Israel Is a State, Not a Synagogue
“We want Israel to be our synagogue. … OK, well, Israel’s a state. It’s not a synagogue, and it’s going to make a whole set of calculations,” said Tal Becker, an Israeli lawyer and diplomatic adviser, in 2022. He was speaking at an event on Russia’s war in Ukraine and was discussing Israel’s response. Becker explained that many people want Israel to behave like a beloved rabbi, but it can’t. It’s a state.
I’ve thought of Becker’s remarks often over the past few months, and in particular as he argued on Israel’s behalf at the International Court of Justice in a genocide case brought forth by South Africa. I’ve thought of it listening to discussions and debates over antisemitism and criticism of Israel’s war; following the aforementioned ICJ proceedings; hearing of family and friends arguing over what the appropriate “Jewish” response to the war is; having these arguments myself. And as competing news emerges over how close Israel and Hamas are to a cease-fire and hostage deal, it is perhaps worth putting forth that there is a tendency in some corners to see Israel’s war in the context of Jewish history. And it belongs there. But it also needs to be understood in the context and history of nation-states.
To be very clear: This does not mean that the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent war should not also be understood in the context of Jewish history. Nothing in this world is inevitable, but the fact that images of people dragged from their homes reminded Jews of pogroms, or that the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust recalled the Holocaust, comes close to inevitability. And this war, too, is impossible to separate from a Jewish context, in that it is being carried out by the Jewish state. But state remains a key part of understanding this conflict as well. Many Jews around the world may feel a unique connection to Israel, the only Jewish state, and process what is happening now as another tragic, fraught event in the history of the Jewish people. But Israel also needs to be understood as a nation-state, one that has power, political and military, as other nation-states do, if one is to understand the reality of the war and the global debates that continue to rage over it.
Consider, for example, the conversation around Israel being charged with genocide at the ICJ, or accused of genocide more generally. The controversy has been shaped not only by the state of Israel’s actions but also by Jews’ historic experience as the victims and targets of genocide.
There have been debates among scholars of genocide over whether the word appropriately describes how Israel is carrying out its war. Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, argued back in October that Israel was carrying out a “textbook case of genocide,” while Omer Bartov, a historian of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote in November that “there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening,” and that this meant the time to warn of a genocide was now, before one occurred.
But there were also those who objected, on the grounds of Jewish history, to the very idea of using the term genocide. Howard Jacobson, the British novelist and journalist, wrote in December, “There is a sadistic triumphalism in charging Jews with genocide, as though those making it feel they have their man at last. The sadism resides, specifically, in attacking Jews where their memories of pain are keenest. By making them now the torturer and not the tortured, their assailants wrest their anguish from them, not only stealing their past but trampling on it.” Implied here is that Jews cannot be carrying out genocide, and that such a thing is at odds with Jewish history.
Leaving aside that history has no shortage of examples in which the victim becomes the perpetrator: The trouble with Jacobson’s argument is that it is not only Jews who are being accused of genocide, but the Jewish state specifically. And the history of states is a different story from the history of the Jewish people, and it is certainly different from the history of the Jewish people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. States, with their governments and armies, have long carried out violence against other people, internally and externally. States wage war; states draw borders and defend them; and states, yes, have been known to kill, and even to carry out atrocities. Of course a state could carry out violence, even against a group of people. That is what states do.
Similarly, there was the issue of how to understand remarks made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellow ministers that were used in the trial at the ICJ as evidence of their genocidal intent. Israeli historian and writer Fania Oz-Salzberger expressed one view of the proceedings: “What stands on trial today is the ancient Jewish habit of speaking to each other as if no one else is listening. The Jewish habit of making extreme statements irresponsibly, unthoughtfully, without expecting any payback,” she wrote on X. “Our disputative, wordy culture deserves to be celebrated, but it must denounce its dangerous outcrop of inciters to blind violence” because the speech had become “too doable.”
I would put a finer point on it: When, in October, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that he would allow no food or fuel into Gaza, he was doing so not only as a Jew, but as the minister of defense. When Netanyahu invokes Amalek, biblical enemy of the Israelites, he is doing so not as a rabbi or a scholar, but as prime minister of a country with an army that is waging war. And when Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich imagines the depopulation of Gaza, he is not only entering that statement into the annals of Jewish history but making a policy prescription, one that would be carried out by a state. A state, and not a synagogue.
There is an argument that Israel is held to a different standard than other states. And there may well be cases when that is true. But to effectively deny that Israel is capable of doing what other states are doing—or that those in power within that nation-state are capable of acting as though they have state power—is to implement another double standard. The reaction by much of the world to, for example, Gallant’s proclamation that Gaza would be denied food was broadly consistent with the modern norms of international law, to say nothing of international conscience. Further, in the community of nations, such as it is, states respond to violence committed by other states.
It can be difficult to hold these two truths at once: that Jewish history is full of pain and victimhood and being the target of ethnic and religious violence, and also that Israel is a nation-state with a government and an army that is currently waging a war that has killed, per Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health, more than 27,000 people. It can be intellectually confusing. And there may be a sort of painful cognitive dissonance. But the alternative is to see only half the picture—or, worse, a warped view of the whole.
