Jews condemning Jews for ‘questioning the wisdom of the Gaza assault’

Rabbi Eric Yoffie posted an op-ed piece in The Forward last week in which he lamented those “few Jewish doves” who “have demonstrated an utter lack of empathy for Israel’s predicament,” calling their views “morally deficient.” J Street, one of Rabbi Yoffie’s targets, responds:

Our position on the crisis reflects our support for Israel, our hope for its security and our sympathy with the ongoing suffering of the people on both sides in this conflict. It is hard for us to understand how the leading reform rabbi in North America could call our effort to articulate a nuanced view on these difficult issues “morally deficient.” If our views are “naïve” and “morally deficient”, then so are the views of scores of Israeli journalists, security analysts, distinguished authors, and retired IDF officers who have posed the same questions about the Gaza attack as we have.

And, when tens of thousands of pro-Israel American Jews are joining with statements made by J Street, Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek, Israel Policy Forum and others calling for a ceasefire – it is simply wrong to call these views out of touch with Jewish sentiment.

American Jews are, as Rabbi Yoffie says, by and large sensible and centrist, and they support Israel in her hour of need.  But many of those same Jews – and their friends who want the best for Israel – are well within their rights and within the centrist mainstream to question the wisdom of the actions taken this week, to question where they will lead and to ask the US and others to help bring an end to the violence as quickly as possible.

It’s not completely unlike the condemnations by the pro-war crowd against anyone who questions the wisdom of our own nation’s military actions, especially when some of those actions prove to have been based on false premises and crumbling justifications. While there are often legitimate reasons for military action to protect our nation’s security, there are also those in this country who seem to relish at the thought of starting wars, especially if it means attacking Arab/Muslim countries.

In light of this most recent conflict in Gaza, Glenn Greenwald notes:

Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries — from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan — are able to do so because they don’t really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human.  For obvious reasons, one typically finds this full-scale version of sociopathic indifference — this perception of brutal war as a blood-pumping and exciting instrument for feeling vicarious sensations of power and strength from a safe distance — in the society’s weakest, most frightened, and most insecure individuals.

Andrew Sullivan adds:

The inability on both sides to see Jews and Arabs as equally and indistinguishably human before they are Jews and Arabs is at the heart of the problem. In a contest between Israel’s flawed democracy and Hamas’s theological murderousness, I see no moral equivalence. But Israelis and Arabs demand exactly the same respect as human beings, every single one, including the “worst of the worst”. A refusal to grapple with the moral costs of this conflict, and a glib dismissal of the terrible human carnage now being inflicted by Israel (and paid for in part by Americans) is a sign of moral unseriousness. But it is the same mindset that can authorize the torture of human beings and see it as “coercive interrogation” only when Americans do it to Muslims.