I Believed in Israel. What I See Now Is Hard to Defend

By Jason Duchin

I’m a Jew. I lived in Israel. I studied there. I believed in its promise.

There is a moral rupture at the heart of Israel’s leadership, a rupture so profound that it is reshaping how an entire generation understands not just Israel, but Jews and justice itself. What we are seeing is human devastation on a scale that defies morality.  A million people displaced in Lebanon 2 million people in Gaza.  At least 75,000 people butchered.

Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, has been reduced to something unrecognizable. Look at the pictures.  Israel has taken the just impulse to retaliate after the Hamas attack in October and gone bezerk.  They have turned a geography into a slaughterhouse.  Entire neighborhoods erased. Families buried beneath rubble. Children obliterated.  Ash and bone. A history.  Infrastructure shattered to the point where survival itself is a daily negotiation. This is not the pursuit of peace. This is the attempted erasure of a people. Genocide.

Widening the scope of military action into Lebanon, cajoling the village idiot Trump into an adventure of demolition in Iran.  Bombs and guns and blood. An intoxicating brew of Christian and Zionist nationalism.  A theology of enlightenment carried forward under the light of a blazing sword.  

The moral irony of all of this is being uncomfortably digested by the globe. The Jewish people carry a history marked by persecution, displacement, and unimaginable violence. That history is not abstract. Memories of carnage. Trauma. A Holocaust. The foundation of why Israel exists. And with that extraordinary weight of history to see policies and actions that result in the attempted extermination of the Palestinian peoples ruptures the mind in its brutal hypocrisy.  Palestinians trapped without basic rights, without water, food, health, mobility.  What does it mean to carry the memory of oppression, and then preside over a system that inflicts death and profound suffering and displacement of millions of others.  What does that fact do to the memory of the Jewish people?

Palestinians have lived under a different set of rules than their Jewish neighbors. Apartheid is the only word that fits what they have endured for decades.  And after the horrific attack on Israel in 2023, Israel has now labeled an entire people as Hamas.  Children, mothers, fathers.  All of them labeled terrorists.  The revenge is astonishing.

The world is watching. Particularly young people. Particularly in the United States.  And most are sickened. They are turning away from Israel because they are watching in real time the consequences of power exercised without restraint. And they are drawing the conclusion that Israel is led by war mongers and tyrants.   There is good reason that so many are demanding that we stop shipping guns and bombs to a band of nationalists building a nation of blood lust.

Something else deeply troubling is happening, criticism of Israeli government policy is now being collapsed into accusations of antisemitism. That conflation is poisonous. It shuts down debate. Erases accountability. It weaponizes identity. And it ultimately weakens the very fight against actual antisemitism. You can be deeply committed to Jewish safety, to Jewish community and history, and still be outraged by what is being done in its name.

And outrage is the most honest expression to this butchery. Because if Israel is to have a future that is not defined by perpetual conflict, it cannot be built on the indefinite subjugation or devastation of another people. That is not security. That is a cycle of violence and murder. This is a perversion of the original promise of Israel.  To be silent is cowardice and complicity.

Emma Young's comment says it all: "That image (posted with Duchin's statement) says something far more terrifying than these words.  It shows two evil men who have been criminally convicted and are doing everything in their power to remain free from prison, and when their power is exhausted and they have no more chips left, they are willing to blow up the world rather than suffer a final loss."