When Criticism of Israel Becomes a Test for Jews Everywhere

A decent society should be able to hold several ideas together at once: Israel can act wrongly. Palestinians can suffer grievously. Hamas can commit atrocities. And Jews can still be treated unfairly in the way all of this is discussed.

The problem is that much of today’s discourse no longer keeps those distinctions intact.

What begins as criticism of Israeli policy often becomes criticism of Jewish legitimacy. What begins as anger at a government drifts into suspicion toward a people. Jews feel that shift not as theory, but as social fact: in classrooms, in workplaces, online, outside synagogues and in the ambient demand that Jews distance themselves from Israel in order to prove their moral acceptability.

That demand should be rejected.

Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. States can sin. Governments can become reckless. Wars can be fought in ways that deserve sharp condemnation. No serious Jew should deny that. A people secure in its own moral tradition should not fear judgment of state conduct.

But something more than judgment is happening now.

There is a difference between arguing that a military campaign is wrongful and arguing that a Jewish state is inherently illegitimate. There is a difference between condemning settlements and denying Jewish self-determination as such. There is a difference between criticizing a government and treating Jews elsewhere as morally implicated in that government’s conduct simply because they are Jews.

These are basic distinctions. Yet much of our public life now depends on blurring them.

That is why so many Jews feel the argument is not really about this or that Israeli policy. It is about whether Jewish particularity may exist in public without apology. It is about whether Jewish attachment to Israel counts as a normal expression of peoplehood or as evidence of moral contamination. It is about whether Jews are allowed the same political complexity granted to everyone else.

Other diasporas are not usually treated this way. People understand that one may care deeply about another country without being answerable for every decision of its government. But many Jews are now expected to denounce, disclaim and perform distance in ways that would be recognized as illiberal if imposed on most other groups.

Attachment is not culpability.

Many Jews love Israel not because they think it is flawless, but because Jewish history without power was not a golden age of ethical refinement. It was also an age of dependency, vulnerability, expulsion, massacre and humiliation. To understand why Israel matters to Jews, one does not need to romanticize every government in Jerusalem. One only needs to remember that Jewish powerlessness was not morally cleansing to the Jews forced to endure it.

This is why the present mood feels so dangerous. The pressure is no longer merely to criticize Israel. The pressure is to treat Jewish sovereignty as uniquely suspect and Jewish fear as uniquely untrustworthy. Jewish grief is often interrogated before it is acknowledged. Antisemitism becomes harder for many educated people to recognize once Jews have already been reassigned to the category of the powerful.

That is not moral sophistication. It is moral distortion.

None of this means Palestinian suffering should be minimized. It should not be. Civilian suffering in Gaza is real. The moral obligations of power are real. A serious Jewish conscience should be able to say all of that plainly. But seriousness also requires refusing the lie that Hamas is incidental, that Oct. 7, 2023 is secondary, or that the Jewish state is the one nation whose sins retroactively nullify its legitimacy.

American Jews should not accept a framework in which they are forever summoned to prove they are the good kind of Jews by showing more coldness toward their own people than anyone else is asked to show toward theirs.

The better standard is simpler. Judge Israel as you would judge any state: rigorously, truthfully and proportionately. Defend Palestinian dignity without romanticizing Hamas. Condemn antisemitism even when it adopts the language of justice. And do not turn Jews in America into symbolic defendants in a global morality play.

A decent society can criticize Israel without making Jewish legitimacy itself the issue.

At the moment, too much of American life is failing that test.

Emir J. Phillips is a teacher and scholar with 25+ years of professional experience spanning finance, economics, law, and entrepreneurship.