When is it too much?

July 21, 2025

 When I first came to Israel for my Bar Mitzva in 1969 at my request to my parents, I remember telling my mother, while sitting on the veranda of my cousin’s apartment in Givatayim gazing out towards Tel Aviv, shortly before Shabbat began that “I feel at home”. Israel is my home. “Home” - that one very large word is the best description that I have for Israel since moving here 47 years ago. I have no other place in the world where I feel “home” and yet Israel of 2025 is a very different place than it was in 1969 or in 1978 when I made aliya. Now I find myself conflicted everyday with the question of when is the time that I can no longer live in the place that I call home. Israel is rapidly becoming a foreign land to me, where people who share the same values of my own are attacked by the police, silenced in the media, and pushed to seriously consider that Israel is no longer a place where I can live.  I know that the talk-backers from the poison machine of the current Israeli regime will write: good riddance - we don’t want you and your kind here in the country. If I wasn’t Jewish, they would call me an antisemite, but since I am Jewish, they will label me a self-hating Jew.

Israel is committing horrendous war crimes in Gaza. I physically experience pain as I write these words. Israel has systematically destroyed a civilization in Gaza where the death toll climbs every day of non-Hamas civilians – women, children, elderly, sick, boys and girls, men who spend their days searching for shelter, food and water. Yes, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and committed horrific crimes against humanity and they bear responsibility for what has become of Gaza. But for almost two years, Israel is responsible for unspeakable horrors that will be ascribed to the State of Israel for years to come. Now people in Gaza are also dying from hunger before our eyes. About 80% of Gaza’s buildings have been erased – entire neighborhoods and towns gone, bombed, bulldozed, destroyed. Now even private Israeli contractors are profiteering from the destruction of buildings and lives in Gaza.  There is no place safe in Gaza for more than two million people. Just last night I sent some money to a Gaza family living in a tent in Deir el Balah because it is no longer safe for them to stay there, where they had found some sort of refuge from Israeli bombs. Another young family in Gaza that I have known for years sends me messages on whatsapp “we are hungry and thirsty” - it breaks my heart. I see the human tragedy every day that Israel has created in Gaza in my social media – the reportage that the Israeli media self-censor. Even when an extraordinary journalist like Emmanuele Elbaz Phelps ties to speak out on Channel 13 about the death and starvation in Gaza, she is shut down by Berko and Moria for daring to defame Israel. This is the reality for almost all of Israel’s media – deafening silence and self-censorship.

Israelis don’t want to know. I think that many of them have no regrets and are happy to see the suffering of the more than two million Gazans. This war of revenge has deep support from all over Israeli society, it is not just the government of Israel. It is true that a large majority of Israelis want a deal to bring the hostages home and to end the war, but probably a majority of Israelis also believe that there are no innocent people in Gaza.

Hatred against Arabs in Israel has reached new peaks. An Arab Member of Knesset, Ayman Odeh, is violently attacked and almost lynched and the police stand by watching. Ayman Odeh is accused of being a traitor, a fifth column, but ironically, Ayman Odeh is one of only a handful of Members of Knesset today who today would agree to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Most if not all of the Members of Knesset from today’s ruling coalition would refuse to sign the founding document of Israel because of its calling for peace and for the assertion that the state of Israel guarantees full equalaity for all Israelis, including the Palestinian citizens of Israel.  Some Members of Knesset from the right-wing parties might even label the Declaration of Independence of Israel as an antisemitic, or anti-Zionist document. Violence against Palestinians is all around us. Arab workers at a Jerusalem cinema are violently attacked on comera with cries “Death to the Arabs” and people casually watch as the walk by as if this is a normal and acceptable event. Arab bus drivers are beaten by Jewish passengers and then are arrested by Ben Gvir’s police for trying to defend themselves. Palestinians all over the West Bank are attacked by settlers with police and soldiers watching over the settlers. Palestinians are forced off their land and even killed by violent settlers and no one is arrested or convicted of crimes. In fact, these violent settlers are protected by the Israeli police and army which arrests and attacks the victims.

Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. Israel is committing war crimes in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Israel’s media is complacent in these war crimes. The Israeli public is responsible and we cannot escape our responsibility. It is not just the army, the police and the government. These war crimes are being done in my name, in our name, in the name of the people of Israel. We cannot be silent. Calling it out for what it is makes me, in the eyes of probably a majority of Israelis a traitor (and we know what happens to traitors).

From the beginning of the war in Gaza, my youngest son (31 years old) every Friday night at our Shabbat dinner would insist that I say what needs to happen for me to say that I can no longer live in Israel.  After months since the beginning of the war, I agreed to put down two red-lines. The first was easy: If Ben Gvir becomes Prime Minister of Israel I could no longer live here. The second one is more problematic and has a higher chance of becoming a reality: If after October 7 and all that has happened since, Netanyahu wins another election, then, I said, Israel is beyond repair. I say this still with the deep sense that I have no other home in the world and no other place in the world where I feel that I have something to do and a reason for existing.

I have spent my entire adult life trying to make Israel the kind of place that reflects my values – those that I used to think are Jewish values. I have dedicated my life to building bridges of understandings between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. I continue to do that work every day and I convinced more than ever that the chances of peace, of two states, is a lot closer than what most people believes. But the chances of peace and two states is also maybe farther away than ever before. If serious new leadership does not come forward in Israel, the chances of reversing the damage that has been done and spring boarding off the trauma toward healing as a society may never happen. That is the fear that I live with every day.

I remember the dilemmas of South Africans who were opposed to Apartheid who struggled with the question of staying to fight for justice and equality or determining that they could no longer live in a society which was so unjust and ugly. For me, now, at this time I am experiencing the same struggle. There are so many amazing Israelis doing wonderful things. There are so many positive things about Israeli society, but I fear that our country is being overtaken by the ugly, the unjust, the criminal, and hate and the fear. Our society is violent – how can it not be when so many hundreds of thousands of us do what they do in Gaza and then come home living with post-trauma. Violent behavior, anger, frustration and guilt do not stop at the border when they come home. The dehumanization which is enlisted and enhanced in order to be able to commit the crimes that Israel is doing in Gaza and in the West Bank meet some kind of cognitive dissonance at home which finds justification for behaviors and actions that cannot ever be justified.

This is the reality of Israel in July 2025. Fifty Israeli hostages are still abandoned in Gaza. Thousands of Israelis remain abandoned by the government after being made homeless by the wars that Israel has been fighting for more than 650 days. The Israeli government and the Prime Minister are more concerned with their power and their jobs giving corruption than they are concerned with the welfare of the people. Israel is becoming increasingly messianic and fundamentalistic. Israel is becoming the most hated country in the world and Israelis will continue to feel less welcomed wherever they travel. That is Israel 2025.

Still, there is no other place in the world that I can call home.  There is no other country in the world where I have a life’s mission to complete. But we are rapidly moving to the reality of a place that I will not want to call home, a place that I cannot call home, a place where I am no longer made to feel welcomed, and place that I will no longer want to be associated with. That is Israel of 2025.