Skip to content
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
When I have the time and space, I try to share with you my own personal wrestlings regarding two interrelated dynamics that have weighed heavily on our hearts for almost 21 months now: (1) war in Israel, Gaza, and around the Middle East, and (2) antisemitism as it shows up in the United States and around the world. My hope in sharing my perspectives with you — and they are just that: my perspectives; not an attempt to speak on behalf of anyone else — is that they might give you space and direction to form your own relationship to these questions that so affect the Jewish people, and really the whole world.
War in Israel, Gaza, and around the Middle East
Early on in this war that Hamas launched on October 7, 2023 with its horrific attack on Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages, I said two things as Israel formed its response:
1. That while war is horrific — destroying individuals and families, homes and communities — history is also littered with moments that required nations to stand up to a terrorizing force that would carry war out against whole peoples, destroying whole peoples if they could, and that sometimes a people’s enemies force its hand to respond militarily. I shared my personal belief that Hamas was such a force; that while it may not have had the capability to destroy Israel as a country, it has the stated desire to do so, and to repeat October 7 if and when it could. And as such I supported Israel’s military response to seek to end Hamas’s capacities to operate militarily and govern Gaza.
2. I also said that, while I disagreed with those calling for a ceasefire in the early stages of the war, I didn’t entirely begrudge those who did — because I shouldn’t pretend to feel any level of certainty when it comes to as grave a question as war, given the stakes for human life. While I had my own personal, (non-professional) instincts for what was right for the people of Israel, the stakes of war are so high, the death toll of war so heartbreaking, that I didn’t want to imagine I had any sort of monopoly on the right path forward.
(Where I did push back hard was when I saw people advocating for a ceasefire not exclusively out of desire to ease the suffering in Gaza — which has been, and continues to be, a legitimate concern — but also from a place of seeing Jews’ very presence in the region as illegitimate. People who view Jews as interlopers and colonialists, there to settle and terrorize a land that isn’t theirs. For them, every mistake Israel makes isn’t an opening to improve the country, but an opportunity to delegitimize it — to turn Israel into a pariah state, and ultimately to bring about its end.)
After Hamas attacked Israel, Israel was attacked by Hezbollah and Iran to the north, militias in Iraq and Syria to the north and east, and the Houthis in Yemen to the south, all of whom were funded and armed by Iran, for whom “death to Israel” has been a central strategic priority — even in ways that have centered terrorizing Israel over the well-being of Iran’s own citizens.
In response, Israel has achieved intelligence and military victories that have, in many ways, remade the entire Middle East. The idea, for example, that Israel could have severely damaged Iran’s nuclear reactors and that Hezbollah would have had no capacity to respond was unthinkable a mere 22 months ago. The victories against Hezbollah and Iran on the part of Israel were swift and decisive, and Israel has remade the balance of power in the region, and improved, for now, the Israeli people’s relative security as a result.
The war against Hamas has gone much differently. Israel has certainly achieved significant military victories against Hamas; Hamas is nowhere near the threat it was on October 7, 2023, and its leadership has been decimated. But Israel was clearly not as prepared for this war with Hamas as it was for war against the Iranian regime and Hezbollah, and its victories against Hamas have come at great cost; protracted war means more civilian deaths in Gaza, more deaths of Israeli soldiers, more stress on families through death and separation, more time for hostages to endure terrible circumstances.
War puts immense strain on all parties, increasing the likelihood of choices they’ll later regret. War dehumanizes both the more powerful and the less powerful, putting them in circumstances most of us can’t imagine. We read about the deaths of Gazans just seeking to get aid, something for which I feel shame. We read about the plight of the hostages and the horrors they’ve encountered, from which I recoil.
It’s not that a country never needs to act militarily to defend itself. In many ways, Israel has shown how to do that swiftly and successfully over the last year, albeit always with tragic human cost. But when it comes to war in Gaza, Israel has long since significantly degraded Hamas. The war goes on, Gazans suffer, and the hostages languish. I pray for an end to this war, a return of the hostages, a path forward to peace.
Antisemitism
Meanwhile, conversations about antisemitism swirl around us. Its effects are also dastardly: an 82-year-old woman, Karen Diamond, succumbed this week to the injuries she sustained from a firebomb attack in Boulder, Colorado a few weeks ago, an attack unleashed against a small weekly demonstration meant to draw attention to the plight of the hostages. Police say the attacker yelled “Free Palestine” as he threw the projectile. An FBI affidavit said the attacker wanted to “kill all Zionist people.”
This attack comes on the heels of two other attacks; the killing of two people leaving the Jewish museum in Washington DC, both of whom turned out to be Israeli embassy employees, with the alleged murderer having reportedly shouted, “Free, free Palestine,” while carrying out the attack, and the arson of the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, by an assailant who identified “[Governor Shapiro’s] plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people” in reference to his arson on the Governor’s home as he and his family celebrated Passover. (It shouldn’t need to be stated that Governor Shapiro has no foreign policy role in his position as Governor, and that he has roundly criticized Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.)
All of these attacks come in the context of vigorous debates about the meaning of antisemitism, and specifically whether criticism of Israel can be antisemitic or whether “anti-Zionism”, i.e. opposition to the establishment or support for the state of Israel, is antisemitic.
Frankly, I think that discourse often misses a lot, and I want to offer a few, non-comprehensive, observations that I hope are helpful:
(1) Criticism of Israel is not always antisemitic.
(2) Criticism of Israel absolutely can sometimes be grounded in antisemitism.
(3) Regardless of whether criticism of Israel is antisemitic, we can legitimately disagree (or agree) with that criticism.
Let’s take each in turn:
(1) Criticism of Israel is not always antisemitic.
This should be obvious. Human beings are fallible and often fail. Countries governed by human beings, who are elected by fellow human beings, are fallible and often fail. This should be non-controversial. Jews have always criticized their leadership and their governing bodies, and, when that criticism is brought with an eye towards improvement (makhloket le’shem shamayim, “disagreement for the sake of heaven” we call it in Jewish tradition) it can be quite appropriate.
This also applies to criticism brought by non-Jews: it is not always antisemitic. We are all observers of world events; we are all free to shape our opinions based on what we’re seeing. To have certain countries and their policies off-limits from criticism is not a fair standard, and few, if any of us, would advocate for it.
However:
(2) Criticism of Israel absolutely can sometimes be grounded in antisemitism.
I have seen some of Israel’s critics essentially argue for a false corollary of (1): “Not only is criticism of Israel not always antisemitic,” they argue, “it never is.” “It can’t be,” they say, “because antisemitism is about Judaism, the Jewish religion, and criticizing a state has nothing to do with prejudice against a religion.” Or, alternatively, “antisemitism is about prejudice against the Jewish people, and Israel is a state. So criticizing Israel can’t be antisemitic.”
In my view, this misses the mark for a couple of reasons:
(a) Being Jewish is not only about having the religion “Judaism”, as we know from the fact that many Jews identify strongly as being Jewish without being at all religious. Being Jewish is about being part of a people, a tribe, bound together by a shared story. Some Jews adhere to Jewish religious principles, some share ethnic traits, but Jewishness transcends both categories. Therefore someone can be prejudiced against Jews, without having any interest in or knowledge about their religion. And for some people who hold antisemitic beliefs, this shows up as being focused on Israel as a singular evil in the world.
This is related to another reason that criticism of Israel is sometimes, though not always, antisemitic:
(b) Antisemitism is one of the world’s oldest prejudices. Traces of it can be found in the New Testament, one of the foundational documents of western society. Antisemitism has shown up in generations for millennia now. It seeps its way into culture, with certain stereotypical depictions of Jews as power hungry, sleazy, and sometimes murderous, often behind many of the world’s most pernicious problems. Even the best-intentioned citizens of western society are subject to these millennia-old influences. In the same way people in the United States have — consciously or otherwise, intentionally or otherwise — internalized negative, racist stereotypes about Black people in ways that have made life harder for Black people for centuries now, people in the West internalize negative messaging about Jews, and it takes hard, conscientious work to raise our consciousness to recognize when these messages are influencing our thinking.
By the way, Jews are subject to these messages, too! About themselves! About ourselves! In the same way that all historically oppressed groups can develop negative self-impressions — conscious or otherwise — because of the oppressive systems in which they find themselves, Jews can too!
All of this is to say that, while criticism of Israel can absolutely be valid and grounded in ideas that have nothing to do with antisemitism, Western society has long been permeated by antisemitism. So to claim that the intense energy directed against Israel — the world’s only Jewish state — not only since the war in Gaza but long before it, has nothing to do with antisemitism, that the critique is entirely coincidental in its connection to centuries of anti-Jewish bias, is, dare I say, preposterous. Or, at the very least, such a claim must bear the burden of proving it has no relationship to antisemitism.
I understand why Palestinians would have vociferous opposition to Israel. Israel’s formation directly impacted Palestinians in ways that unsettled their relationship to the land, and for which they bore a disproportionate burden. The devastation of the Jewish people during the Holocaust meant the world community wanted to us to find a safe home, and partition of our ancient homeland was the international community’s plan for doing that.
Where I have questions about the degree to which antisemitism influences anti-Israel sentiment — not just since the war in Gaza, but long before it — is with respect to those who have no specific tie to either party directly involved in the conflict and yet for whom opposition to Israel is a central force of their activism. Given the millenia-old legacy of antisemitism in the Western societies in which many of us were raised, and given our knowledge that many of us often hold deep-seated prejudices of which we are not aware and which take work to unpack, I am sometimes surprised at the degree to which Israel’s sharp critics do not seem to be aware of these possibilities within themselves, even while it is also the case that there are areas regarding which Israel is deserving of criticism.
Which brings us to (c):
(c) Regardless of whether criticism of Israel is antisemitic, we can legitimately disagree (or agree) with that criticism.
Whether or not certain criticism of Israel is antisemitic is not the end of the conversation, especially when it comes to Israel’s existence, contrary to the way the discourse often unfolds.
For example, I believe Israel should exist because:
1. We’ve seen the experience of Jews in the diaspora for millennia now, with regular threats to our well-being culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust, so I think having a safe harbor for Jews when antisemitism flares up on short notice is incredibly important. Nations tend to pull up their ladders and raise their walls in times of crisis. One of the central lessons of the Holocaust is that Jews must have a place of survival.
2. I cherish Jewish heritage as a source of nourishment and holiness in our lives, and having one tiny country — in a multicultural world filled with Christian countries and Muslim countries, Buddhist countries and Hindu countries, English-speaking countries and Spanish-speaking countries, a country for the French and a country for the Japanese — where Jews can nourish and invest in Jewish tradition without a threat of assimilation from a predominant culture strikes me as reasonable, especially when…
3. It is in land that Jews have had a sacred relationship to for millennia, have yearned for across generations, as described throughout our daily prayers and our centuries-old proclamations of “next year in Jerusalem,” which we proclaim at the end of Passover and Hanukkah.
Now, Palestinians in particular have borne some of the costs of the creation of the State of Israel, which is why I have long been a proponent of a pathway forward that holds the rights to dignity and self-determination for both peoples. I pray that both peoples will have autonomy and self-determination. Compromise is an important part of life.
But my point is that I would argue for Israel’s existence vehemently regardless of whether the person I am arguing against is antisemitic. In other words, just because someone has a view rejecting Israel that isn’t grounded in antisemitism, isn’t grounded in prejudice against Jews, doesn’t mean the inquiry is over. Just because someone’s ideology isn’t grounded in antisemitism doesn’t mean that you aren’t allowed to argue against it. I’m going to argue for Israel’s right to exist even if the person I’m arguing against is not at all antisemitic.
Antisemitism is a complicated force because Jews are a complicated people. We’re not just a religious group, we’re not just an ethnic group; we’re a tribe, which doesn’t have an easy modern resonance.
We can — and should — make space for self-criticism and reformation, while also holding strong when we receive unfair treatment, whether that treatment is motivated by biases or not.
This is the hard stuff of persevering and thriving in today’s world, seeking to do justice for ourselves as well as for all peoples and the whole world.
Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom, a Shabbat of much-needed peace,
Rabbi K.
