One of the essential elements of Judaism is the annual cheshbon hanefesh or “accounting of the soul.” This takes place during the Hebrew month of Elul, which leads up to Rosh Hashanah and the Yamim Noraim (the Ten Days of Repentance) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). It involves a necessary period of introspection during which every Jew reflects on his or her behavior and deeds during the past year. Without it, forgiveness—whether coming from those we have offended or the Almighty—is impossible. It is supposed to result in a pledge to do better in the coming year.
If that’s required of individual Jews, then why not go through the same exercise for evaluating the actions of the one Jewish state on the planet? That’s the justification for pundits who use this time of year to write pieces beating their breasts about the sins of Israel, its government and its people. It is, by the lights of most people, a very Jewish thing to do.
High Holidays virtue-signaling
But while Israelis and those who care about the nation are right to think carefully and seriously about the actions of the government and army, inevitably, many of the resulting reflections often have more to do with political opinions than dispassionate moral judgements. And that can be particularly egregious when applied to the efforts of those who serve its cause in the middle of an armed conflict with the genocidal Islamist forces that head the Palestinian national movement.
Those who engage in this process also need to be aware that while Jews are taking part in acts of harsh self-evaluation in the midst of a war in which Israel’s survival is at stake, the other side, along with their numerous enablers and cheerleaders, are doing no such thing. The musing of Israelis and Jews about their alleged shortcomings is likely to be exploited by their enemies to fuel the ongoing surge of antisemitism that seeks Israel’s isolation and destruction, as well as the intimidation and silencing of Jews elsewhere.
Yet that doesn’t stop those who believe that this sort of commentary is not only appropriate but even required for Israelis to save their souls.
Doubtless, this will be the subject of innumerable High Holiday sermons that those gathered in synagogues in the coming weeks will be subjected to by their rabbis. This is a given, especially among those liberal denominations of Judaism where Zionism—the modern expression of one of the basic elements of Jewish faith and identity—has come into question among a noisy yet influential minority. In certain sectors of Jewish life, the act of distancing oneself from the actions of an Israel forced to defend itself against not just critics but terrorists, like those of Hamas, which led the Palestinian Arab attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has become an all-too-common expression of virtue-signaling for many on the Jewish left.
These “as a Jew” detractors are legion in the current environment in which some in the Jewish world seek to remain in sync with their erstwhile allies, who have abandoned any vestige of support for Jewish rights or empathy for Israel’s dilemmas since Oct. 7. While they are easy to dismiss, those who approach this idea of a cheshbon hanefesh for Israel from a position of Israeli patriotism and belief in Zionism should not be dismissed out of hand.
Has something gone very wrong?
One such person is Yossi Klein Halevi, the author of some interesting books about Israel, and looked to by many as a voice of Jewish conscience. Halevi has earned the right to be taken seriously even by those who disagree with him. But his latest column in The Times of Israel nevertheless deserves a response, precisely because he is seeking to engage in a discussion about the current situation without necessarily accepting the premise of Israel’s unfair detractors.
Indeed, Halevi goes a long way toward debunking the entire premise of High Holiday critiques of Israel by knocking down as patently false many of the assumptions that its foes have accepted about its behavior:
“We know any nation in our place would have reacted to Hamas’s mass atrocities as we did. We know we face an enemy willing to commit any crime and that the IDF is fighting under conditions that would test the moral limits of any army. We know the young Israelis who have fought for months, many for nearly two years, are among the most heroic and self-sacrificing this country has produced. We know Israel is subject to a relentless campaign of lies, half-truths, distortions and convenient omissions. We know the outrageous accusation of genocide against Israel only diverts the world’s focus from radical Islamism, the truly genocidal side in this conflict.”
All true. But he then goes on to argue that the war being fought against Hamas is a failure—“something has gone very wrong in Gaza”—and to decry plans for eliminating the last Hamas strongholds in Gaza City. He backs this up with a partisan polemic about the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being “a coalition of the fanatical and the corrupt, [that] is disgracing the Jewish state.”
That resembles his musings from the months before Oct. 7, when he was among those disingenuously arguing that Netanyahu’s government was a threat to democracy because it attempted to reform and rein in an out-of-control, all-powerful judiciary. It was Halevi’s side in that dispute that was seeking to enshrine an undemocratic rule of elites as part of a culture war of liberal secularists against Mizrahi, religious and nationalist Israeli voters, in which Halevi was an unlikely recruit for the former.
An advocate for ambivalence
The wrongheaded nature of this jeremiad is not so much a matter of the awfulness of the current coalition or worries about the conduct of the war, important though those topics may be. It is Halevi’s advocacy for what he calls “ambivalence” about the conflict, as he decries those who either think Israel can do no wrong or no right, that needs to be addressed.
Both extremes are foolish, though the latter is not so much mistaken as it is culpable for the way it is consciously aiding Hamas’s goal of destroying the Jewish state and achieving the genocide of its population.
Moderation in all things is a good general principle to adopt in most circumstances. But not always.
Moderation was key to one of the genuine insights Halevi has offered his readers in the past, when he pointed out more than a decade ago that the old left-right divide in Israel was outdated. He was right to say that in the aftermath of the collapse of the Oslo peace process in 2000 and the evacuation of Gaza in 2005, which resulted in a Hamas terrorist state, the old arguments no longer made sense. The Israeli left had been wrong to believe that the Palestinians desired peace, and the Israeli right was wrong to think that it could ignore the reality of a hostile population that neither wanted a two-state solution nor could be absorbed into the Jewish one.
Unfortunately, he or anyone else has yet to come up with a way to solve that problem without endangering Israel. Still, he put aside that moderation when the Israeli right won a clear majority in the Knesset elections of November 2022.
Oct. 7 brought a reminder that the hopes of peaceful coexistence with a people whose national identity is inextricably linked to a permanent war against the Jews must be indefinitely postponed until sometime in a theoretical and far-off future when they are ready to change. Moreover, the willingness of so much of the international community and political left to join forces with Islamists meant that the sort of principled and righteous moderation that Halevi advocates for is simply an insufficient response to the current crisis.
Even worse, he argues that the “imminent invasion of Gaza City, many of us fear, will be a strategic and moral disaster” because it will not achieve any military goal and will further tarnish Israel’s good name by an immoral amount of Palestinian suffering. He thinks that requires Jews to join in a moral outcry to stop the government.
Yet that assertion falls flat. That’s not because the war has been conducted without mistakes, or that it is a certainty that Netanyahu’s plans are foolproof, or even because bad things will happen to those Palestinians who have been put in harm’s way by Hamas’s decision to launch a war and then hide behind civilians.
It’s because if we should have learned anything about the conflict from Oct. 7—and the way it mobilized antisemites around the world—it is that compromise with Hamas and a Palestinian people that supports its war simply isn’t possible.
No compromise with evil
Our Western sensibilities and desire to settle all conflicts on a reasonable basis cry out in favor of some sort of compromise with the Palestinians. But there is no compromise with those who are committed to the deaths of Israelis and Jews—not to achieve a limited political goal, but as a religious and national obligation.
Holding back from doing the necessary and awful job of eliminating the last Hamas strongholds won’t improve Israel’s image abroad or save its collective soul. It will only ensure that the conflict will continue on an even more horrible basis sometime in the near future, guaranteeing more death and destruction for Jews and Arabs alike.
Of course, as is the case with every nation in history that ever fought a war, it’s correct to say that this government is flawed and that the army has made mistakes. But Halevi argues that because Netanyahu has not stated in advance what Israel will do once the war is over, that essentially means the remnants of Hamas still holding out in the tunnels underneath Gaza City should be left in place. That is neither a reasonable nor a moral argument.
His claim that under the current circumstances, “even if we win against Hamas, we lose,” may sound wise, but it is sophistry masquerading as morality.
No one should blindly trust Netanyahu—or the generals or politicians who disagree with him. But in a war in which the other side is prepared to sacrifice all of their own people in an effort to further Israel’s destruction, there is no substitute for complete victory over such amoral monsters.
It was, after all, sensible moderation that led Netanyahu and virtually all of his political opponents to support leaving Hamas in place, bribing them with payments and Palestinian work permits to maintain a ceasefire. And it might have worked if the Palestinians were equally interested in sensible moderation or coexistence. But they weren’t, and they aren’t. And that leaves Netanyahu—or anyone else who would be placed in his position—with the obligation to safeguard Israel’s future by eliminating Hamas and its rule.
To use the High Holidays and the annual ritual of self-evaluation to second-guess his determination to pursue victory in this war is worse than mere Jewish navel-gazing. It is, in its own way, just as much a form of immoral chest-pounding as those who seek to demonize Israel and the just war of self-defense it never sought, but has been forced to fight.
To put Israel on trial now, with much of the world wrongly embracing blood libels against Israel and normalizing antisemitism, and with the war’s outcome still hanging in the balance, isn’t the laudable process Halevi thinks it is. You don’t have to sympathize with the prime minister or to support some of his coalition partners to believe that Halevi is mistaken. Rather, his call for an outcry against Israel’s democratically elected government at this time is a weaponization of Jewish tradition to create a political cudgel against Netanyahu to force him to end the conflict on terms that will ensure its repetition.
That will satisfy those who are so embittered by the prime minister that they view certain failure in Gaza as preferable to his continued stay in office. But the calculus by which they have arrived at that preferred outcome should not be mistaken for the sort of accounting of our souls demanded by Judaism.
The true Jewish moral imperative
It’s all well and good for Halevi to claim that the high point of the Jewish state’s history is its willingness to admit fault in 1982 for “a massacre Israel didn’t commit.” But in a war that he admits that the Israel Defense Forces is striving to fight morally, to declare it guilty of wrongdoing when that gives aid and comfort to antisemitic mobs and Hamas, is not wisdom. And it’s not ethical.
The moral imperative facing Jews this year should require them to join in solidarity with Israel’s efforts to extinguish Hamas, rather than virtue-signal their ambivalence about a war against a truly evil opponent. And not because they think Israel can do no wrong, but because they have come to the correct conclusion about a zero-sum conflict in which any outcome other than Hamas’s destruction is an unparalleled moral disaster.
They should put aside partisan differences—both in Israel and in the United States—to support efforts to achieve a result to end this war on terms that will make it impossible for the Palestinians to continue it, regardless of their sense of grievance about Israel’s continued existence. Anything else is a betrayal of our obligation to support those fighting for the life of the Jewish state, rather than to gratuitously appoint ourselves as their judges.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
