Jewish communities must confront their complicity in Israel's genocide

Antony Loewenstein

13 November 2025 

After more than two years of war, Jewish support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza requires accountability, moral clarity and an urgent reckoning across Israel and the Diaspora

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/jewish-communities-must-confront-their-complicity-israels-genocide

here's a desperate need for a moral reckoning among the global Jewish population after more than two years of Israeli-inflicted horrors in Gaza.

From the mass starvation of Palestinians to AI- and cloud-enabled killing, Jewish complicity, both in Israel and across the Diaspora, has been a profound moral failure.

I write this as a Jew who has spent decades opposing Israel's suffocating hold on the Jewish Diaspora, and as a man whose family was murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

Since 7 October 2023, we have witnessed a genocide on our watch, as Jews and as citizens.

Now is the time for accountability - including international war crimes trials - not only for those who actively participated in it, but for Jews who wholly embraced the carnage from London to Sydney out of racism, fear, revenge or sheer bloodlust.

Never forget that those who committed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 weren't only the ones carrying out the physical violence; they also included those who promulgated hate speech on the radio.

With an Israeli Jewish population that overwhelmingly views all Palestinians in Gaza as suspect, if not outright hostile, the need for this moment is clear.

It's hard to describe what the post-7 October 2023 environment has been like in many Jewish communities.

It has ranged from outright hostility towards any publicly expressed criticism of the Netanyahu regime to, perish the thought, any Jew disagreeing with the stated policies of an Israeli government that repeatedly announced its desire to eradicate all Palestinians.

And then there are the ethical contortions around the proper way a modern, humane Jew should feel about Israeli soldiers proudly celebrating killing, destruction and rape in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond.

What, exactly, is the moral quandary in condemning genocidal behaviour and intent?

Still, far too many Jews dismiss or ignore these abominations as outliers - black sheep in the Israeli military or governmental establishment.

It's a convenient myth, but deluded thinking about the real nature of the Zionist state from its inception to today.

Palestinians have always been viewed as a threat to a Jewish majority in Israel. Ethnically removing or killing them has never been far from the minds of many Israelis and their supporters in the West.

Moral collapse

"It's us or them." This has been the essence of Zionist thought from the earliest political Zionist writings in the 1890s to the present day.

More than 120 years after the birth of political Zionism, it's impossible to separate theory from reality.

Zionism has led us to a point in history where Israel can justify a mass killing campaign in Gaza in the name of "self-defence", and much of the western political and media establishment will defend, arm and endorse it.

Jehad Abusalim, from Deir el-Balah in Gaza and now Executive Director of the US-based Institute for Palestine Studies, writes that:

Gaza's rebellion has been a rejection of a draconian and tyrannical vision for what life in the 21st century might look like... Gaza showed that the poorest, most isolated, and besieged people on earth could still live - and die - for a cause. It showed entire generations that subjugation can be refused, even when the cost is unimaginable, beyond what most people can fathom. But Gaza did more than inspire. It exposed the enemy. It revealed corrupt politicians, inept political parties and systems, and the fragility of the so-called international order.

Thankfully, a growing number of American and western Jews have rejected Israel's genocidal campaign, opposing Netanyahu's scorched-earth policy and correctly characterising it as a catalogue of war crimes.

Zionist reality

Despite these positive trends, especially among younger Jews in the Diaspora who refuse to accept Israeli supremacy as integral to Judaism, much of the Jewish establishment has remained steadfast in its backing of Israeli actions.

Jewish scholar Shaul Magid explains that this is because the spirit of assassinated far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane inhabits the thinking of many in the western Zionist establishment and underpins its proud partnership with an extremist Israeli government.

A visceral hatred of Arabs, Islam and Palestinianism is ubiquitous in these circles.

It helps explain why many in this community either said nothing after 7 October or backed Israeli actions with full-throated support.

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York has exposed this mindset in all its ugliness.

While it's a democratic right to oppose Mamdani on policy grounds, the mainstream Jewish establishment - including rabbis - focused solely on his criticism of Israeli actions and unapologetic anti-Zionism, accusing him of antisemitism and of posing an existential threat to Jews.

It was an absurd and dangerous accusation, and yet, as Jewish journalist Peter Beinart observed, there's nothing these so-called Jewish leaders won't do to demand complete obedience to Israeli state policy, even when Israel is credibly accused of genocide, the pinnacle of all crimes.

"What else are these Jewish leaders willing to sacrifice for the idolatry of unconditional support for the state of Israel?" Beinart asked.

"Well, complicity in a mass campaign of anti-Muslim bigotry," unleashed by Mamdani's main opponent, Andrew Cuomo, and his far-right media allies.

These are the "Jewish values" that many Jewish leaders espouse, and yet it's a Jewish abomination to cast your lot with genocidaires.

Kahane's legacy

Not to be outdone, a few hours after Mamdani's win, Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, a man with a long record of palling around with the global far right, tweeted that "the city that was once a symbol of global freedom has handed over its keys to a Hamas supporter, one whose stance is not far removed from the jihadist fanatics who murdered three thousand of its own people 25 years ago".

As a "solution", Chikli invited New Yorkers to move to Israel.

These are the Jewish values of Kahane: supremacy and hate.

While they're not shared by many Jews who despise how our religion has been hijacked by Zionist idolatry, they still represent a sizeable number of Jewish leaders who claim to speak for us all.

This is why a moral reckoning is needed in the Jewish faith: separating Zionism from Judaism and disassociating from an Israeli government, and most Israeli Jews, whose vision is an ethnically pure Jewish nation.

Gaza has been the trigger, but these issues have been with us for decades.

It can't happen soon enough.