Cheshbon hanefesh

The High Holidays are upon us. Many of us will dip apples in honey; some will soon sit in a temporary hut. But beneath the rituals lies a season of moral accounting. And this year, we have more than usual to account for.

Three years have passed since October 7, 2023, and no amount of honey can remove the bitterness of that day or of the terrible war it unleashed. Hamas’s horrifying attack and Israel’s devastating response have left Israelis traumatized, Palestinians shattered, and Jews around the world confronting questions that are painful even to articulate.

But this is precisely when we are commanded to look, rather than to look away.

Cheshbon hanefesh means an accounting of the soul. Just as we examine our own conduct, we must be willing to examine the conduct of the homeland we love. Denial does not defend Israel. It only deepens the damage.

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On October 7, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and deliberately murdered men, women and children. And those they left alive suffered torture, rape, and being dragged back to Gaza to serve as hostages. The world responded with horror and, for a time, with sympathy for Israel.

When the Netanyahu administration’s response failed as a concentrated campaign against Hamas and devolved into an urban war with exceedingly high civilian casualties, the onetime victim was suddenly perceived as the aggressor. It is not easy to wage war against a guerilla force that chooses to hide among its own civilian population. But the actions of the army and the pronouncements of the government made it clear that this was a different kind of war. Even as the Israeli army announced where and when their jets would be dropping bombs, warning the civilians to relocate, other military rules of engagement were changed.

The change was not merely one of scale. According to a New York Times investigation, the IDF substantially loosened its safeguards on October 7. In previous Gaza conflicts, many strikes were approved only when planners expected no civilian deaths. Some permitted a risk of as many as five; risking 10 or more was reportedly rare. The new order allowed mid-ranking officers to authorize strikes against even low-ranking Hamas members when as many as 20 Palestinian civilians were estimated to be at risk. A previous daily cumulative limit on civilian risk was also reportedly removed. For certain senior Hamas leaders, higher commanders approved strikes carrying far greater projected civilian costs.

Israel tightened some of those rules beginning November 5, but they remained more permissive than before the war. Whether the initial changes were an understandable response to an unprecedented emergency or a disastrous abandonment of restraint can be debated. Their consequences cannot.

It can be debated whether these new orders were reasonable considering the battlefield or extreme and badly conceived. But what we do know is that they changed the tenor of the war. Suddenly individual soldiers felt free to post videos of acts of vandalism and humiliation that they committed. Too often, discipline appeared absent. Government ministers spoke as if Gaza’s entire population were the enemy. Restrictions on food and other necessities were publicly celebrated by some officials. Displacement was not discussed merely as an unfortunate consequence of war but promoted by members of the governing coalition as an objective. As recently as this month, senior government officials were promoting a plan to remove all Palestinians from Gaza.

Words matter here. One reasonably can resist calling what the Bibi administration has promoted “genocide” because it is not extermination. It is not what the Nazis did to Jews during the Second World War nor what the Ottoman Turks did to Armenians in the First. But rejecting that language cannot become a way of excusing what the Israeli government has done and is doing. Moral accounting requires us to face what the evidence supports.

Nor is the crisis confined to Gaza. In the occupied West Bank, settlers armed with weapons provided by the Israeli administration have attacked Palestinian homes, villages, and farmland, vandalizing property, beating residents and in some cases killing them in full view of the Israeli army, which has made itself complicit by its program of inaction. Palestinian communities have been driven from their homes through intimidation and sustained abuse, forced from their homes through this campaign of terror and intimidation. The Israeli government’s activities continue largely unabated while various officials, including Netanyahu, utter empty words and deny the extent of the government’s program and its damage.

Israeli military commanders stationed in the West Bank now say they can no longer control the situation, fearing armed confrontation with the settler gangs that have the full support of the government.

Recent reporting in Haaretz alleges that the president of the United Arab Emirates personally warned Netantahu shortly before October 7 that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But Netanyahu dismissed them. He failed to disclose them to his security establishment. Instead, he ordered Israeli Defense Force deployments to the West Bank moving units away from the Gaza border.

Three years later, Hamas has still not been eliminated, and there is still no convincing political plan for what follows the fighting. And now former IDF generals warn of an impending security disaster in the West Bank due to out-of-control settler violence.

But it is the moral failures which are likely to do the most damage.

Once upon a time, Israel’s security was transformed not by permanent war but by peace agreements, first with Egypt and later with Jordan. Those relationships have grown cold, and efforts to expand Israel’s regional acceptance have been badly damaged. The Netanyahu government’s conduct has made even the talk of normalization, much less peace, politically toxic across much of the region.

The damage is visible beyond the Middle East. Several European countries have moved to restrict trade connected to West Bank settlements, responding to settlement expansion and escalating settler violence. These measures are carefully directed at the settlements rather than Israel as a whole, but they reflect a profound erosion of Israel’s international standing.

That erosion has reached the United States as well. In a midterm-election year already consumed by President Trump’s authoritarian conduct and extremist agenda, Israel’s war in Gaza and its policies in the West Bank have become American political issues. American Jews therefore face a moral accounting of our own.

For too long, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has conflated support for Israel with support for the Netanyahu government and its agenda. That conflation has been both a policy failure and a security failure. AIPAC strongly backed Netanyahu’s campaign against the Iran nuclear agreement. The agreement was imperfect, but it verifiably constrained Iran’s nuclear program; its collapse was followed by Iran’s unconstrained nuclear advances and, eventually, a ruinous regional war. Today that war has strengthened Iran’s determination, destabilized the region and effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to normal commercial traffic.

AIPAC’s political activity has also helped turn support for Israel into an increasingly partisan cause. It has spent heavily against candidates who support Israel’s existence and security but criticize the Netanyahu government, including American Jewish candidates. In defending nearly every action of Israel’s government, it has made itself, and increasingly Israel, an issue in American elections.

American Jews need not choose between indifference to Israel and obedience to its government. Organizations such as J Street and other liberal Zionist movements offer another path: support for Israel’s security and continued existence alongside unequivocal opposition to occupation, annexation, settler violence, and the mistreatment of Palestinian civilians. Once dismissed as insufficiently pro-Israel, these organizations may now be essential to preserving a pro-Israel constituency grounded in democratic and Jewish values.

This is both a moral and practical response as the misbehavior of the Netanyahu administration continues to erode Israel’s standing with the American public.

Israel and the United States both face serious security threats. Their alliance, built over decades, remains important to both countries. But alliances endure through shared interests and shared values not through silence, denial or unconditional political protection.

Cheshbon hanefesh does not mean abandoning Israel. It means refusing to abandon the values Israel was created to embody, the ideals inscribed in its Declaration of Independence. It requires acknowledging wrongdoing, changing course and repairing what can still be repaired.

That is not betrayal. It is the road to teshuvah.

Dr. Mark Gold of Teaneck holds a Ph.D. in economics from NYU. He is on the executive board of Partners for Progressive Israel, a member organization of the American Zionist Movement and an affiliate of the World Union of Meretz.

Hiam Simon of Englewood is the past chief operating officer of Ameinu, the leading progressive Zionist membership organization in the United States. He lived in Israel for many years, where he was the dean of students at what is now the Alexander Muss High School, and he served in the IDF as a noncommissioned officer in the artillery.