When Goodwill Toward Israel Goes Sour

Two leading Israeli analysts on how to respond to the sharp backlash that’s sure to increase as the IDF’s powerful wartime campaign steps up in Gaza.

From pride to weakness: The Israeli flag, and the nation it represents, have been battered this week.

Jerusalem – Yossi Klein Halevi, a leading American-Israeli journalist and author, told me on Friday morning that diaspora Jews should “savor this moment of international sympathy while it lasts” in the wake of the Simchat Torah massacre of more than 1,000 innocent Israeli men, women and children by Hamas terrorists. The Palestinian cause is certain to gain in the compassion competition, he said, when Israel unleashes “a ferocious response.”

Polls show that a majority of Americans side with Israel, especially in the wake of the Hamas pogrom. But with major American media turning its focus increasingly on the devastating results of Israel’s bombing raids on Gaza, and an imminent IDF ground assault that likely will be brutal, one can already sense the wave of empathy shifting sides. 

Halevi, who often writes with empathy for his Arab neighbors in covering the Arab-Israeli conflict, is willing to forego the world’s tears. 

“I’m very uncomfortable with the world's outpouring of sympathy for Israel,” he told me during our phone interview. Most important, he said, is that Israel do whatever necessary to reverse the image of “Jewish helplessness” that it has borne since Oct. 7, with the utter failure of the army, intelligence and political system to protect its citizens.

He said the IDF must eradicate the Hamas leadership, knowing that, tragically, such an assault almost certainly will result in large numbers of civilian casualties. “We don’t have any choice,” Klein Halevi said. “We destroy homes because Hamas operatives are in those homes. That is a legitimate and proportionate response.”

Klein Halevi cited a comment he read on social media that called out those who call for “proportionate response,” noting that, literally, a proportionate response to the brutal Hamas attack would be for Israel to burn elderly people and behead babies. “But of course that’s not who we are.

“It’s important to remind ourselves that this is not about revenge,” he asserted. “It’s about restoring Israel’s deterrence.”

How can Israel conduct an aggressive military assault against a barbaric terrorist group while maintaining moral codes of war? “For me the red line is Dresden,” Klein Halevi said, referring to the German city that during World War II was almost completely destroyed by allied bombing raids in February 1945, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Some historians said the raids quickened the defeat of the Nazis while others condemned it for excessive use of force.

In this case, allowing Hamas to continue to control Gaza appears immoral, both in terms of its treatment of its own population and the ongoing threat it represents to the citizens of Israel.

Klein Halevi said he is disturbed by “the gratuitous vulgarity and hatred” of some on the right who flaunt Jewish power and see all of Islam as the enemy. “The Palestinian people and Muslim and Arab world have much to answer for,” he said, "but such dismissive behavior in condemning Islam is shooting ourselves in the foot.” (Klein Halevi co-directs the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative, educating American Muslims about the Israel-Palestine conflict. He noted that hundreds of imams issued a statement this week condemning the massacre.) 

He observed that some Jews on the left are uncomfortable with owning power. "The ability to defend yourself comes with a loss of innocence,” he noted, adding that Israel’s great challenge is “to maintain moral credibility while dealing with a genocidal threat.”

Klein Halevi said Israel needs American Jewish partners in that conversation. “That means left-wing Jews who understand that, for the Jewish people, powerlessness is untenable, and right-wing Jews who understand that there are moral limits to power."

Can Israel Combine Love And Fear?

During a podcast interview with The Times of Israel this week, Micah Goodman, a prominent Israeli public intellectual and educator, offered a challenging but potentially productive path toward reconciling a key either-or dilemma for Israel. 

“We want Madonna and Bono to love us, but we want Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran to panic when they think of us,” he said. “The problem is that there is a zero-sum game between these emotions of love and fear.” You have to choose between them.

“What we do to restore the fear will erode the love,” he reasoned.. “And if we try to keep the West’s love, we won’t restore fear of us in the Mideast.”

He called on supporters of Israel to help the Jewish state break this zero-sum game in stages by “staying with us with love while we restore the fear” in the Mideast through powerful but necessary military action against Hamas. “We need the help of the Jewish world to keep Israel strong. And with your help, we will win.”

Recognizing that statements of support for Israel inevitably “evaporate after we hit back,” Goodman urged: “Please remember how you feel in this moment of moral clarity. Be loyal to what you see now, and stay loyal even when you won’t feel what you are feeling now.”

That’s a tough order. How Jerusalem uses its power will determine not only the outcome of the present conflict but the character of the Jewish state going forward.

 Jewish law and tradition are clear here: The Torah commands that we “choose life,” and that we remember –– and eradicate – Amalek, the quintessential enemy of the Jews who attacked the weak and frail among the Israelites when they passed in the desert.. 

Whether support for Israel will hold or deteriorate in the weeks and months ahead remains to be seen. The same is true of the country’s deep divide over political and social issues. For now, though, there is consensus that all sides must come together to assure a decisive Israeli victory, leaving the politics and investigations into the IDF and security meltdown of Oct. 7 for later. 

The priority is to restore deterrence, and erase the image of the all-too vulnerable Israel that emerged on this fateful Simchat Torah. “For 12 hours that day,” Micah Goodman said, “the State of Israel did not exist in the South. It was not there to protect its citizens.

“Never forget what happened that day,” he said.