After the devastation of Gaza, it can no longer be said that the Jewish people are a persecuted nation -- Avrum Berg
Sid Shniad
There are moments in history when not only states change but entire nations. It is not borders that are redrawn but consciousness itself; not governments that are replaced but the collective soul that undergoes transformation. After 1945 the Germans awoke from the nightmare of Nazism and faced what had been done by them and in their name. After Vietnam, Americans emerged from the shattering of national innocence as a different people. The war in Gaza is such a moment for the Jewish people. It is not another round in the endless cycle of Middle Eastern violence but a historic turning point. It is a moment in which we must look in the mirror and recognize what we have become. And it is ugly.
For centuries Jewish consciousness was shaped by the experience of persecution. From the Babylonian exile through the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and ultimately the Holocaust, the Jewish story was the story of the persecuted, innocent victim. The Shoah engraved in our being the conviction that we carried humanity’s memory of pain and were therefore bound to build a moral society that would never do to others what had been done to us. “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,” said Hillel. “That is the whole of the Torah.”
All this has collapsed in the last two years. The days that followed October 7, 2023 were days of horror and shock. For a fleeting moment, we returned to the older Jewish memory, the one that preceded Israeli power. But that moment passed and was squandered. Self-defense gave way to vengeance. Vengeance hardened into policy. And policy descended into racial supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and primitive nationalism.
Two years later, after the devastation of Gaza, it can no longer be said that the Jewish people are a persecuted nation. Historically and morally, the Israeli Jew has become a persecutor. This is a seismic reversal. For generations we asked, how could the world have stood by while Jews were being murdered? Now the world asks us the very same question: how can you stand by the Israeli who kills that way? Every Jew, in Israel and in the Diaspora alike, must give an answer. For the Diaspora, this moment carries particular weight. For generations, Jewish communities worldwide stood at the forefront of struggles for civil rights and social justice. They were part of humanity’s moral conscience. That legacy now hangs in the balance.
Because of Gaza and its atrocities, the old dividing lines between Jewish groups no longer hold. The fault lines today are not of religion, ethnicity, or politics. They are ethical. On one side stand those who supported a war that went far beyond self-defense and descended into annihilation. On the other stand those who opposed it in the name of that ancient Jewish conscience and proudly rebelled and declared: no more. Not in our names.
The Jew who supported the campaign of destruction, the killing, the lies, the looting, the callous indifference, learned from the Holocaust only one lesson: power. They believe that power is the sole guarantee of existence and that morality is just a luxury. They turned memory into a weapon, trauma into justification, and historical suffering into an ideology of revenge.
Opposite them stands the Jew faithful to our people’s ethical tradition, the one who learned from the Holocaust an entirely different lesson: that the calamity we endured was not meant to make us cruel but compassionate; not to harden our hearts but to bind us more deeply to conscience.
Jewish civilization was never born as a culture of might. It was born as a faith of conscience, of perpetual struggle with brute power. Abraham did not plead for his bound son Isaac but for the wicked city of Sodom. He stood before God and demanded, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” This was the first moral protest in human history. After him came the prophets who stood in defiance of kings and priests and placed justice above ritual. The beating heart of Judaism was never physical force but spiritual refinement. The Jewish hero was never the neighborhood bully but “the one who conquers his own impulse,” and “the one who turns his enemy into a beloved friend.”
All this was buried in Gaza. Even if one could justify the start of the war as a response to a monstrous crime, nothing can justify what followed: the obliteration, the bombardments, the erasure of entire neighborhoods, the killing of tens of thousands of innocents for whom we did not even pretend to mourn. Israeli soldiers and their commanders interred the sacred commandments of their own tradition beneath the ruins of Gaza. Those commandments begin in the Bible: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls.” And they continue in the ancient Midrash, when God rebuked the angels for singing after the drowning of the Egyptians: “My creatures are drowning in the sea, and you would sing?” Even a just war must have limits. Even an enemy is human.
Yet in Israel there was not a single moment of collective sorrow. Not in the Knesset, not in most synagogues, not in the public square. Not a single prayer was uttered for the children who died pointlessly on the other side. There were only endless rationalizations: “They understand only force.” “They used human shields.” “It’s their fault.” Is this the language of the people who for generations taught humanity that life is sacred? In Gaza, the Jewish people broke.
This collapse is not political; it is existential. A people that was once a community of conscience has become an organization of force. The nation that once invoked God as the Father of Mercy now bows before the Lord of Vengeance and the Man of War. Let us speak plainly: it is not only Gaza that lies in ruins, nor the kibbutzim along the border. The Jewish soul itself is shattered.
And yet this ruin can mark the end of a long chapter in Jewish history or the beginning of a great renewal. Out of the destruction may rise a new Judaism, one that does not close in on itself but opens to others, that answers not with power but with repair. Humanist Judaism need not ask permission to speak again in the name of conscience; it must simply do so. We must build institutions of our own, independent of the state and of the clerical establishment, dedicated to the construction of a better world. Even if our fiercest adversaries are fellow Jews, we must not fear them, and we must not yield.
The first institution to emerge from the ashes should be a Global Jewish Fund for the Reconstruction of Gaza and for the support of its inhabitants. This would not be a political gesture but an ethical act of faith, a tangible expression of the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Such a fund would operate independently of governments and political movements. Its mandate would be clear: to rebuild schools, hospitals, homes, and infrastructure; to provide medical care and trauma support; to enable the return of displaced families to lives of dignity. Funding would come from voluntary contributions by Jewish communities worldwide: individuals, foundations, and congregations choosing to act according to conscience rather than tribal loyalty. Every dollar contributed would be a small act of tikkun, of repair, an acknowledgment that we bear responsibility not only for our own pain but for the pain inflicted in our name. This is not charity. It is restitution.
Around such a fund, a new network of spiritual and communal institutions must grow: Houses of Compassion where prayers are offered for every human being, not only for Jews; synagogues where the Kaddish is recited also for Palestinian dead; Yeshivot of Conscience where Torah is studied alongside the philosophy of human rights, Jeremiah beside Camus, Elder Hillel beside Martin Luther King Jr.; and Communities of Repair dedicated to building bridges, defending human dignity, and confronting callous indifference.
These new institutions must be built first and foremost by the Diaspora. It is Diaspora Jews who must lead the rebellion against the institutional establishment that surrendered Jewish conscience without mandate. Now is the time to break away from their servility and return to our historic vocation: the Diaspora as moral voice, as bridge to the world, as the human memory of our people.
This Jewish peace force must always stand at the forefront of the struggle for peace, even when, especially when, Israeli governments oppose it. It must champion the universality of international law, even when this means supporting the prosecution of Jewish war criminals before international tribunals. What is forbidden is forbidden for Jews as well. No one is exempt from justice. No people, no matter how persecuted in the past, stands above the law. If we demand accountability from others, we must accept it for ourselves. This is not betrayal; it is fidelity to the deepest principles of Jewish tradition. “Justice, justice shall you pursue” without exception, without excuse.
This is not utopia. It is the only realistic path back to being a people of spirit. If the devastation in Gaza displayed the extent of our power, the rebirth of a humane civilization would prove that we still possess a soul.
Some will say that such a demand is naive, even dangerous. The truth is the opposite. It is the only way to survive spiritually. A people that has abandoned its conscience will never truly win, even if it wins the war. “Never again” can be said in two ways: “Never again to us,” or “Never again to anyone.” The first leads to an endless spiral of fear, power, and revenge. The second is the only path toward a better world.
The Jewish people after Gaza must choose: persecutors or compassionate beings; soldiers who “just follow orders” or the founding brigade of a global army of peace. This ruin can be our end or the beginning of our repair.