THE JEWISH DILEMMA

The Bondi massacre dominates the English-language press.  There is no doubt about what it was, and no mystery why it was done: it was an irrational act of mass murder of Jews.

The murderers killed innocent Jews as ideational revenge for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.  The Jews who died had no connection to Israeli mass murder.  They died because, in the killers' minds, they represented what Israel is doing in Gaza.

There is great outrage and fury around the world at Israel for the genocide it is mercilessly conducting, and there will be more violent acts against Jews who have no direct connection to it.

People see Israel’s egregious mass murder, know it is a Jewish state, and that those involved in, and supporting, the killing, are Jews. The educated understand that Israeli Jews are citizens of Israel, and that the far greater number of Jews are not Israelis.

The genocide against the Palestinians is a project of the Israeli state, and is supported by a vast preponderance of Israeli Jews.  Convincing the non-Jewish world that what is done by Israeli Jews does not implicate the entire Jewish people is very difficult.  

It is difficult because simple, unsophisticated minds do not make subtle distinctions, and the difference between Israeli Jews and the bulk of world Jewry is, to them, unclear and confusing.  It is far more natural for such minds to assume that all Jews are involved in the mass killing, and to resent them all for it.

Events such as the Bondi killings evoke strong responses from all Jews, either publicly or privately.  For those of the faith—binding as Judaism is for compelling historical reasons—to be witness to the killing of believers has to provoke deep moral outrage.

The Israeli state’s extremist, militarist leaders use such incidents to defend their genocide, condemning them as what they truly are: racist, and anti-Jew—which they term anti-Semitic, even when perpetrated by Semites—and then cynically claim such horrors excuse and justify their own monstrous barbarity.

Attempting to co-opt world Jewish opinion, they argue that any act of brutal violence against innocent Jews justifies a state program of mass race murder.  This broken logic can’t persuade an ethical Jew, regardless of the anger and sorrow he feels at racist crimes.

A deranged being’s psychotic act, though viciously racist, cannot serve to excuse coldly calculated and executed state genocide, and an ethical Jew knows it in his heart.  Nonetheless, it faces him or her with a hard choice.  His/her sympathies will be with victims of their own religion, and that inclination will require him to honor his ethics, and not yield to the passion of the moment. 

This is asking a great deal from normal humans with vulnerability to their emotions, but difficult, and appropriate, moral choices are demanded in the core of Judaic teachings.  This being the case, it is probable that a great plurality of Jews worldwide disapprove of the genocidal policies of Israeli leadership.

True or not, a further moral conundrum faces Jews individually and collectively worldwide.  That is the question of how their convictions about Israel’s genocide are articulated to the world.

Some Jewish groups and organizations, and large numbers— perhaps a majority—of younger Jews in America and elsewhere have made their shame and adamant disapproval very clear.  These substantial elements, vocal and courageous as they are, do not begin to represent a worldwide consensus of Jewry.

The overall impression, instead, seems to be that the great silent majority of world Jews, in spite of the ethical perspective that should govern their posture on the genocide, passively endorses, or at least accepts the fact of it, without protest.

Israel’s evil, but in some measure successful, effort to co-opt all of world Jewry in their genocide, besides exposing that nation for the brutal fraud it is and has always been, has done grievous and irremediable harm to Jews worldwide.  In an effort at specious exoneration of its own unforgivable villainy, it has made its entire religion appear blameworthy to the civilized world.

And as Isaiah said, when Israel betrayed itself:  “For we have made a covenant with death, and with Hell are we in agreement.”