If you oppose the state of Israel, this post is not for you. Let me repeat: This post is not for you.

Many of my readers here, Jews and non-Jews, are already clear about the wrongness of what Israel is doing in Gaza. A subset of those readers are already clear that the State of Israel—as it was designed and constructed as an ethnocracy, an apartheid state, a Jewish supremacist state, what have you—is a historic injustice.

This post is not for you.

This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify as Zionist or with parts of the Zionist project, who have supported, or continue to support, the military actions of the Israeli government in Gaza (even if they vehemently oppose Netanyahu), people who call for a return of the hostages and a ceasefire and say no more, people who fear that anti-Israel protests on college campuses are a sign of rising antisemitism in the US, people who believe, or hope, that Israel as a Jewish state is a cause worth defending.

This post is for you.

It’s for you because, given the way algorithms go and online communities sort themselves out, you may not have seen some developments in the last few days, among people who hold or once held views similar to yours. I’m posting these statements here just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing. And it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm. Most of these individuals below continue to identify as Zionists, as liberal Zionists, and of those who no longer identify as Zionist, they come by their positions honestly, as I hope you will see.

Omer Bartov, July 15, 2025

Born in Israel in 1954, Bartov fought in the Yom Kippur War as a company commander. He’s become one of the leading international scholars on Nazism and the Holocaust. In a piece titled, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” he writes:

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide.

A side note: According to statements from the governor of New York and chancellor of CUNY, were a faculty or staff member or student at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation of Bartov’s research on the Holocaust and comparison to his claims about the war on Gaza, they could be disciplined and fired.

Michael Ben-Yair, July 29, 2025

Ben-Yair is the former Attorney General of Israel. He writes:

Jews, who went through a genocide 80 years ago, are committing genocide in Gaza.

Side note: Were a faculty or staff member or student at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation of and comparison to the Holocaust, they could be disciplined and fired.

David Grossman, August 1, 2025

Grossman is an Israeli novelist and journalist. For a generation of Jews my age (I was born in 1967), he defined what it was to a moral voice of liberalism in Israel. During the First Intifada, he awakened many of us to the plight of the Palestinians. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten tired of what has come to feel like a shtick. I’ve grown somewhat cynical about Grossman, who embodies the agonized conscience of Israeli state power. Even so, I was extremely surprised that he came out with this, and am hoping that for other Jews my age, who still look to Grossman as a guide, that they may heed his words. First this:

For years, I refused to use the word ‘genocide.’ But now I can’t hold back from using it, after what I’ve read in the newspapers, after the images I’ve seen and after talking to people who have been there.

And then this:

I want to speak as a person who has done everything he could to avoid having to call Israel a genocidal state. And now, with immense pain and a broken heart, I have to say that it is happening before my eyes. Genocide.

Dov Waxman, August 1, 2025

Waxman is the Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies at UCLA. A former colleague of mine at CUNY, he’s a leading and widely respected scholar of political science and Israeli politics. He writes:

I initially rejected the genocide charge, but I have changed my mind….It has been a long and emotionally difficult process over the past 22 months of horrific violence and heartbreaking suffering in Gaza for me to conclude that Israel is guilty of genocide. The possibility that Israel, a Jewish state legitimized by the Nazis’ genocide of Jews, could itself carry out a genocide was one that I, probably like most Jewish people, could barely countenance. I also struggled to accept the possibility that Jews, the victims of genocide, could become the perpetrators of one. Because my conception of genocide was based on the Holocaust, it was also hard for me to recognize that genocide does not have to involve the deliberate attempt to exterminate an entire people, nor does it have to be the ultimate goal. The Holocaust was significantly different from the genocide in Gaza today in many ways. However, this fact should not prevent us from recognizing that what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza amounts to the crime of genocide.

Lihi Ben Shitrit, August 2, 2025

Ben Shitrit is the Henry and Marilyn Taub Associate Professor of Israel studies at NYU and director of NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies. She writes:

As an Israeli political scientist researching Israeli and Palestinian politics, I’m regularly invited by different universities to speak about the Middle East. Inevitably, someone in the audience asks what I think about the allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. While I have been unequivocal about my opposition to the current war, I tell them that I’m not a lawyer or an expert on international law. Therefore I have no authority with which to judge on the question of genocide. This is a copout….I think there are several reasons for many liberal Jews’ tremendous difficulty in seriously confronting the question of whether Israel is committing genocide, including a misunderstanding of what genocide can look like. None of these, however, if we are truly honest with ourselves, justify turning away from it….I am familiar with emotions of outrage and revulsion with the conduct of the Israeli government and the dissemination of Jewish supremacy, but the question of genocide, I now understand, provoked new feelings I had not encountered before — shame and guilt. As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, August 3, 2025

Ben-Ami is head of J Street, a mainstream pro-Israel organization in the US. His father fought in the Irgun. He writes:

Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide. I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention. Based on the law as I read it, the Prime Minister and others in his government will have to answer for what they have done and will be held accountable….The stain of this abomination will forever be on the Jewish people because we have not stopped this. Far too many have been far too silent.

Avrum Burg, July 26, 2025

Burg is the former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, former interim President of Israel, former chair of the Jewish Agency, and former chair of the World Zionist Organization. He writes:

Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since….The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist.

Side note: Were a faculty or staff member or student at CUNY to make such a statement, with its questioning of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, they could be disciplined and fired.

For many of you, statements like these are old news. Too little, too late. Again, this post is not for you.

This post is for readers of mine, many of whom I know personally, who are still wrestling with these questions, and who feel that the only people who would say that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide or that Israel is in a condition of profound moral wrong, are people who are not like them. That is, people who are antisemites, leftists who’ve been indoctrinated by college professors or their peers, followers of Zohran Mamdani, editors at the New York Times (who folks on this side of the issue think are anti-Israel), and so on. I’m trying to show readers that that people who are like them, or who once were like them, have also come to this position.

For those of you who oppose State of Israel, what I’m doing here may seem like a fool’s errand. Or may give insufficient weight the voices of Palestinians who’ve said this for a long time or to other dissenters who have said this for a long time, and have paid for their positions in one way or another.

I certainly understand that argument, and it has an important place. But I don’t think it exhausts the field of political debate. I say this from personal experience.

In my lifetime, I’ve undergone some profound changes of belief and position. As many friends of mine from graduate school will tell you, when I arrived at Yale, I was staunchly opposed to the effort to unionize graduate students. Staunchly. I spoke against it repeatedly. I wound up leading our union and taking out our members on strike. This was a fundamental shift for me, involving not just questions about unions and activism but how I related to the left as a whole.

On the question of Israel, I, like many other Jews my age, was raised in a Zionist household. My family and I, all five of my sisters, my parents, along with my grandfather, traveled to Israel in 1977 on a trip sponsored by our synagogue, Temple Beth El, and our rabbi, Rabbi Chaim Stern, and his family.

I continued to support the State of Israel through my years in college.

But a combination of factors, between the ages of 20 and 26, changed my mind, my whole being, on this issue. It took me a long time to change. This was the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was painful. It often has involved bitter, emotional arguments with people I love very much, including my mom, who died last year.

So while I understand that for many readers here I am in one camp, and perhaps can’t even be trusted on this question, I do have a very clear understanding and personal memory of where a lot of people who disagree with me on this issue are coming from. And I understand, I think, how uneasy and uncertain one can be in moments of confusion and debate, and that terrible feeling of not knowing whom to trust, and fearing that antisemitism lurks underneath or behind every criticism of the State of Israel. I get it.

I’m hoping some of these other voices that I’ve provided here can provide a path, a path, I hope, that leads readers closer to my own position. But even if not, at least to some understanding and to less distrust of what lies on my side of this issue.