Tablets Shattered by Joshua Leifer

Author:Joshua Leifer [Leifer, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

Responsibility

Today, Israel is failing the ethical test of sovereignty. The Israeli armed forces’ recent punishing, indiscriminate bombardment of the Gaza Strip has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Entire families have been wiped out; untold children left as orphans. Millions of Palestinians have been internally displaced from their homes. Within Israel, politicians call for ethnic cleansing, the resettlement of Gaza by Jewish settlers, and even the expulsion of all Palestinians living under Israeli control. Long before the gruesome October 7 attacks by Hamas that ignited the most recent war, Israel/Palestine had become the site of a unitary, Israeli-controlled regime defined by variegated hierarchies of laws, privileges, and rights determined by ethno-national identity. As of this writing, the region has plunged into a catastrophe that far exceeds the death and destruction wrought by the war of 1948.

I understand those who look at this situation and want nothing to do with it—who, in their rage, dream of dissolving the ties between their Jewishness and Israel. But for me and, I imagine, for many American Jews, this is not possible. And it would not be morally right even if it were. As opposed to the Jewish establishment’s complicity, on the one hand, and the diasporist and anti-Zionist impulse toward renunciation, on the other, I prefer the position of responsibility as a response to Israel’s actions. My humanism means that I am appalled by Israel’s carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip and mourn the lives of the Palestinians whom Israel has killed; my membership to the Jewish people, the plurality of whom now live in Israel, means that I am aggrieved by what my people have done.

But I cannot disavow our bounds of faith, language, and heritage. I will not renounce my belonging to our collectivity, nor will I adopt a pose of radical hard-heartedness toward the fate of Israeli Jews, as some on the American left have done. I do not chant “not in my name,” but prefer to accept that because Israel is increasingly home to most of the world’s Jews, I am, as a Jew, implicated in its crimes. I want to speak to my fellow Jews, to beseech them—if necessary even to force them through sanctions or conditions imposed on future U.S. support—to pursue justice and seek peace, instead of occupation and endless war. Our fates are inextricably entangled, so it is my obligation.

We live in the age of what some Jewish theologians call hester panim—in the age of God’s hiddenness. The divine does not intrude into human events. And human beings, by the same token, have no power to hasten the end. “Any messiah that comes,” the great Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz once quipped, “is a false messiah.” Israel’s founding was not an act of providence, nor was it the dawning of the period of redemption, however miraculous its creation may have seemed.

But while an event of mundane history, the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state and the imminent return of most Jews to the Land of Israel nonetheless

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