Tapestries-62 | Forward
Absorbing the emotion and lessons of Israel’s terror, and resolutely focusing on the future.
The last few weeks have been filled with many emotions. They include rage and fury at the unspeakable horrors visited on peaceful Israeli civilians and families; pride and resolve watching the way Israelis and the Jewish diaspora have rallied together; grief and despair as Gazan civilians are caught in the crossfire and sacrificed by their corrupt, demonic, and genocidal leadership; and fear and isolation driven by the the outpouring of antisemitism around the world.
My sincere hope is that our collective emotions are at or near their peak. Today, Israel is still burying its dead, yearning for the return of its 200+ hostages, and readying its sons and daughters to battle with the death cult that is Hamas. On the Gazan side, the civilian suffering is also immense, and is something we should not avert our eyes from. I hope that as we move to a new phase of the military exercise against Hamas, we’ll need fewer airstrikes, and that more essential aid will flow to those who need it.
Alongside the intense emotions, we’ve also learned many lessons. Chief among these lessons is that there remains good and evil in the world, and that antisemitism is not some abstract threat. Many Jews around the world have friends or family that have either been killed, kidnapped or injured, and if they don’t know someone directly impacted, they’re at most one step removed from someone who does.
When the stakes are this high, it’s impossible to entirely elevate oneself above the emotions. But when the stakes are this high, it’s also essential to think rationally, take the lessons being shoved in our faces, and proceed with an eye on the future. This piece is not going to re-state the horrors of October 7; others have done so with more power and relevance than I ever could. Instead, this is a piece about how we can internalize the lessons of the last few weeks, and use them to move forward with clarity and strength. Because alongside the emotion and the pain, we must also look to the future. These are my suggestions for how we can move forward.
#1 We must resolutely support Israel, and expect it to adhere to certain standards
The Jewish state’s survival has always been under threat, and today the threats are as tangible as they’ve been in most of our lifetimes. The most important thing we can do in response to the last few weeks is invest as much energy as possible in supporting Israel and its people.
There are many options available to us in the diaspora. We can donate money to Israeli organizations, of which there are many. We can remain in close contact with friends and family there, and make clear to them every day that they are not alone in the fight. We can support Israelis abroad with friendship and community, and by standing alongside them in protests and vigils around the world. We can engage non-Jewish friends in respectful and thoughtful conversation about Israel, the plight of the Palestinian people, the resilience and power of the country, and the gravity of the fight Israel is currently waging on behalf of western values. While I cannot directly impact Israel’s actions today, I can hopefully impact the conversation around it with Jewish and non-Jewish friends. This newsletter, and my connectivity with the country are my channels, and I am committed to growing their impact over time.
We have grown up with the idea of Israel as a modern, powerful, wealthy and indestructible country. But this is an image that has been cultivated over the span of a few short decades. History, and the historic nature of the present moment in particular, must be a call to arms to double and triple down on our support of the Jewish state. We must support our Israeli brothers and sisters — Jewish, Muslim, Arab and Druze — serving on the country’s frontlines, and those supporting it on the home front too. But being a supporter of Israel does not call for unconditional support of Israeli actions. Quite the opposite. It demands above all else — especially in the face of inhuman violence and its supporters justification of it — an unwavering commitment to moral clarity. How do we support Israel, and its essential military goals and objectives, in a manner consistent with this moral clarity?
One way is to seek a more articulate and detailed explanation of what the endpoint of “eliminating Hamas” means. Another is ensuring that this plan includes an eventual end to Gaza’s aerial bombardment, and the opening of humanitarian corridors. It also includes the demands that Israel arrest, prosecute and imprison all Israeli terrorists that have used the chaos of the last weeks and months to attack and vandalize Palestinian towns in the West Bank, and to similarly crack down on any Israelis that seek to target or intimidate any of their fellow Arab citizens. We must also eventually push for an Israel with a plan for the future of the Palestinians, while also acknowledging that the orgy of violence and hatred that exploded on October 7 means that the time for a solution may have to wait. The importance of a Jewish state has never been clearer, and we must therefore support it accordingly.
#2 We must never dehumanize our enemies or emulate their moral bankruptcy
Our enemies and opponents seek to dehumanize us. Hamas and other Islamic extremists have always dehumanized Israelis and Jews, calling us vile, subhuman, vermin. When Israelis and Jews are murdered, they celebrate our butchering and mutilation by handing out candies in the streets. Elements of the progressive movement dehumanize us by denying our right to a homeland, tearing down posters of our hostages, debating the number of babies actually beheaded (and how they were beheaded), and claiming that our evidence of atrocities is simply AI-generated propaganda.
In response to this dehumanization and moral bankruptcy, Israelis and Jews could be forgiven for dehumanizing our enemies and opponents in turn, and for relegating moral considerations in favor of revenge and retribution. But we cannot give in to that impulse, because we have to be better than them. I’ll give you some examples of what I mean. It’s now clear that Israel didn’t bomb the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza, and that over 500 people did not die. In response, we would be entitled to yell into the void “see, it wasn’t us and it was only 50!”. But whether it was 800, 500 or 50, it is still a human tragedy of monumental proportions. There’s also a debate raging over the number of civilian deaths in Gaza, as clearly we shouldn’t trust the Hamas-run ministry of health. But whether it’s a few thousand or ten thousand, or thousands of children or a few hundred, the death of any innocent civilian is a tragedy, and to debate the actual number is to lower ourselves into the moral abyss in which our enemies are so at home.
There is a clear intent to dehumanize Israelis and to justify and qualify horrors committed against them. If that’s how our enemies and opponents want to proceed, let them. But we must avoid the same depravity and dehumanization in return, as it’s a hallmark of a movement with no future.
#3 We must be smart about how we respond to antisemitism
The reaction to the October 7 massacre revealed that history’s oldest hatred is alive, flourishing and is now embedded in the fabric of the developed world. Unfortunately, it has been there for anyone willing to listen to the signs for several years. If one follows the logic that anti-Zionism and antisemitism aren’t the same thing, it’s curious (and scary) that conflict in Israel always leads to the targeting of Jews around the world. See in the last two weeks: firebombing a Berlin synagogue and marking Stars of David on the city’s Jewish apartments; chants of “F*ck the Jews, Gas the Jews” at the Sydney Opera House; a deranged man breaking into a Jewish home in Los Angeles and telling a 9-month pregnant mother of 4 that “I’m going to kill you because you are Jewish”. I’m not going to spend any more time talking about antisemitism. I’ve written about it at length over the years which you can read here, here and here. Instead, I want to talk about our response to it.
Today, many of our feeds are filled with videos, facts, testimonials and infographics articulating why our enemies and their supporters are wrong, and sharing the facts we have to prove it. I think it’s an important and useful response, but I think we have to be smart about how we respond to falsehoods and libels. In her book titled How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Bari Weiss shares a piece by a Columbia alumnus in the 1990s called Ze’ev Maghen. After watching the Jewish community respond to an antisemitic speaker on campus with the usual signs and slogans justifying their own existence, he was “outraged by the fundamental weakness of such an approach. "A man calls you a pig," he wrote. “Do you walk around with a sign explaining that, in fact, you are not a pig? Do you hand out leaflets expostulating in detail upon the manifold differences between you and a pig?”.
Maghen’s point is that to respond to every false, libelous and dumb charge leveled against us is to fight on our enemies’ turf. While there is an impulse to refute every accusation of genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, to submit to the impulse is to play into our opponent’s hands. Once you realize that your accusers have no capacity or desire to change or debate, and are instead more interested in pushing their own agenda, to invest significant effort in debating or refuting them is to lose. Maghen continues in his original piece with the following statement:
why are we still here? What is the key to our unique, defiant, unparalleled survival against all odds and forecasts? St. Paul predicted we'd "wither away," Hegel said our jig was up, Spengler consigned us to "winter season," Toynbee called us a fossil. Wrong, gentlemen. So what is it, this ingredient that makes us the “Indestructible Jews?" What, as Mark Twain asks, is the secret of our immortality? Surely none of you will tell me that down four millennia, and through the wrenching vicissitudes and savage depredations of exile, it was our appeals, protests and screams for equitable treatment that sustained us, kept us in life, and brought us to this season. No, my friends, our history teaches us a different lesson: that those who, rather than appealing and screaming, choose to build, to educate toward cultural and national revival, to defy anti-Semitism not with Jewish pleas and Jewish hand-wringing but with Jewish learning, Jewish observance, Jewish strength and Jewish achievement-such are those who bring our people survival, salvation, a future.
It is important to push back on falsehoods, and we must all educate ourselves with a baseline understanding of the facts surrounding Israel’s past and present if we want to be effective supporters. But many of the people we will find ourselves “fighting” with online do not operate in good faith, don’t believe Israel has a right to exist, and just do not care about what we have to say. There is a finite amount of energy we all have to fight with, and wasting it on bad faith people and libelous claims is an easy way to notch a small defeat. If we take Maghen’s advice, there are more effective places to channel our energies.
#4 We must support each other, and be proud of who we are
To succeed and move forward, we must support our fellow Jews, Zionists and Israelis, and be proud of who we are.
When it comes to supporting Israel, we have many options. Israelis have spent the last year protesting in huge numbers against a government they feel has abandoned their values and undermined standards of morality. We should support them in that political fight, while also ensuring that the new political landscape that emerges does a better job of addressing the concerns of all Israelis, not just the political and economic elite. We must celebrate and support Israeli businesses and their innovations in technology, agriculture and biotech. We should support Israeli companies that employ and train Arab and Palestinian workers, and help build more economic bridges that will underpin a brighter future in the region. We must travel there, and spend our money on beers on the beaches of Tel Aviv, take tours of the deserts of Judaea and the Negev, and swim in the streams of the Golan and the north. We must celebrate and support the right of all people, ethnicities, religions and sexual orientations to enjoy the Middle East oasis that is Israel, and we should implore our non-Jewish friends to join us in doing so too.
When it comes to fortifying our Jewish identity, we also have many options. We can commit to building a Jewish home for our children, and strengthen the schools and communal institutions that scaffold their and our lives. We can make Shabbat dinners and Jewish holidays staples of not just our family and friends, but of our non-Jewish brothers and sisters too. We are the inheritors and stewards of a breathtakingly epic history and story, and we should share it whenever we can. Because without our friends and supporters, we will continue to toil in a lonely fight.
#5 We must be very clear who are our friends, and who are not
#5A Who are not our friends
If it wasn’t clear before, it should now be clear to liberal people, and liberal Jews in particular, that the progressive movement is absolutely not a friend we can count on. The moral and intellectual voids, and cowardice, that sit at the movement’s core are now there for all to see. When a movement implicitly condones violence, equivocates in the face of slaughter and torture, and chants “Palestine will be free from the River to the Sea”, it is either stupid and gullible, or fundamentally hateful and committed to the destruction of Israel. It is a cause all too willing to march for the popular and easy cause (“Free Palestine”), while actual ethnic cleansing and genocides occur today in Sudan, Azerbaijan and Yemen, and while Palestinians continue to languish in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
If you’ve been a subscriber of mine for a few years, you’ll know my disdain for parts of the progressive movement. I think progressive ideology is dishonest and dangerous, and the last few weeks have made that clear for everyone to see. And now I’m taking a new approach to talking about it, which is to call out some of its stupidity and contradictions. Here are a few of my favorites: hysterically calling for a boycott of Nike while wearing Nike Air Force 1s. Calling for “decolonization” while walking on the streets of the USA, Australia and the UK aka the OG colonies/colonizers who to this day treat their indigenous populations with cruelty and disdain. Rebranding tragic but not population-level civilian deaths in a conflict zone (where Hamas has constructed the conflict zone to increase civilian deaths) as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. And almost entirely ignoring actual genocides occurring around the world today (see above). You may call this cherry picking, but I call this revealing the empty, infantile tantrum that the progressive movement has become.
If you are a liberal Jew, any movement that demands you check your Judaism or Zionism at the door is not a movement you should continue to associate with. And if you’re a liberal person, I suggest you also reassess your relationship with the progressive movement, because “when the world is defined in terms of the "right" and "wrong" binary, I promise you it's a lot easier to find yourself on the side of the "wrong" than the "right," whether you can see it today or not.”
#5B And who are our friends
In addition to revealing who we cannot count on, the conflict has also revealed who we should consider real friends. Our personal friends and allies have revealed themselves in simple messages just to say how are you? Solidarity does not require grand or public gestures (although they help). Solidarity simply means telling a friend going through something challenging that they’re not alone.
It it is also now clear who our ideological and intellectual allies are. The leaders of the free world — the US, France, Canada, UK, Germany and the EU — have stood out in their moral clarity and courage (whether driven by intrinsic values or domestic political and security considerations), as have public intellectuals who prize intellectual rigor and honesty above popularity and acclaim. These people are acting the way they are because it’s the right thing to do. And to be clear, the right thing isn’t to blindly support Israel. The right thing to do is to maintain a very clear standard of what it means to be a person of moral clarity and courage, and to always act consistent with those values.
We need our friends now more than ever. We need our friends in power and in politics to give us their loud and prominent moral and military support. We also need our personal friends to give us their dignified solidarity and allyship. We don’t need our friends to share all of our ideological positions, or give us unqualified support. Friendship is based on shared values, not airtight alignment and agreement. And we should celebrate and give thanks for the support we get, instead of condemning those who don’t provide it, or criticizing those who don’t give it in the unequivocal terms or strong language we would ideally like. Lift people up and help them be the friends we need, instead of pushing them further away when they don’t meet our demands of perfect support.
Whereas we should devote little attention and energy to those who seek to malign and condemn us in bad faith, we should devote lots of attention to those people we consider our friends when they seek to debate or challenge us in good faith.
Bringing it together
The savagery and barbarism visited on our people in Israel could have understandably led to an outpouring of unmitigated rage on the streets of Israel and Western democracies. Israelis, Zionists and our supporters could have fumed with an I told you so about our enemies’ intent and depravity. Instead, it is largely amongst those on the other side that you will find virulent hatred in their signs, slogans, violence and intimidation.
The people of Israel — Jewish, Arab, Druze, Bedouin — have mobilized and rallied around each other in remarkable ways. Jews of the diaspora have reacted with a calm resolve. The vigils and protests I have attended in New York and London have been notable for their dignity and humanity, and for the unity and courage-inducing feeling that the Jewish stranger standing next to me is my brother or sister, no questions asked.
There is something undeniably cosmic and powerful about the idea of a biblical people walking amongst their brothers and sisters 4,000 years later on the streets of New York, London, Paris, Sydney or Melbourne, while their contemporaries in the ancient texts — Hittites, Canaanites and Midianites — were confined to history millennia ago. Our entire existence as a people attests to our ability to survive, win and thrive. To be Jewish is to face evil, to endure suffering, and to win. The fight with Hamas is existential, and will continue until all Israeli hostages are returned, and Hamas is no longer a military threat on Israel’s border. Anybody seeking a pause in the fighting that does not change those two facts is not a serious person, and seriously underestimates Israel’s resolve.
The news cycle will inevitably move on, and when it does, we will be left with the task of supporting our family and friends in Israel as they recover from unspeakable terror and trauma. Israel is a place we must all continue to build, and Jewish identity is a cosmic web we must all continue to thread. We’ll continue to live in the emotion. But let’s keep a productive eye on the future too.
עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי. Am Yisrael Chai. “The people of Israel live”.
Chills: "There is something undeniably cosmic and powerful about the idea of a biblical people walking amongst their brothers and sisters 4,000 years later on the streets of New York, London, Paris, Sydney or Melbourne, while their contemporaries in the ancient texts — Hittites, Canaanites and Midianites — were confined to history millennia ago."
Beautiful - captures exactly what I’ve been feeling. Thanks for sharing Daniel! Sending it off to a lot of my friends who are struggling to put their emotions into words.