To describe Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as a “nightmare” for liberal American Jews would be to badly understate the case. Its behavior is likely worse than any of us previously could have imagined. Netanyahu and his extremist Cabinet have put Israel in what Rabbi Jill Jacobs told me is “the worst position it’s ever been, morally and ethically.” Even Jacobs, who heads T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization, may be understating the case. This government is responsible for what is quite possibly the worst self-inflicted catastrophe for the Jewish people in their entire history.
With the counted dead numbering over 60, 000 in Gaza—a figure that includes neither those missing and likely buried under rubble nor the increasing number succumbing to starvation and war-induced disease—Jacobs argued in The Forward that “this war long ago ceased being a war to neutralize Hamas, return the hostages, and protect Israelis, and became a war of revenge and of settlement that serves primarily to hold the government coalition together and keep Netanyahu out of prison.”
Israel’s behavior is under attack from almost every corner imaginable, but especially from Jews. In recent days, two Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, judged their country’s behavior in Gaza to fit the legal definition of “genocide.” This came shortly after a well-respected Israeli-born professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, Omar Bartov, made the same case in a 3,700-word New York Times op-ed.
For decades the darling of the mainstream media, Israel is in the news these days primarily for its policies deliberately causing the starvation of Gaza’s population, bombing its hospitals, and killing those searching desperately for food with sniper fire. Each day’s news cycle brings another report of a hundred or so Gazans killed by Israel (journalists are forbidden by Israel to enter Gaza, so reporting is necessarily sketchy).
At the same time, West Bank settlers are carrying on a campaign of terror against Arab residents with the implicit and often explicit support of the government and the army. This week, Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist who helped make the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was apparently murdered on video by a famously violent Israeli settler. The settler was immediately released on house arrest with only trivial charges leveled against him. Hathaleen is one of 1,009 Palestinians who have been killed, with more than 7,000 injured, in the West Bank since October 2023. Few if any of the settler-terrorists who perpetrated these crimes have been arrested, much less seriously punished.
What’s more, Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and the man who’s asleep-at-the-switch leadership helped ensure the success of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack against Israel, which led to its catastrophic response, has adopted the Trumpian tactic of gaslighting truth tellers, denying observable reality, and blaming deep-state leftists and alleged traitors for raising any questions, even going on MAGA manosphere bro podcasts to make his case.
Netanyahu argues for U.S.-Israeli control of food distribution in Gaza because, as he said back in March, after breaking off ceasefire talks, “Hamas is currently taking control of all supplies and goods entering Gaza.” In fact, as the Times reported, the Israeli military never found any proof that Hamas had systematically done so when Israel was allowing the U.N. to distribute food and medicine. He also insists that when “Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza,” this is “a bold-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza. And there is no starvation in Gaza.”
Now Netanyahu is reported to be threatening to annex parts of Gaza unless Hamas meets his demands. In this regard, as in so many others, he is being led by the nose by the far-right ministers in his government who hold the key to his political survival (and therefore are keeping him out of jail). For instance, his National Security Minister Itmar Ben-Gvir recently declared, “The only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is to completely stop the ‘humanitarian’ aid, conquer the entire Gaza Strip, and encourage voluntary migration.” Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu congratulated the prime minister for “racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out.”
A certain segment of anti-Zionist Jews have protested Israel’s actions owing in part to their ideological opposition to the existence of a Jewish state itself. Today, however, the composition of those protests has changed dramatically. On July 28, for instance, Jacob was joined by what she termed “a minyan of T’ruah rabbis wearing tallitot and holding sacks of flour and rice [who] blocked Second Avenue in New York City, in front of the Israeli consulate. Holding signs that read ‘Food --> Gaza’ and posters with images of starving Gazan children.” They were arrested as “hundreds of American Jews and Israeli Americans cried out ‘Let Gaza Live!’ [with] chants of ‘That’s My Rabbi’ from the assembled crowd, and we were so moved by the support, giving us strength to keep being a loud moral voice.”
The next day, in Washington, 27 rabbis affiliated with the advocacy group Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza entered Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office holding banners that read “Rabbis say: Protect Life!” and “Rabbis say: Stop the Blockade.” Over 1,000 rabbis have now signed an open letter demanding that Israel “stop using starvation as a weapon of war.”
No doubt even more significantly, the Union for Reform Judaism, representing the largest organization of Jews in North America, together with the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the American Conference of Cantors, issued what are likely the strongest condemnations of Israel in their respective histories, insisting that Israel’s policy of “denying basic humanitarian aid crosses a moral line. Blocking food, water, medicine, and power—especially for children—is indefensible.”
Other signs of a fundamental change abound. A recent poll of Jewish New Yorkers found Zohran Mamdani leading Andrew Cuomo by a margin of 43–26 despite a nearly full-court press of legacy Jewish organizations slamming the Muslim-born candidate for his support for boycotting Israel, reluctance to condemn the use of the “globalize the intifada” slogan, and willingness to allow the International Criminal Court to arrest Netanyahu on war crimes charges when he next travels to New York, the city with the largest Jewish population of any on earth. Another poll found that 60 percent of New York City Democratic voters say they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate who, like Mamdani, declines to travel to Israel. This despite the fact that a friendly trip to Israel has been an all-but mandatory mitzvah for pretty much every ambitious New York City–based candidate for nearly 60 years.
The political trends are unmistakable. Roughly 70 percent of American Jews reliably vote Democratic, and in a recent Gallup poll, a mere 8 percent of the self-identified Democrats expressed support for Israel in the war. On Wednesday evening, a majority of Senate Democrats voted in favor of Bernie Sanders’s bill urging the government to withhold certain offensive weapons being used in the war in Gaza, nearly double the number that did so as recently as April. This once unimaginable vote count is consistent with changes throughout the body politic. Nationally, a majority of Americans now disapproves of Israel for the first time ever, a political trend that can only increase as Israel allows starvation conditions in Gaza to worsen.
The future is, as always, unwritten. But as Jonathan Jacoby, who heads the Nexus Project, an American nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism, avers, “This is more than a crisis in the relationship between Israel and American Jews. It’s a turning point. And nobody really knows in which direction we’re headed.”
