I saw a picture today that haunts me: a young Palestinian boy, dead from starvation, his ribs sticking out, his limbs like sticks. It haunts me, in part, because it brings to mind the many, many pictures I’ve seen throughout my life of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps. Growing up in the post-war American Jewish community, I saw so many of those pictures, heard the horror stories, wondered how any people could commit such cruel and sadistic crimes. And now, today, I see some of my own people weaponizing and dishonoring that horrific suffering to justify inflicting it on others.
If you were raised, as I was, to see Israel as the one restitution for all the suffering of the Holocaust, the homeland we’d longed for through 2000 years of exile, it’s an emotionally wrenching journey to face the bitter reality of what Israel is doing. It requires a painful relinquishment of a dream, the letting go of the conviction that we cannot be oppressors because we are always the morally righteous oppressed. Yet there are overriding reasons why we must face that pain. The first, the most urgent and overwhelming, is the unfathomable suffering Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian people. If there is one moral bottom line, one ethical ground that no one should sink below, it’s this: there is no justification for the starvation of children. To be an ethical human being, we must speak out against it and do whatever we can to stop it.
But there is also a secondary reason for making the effort to turn from this path, one that needs to be understood by those who do, in some deep recess of the heart, still care about Israel. The genocide in Gaza will be the destruction of Israel. If Israel succeeds in destroying the Palestinian people, she will destroy herself.
Already this is happening. Israel is becoming a pariah among nations. No longer can she command the moral high ground. No one will ever be able to see those pathetic stick figures in the striped uniforms of Dachau or Auschwitz without hearing in their mind, “and then…”. And then…the hospitals bombed to rubble, the fathers shot while desperately trying to glean a bit of food for their families, the bone-thin limbs of the children of Gaza.
Who will ever want to go to Israel? The Jewish Diaspora, once united in support of Israel, is now deeply divided and Israel is losing more and more support every day, especially among younger Jews. Yet Israel has always been dependent on the Diaspora. Jewish philanthropy enabled the establishment of the State of Israel, funded its infrastructure, paid for its campaigns to encourage Jewish migration from Arab countries and those under Soviet rule. As a child, I saved my pennies to buy trees to plant in the name of my dead father (who, unknown to me, was an anti-Zionist and a radical and would not have wanted such a memorial.) My grandparents kept a little blue can in the kitchen where we collected spare coins to aid the new state. Who but the most fanatic will offer that kind of heartfelt support now? Diaspora Jews contribute $3 billion dollars annually to prop up the Israeli economy. What will happen if that support goes away? Already, long before the horrors of October 7, it had begun to decline, as younger Jews no longer felt the same kind of identification with Jewish institutions as their parents and grandparents did. October 7, which was a traumatizing and indefensible assault on civilians, brought forth a new wave of sympathy and contributions. But Israel’s relentless revenge, using Hammas as an excuse to brutalize an entire population, to starve the innocent and attack every institution of culture, sustenance or care, has horrified younger and progressive Jews, who are now far more likely to donate to Palestinian relief than the Jewish National Fund.
Who is going to want to visit Israel, even when the war is over? Come vacation in the land so holy that its people can blithely watch children wither away into skeletons! Who will invest in her enterprises? Jewish tourism and investment are big parts of Israel’s economy. Israel has long benefited from the immigration of Jewish thinkers, cultural figures and scientists. The boycotts of Israel goods and cultural production will only grow greater the more children starve.
And what is Israel doing to its own people, to its young soldiers placed in a milieu that rewards sadism, where posting selfies of acts of cruelty and humiliation has become a thing? What kind of fathers, what kind of mothers will these young people be when they have spent their youth starving others’ children to death? What kind of neighbors, coworkers, friends, citizens will you be living among when the soldiers who regularly target famished people searching for food come home?
The most sensitive among them, those who have not utterly lost their humanity, may break under the strain. Already the suicide rate among reservists is at a 13 year high, and thousands are unable to be deployed due to mental incapacity. The trauma of starvation destroys the body, but inflicting starvation is its own form of trauma, one that can shatter the mind and destroy the soul.
The Judaism I was raised in taught that the prophets were revered because they held kings to account and spoke out against cruelty and oppression. Rabbi Hillel, contemporary of Jesus, was said to have taught that “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you,” was the core teaching of the Torah. Intellectual freedom was God’s gift to us—we were given minds and expected to use them. Our patriarchs wrestled with God—Rabbi Arthur Waskow translates the very name ‘Israel’ as ‘God-wrestler.’
Yet in the need to somehow justify the unjustifiable, to deny or suppress the wrong that Israel is committing, we have so-called defenders like the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC attempting to suppress free speech everywhere, vilifying those who make what should be the most clear and basic claim on universal morality—that starving children is wrong! In the U.S. we have imprisoned Palestinian students and writers for exercising their first amendment rights. In London, on August 9, police arrested over 500 people for simply displaying signs supporting Palestine Action—and half of the arrestees were over 60! In charging ‘anti-Semitism’ against everyone who objects to the forced starvation of children, they give ammunition to the ultra-right weaponization of ‘anti-Semitism’ as an excuse to shut free inquiry and shutter universities, to defund crucial research and to target scholars and activists, all while allying with those who are bona fide, old-school classic Nazis fueling the rise of true anti-Semitism worldwide.
If you are obligated by your politics to support those who condone the starvation of children, you’ll be supporting those who ultimately do not have your best interests at heart, whether that’s Netanyahu in Israel or Trump in America.
Facing this painful reality is hard, but it’s not nearly as hard as listening to your children crying for food when you have nothing to give them. Relinquishing a dream is painful, but not as painful as trudging miles for a pittance of food, only to be shot by grinning soldiers. Now Netanyahu and his ultra-right claque are preparing to annex Gaza City—a further war crime that will not bring home the remaining hostages nor secure any form of peace. If you sow the seeds of hatred you must expect to reap the bitter fruits. If Israel has any hope of of securing some kind of lasting peace in the Middle East, it must be based on justice for Palestinians and Israelis both. End the war now. Open the gates to food, to water, medicine and the means of life. Stop the killing and begin the healing.
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This post has been syndicated from Starhawk’s Substack, where it was published under this address.