It is not clear to me how it works, although I saw it in my parents, but as I get older, more and more of what is important to me is filtered through my Jewish identity. Profoundly uneducated in Jewish matters, largely uninterested for most of my life, focusing instead on a liberal, more universalist identity, with broad interests and exposure, too many elitisms, love and friendships with many different types of people, it is now my Judaism that can no longer be held aside. It is deep somewhere in my psyche. And so when I think of Israel and Israelis, I feel that they could be me.
This was a lot to think about in June and July when I was in Israel during and following the 12-day war with Iran, and during the ongoing war in Gaza. There was never much danger to me. I am not a soldier or a civilian in Gaza, and my life has been sheltered, never in a war zone.
I arrived in Jerusalem on June 12, the evening of the war, for the wedding of my cousin Miriam’s son and a six-day trip that extended to over a month. The wedding was scheduled for the next day, but in the middle of the night Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear capacity, and Iran responded with missiles. At the Dan Hotel we were awakened twice by alerts and directed to concrete stairwells for safety.
The groom, Yishai, woke up early the next morning and dressed for his wedding, determined to marry. His bride, Nomi, joined him in the hotel lobby where they remade their wedding, reducing it from 300 guests in a large place, to about 60 in their landlords’ garden. Nothing seemed lost, except most of the guests, certainly not the couple’s joy, nor everyone else’s. The bride’s family had traveled from Australia; the groom’s is from the United States, now mostly living in Israel. Those present were a blend of Australians, Americans and Israelis, secular and religious. Everyone was friendly and interactive, an ecumenical Judaism I had not seen previously, and everyone knew the same songs and music.
Afterwards, we were seated at the hotel for a family dinner, when again missile alerts sent us to below-ground safe rooms. We were guided downstairs by the hotel staff, almost entirely Israeli Arab, courteous, friendly, sharing the same danger; I wondered what they thought of us. Between missile volleys, they gave us twelve minutes to run upstairs and get food. So our dinner was in the basement, and there was singing led by the groom’s family.
The next evening, there was a Shabbat dinner at the house of the rabbi, the groom’s uncle, who had performed the service. Miriam and Jonathan then drove me to Tel Aviv; and after two nights with them, I was briefly in a hotel booked for my Hebrew teacher’s canceled dance performance. Miriam’s sister Laura then moved me to her boyfriend Paul’s large house near Haifa, where I was safe and entertained by cooking, his family and his humor. After the war, I spent a few days with Laura in the Galilee, followed by a visit to old friends in Jerusalem. So during the 12-day missile war, I was near safe rooms or with Israelis and Americans who knew how to find them.
At the beginning of the conflict, I was calm, from ignorance, but my nervousness increased with time. A few weeks later, a Houthi missile alert triggered shaking legs. Every alert and every dash to safety is now a memory, one notably while driving to Tel Aviv with Miriam and Jonathan–their sudden intense focus as we passed the airport, left the highway, and took refuge in a public park and shelter. We were welcomed to safety, offered soda by the local vice mayor and told that the Lord would protect us. The concrete safe rooms, miklatim, are communal real estate that can be ranked by size and strength, comfort and the quality of their air-conditioning. By far the largest, the most comfortable, the cleanest that I saw, were the two large rooms at the Dan Hotel in Jerusalem. My favorite, the funkiest, and the most terrifying was in the cinder-block basement under Miriam and Jonathan’s building. We saw the missiles above us while rushing to it and heard them intercepted or hit. We shared the shelter with babies, dogs, twin brothers and their radio.
Israel’s Iron Dome defense system is effective, but the Iranian missiles were numerous and powerful. Most were hit by intercept missiles; a few landed. About twenty-eight people in Israel were killed, and a much larger number were displaced. In Tel Aviv, a single strike did wide and severe damage.
There is a shortage of safe rooms in Israel. Older parts of Tel Aviv and some of the Arab towns are lacking them, but where they do exist, everyone is welcomed. (I was told if on the street, to just follow everyone.) At my first Tel Aviv hotel, neighbors came and joined the hotel guests around an oversized conference table, and most of the hotel guests were Israelis who had checked into the hotel in order to have access to its safe room. At the end of my visit, at a second hotel, on the beach in Tel Aviv, many of the guests were refugees from damaged apartments. Israel’s alert systems are also well organized. I downloaded a telephone app from the Home Front Command. Its loud sirens warned of each impending strike, giving us a few minutes to move to the vicinity of a safe room; a second siren then told us to move into the room immediately. Military intelligence tracked when missiles were fired, roughly where they were directed, and roughly when they would land, if not intercepted. We were never in the safe rooms for long, but sometimes there were two or even three attacks in 24 hours, and once there was a disconcerting three-hour lag between the warning and the second alerts. (In the first Tel Aviv hotel, I stopped getting undressed at night. ) Generally the app, or a safe room television signaled the end of each attack, and the Israelis pivoted immediately to surprising normalcy.
Although a few Israelis were killed in safe rooms, that was rare, and judging the unlikelihood of a direct hit, I chose to stay in Israel, instead of leaving through Jordan or Egypt. This is what I meant about my changing outlook. Staying was not about agreement with Israel’s war strategies, rather identification. I chose to stay near my cousins, near events in Jewish history, instead of in the American interlude that has occupied most of my life .
America is changing. It no longer feels like the safe place where I grew up. Guns are everywhere, including across the street this morning where a neighbor was threatening to kill herself. The progressive left is anti-Zionist. A mere generation after my mother fled from Europe, we have become oppressors or privileged white people, a perspective that dismisses entirely what I have felt and seen, while on the right, Jews are associated with conspiracy theories, and hatred has become acceptable in governance. The President himself has frequented nationalist anti-Semites, yet his administration denounces left-wing anti-Semitism on campus. I am alienated politically.
Regarding Israel, I don’t have to agree with its aggressive response in Gaza to understand that Jews still need defending, and not just in Israel. During my visit, I saw young people in uniform carrying guns. This was unthinkable in my life. I learned to defend myself with my brain, my education, and my speech. I have no idea how to defend myself or my community physically; I have never lived in a society where I needed to. It is not that America isn’t violent; rather it is that some of us have been coddled and protected because of who we are and where we live. We tend to be self-righteous, because the dirty work is done by others. In Israel everyone participates.
Israelis view this war differently than we do, and much of what I wanted to understand was that. Perhaps like all countries at war, Israelis focus on their own fears and sacrifices and their own losses: that is the massacres of October 7, the hostages and loss of soldiers, the fear of infiltration from Hezbollah, attacks from Yemen, the threat from Iran. One friend, a unit commander for three months in Gaza, told me that his greatest fear was the loss of one of his thirty men. Israelis are properly focused on their self-defense, acutely aware that they are surrounded by enemies that view Israel as a state that should not exist. Even former enemies accept it, only because they finally understandd that they cannot destroy it.
As in the United States, there is a powerful right wing in the Israeli government. Not only is Gaza being demolished in the pursuit of Hamas’ destruction, but also the war has emboldened extremists in the settlement movement who are attacking Palestinians for land on the West Bank. Some Israelis are fighting it. I met a family friend at the wedding, an American/Israeli, who afterwards joined one of the groups that is trying to protect Palestinian farmers. Yet the West Bank now has about 700,000 Israeli residents, indicating that since 1967 government policy has on balance supported settlement. I have a young friend from Beitar Illit, a Haredi (orthodox) city on the West Bank, with a population of over 64,000 in 2022. The city is not recognized in international law, yet it is just ten miles southwest of Jerusalem and this friend told me that the border with Israel proper is not easily noticed. Israel has a substantial Arab minority. A Palestinian West Bank state would also have a substantial Jewish minority, not accounting for possible land-swaps. Israel has been imperfectly successful in accommodating its Arab population, but a Palestinian state with Jewish “occupiers” as residents, in a region where ancient Jewish communities no longer exist in Moslem states? One wonders how these two ethno-states could co-exist with mixed populations and the enmity between them.
Until the recent hunger crisis, Israelis were somewhat sheltered by their media from the suffering of Gazans. This wasn’t universal of course. The prominent liberal newspaper Haaretz regularly criticizes the war policies of the Israeli government. Old friends in Jerusalem told me that they initially supported this war, but now view it as a war of revenge and a tactic for maintaining Netanyahu’s government. Perhaps most blame Hamas, its war from within its civilian population; its unwillingness to release the hostages, its refusal to surrender, its insistence on survival. Many Israelis, including senior officers in Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF) would like to focus on the release of the remaining hostages and a cease fire, but at this writing, the Israeli government is insisting on a return of all the hostages and total disarmament and surrender, which Hamas refuses. Conciliatory views have not prevailed in Israel’s government. After years of trying to buy-off and contain Hamas, the government, after October 7, now insists that it must remove and destroy it. (Hamas in turn has insisted that its attacks will be repeated.) If the removal of Hamas is considered a security necessity for Israel, and if Hamas is fighting from within and without regard to its civilian population, then the deaths of the Palestinians becomes a predictable and acceptable outcome for both sides of the conflict.
What would Israel’s policy have been if it had reacted more decisively to the intelligence warnings it received regarding Hamas military preparation for this attack? Would it have demolished Gaza in its determination to destroy the tunnels? Would it have insisted on destroying Hamas, or might it instead have developed a slower, more careful strategy, including cutting off the funding that Hamas received from Qatar, which it had countenanced? Of course any Israeli strategy would have been criticized, but perhaps with fewer civilians dead.
Anti-Zionism has become popular in the West. In Israel its legitimacy is a given, a historical necessity. There is a fashionable view in some circles that anti-Zionism is separable from anti-Semitism, yet although not identical, they are not easily separable; read the Bible. The pre-Zionist argument was not about whether but about when Jews should return to live in the Land, and arguably more of us would have survived the pogroms and the Holocaust if it had happened sooner.
In many Palestinian and some Arab circles the existence of Israel is unacceptable, making long-term peace impossible. Some speak about de-radicalizing the Palestinian population so that moderation is taught in the schools. But Zionism also has its extremists; some are presently ministers in government. The belief that God gave us the land needs to be moderated by the reality that the Old Testament is largely a history of ongoing war, and that the Palestinians, like the Jews, have proven unwilling and unable to go elsewhere.
For Israel to continue to fulfill its present role, as a gathering place and a safe haven for Jews, it must be an ethno-state, like the ethno states around it, retaining a Jewish majority and control, albeit with rights for its minorities. Some may not believe in ethno-states, as they do not offer equal political power to all types of citizens. This does not mean that a Jewish state is illegitimate, or that pluralistic states do not have cruel wars and stubborn inequalities . . .
The anti-Semitism that led to Zionism and the founding of Israel was mostly European, not Middle Eastern, and yet because our historic origins were in Israel, it is Arabs who were displaced, largely because they refused to agree to a Jewish state in a region that they had dominated for over 1,000 years. The Arabs were originally outside conquerors of Palestine in 636-38, and other Arab countries could have absorbed the Palestinians in 1948. But they would not accept partition of the land into two states when they thought they had the power to deny it. Now many insist on two states, when they may have lost the power to get one. Still , the displacement of Palestinian civilians is an injustice, not by biblical standards but according to modern morality. Since Israel must exist for the Jews, our issue should be how to correct the injustice without giving it back. For the Arabs, it should be how to obtain justice, when they cannot have the land back. There is no other solution to endless war.
Cousin Yishai is an Arabic speaker, a student at the Hebrew University, a certified tour guide, and a big reader. So when he recommended the autobiography of Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian intellectual, I read it. Nusseibeh offers an interesting perspective on reconciliation on page 164. Driving near Jerusalem as a young man, an older peasant woman leapt in front of his car, to catch a bus. He hit her, but gently, she was fine. Three weeks later, his father, a notable in Jerusalem, came to see him and asked what he had done. “You failed to do the main thing”, he said. “By not apologizing, you impugned the honor of their family and ours.” Whether guilty or not was irrelevant; the family had to honor the family of the victim. So 100 of Dr. Nusseibeh’s family members drove to the old woman’s village, where apologies were made and compensation was offered. The woman’s family accepted the show of respect and showed their respect by refusing to take anything.
Dr. Nusseibeh said the following to an Israeli audience after telling this story, years after the event. “It doesn’t matter whether you set out premeditatedly to cause the Palestinian refugee tragedy”, “the tragedy did occur, even as an indirect consequence of your actions. In our tradition, you have to own up to this. You have to come and offer an apology. Only this way will Palestinians feel that their dignity has been recognized, and be able to forgive. But by denying all responsibility, besides being historically absurd, you will guarantee eternal antagonism—and a never-ending search for revenge.”
On July 10, Yishai took me on a day tour of southern Israel, to visit a social worker in a Bedouin town, to see Gaza from a distance, and to the kibbutzim destroyed on October 7 that are being rebuilt. We drove south, to an observation point, near a military installation, from which we could see Gaza. It was a hot day, on a dirt hill, with a covered observation platform, and a view over fields to the border, to still-standing high rises, and to ruins, all visible at a distance. There was an explosion, and a slow rising mushroom cloud. Apparently these are meant to destroy sections of the tunnel system, or booby traps that prevent soldiers from entering buildings, but they bring the buildings down. Later in the day, from the highway, we saw two or three more.
Next we stopped to have a look at the memorial that has been made at the Nova Festival site. There were a few cars and one or two buses of visitors, speaking Hebrew. Large printed photos on posts of each person murdered were clustered on what had been the festival dance floor. Nearby, trees are being planted for each one of the dead, again next to a printed photo and a name, on a post. I looked at several of these pictures—most were young—and wondered why they had died instead of me. I was frightened by an explosion; there were two or three while we were there, but none of the other visitors reacted. They were the sounds of missiles, not landing, but being launched from nearby.
I wrote the preceding paragraphs in the morning, in my Tel Aviv hotel room, following a 5 AM alert and a walk down six flights of stairs to a safe room, to shelter from a Houthi missile shot from Yemen. I am having trouble thinking about New York, about conversations about vacations or restaurants, social and professional contacts, vacations. Even US politics seems like a series of cartoons. I want to shut it all out. Israel’s fight for survival is much more elemental, although the extent and ferocity of war also becomes devoid of meaning.
Jewish history insists on particularity, on a particular relationship with God, and on the texts and culture that derive from it. Now for the first time, I feel its length and the lengthy, historical aversion to us. I am the close descendant of Jews, of victims, living for most of my life in the moral assurance of the victim, witness to its trauma. Now I see clearly that I am also a descendant of perpetrators, those who refused Christ and crucified him, who lived as middle-men or on usury, on the backs of Polish or Ukrainian peasants–the descendant of Jews who assimilated, too successfully, took too many of society’s top positions, too capitalistic or too liberal, too radical now too nationalistic, now Zionists, supporters of genocide. There has always a good reason to dislike us. It is not clear what path to follow, how to end the periodic persecution without choosing to disappear. . yet I will not remove myself from it. My mother once, said, “I am no longer afraid to be a Jew.”, and to this I add that I will not be embarrassed to be one.
Yishai also drove me to Rahat, the largest of Israel’s Bedouin towns. It is not unpleasant; neither is it particularly attractive. The buildings date from recent decades; there aren’t too many trees. Like much of urban Israel it is not particularly attractive. Much of urban Israel was built too quickly, to house immigrants. It is the personalities that make Israel interesting. In Rahat, we met in a café with a Bedouin social worker, with whom Ishai had common connections and interests, related to Arab-Jewish peace efforts, and therefore reasons to stay in touch. Ahmed was polite, friendly, seemingly soft, with his eyes largely closed in the sunlight outdoors. In the café, he insisted on paying for our coffees, but when we were seated, his eyes are wide open and his manner friendly and polite. Ahmed is Bedouin, that is dark skinned with deep dark eyes, but like the others in Rahat, he is a town dweller, that is no longer nomadic. The Bedouin population are the most closely related to the historic Arabs, that is the tribes that originated and invaded from the Arabian peninsula. Now the Israeli Bedouin are somewhat marginalized, sometimes involved in illegal businesses. Ahmed is a social worker, educated at McGill, fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, running a social program for Bedouin youth, many of whom lack a clear sense of their role and their identity, often underemployed. He meets with us, and everybody else I think, drumming up support for his work, to which he is seriously committed.
Finally we drive past some of the Gaza border Moshavim and Kibbutzim, the border communities that were attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023. These are being rebuilt, although we decide not to enter them to avoid voyeurism. One of them has a bicycle store and a café that doubles as a cheese shop, selling kibbutz-made products. These we visit. One of the Moshavim has also built a temporary dining and rest center for soldiers and reservists, when they are off duty. It has a large kitchen and tables, a bit makeshift but nice. A young woman from New York shows us around. She is clearly American, but her slight accent, she explains, comes from her Orthodox upbringing. The volunteers cook and serve free food to those who are protecting them. The day we stopped-in was schnitzel day; they were waiting for the arrival of the volunteer whose schnitzel has a reputation.
In the last week of my trip, I met a young Israeli, the unit commander in Gaza, the friend raised in Beitar Illit, and we had a number of long conversations. He was raised in an orthodox household, studied in a yeshiva, speaks Hebrew, English, Yiddish, some Russian and Spanish, and he has read the Talmud in Aramaic. He was in the Israeli Defense Forces as a soldier, an officer, and a reservist. He spoke directly about who he is and what he thinks: fearless, engaged, and direct, with a close and wide circle of friends and acquaintances of whom nearly 20 have died in the Gaza War. His life is entirely different from mine, and yet I learned from him and felt at home in his company. This is Israel, and why I will go back to it.
Larry Sicular
September 2025
Israel at War
It is not clear to me how it works, although I saw it in my parents, but as I get older, more and more of what is important to me is filtered through my Jewish identity. Profoundly uneducated in Jewish matters, largely uninterested for most of my life, focusing instead on a liberal, more universalist identity, with broad interests and exposure, too many elitisms, love and friendships with many different types of people, it is now my Judaism that can no longer be held aside. It is deep somewhere in my psyche. And so when I think of Israel and Israelis, I feel that they could be me.
This was a lot to think about in June and July when I was in Israel during and following the 12-day war with Iran, and during the ongoing war in Gaza. There was never much danger to me. I am not a soldier or a civilian in Gaza, and my life has been sheltered, never in a war zone.
I arrived in Jerusalem on June 12, the evening of the war, for the wedding of my cousin Miriam’s son and a six-day trip that extended to over a month. The wedding was scheduled for the next day, but in the middle of the night Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear capacity, and Iran responded with missiles. At the Dan Hotel we were awakened twice by alerts and directed to concrete stairwells for safety.
The groom, Yishai, woke up early the next morning and dressed for his wedding, determined to marry. His bride, Nomi, joined him in the hotel lobby where they remade their wedding, reducing it from 300 guests in a large place, to about 60 in their landlords’ garden. Nothing seemed lost, except most of the guests, certainly not the couple’s joy, nor everyone else’s. The bride’s family had traveled from Australia; the groom’s is from the United States, now mostly living in Israel. Those present were a blend of Australians, Americans and Israelis, secular and religious. Everyone was friendly and interactive, an ecumenical Judaism I had not seen previously, and everyone knew the same songs and music.
Afterwards, we were seated at the hotel for a family dinner, when again missile alerts sent us to below-ground safe rooms. We were guided downstairs by the hotel staff, almost entirely Israeli Arab, courteous, friendly, sharing the same danger; I wondered what they thought of us. Between missile volleys, they gave us twelve minutes to run upstairs and get food. So our dinner was in the basement, and there was singing led by the groom’s family.
The next evening, there was a Shabbat dinner at the house of the rabbi, the groom’s uncle, who had performed the service. Miriam and Jonathan then drove me to Tel Aviv; and after two nights with them, I was briefly in a hotel booked for my Hebrew teacher’s canceled dance performance. Miriam’s sister Laura then moved me to her boyfriend Paul’s large house near Haifa, where I was safe and entertained by cooking, his family and his humor. After the war, I spent a few days with Laura in the Galilee, followed by a visit to old friends in Jerusalem. So during the 12-day missile war, I was near safe rooms or with Israelis and Americans who knew how to find them.
At the beginning of the conflict, I was calm, from ignorance, but my nervousness increased with time. A few weeks later, a Houthi missile alert triggered shaking legs. Every alert and every dash to safety is now a memory, one notably while driving to Tel Aviv with Miriam and Jonathan–their sudden intense focus as we passed the airport, left the highway, and took refuge in a public park and shelter. We were welcomed to safety, offered soda by the local vice mayor and told that the Lord would protect us. The concrete safe rooms, miklatim, are communal real estate that can be ranked by size and strength, comfort and the quality of their air-conditioning. By far the largest, the most comfortable, the cleanest that I saw, were the two large rooms at the Dan Hotel in Jerusalem. My favorite, the funkiest, and the most terrifying was in the cinder-block basement under Miriam and Jonathan’s building. We saw the missiles above us while rushing to it and heard them intercepted or hit. We shared the shelter with babies, dogs, twin brothers and their radio.
Israel’s Iron Dome defense system is effective, but the Iranian missiles were numerous and powerful. Most were hit by intercept missiles; a few landed. About twenty-eight people in Israel were killed, and a much larger number were displaced. In Tel Aviv, a single strike did wide and severe damage.
There is a shortage of safe rooms in Israel. Older parts of Tel Aviv and some of the Arab towns are lacking them, but where they do exist, everyone is welcomed. (I was told if on the street, to just follow everyone.) At my first Tel Aviv hotel, neighbors came and joined the hotel guests around an oversized conference table, and most of the hotel guests were Israelis who had checked into the hotel in order to have access to its safe room. At the end of my visit, at a second hotel, on the beach in Tel Aviv, many of the guests were refugees from damaged apartments. Israel’s alert systems are also well organized. I downloaded a telephone app from the Home Front Command. Its loud sirens warned of each impending strike, giving us a few minutes to move to the vicinity of a safe room; a second siren then told us to move into the room immediately. Military intelligence tracked when missiles were fired, roughly where they were directed, and roughly when they would land, if not intercepted. We were never in the safe rooms for long, but sometimes there were two or even three attacks in 24 hours, and once there was a disconcerting three-hour lag between the warning and the second alerts. (In the first Tel Aviv hotel, I stopped getting undressed at night. ) Generally the app, or a safe room television signaled the end of each attack, and the Israelis pivoted immediately to surprising normalcy.
Although a few Israelis were killed in safe rooms, that was rare, and judging the unlikelihood of a direct hit, I chose to stay in Israel, instead of leaving through Jordan or Egypt. This is what I meant about my changing outlook. Staying was not about agreement with Israel’s war strategies, rather identification. I chose to stay near my cousins, near events in Jewish history, instead of in the American interlude that has occupied most of my life .
America is changing. It no longer feels like the safe place where I grew up. Guns are everywhere, including across the street this morning where a neighbor was threatening to kill herself. The progressive left is anti-Zionist. A mere generation after my mother fled from Europe, we have become oppressors or privileged white people, a perspective that dismisses entirely what I have felt and seen, while on the right, Jews are associated with conspiracy theories, and hatred has become acceptable in governance. The President himself has frequented nationalist anti-Semites, yet his administration denounces left-wing anti-Semitism on campus. I am alienated politically.
Regarding Israel, I don’t have to agree with its aggressive response in Gaza to understand that Jews still need defending, and not just in Israel. During my visit, I saw young people in uniform carrying guns. This was unthinkable in my life. I learned to defend myself with my brain, my education, and my speech. I have no idea how to defend myself or my community physically; I have never lived in a society where I needed to. It is not that America isn’t violent; rather it is that some of us have been coddled and protected because of who we are and where we live. We tend to be self-righteous, because the dirty work is done by others. In Israel everyone participates.
Israelis view this war differently than we do, and much of what I wanted to understand was that. Perhaps like all countries at war, Israelis focus on their own fears and sacrifices and their own losses: that is the massacres of October 7, the hostages and loss of soldiers, the fear of infiltration from Hezbollah, attacks from Yemen, the threat from Iran. One friend, a unit commander for three months in Gaza, told me that his greatest fear was the loss of one of his thirty men. Israelis are properly focused on their self-defense, acutely aware that they are surrounded by enemies that view Israel as a state that should not exist. Even former enemies accept it, only because they finally understandd that they cannot destroy it.
As in the United States, there is a powerful right wing in the Israeli government. Not only is Gaza being demolished in the pursuit of Hamas’ destruction, but also the war has emboldened extremists in the settlement movement who are attacking Palestinians for land on the West Bank. Some Israelis are fighting it. I met a family friend at the wedding, an American/Israeli, who afterwards joined one of the groups that is trying to protect Palestinian farmers. Yet the West Bank now has about 700,000 Israeli residents, indicating that since 1967 government policy has on balance supported settlement. I have a young friend from Beitar Illit, a Haredi (orthodox) city on the West Bank, with a population of over 64,000 in 2022. The city is not recognized in international law, yet it is just ten miles southwest of Jerusalem and this friend told me that the border with Israel proper is not easily noticed. Israel has a substantial Arab minority. A Palestinian West Bank state would also have a substantial Jewish minority, not accounting for possible land-swaps. Israel has been imperfectly successful in accommodating its Arab population, but a Palestinian state with Jewish “occupiers” as residents, in a region where ancient Jewish communities no longer exist in Moslem states? One wonders how these two ethno-states could co-exist with mixed populations and the enmity between them.
Until the recent hunger crisis, Israelis were somewhat sheltered by their media from the suffering of Gazans. This wasn’t universal of course. The prominent liberal newspaper Haaretz regularly criticizes the war policies of the Israeli government. Old friends in Jerusalem told me that they initially supported this war, but now view it as a war of revenge and a tactic for maintaining Netanyahu’s government. Perhaps most blame Hamas, its war from within its civilian population; its unwillingness to release the hostages, its refusal to surrender, its insistence on survival. Many Israelis, including senior officers in Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF) would like to focus on the release of the remaining hostages and a cease fire, but at this writing, the Israeli government is insisting on a return of all the hostages and total disarmament and surrender, which Hamas refuses. Conciliatory views have not prevailed in Israel’s government. After years of trying to buy-off and contain Hamas, the government, after October 7, now insists that it must remove and destroy it. (Hamas in turn has insisted that its attacks will be repeated.) If the removal of Hamas is considered a security necessity for Israel, and if Hamas is fighting from within and without regard to its civilian population, then the deaths of the Palestinians becomes a predictable and acceptable outcome for both sides of the conflict.
What would Israel’s policy have been if it had reacted more decisively to the intelligence warnings it received regarding Hamas military preparation for this attack? Would it have demolished Gaza in its determination to destroy the tunnels? Would it have insisted on destroying Hamas, or might it instead have developed a slower, more careful strategy, including cutting off the funding that Hamas received from Qatar, which it had countenanced? Of course any Israeli strategy would have been criticized, but perhaps with fewer civilians dead.
Anti-Zionism has become popular in the West. In Israel its legitimacy is a given, a historical necessity. There is a fashionable view in some circles that anti-Zionism is separable from anti-Semitism, yet although not identical, they are not easily separable; read the Bible. The pre-Zionist argument was not about whether but about when Jews should return to live in the Land, and arguably more of us would have survived the pogroms and the Holocaust if it had happened sooner.
In many Palestinian and some Arab circles the existence of Israel is unacceptable, making long-term peace impossible. Some speak about de-radicalizing the Palestinian population so that moderation is taught in the schools. But Zionism also has its extremists; some are presently ministers in government. The belief that God gave us the land needs to be moderated by the reality that the Old Testament is largely a history of ongoing war, and that the Palestinians, like the Jews, have proven unwilling and unable to go elsewhere.
For Israel to continue to fulfill its present role, as a gathering place and a safe haven for Jews, it must be an ethno-state, like the ethno states around it, retaining a Jewish majority and control, albeit with rights for its minorities. Some may not believe in ethno-states, as they do not offer equal political power to all types of citizens. This does not mean that a Jewish state is illegitimate, or that pluralistic states do not have cruel wars and stubborn inequalities . . .
The anti-Semitism that led to Zionism and the founding of Israel was mostly European, not Middle Eastern, and yet because our historic origins were in Israel, it is Arabs who were displaced, largely because they refused to agree to a Jewish state in a region that they had dominated for over 1,000 years. The Arabs were originally outside conquerors of Palestine in 636-38, and other Arab countries could have absorbed the Palestinians in 1948. But they would not accept partition of the land into two states when they thought they had the power to deny it. Now many insist on two states, when they may have lost the power to get one. Still , the displacement of Palestinian civilians is an injustice, not by biblical standards but according to modern morality. Since Israel must exist for the Jews, our issue should be how to correct the injustice without giving it back. For the Arabs, it should be how to obtain justice, when they cannot have the land back. There is no other solution to endless war.
Cousin Yishai is an Arabic speaker, a student at the Hebrew University, a certified tour guide, and a big reader. So when he recommended the autobiography of Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian intellectual, I read it. Nusseibeh offers an interesting perspective on reconciliation on page 164. Driving near Jerusalem as a young man, an older peasant woman leapt in front of his car, to catch a bus. He hit her, but gently, she was fine. Three weeks later, his father, a notable in Jerusalem, came to see him and asked what he had done. “You failed to do the main thing”, he said. “By not apologizing, you impugned the honor of their family and ours.” Whether guilty or not was irrelevant; the family had to honor the family of the victim. So 100 of Dr. Nusseibeh’s family members drove to the old woman’s village, where apologies were made and compensation was offered. The woman’s family accepted the show of respect and showed their respect by refusing to take anything.
Dr. Nusseibeh said the following to an Israeli audience after telling this story, years after the event. “It doesn’t matter whether you set out premeditatedly to cause the Palestinian refugee tragedy”, “the tragedy did occur, even as an indirect consequence of your actions. In our tradition, you have to own up to this. You have to come and offer an apology. Only this way will Palestinians feel that their dignity has been recognized, and be able to forgive. But by denying all responsibility, besides being historically absurd, you will guarantee eternal antagonism—and a never-ending search for revenge.”
On July 10, Yishai took me on a day tour of southern Israel, to visit a social worker in a Bedouin town, to see Gaza from a distance, and to the kibbutzim destroyed on October 7 that are being rebuilt. We drove south, to an observation point, near a military installation, from which we could see Gaza. It was a hot day, on a dirt hill, with a covered observation platform, and a view over fields to the border, to still-standing high rises, and to ruins, all visible at a distance. There was an explosion, and a slow rising mushroom cloud. Apparently these are meant to destroy sections of the tunnel system, or booby traps that prevent soldiers from entering buildings, but they bring the buildings down. Later in the day, from the highway, we saw two or three more.
Next we stopped to have a look at the memorial that has been made at the Nova Festival site. There were a few cars and one or two buses of visitors, speaking Hebrew. Large printed photos on posts of each person murdered were clustered on what had been the festival dance floor. Nearby, trees are being planted for each one of the dead, again next to a printed photo and a name, on a post. I looked at several of these pictures—most were young—and wondered why they had died instead of me. I was frightened by an explosion; there were two or three while we were there, but none of the other visitors reacted. They were the sounds of missiles, not landing, but being launched from nearby.
I wrote the preceding paragraphs in the morning, in my Tel Aviv hotel room, following a 5 AM alert and a walk down six flights of stairs to a safe room, to shelter from a Houthi missile shot from Yemen. I am having trouble thinking about New York, about conversations about vacations or restaurants, social and professional contacts, vacations. Even US politics seems like a series of cartoons. I want to shut it all out. Israel’s fight for survival is much more elemental, although the extent and ferocity of war also becomes devoid of meaning.
Jewish history insists on particularity, on a particular relationship with God, and on the texts and culture that derive from it. Now for the first time, I feel its length and the lengthy, historical aversion to us. I am the close descendant of Jews, of victims, living for most of my life in the moral assurance of the victim, witness to its trauma. Now I see clearly that I am also a descendant of perpetrators, those who refused Christ and crucified him, who lived as middle-men or on usury, on the backs of Polish or Ukrainian peasants–the descendant of Jews who assimilated, too successfully, took too many of society’s top positions, too capitalistic or too liberal, too radical now too nationalistic, now Zionists, supporters of genocide. There has always a good reason to dislike us. It is not clear what path to follow, how to end the periodic persecution without choosing to disappear. . yet I will not remove myself from it. My mother once, said, “I am no longer afraid to be a Jew.”, and to this I add that I will not be embarrassed to be one.
Yishai also drove me to Rahat, the largest of Israel’s Bedouin towns. It is not unpleasant; neither is it particularly attractive. The buildings date from recent decades; there aren’t too many trees. Like much of urban Israel it is not particularly attractive. Much of urban Israel was built too quickly, to house immigrants. It is the personalities that make Israel interesting. In Rahat, we met in a café with a Bedouin social worker, with whom Ishai had common connections and interests, related to Arab-Jewish peace efforts, and therefore reasons to stay in touch. Ahmed was polite, friendly, seemingly soft, with his eyes largely closed in the sunlight outdoors. In the café, he insisted on paying for our coffees, but when we were seated, his eyes are wide open and his manner friendly and polite. Ahmed is Bedouin, that is dark skinned with deep dark eyes, but like the others in Rahat, he is a town dweller, that is no longer nomadic. The Bedouin population are the most closely related to the historic Arabs, that is the tribes that originated and invaded from the Arabian peninsula. Now the Israeli Bedouin are somewhat marginalized, sometimes involved in illegal businesses. Ahmed is a social worker, educated at McGill, fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, running a social program for Bedouin youth, many of whom lack a clear sense of their role and their identity, often underemployed. He meets with us, and everybody else I think, drumming up support for his work, to which he is seriously committed.
Finally we drive past some of the Gaza border Moshavim and Kibbutzim, the border communities that were attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023. These are being rebuilt, although we decide not to enter them to avoid voyeurism. One of them has a bicycle store and a café that doubles as a cheese shop, selling kibbutz-made products. These we visit. One of the Moshavim has also built a temporary dining and rest center for soldiers and reservists, when they are off duty. It has a large kitchen and tables, a bit makeshift but nice. A young woman from New York shows us around. She is clearly American, but her slight accent, she explains, comes from her Orthodox upbringing. The volunteers cook and serve free food to those who are protecting them. The day we stopped-in was schnitzel day; they were waiting for the arrival of the volunteer whose schnitzel has a reputation.
In the last week of my trip, I met a young Israeli, the unit commander in Gaza, the friend raised in Beitar Illit, and we had a number of long conversations. He was raised in an orthodox household, studied in a yeshiva, speaks Hebrew, English, Yiddish, some Russian and Spanish, and he has read the Talmud in Aramaic. He was in the Israeli Defense Forces as a soldier, an officer, and a reservist. He spoke directly about who he is and what he thinks: fearless, engaged, and direct, with a close and wide circle of friends and acquaintances of whom nearly 20 have died in the Gaza War. His life is entirely different from mine, and yet I learned from him and felt at home in his company. This is Israel, and why I will go back to it.
Larry Sicular
September 2025