Viewing Israel From America In The New Year
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/opinion/israel-violence-palestine.html
In synagogues throughout the world on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, rabbis spoke about Israel and they spoke about antisemitism and they spoke about how their congregations in the diaspora should approach both issues.
In the attached op-ed from The New York Times on September 14, Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, outlines his viewpoint on the first issue, Israel. It is a viewpoint held by many young American liberals. Their position is that Israel is an aggressor nation. This group takes issue with the policy of the current Israeli government as represented by finance minister Bezalel Smotrich to give Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza three options: “abandon their national claims and accept life under Jewish supremacy, leave, or face military force if they resisted.” The word genocide is often tossed around about now in the discussion by those holding these mostly left-wing beliefs, particularly as “genocide” might apply to Israel’s military actions in Gaza in response to the terror attacks of October 7.
The three options are an accurate description of Mr. Smotrich’s beliefs. I do not believe that it is an accurate description of the beliefs of most Israelis and certainly not of most American Jews, but I have no data on this.
Israelis will make their views known in late October when they go to the polls and decide whether or not to keep the current government in place. We American Jews don’t get to weigh in. This is as it should be, even as it can be frustrating.
Most of us diaspora Jews love Israel, especially those who have been there. There is nowhere else I have ever been where I feel more Jewish and more at home. But we watch from afar in this new year. And we pray.
I believe that most of the Jews in the diaspora, including many who I know personally, want Israel to be a Jewish state and a homeland for all Jews forever, but understand the reality that there are an equal number of Arabs as Jews in the land “between the river and the sea” and those Arabs too have a right to live in peace. What complicates everything is history.
It is true that both Jews and Arabs have inhabited the land that the British called Palestine for hundreds of years. It is also true that Jews have been systematically driven from almost every country in the world at one time or another and Nazi Germany tried to extinguish Jewish life in its entirety, but failed. Just barely. After WWII, it was quite clear that the Jews needed a place to go when there was nowhere else to go.
In 1948, largely due to both successful local fighting by the Jews in then-British Palestine and post-WWII politics (and maybe guilt about the Holocaust), the state of Israel was born. In 1967, that state doubled in size in six days after Israel’s defeat of the combined armies of Arab states in the region. The problem of Arabs on the West Bank was born when Israel conquered that land that had been Jordan’s before 1967. From then on, there were Arabs living in territory that Israel gained through military action and which many people in present day Israel, including members of Prime Minster Netanyahu’s cabinet, believe should be annexed. They believe the entirety of the West Bank should be Israel.
But that land was always occupied by non-Israeli Arabs. If you want to call the Arabs living there Palestinians, that’s fine, but know that there is no such country as Palestine and, as far as I know, never has been.
Since 1967, there have been several attempts to bring an Arab Palestinian state into being. All have failed, mostly because no matter what Israel and its allies offered the Palestinian leadership at the time, it was never good enough. In exchange for Israeli offers of a significant Palestinian state in 1993 on the White House lawn based on the Oslo Accords, and later in 2000 at Camp David, instead of peace for his people, Yasser Arafat gave Israel the Second Intifada. Arafat’s people gained nothing. Since then, there have been lulls to armed conflict, but the Palestinian people have had no visionary leaders willing or able to finalize a deal.
Today, as the op-ed describes, the Israelis are looking for “Hachra’ah,” what Mr. Novak calls “bringing a struggle to an irreversible end through the final defeat of the other side.” Indeed, that is what Mr. Netanyahu’s current policies seem to be advocating. Violence by West Bank settlers against the Arab population of the West Bank has risen dramatically and there are no effective police or military efforts to stop it. It does indeed appear that the Israeli government wants to turn “the land
from the river to the sea” into a greater Israel. The Palestinians have always said that was their goal as well—a Palestinian Arab state including all of what is Israel today with all the Jews gone.
As I watch from the safety of the United States, I am horrified that wholesale killing is the policy of Israel and certainly the policy of Hamas and Hezbollah, and thus the goals of the Iranian benefactors of these militia groups. I am equally horrified by the lack of any meaningful effort on the part of the Sunni Arab Gulf States to help find a solution. There ought to be no U.S. security pact with the Saudis or any assistance fighting the Houthis in Yemen until the Saudis make an effort to help their own people in Gaza and the West Bank and additionally join the Abraham Accords with Israel. Unfortunately, the current policies of this Israeli government make that impossible. October 7 guaranteed that the Saudis joining the Abraham Accords would be unlikely. Furthermore, the Trump Administration has been unsuccessful in mediating a solution in Gaza or the West Bank even as the lead negotiators for the U.S., Kushner and Witkoff, get richer using Saudi and other Gulf State investment money. Jared Kushner is both a U.S. government representative and someone with an interest in acquiring as much Arab money as he can for himself and his business interests. Talk about a conflict of interest!
I do not have a simple answer to this ultra-complicated dilemma. On Rosh Hashanah, my own rabbi, David Lyon, urged the congregation of Beth Israel to use our heads and our hearts when thinking about Israel and that is what I will do. My heart wants the Israelis to have all of the land between the river and the sea, but my head knows better from having been there five times including several visits to various places in the West Bank—Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, and Jericho. The Arabs are real people with real families and real dreams. The Palestinians are a very well-educated people. There simply must be capable Palestinian leaders who could deal with a more rational Israeli leadership than is currently in place. But, the first step is in the hands of the Israeli people, all of them, the many different kinds of Jews from Sabras to new arrivals, and the Israeli Arabs, and the Druze and everyone else. They need to decide how much longer the state of war that began 78 years ago goes on. What is certainly clear is that the current Israeli government is uninterested in any peaceful accord with the West Bank or Gaza Arabs, and after October 7, who can blame them?
In the op-ed, much is made of the differences in language used to describe the situation on the ground in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. That’s politics. The people on the ground need to push past the politics and the language to a place where there is room for everyone who currently lives between the river and the sea. Until both sides hold the belief that all the people in the region have a right to live in peace, and neither side does currently, there will be no solution.
And all we Jews in America can do is watch and pray.
For my fellow Jews, may you have an easy fast on Monday.
