled from the rubble of bombed houses, bodies burned beyond recognition.
We also know that Israel is building a concentration camp for Palestinians in Rafah, a major southern center which has been completely reduced to rubble. The Israeli Defense Minister is calling it a “humanitarian city,” which will accommodate an initial group of some 600,000 displaced Palestinians. It would then be expanded to accommodate Gaza’s pre-war population of some 2.2 million people. They would not be allowed to move to other areas in Gaza but would instead be encouraged to “voluntarily emigrate” to unspecified countries.
So many of us who have been protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza for the past year and a half have warned that this what it would come to: the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Now it is happening in front of us, for all too see: by bombs, by bullets, by starvation and by forced emigration.
In the decades after the Holocaust, a number of books were written that took the American government and the Allies to task for its inaction during the genocide against European Jewry. But even in that case, it could be argued that while we knew much of what was going on, we didn’t know the full extent of the heinous reality that was the Final Solution. In this case, we have no such excuse. This plans of this genocide are being announced openly and without shame by its perpetrators.
They are doing so because they know they no one will stop them. Not the US government, which is funding and supporting this genocide, not the international community, which is either aiding and abetting or simply wringing its hands. Not the UN, nor the ICC nor the ICJ, which can make pronouncements but have no power of enforcement.
The destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza is the moral outrage of our time. Shame on every government and institution that has the power to stop it and has refused. Shame on every individual who had the power to lift their voices against this outrage and has remained silent.
Five-year-old Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil, trying to escape a burning classroom at the Fahmi Al-Jargawi School in Gaza City, May 26, 2025
Warning: this post contains descriptions of extreme violence.
After the Holocaust, no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that is not credible in the presence of the burning children.
This famous phrase comes from a 1974 essay, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” by theologian Rabbi Irving Greenberg, in which he attempted to lay out a new Jewish theology that could respond to the monumental cataclysm of the Holocaust. For Greenberg, the image of burning Jewish children was the ultimate moral obscenity – as well as a critical theological challenge. As he put it, “The cruelty and the killing raises the question whether even those who believe after such an event dare talk about God who love and cares without making a mockery of those who suffered.”
I thought of Greenberg’s words last week when, on Monday, May 26, the Israeli military conducted a series of airstrikes in northern Gaza, killing 54 Palestinians – most of them in a school building sheltering displaced families. The Fahmi Al-Jargawi School in Gaza City housed hundreds of peoplefrom Beit Lahia, which had been under intense Israeli military assault. At least 35 were reported to have been killed when the school was hit, half of them children. The Israeli military claimed, without offering proof, that it had been targeting “a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control center” there.
Videos shared online showed large fires engulfing the school, with graphic images of severely burned victims, including children, and survivors suffering critical injuries. Faris Afana, Northern Gaza ambulance service manager, arrived at the scene with crews to find three classrooms in flames. “There were sleeping children and women in those classrooms,” he said. “Some of them were screaming but we couldn’t rescue them due to the fires. I cannot describe what we saw due to how horrific it was.”
In one widely shared video, five-year-old Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil can be seen silhouetted against the flames, trying to escape a burning classroom. Ward had witnessed the deaths of her mother and five siblings: Abd al-Rahman, 17; Muhammed, 14; Maria, 13; and Silwan, 11. Her father remains in intensive care. Her uncle Iyad, who found her at Baptist hospital, said, “She told me that she saw them burn to death and she couldn’t do anything. She tried to escape the fire before some men arrived and pulled her out.”
Tragically, this horrifying incident wasn’t the first time that Israel engaged in military operations that burned Palestinian children alive. On October 14, 2024, Shaban al-Dalou, his mother and younger siblings Abdul and Farah were engulfed in flames in their tents during an Israeli attack on Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital. Last April, five children, four women, and a man from the same family died from severe burns after an Israeli airstrike hit the tent where they were staying in Khan Younis. On the same day, UNICEF announced that 15 children, including a child with disabilities, were burned to death in their tents over a period of 24 hours.
It should be added that the Israeli military has burned Palestinian children to death well before the current moment. During its military assault in 2008-2009, “Operation Cast Lead,” human rights organizations extensively documented Israel’s indiscriminate use of white phosphorous – a chemical substance that causes grievous burns, often to the bone. In its report, Amnesty International quoted Sabah Abu Halima, a mother of 10, who was gravely injured and lost her husband, four of her children and her daughter-in-law from a devastating white phosphorus artillery attack on her family home. In her testimony to Amnesty, Sabah said:
Everything caught fire. My husband and four of my children burned alive in front of my eyes; my baby girl, Shahed, my only girl, melted in my arms. How can a mother have to see her children burn alive? I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t help them. I was on fire. Now I am still burning all over, I am in pain day and night; I am suffering terribly.
In truth, the Palestinian children have endured burning at the hands of the Israeli military going back in the establishment of the state of Israel. During the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, Jewish militias killed 110 Palestinians and committed well-documented atrocities against civilians, including women, the elderly and children. There are numerous testimonies to these events from Jewish soldiers and eyewitnesses. One photographer, Shraga Peled reported, “When I got to Deir Yassin, the first thing I saw was a big tree to which a young Arab fellow was tied. And this tree was burnt in a fire. They had tied him to it and burned him.”
Almost ten years ago, the late Jewish scholar and writer Marc Ellis noted the tragic irony of Greenberg’s theological statement in a post for the blog Mondoweiss. During “Operation Protective Edge,” a military assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which the Israeli military killed over 2,000 Palestinians – including over 500 children – Ellis wrote:
As the news reports show and Palestinians know by experience, burning children has become a way of life for Israel. It makes sense to Israel’s government and Jews around the world who support the invasion of Gaza and even Op-Ed writers in the Wall Street Journal. The burning children of Gaza are collateral damage to a larger more important story.
For Greenberg, who viewed the the establishment of the state of Israel in theologically redemptive terms, the only response to the Holocaust that makes any sense is the continued survival of the Jewish people following their near annihilation. This is what comes of attaching sacred meaning to ethno-nationalism. And this is what it has come to: we are watching the result play out every day in a live streamed genocide where we are actually able, obscenely, to watch children burn to death on our mobile devices.
For the record, here is what Rabbi Greenberg had to say about Israel’s current actions in Gaza:
(How) can Israel deal with the fact that it is killing thousands of civilians including many children? Jewish tradition teaches that every human being is created in the image of God and is of infinite value. It is heartbreaking to kill so many individuals and devastating to realize that the price of saving Israel is the death of so many people (including, not to forget, hundreds of Israeli soldiers). One thinks of Golda Meir’s comment that we can never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their children. Still, it is important for the world to know that Israel continues doing what it can to reduce civilian casualties.
I’m not sure that theology is really of much use in this terrifying moment, but I will say this: any statement, theological or otherwise, made in the presence of some burning children and not others is nothing short of chillul hashem: a desecration of God’s name.
The shooting death of the two Israeli embassy workers in Washington DC this past Wednesday evening was tragic and horrific. All human life is precious – there can be no conceivable justification for this immoral act. Moreover, the man who perpetrated these murders is no hero; in addition to the lives he took and the grief he caused their families, his action has only served to harm – not help the Palestinian people. This is not what solidarity looks like.
As of this writing, there is much we don’t know about the shooting – and it would be irresponsible of me to speculate on whether the shooter was motivated by antisemitism. We do know that it was an act of political violence – and that the victims were embassy representatives of a nation that itself is engaged in an act of political violence that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – and is currently taking the lives of hundreds of people in Gaza every day.
Of course, there is no shortage of disingenuous politicians and media figures who are all too eager to use this act of violence for their own political advantage. But we cannot and should not equate the actions of one isolated incident with the entire movement for Palestinian liberation. Indeed, over the past nineteen months, millions of people across the US and around the world have protested peacefully for a ceasefire and an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It is inaccurate – and in fact racist – to use this tragic event to make assumptions about Palestinians or collectively punish people of conscience who have been advocating for Palestinian safety and freedom. Our movement has always been about freedom, dignity and safety for all. The murderous action of one vigilante does not define us – nor should it lessen our resolve to continue advocating for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
According to one of the most sacrosanct teachings in Jewish tradition, all human beings are created in the divine image – and that all lives are equally, infinitely precious. I can’t help but think of this sacred value as I read the many poignant news stories about the young embassy workers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim: stories that honor the people they were as well as their hopes and dreams for the future.
At the same time, I couldn’t help but think: where are these stories in the mainstream media about the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed through political violence in Gaza over the past nineteen months? Where are the tributes to their lives, their hopes, their dreams? If they were afforded the same kinds of tributes, the media would be overwhelmed an endless cascade of stories about precious lives lost forever.
In her book, “Frames of War,” the scholar Judith Butler examines why some lives are “grievable” while others are not. Butler suggests that this selective mourning is due to a process of dehumanization, in which state powers determine which lives have the status of personhood – and thus more worthy of our grief. In short, if a person is deemed less human, they become less grievable.
When we engage in this kind of selective mourning, we become complicit in this process of anti-Palestinian dehumanization and racism. Here in the US, of course, people of color are all too familiar with this process. As Bernice Johnson Reagon powerfully wrote in her classic, “Ella’s Song:” Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons/Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons/…We who believe in freedom will not rest.
How do we respond to the killings of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim? The same way we must respond to the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed – and continue to be killed – by the Israeli military in Gaza: by continuing to protest openly and as openly as possible for an end to Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. By advocating for a free Palestine for all who live between the river and the sea.
And further: to insist on a world in which all may live in safety and dignity – and all people are mourned equally when they die.
In December 2023, just three months into Israel’s genocide on Gaza, Tzedek Chicago’s board released a public statement entitled, “In Gaza, Israel is Revealing the True Face of Zionism,” arguing that “ongoing Nakba is the essential context for understanding the horrifying violence of the past three months.” A year and a half later, these words are resonating with an even more powerful urgency. There is every indication that Israel is beginning the process of engineering the wholesale destruction of Gaza – and the Palestinians who live there – by any means necessary.
We are now three months into Israel’s total blockade of food, fuel and humanitarian aid – and Gazans are gripped by an increasing famine. On May 4 it was reported by Gaza’s government media office that at least 57 Palestinians have already starved to death, more than 3,500 young children face imminent death from starvation, another 70,000 children are being hospitalized for severe malnutrition, and 1.1 million Palestinian children lack the minimum nutritional requirements for survival. Over 20 UN human rights experts have determined that Israel is wielding starvation as a weapon of war, concluding that “these acts, beyond constituting grave international crimes, follow alarming, documented patterns of genocidal conduct.”
At the same time, the Israeli military has been stepping up its bombing campaign, killing Palestinians at a higher rate than any point since the beginning of the genocide. As of this writing, Israel has killed 100 people in the past 24 hours in a series of bombings throughout northern Gaza. In footage taken by NBC News, the bodies of young children could be seen lying among the dead at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
There are ominous, compelling signs that we are indeed witnessing the end game of Israel’s Nakba in Gaza. On May 4, the Israeli government approved a military operation called “Gideon’s Chariots,” directing the Israeli army to seize complete control of the Gaza Strip and displace the entire population to a small area of land in the south. Though this was technically a leaked story, some Israeli politicians have been unabashed about the plan. Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich put it very plainly: “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” as a result of an Israeli military victory, and that Palestinians will “start to leave in great numbers to third countries.”
On top of this news, this past Wednesday, Reuters recently reported that the US and Israel have discussed the possibility of Washington leading “a temporary post-war administration of Gaza.” According to five sources, there would be no set timeline for how long the US led administration would last. They compared the proposal to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003, shortly after the US led invasion that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. As journalist/commentator Mehdi Hasan correctly pointed out in an interview today, the US’s administration of Iraq was an “absolute disaster.” As Hasan put it, “It increased sectarian tensions. It increased violence. It divided the country. It fomented more violent resistance.”
On May 15, the Palestinian people will observe Nakba Day, their collective observance of their dispossession and ethnic cleansing from their homes. For Palestinians this is not only an acknowledgement of an event that occurred in the past but a commemoration of an injustice that is still unfolding in real time. And yet the genocide in Gaza – as well as the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank – are completely absent from the mainstream press and international governmental concern. How long will the world allow this decades-long crime to continue?
I can’t help but note that this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Acharei Mot (which means “after the death”) describes an elaborate sacrificial rite of collective atonement. As I read these words, it is so clear to me that our complicity in this ongoing sacrilege continues to deepen the longer we allow it to unfold. The news out of Gaza has long since receded into the background, even as the Palestinian people continue to cry out to the world.
The world is watching. Will Member States live up to their obligations and intervene to stop the slaughter, hunger, and disease, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity that are perpetrated daily in complete impunity?
…The decision is stark: remain passive and witness the slaughter of innocents or take part in crafting a just resolution. The global conscience has awakened, if asserted – despite the moral abyss we are descending into – justice will ultimately prevail.
Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of violence to children.
As the Jewish community prepares to observe Passover this year, I’m thinking a great deal about the centrality of children to the Exodus story we tell around the seder table. In particular, I’m struck that this narrative from the Torah begins with a terrifying description of atrocities committed against children. As Exodus opens, a new pharaoh arises over Egypt who openly dreads the demographic growth of the Israelite minority. After oppressing them with forced labor, he orders Hebrew midwives to kill newborn male children. When they resist his demand, he charges the Egyptians to throw all baby boys into the Nile. Shortly after, Moses is born and is saved from this decree of death by his mother, his sister and the pharaoh’s daughter, who adopts him.
Among other things, the Exodus story drives home the tragically familiar truth that children are not mere casualties of wartime atrocities, but are actually targeted by state violence. According to a 2014 report in The New Yorker, “The specific targeting of children is one of the grimmest new developments in the way conflicts have been waged over the past fifty years.”
Those who participate in the Passover seder are required not only to read the story of the Exodus, but to examine its relevance, as the Haggadah instructs us, “in every generation.” As such, the opening of the narrative presents us with all too disturbing parallels — and a critical moral challenge. This Passover — the second to come amidst the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, we would be grievously remiss if we failed to acknowledge the scores of children who have been killed, maimed and traumatized by Israel’s ongoing military onslaught.
The official death toll in Gaza has now broken the 50,000 mark, including more than 17,000 children. (The medical journal The Lancet has concluded that the total number of those killed is likely 40 percent higher.) On March 18, the day that Israel broke a two-month ceasefire, the Israeli military killed more than 400 Palestinians, including 183 children and 94 women — on what observers call the single bloodiest day of the genocide.
More recently, on April 3, Israel bombed the Dar al-Arqam School-turned-shelter in Gaza City, killing 29 people, 18 of whom were children. In its report on the attack, Al Jazeeraquoted a spokesperson from Gaza’s emergency rescue workers: “What is going on here is a wake-up call to the entire world. This war and these massacres against women and children must stop immediately. Children are being killed with cold blood here in Gaza.”
For those who stand in solidarity with Palestinians, certain reports and images have become seared into our hearts and minds. For many, the tipping point moment into the abyss occurred in early 2024, with the phone recording of 6-year-old Hind Rajab, pleading with her mother for rescue before the Israeli military shot 335 bullets into her family’s car. One month later, the world was horrified by the image of Sidra Hassouna, a 7-year-old Palestinian girl from northern Gaza, hanging dead off the ledge of a destroyed house with half her body missing.
On May 26, 2024, a 1-year-old baby, Ahmad Al-Najjar, whose headless body was held aloft by a terrified, grief stricken man following what has come to known as the Rafah Tents Massacre — a night in which 45 Palestinians, most of them women and children, were killed, burned alive and beheaded. One doctor who witnessed the carnage commented, “In all my years of humanitarian work, I have never witnessed something so barbaric, so atrocious, so inhumane. These images will haunt me forever… And will stain our conscience for eternity.”
Denial can take many forms. For some, it is rooted in racist dehumanization of the other; others may be just too overwhelmed to allow themselves to comprehend the massive slaughter of children in such a heinous fashion; still others rationalize the truth of it away, dismissing mass murder as “collateral damage” or Hamas’s use of “human shields” (a cynical claim that has been consistently debunked by human rights observers).
For Israel’s supporters, it is even more unthinkable to face the increasing evidence that the Israeli military might well be intentionally targeting children for mass murder. A recent Al Jazeera “Fault Lines” documentary, “Kids Under Fire,” makes a compelling case for this claim, with extensive eyewitness interviews with volunteer American health care workers and human rights experts. Their accounts, corroborated across hospitals and over time, suggest a systematic pattern: increasing numbers of child victims were not injured as a result of bombing raids, but of direct gunshot wounds, often to the head. One of the doctors interviewed in the film, Tammy Abughnaim, an American emergency physician from Chicago, commented:
More and more, I started to see children with penetrating injuries like gunshot wounds. After five, six, seven, eight, I came to the realization that somebody is shooting children. I didn’t want to believe that children were being shot. Nobody wants to believe that. Nobody wants to think that other humans are capable of annihilating children in that way.
Abughnaim’s testimony is corroborated in the film by Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina: “The target at the end of a scope is unmistakable. They are a young human being, and when that trigger gets pulled on that target, it is not by accident. At all. Ever.”
At one point, the interviewer asked Miranda Cleland of Defense for Children International – Palestine, “How you ever thought through ‘what’s the strategic reason to shoot a child? What message should we take from a military that would target children?’” Cleland’s reply: “I’ve thought about it a lot and the only conclusion I can come to is that Israeli soldiers are shooting Palestinian children because they want to. And I think they do it because they are allowed to and nobody has stopped them.”
Nabeel Rana, a vascular surgeon from Peoria, Illinois, put a finer point on it: “You’re wiping out a certain number, maiming a certain number and permanently mentally and emotionally disabling the rest. And that’s going to be passed down to the next generation. So, this is how you cripple a society.”
As centuries of state violence against oppressed communities have long demonstrated, the most direct way to undermine and even eradicate a society is to target its children. In December 2024, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) released a report, “Generation Wiped Out: Gaza’s Children in the Crosshairs of Genocide,” examining Israel’s crime of genocide against Gazans, including the genocide of children. The PCHR report concluded:
The killing of children, infliction of serious physical and mental harm, and subjection to harsh living conditions that destroy their lives cannot be dismissed as mere collateral damage of military attacks. Instead, these actions are part of a systematic strategy aimed at erasing Palestinian identity and annihilating future generations.
There are ominous indications that this annihilation is well underway. A Reutersanalysis of data from the Gaza Health Ministry revealed that at least 1,238 families — defined as married couples and any children they might have — have been totally erased, with no survivors. In an AP article on this issue last year, Omar Shabaan, a Gazan researcher and economist, observed that of Gaza’s 400,000 families, none have been spared, causing permanent harm to Gaza’s society, history and future. “It is becoming clear,” he said, “that this is a targeting of the social structure.”
This dramatic upsurge in the killing of Palestinian children is not limited solely to Gaza. According to a recent report on the “Gazafication” of the West Bank, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found that Israel is now using the military tactics of its assault on Gaza throughout the Occupied Territories, “where Palestinians face mass forced displacements, a surge in airstrikes and a sharp rise in attacks on children and other civilians.” B’Tselem reported that 180 children have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the Gazan genocide began, making it the deadliest period of Israel’s nearly 60-yearlong occupation for adults and children alike.
Reports of violence against children are indeed reminiscent of reports from Gaza. In an article entitled “Child Deaths Surge Amid ‘Gazafication’ of the West Bank,” the Guardian, interviewed Rigd Gasser, the father of 14-year-old Ahmad Rashid Jazar, who was shot in the chest in the village of Sebastia by an Israeli soldier while on an errand to get bread in January. Gasser was in a cafe when he heard the gunshots and rushed out when he heard calls for help. “I got closer and recognized my son. I knew him by his clothes, his body was all covered in blood,” he said.
The article also reports on the killing of cousins Reda Basharat (8) and Hamza Basharat (10) who were killed near home by an Israeli drone strike on January 8. The children were sitting outside with their 23-year-old cousin Adam when Hamza’s mother Eman heard the explosion. When she ran outside, she found Hamza injured and struggling to breathe. “He died in my arms,” she said. Eman added, “When I think about what happened to my son and remember the images of their bodies, and I see what is happening in Gaza on TV, I felt suddenly that they are doing the same thing.”
While these individual reports portray unspeakable cruelty, it’s important to bear in mind that it ultimately serves a larger purpose. Just like the violence inflicted by the pharaoh in the Exodus story, Israel’s violence toward children stems from the view of an entire people as a “demographic threat.” This view itself stems from Zionism: an ideology and movement that seeks to create and maintain a majority Jewish nation-state in historic Palestine. As such, the targeting of children is part of a larger effort to ethnically cleanse Gaza through a variety of means, including demolition of homes, population transfer and, as the PCHR report puts it, “erasing Palestinian identity and annihilating future generations.”
In this regard, Israel’s open fire policy toward Palestinian children is inseparable from other draconian actions that clearly seek the depopulation of Gaza and the West Bank. As of this writing, the AP has reported that Israel now controls 50 percent of Gaza as it enlarges its buffer zone, razing Palestinian homes, farmland and infrastructure to “the point of uninhabitability.” The military has also destroyed 90 percent of the southern city of Rafah, after issuing evacuation orders to its residents.
If there could be any doubt as to Israel’s intentions, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi, of the Likud party, like so many other Israeli politicians and military leaders before him, recently made Israel’s end game all too clear. In a radio interview he said pointedly that Israel should “wipe Gaza off the face of the earth,” adding, “There are no innocents there.… I have no mercy for those who are still there. We need to eliminate them.” More recently he commented in a TV interview: “You can’t live with these creatures next to us.… There is no peace with anyone here.… Every child born now — in this minute — is already a terrorist when he is born.”
Notably, Vaturi has also made similar comments about the West Bank region of Jenin, where 40,000 Palestinians were displaced by Israel in the month of February alone. “Erase Jenin. Don’t start looking for the terrorists — if there’s a terrorist in the house, take him down, tell the women and children to get out.” While Israel’s apologists dismiss comments such as these as hyperbole, it is critical to note that these very clear statements of intent are being backed up by very clear action.
As a congregational rabbi, I’ve been asked recurring questions over the last two Passovers. How can I celebrate this holiday while a genocide is being committed in my name? How can I observe a festival of Jewish liberation while a Jewish nation-state is acting as a pharaoh over an entire people? While I understand the anguish behind these questions, I believe the Passover ritual actually offers us an important opportunity: to squarely face the way the Exodus narrative is playing out in a very real way in our own day, to ask hard questions and avoid the simple, pat answers.
In his searing book about Israel’s genocide, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, writer Omar El Akkad writes:
A woman’s leg amputated, without anesthesia, the surgery conducted on a kitchen table. A boy holding his father’s shoe, screaming. A girl whose jaw has been torn off. A child, still in diapers, pulled out of the tents after the firebombing, his head severed from his body.
Is there distance great enough, to be free of this? To be made clean?
This Passover, the season for asking questions, El Akkad’s challenge pounds insistently on the collective conscience of the world.
Shalom Rav 