Judaism Can’t Justify What Israel Is Doing

When Solomon Perel died this past February in Jerusalem, he did not die alone. With him went the alter ego he’d created more than half a century before, when as a Jewish teenager he survived the Holocaust by hiding in plain sight as “Jupp,” a member of the Hitler Youth. In his many postwar decades living as a citizen of Israel, Perel would give interviews in which he swore, up and down, that Jupp was a fully formed personality that took over his body—and that never fully left him.

Perel’s story was immortalized in one of the great Jewish films, Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s overlooked Europa Europa, from 1990. At the film’s conclusion, young Perel is improbably reunited with his brother, who has been in one of the concentration camps. The two tearfully embrace, and Solomon starts to explain why he is dressed as a Nazi. His brother stops him.

“I don’t care how you survived,” the brother says. “I care that you survived.”

Perel’s story, in fiction and in fact, is an extreme example of a Jewish religious and cultural concept known in Hebrew as pikuach nefesh. Roughly translated, it means “to save a life.” The basic principle is simple: If complying with a Jewish law would endanger you, that law may be suspended. This principle is built on thousands of years of persecution and danger. Unlike other Abrahamic faiths, Judaism traditionally puts little value on martyrdom. If you have to betray your faith to survive, so be it. Survival—individually, and as a people—matters more than anything.

Many American Jews first learn about pikuach nefesh in the context of the Jewish calendar’s most solemn holiday, Yom Kippur, during which Jews traditionally go without food or water for 25 autumnal hours. Children who are nervous about such an undertaking are often told a story about someone being so ill that a fast would have killed them, and subsequently being granted a reprieve from a rabbi on the grounds of pikuach nefesh. It’s a comforting thought for a child: Obeying the Law sounds scary, but at least there’s an exception to keep me alive.

Pikuach nefesh has become deeply relevant in recent days. On Oct. 7, Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since 1945. Today, Israel’s answer is well underway: We are witnessing what may become the greatest massacre perpetuated by Jews in history. In Gaza, all normal rules have been suspended. There is no medicine. There is no fuel. There are no escape routes. There are no civilians, in the eyes of the Israeli military, which is freely bombing hospitals and schools.

Meanwhile, in Israel proper, the hard-right communications minister is backing an emergency measure that would allow the government to imprison any Israeli citizen who “undermines the morale of Israel’s soldiers and residents in the face of the enemy” in social media posts. Long-running street protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have ceased as masses of Israelis are sent to battle; his bitter rivals have had no choice but to fall in line behind their PM on a war footing. Meanwhile, despite some public urging from Joe Biden over the weekend to distinguish Palestinian civilians from Hamas, the U.S. and EU have pledged virtually unconditional support for whatever the Israeli leadership feels it must do.

Hamas’ surprise attack has been called “Israel’s 9/11.” And indeed, it’s hard not to see the aftermath of 9/11 in Israel’s reaction: the rushed and brutal military retaliation, ethnicity-based security crackdowns, capitulation of world leadership. It didn’t go well back then either. Afraid for our lives in 2001, Americans agreed to suspend the legal and ethical norms of our society, such as they were. Doing so, President George W. Bush and others continually argued, was a matter of life and death. A matter of survival.

You could see this as a kind of secular pikuach nefesh—but it led only to more slaughter.

This is one of many problems with pikuach nefesh as a principle. How can one determine when suspending a law is truly a matter of life or death? How do you determine that it’s the only option? What if you suspend a law and the suspension leads to death—even death on a more massive scale than anything avoided?

For these reasons and more, pikuach nefesh has historically been a divisive topic, never quite resolved in a way that firmly establishes what it means for religious Jews, let alone secular ones. Yet after the Holocaust, the concept became the unspoken baseline assumption of militant Zionism, as well as a justification for a permanent state of emergency in which Jewish citizens have severely curtailed civil liberties and occupied Palestinians have virtually none.

As Naomi Klein recently wrote in the Guardian:

The Talmud instructs Jews that there are three things so sinful that the ancient rabbis decided one should prefer death to doing them: sex crimes, idol worship, and—last but most important—bloodshed. And yet, in a world in which Jews live in a perpetual state of existential peril, the law can never be unsuspended; any atrocity is permitted, forever.

Solomon Perel may have done what was necessary for his survival. But what real harm might he have committed during his masquerade as a genocidaire? We accept that in order to survive, it was necessary for him to break not only from Jewish law, but even from the ethics we like to believe underpin those laws. To become something anathema to himself: a Nazi. Once you have saluted gangsters and mass murderers, even if it was in a time of crisis and duress, it’s always hard to shake the sickness you catch from them. Look at the post-9/11 American right.

Or look at Perel: He took Jupp with him to the Holy Land, forever doing battle in his mind with the little fascist construct and its unending hatred. The dovish and generally liberal-Zionist Solomon would find himself reading about the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, for example, and as he put it, “The ‘Jupp’ in me says, ‘See, these are the same methods that we learned about: The Jews don’t have to be in government, it’s enough that they influence the government.’ ” Or perhaps he’d see a sleazy Hollywood movie directed by a Jew “and I think, ‘Jews poison Western culture.’ ” The monster he invented never left him.

Diaspora Jews who have wrestled with Israel’s actions have sought to disentangle Judaism from Zionism. We are not all Israeli. But it is true that these things are done, and continue to be done, in our names. What will be left of our civilization a thousand years from now? Will Judaism survive—or will something else live inside it, wearing our name, looking through our eyes?

It’s hard not to feel the same plummeting sensation in the gut that so many of us felt in late 2001, hearing that whatever America did next was justified because of what had just come before. We have all lived with the consequences. If there is still time for us to learn from still-living history, let us do so now, for the sake of life.