What NJ Gets Wrong About the Israel Debate

By Rabbi Matthew D.Gewirtz

Earlier this year, during the campaign to fill New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District seat, a moderator at a candidates forum asked the contenders whether they believed Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

The candidates were instructed to answer by raising their hands. Only one did. She went on to win the election and now represents my congregation and thousands of other Jewish, Muslim, Christian and unaffiliated New Jerseyans.

I have thought often about what that raised hand represents.

That is not because Israel must be protected from criticism. Israel’s government, its conduct of the war and its treatment of Palestinians deserve serious moral and political scrutiny.

But turning a highly charged and disputed accusation of genocide into a show-of-hands question reduces one of the most painful and consequential issues facing our communities to a litmus test: hand up or hand down, righteous or complicit.

Some supporters of Israel administer a parallel test. Do you stand with Israel or with Palestinians? Do you condemn the Israeli government or defend the Jewish state?
The questions assume that one commitment must cancel the other. On both sides, complexity becomes suspect and identity becomes a verdict.

Litmus tests avoid complexity. They replace critical thought with compulsory declarations.

What I saw in the West Bank

Reality does not fit so neatly into either test.

I recently spent a blazing afternoon in the West Bank with five other Jewish volunteers from Protective Presence. We sat with Palestinian families vulnerable to violence and intimidation by radical settlers. Months earlier, settlers had shot three residents of the village, all of whom survived.

Our method was almost nothing. We sat or stood by a fence, making ourselves visible. Because police would feel obliged to protect us, we could extend some measure of that protection to the families beside us.

A young settler came down the hill with his flock and began loosening the village fence so his sheep could eventually pass through and consume vegetation on which the community depends. When we asked him to stop, he picked up his club and slowly beat it against his palm. Then he filmed us, laughed and returned up the hill.
He left without striking anyone. That is what a good day looks like.

I was there, standing beside those Palestinians, because I am a Zionist, not in spite of it.

Holding two truths at once

To some supporters of Israel, acknowledging Palestinian suffering constitutes betrayal. To some critics of Israel, calling myself a Zionist disqualifies anything else I might say. We should reject both tests.

Opposing settlement expansion, condemning settler violence and demanding accountability for the suffering of Palestinian civilians do not negate Zionism. Palestinians deserve sovereignty, dignity and a normal life.

Nor do those commitments negate the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination in the land where the Jewish nation was born.

That right need not be earned anew by defending every Israeli government, any more than Palestinian national rights depend on defending every Palestinian leader. Neither people’s right to self-determination should be made conditional on the conduct of its worst leaders or most violent members.

A Call for a fuller conversation

That is the principle members of Congress should bring to Washington. Concern for Palestinians need not be abandoned. But elected officials should resist reducing this conflict to gestures and slogans that leave no room for Jewish vulnerability, history or peoplehood.

Every member of New Jersey’s congressional delegation should visit the West Bank and meet Palestinian families confronting settler intimidation. Ask the hardest questions about occupation and Israeli power. I would gladly join them and bring my own tough questions.

They should then come to the communities attacked on October 7. Sit with families who lost parents, children and homes in the Hamas-led attack launched from Gaza—a territory Israel unilaterally withdrew from in 2005 and that Hamas seized two years later.

This moment does not demand agreement before conversation. It requires a conversation broad enough to hold what a show of hands cannot: Palestinian suffering, Israeli fear, Jewish self-determination and Palestinian freedom.