The occupation of Palestine, exemplified most vividly by the siege of Gaza and the ongoing genocide, is not just a political issue. It is a profound moral crisis for the Jewish community.
The civilian casualties and destruction of Palestinian life and infrastructure are not isolated events, but the inevitable outcomes of a system that prioritizes domination over justice. The occupation has turned the concept of Jewish security into an idol that demands endless sacrifice.
The last year has forced us, as Jews, to deeply interrogate what kind of people we have become under the shadow of Israeli empire.
The modern nation-state of Israel is itself a product of larger colonial imperial thinking. It is past time to recognize that Zionism as a tool of empire is failing. It is failing the Palestinians who suffer under its system, and it is failing the Jews who perpetuate it in the name of survival.
To miscategorize the ongoing occupation as the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is to miss the larger picture: the settler empire is built to fail because it is conditioned upon the erasure and elimination of one population over another.
Jews are a covenantal people, bound not by borders, but by a shared commitment to a higher moral standard. Our covenant is not a license to dominate. It is a mandate to serve. The Torah repeatedly describes us as a “stiff-necked people,” burdened with the responsibility of living out a covenant that demands justice, mercy and equality.
To be set apart is not to retreat into isolation or exclusivity but to model a different way of being. It is to live as though another world is possible, even when the empire’s powers insist it is not. It is to resist assimilation and capitulation to the powers that seek to undermine the prophetic vision of liberation.
The Zionist project, for all its initial non-statist aspirations, has become a cautionary tale of what happens when a people defined by exile aligns itself with its oppressors, in this case, Christian Europe.
The millennia-long dream of a Jewish home has become a nightmare for those who were displaced to make room for it. In seeking to secure our own safety, we have contributed to the insecurity of others.
The accusation of Jewish cosmopolitanism—of being rootless, disloyal and unmoored—has been internalized to the point where we now seek to prove our legitimacy through the very systems that once sought to destroy us. But our roots are not in land or power; they are in the covenant, in the relationships we build with each other and the Divine.
Jews are not safer under this arrangement. The perpetual state of conflict has not made Israel invulnerable; it has made it isolated, both morally and politically.
For Jews in the diaspora, the association with an oppressive regime has complicated our relationships with other marginalized groups and undermined our ability to stand in solidarity with them. The promise of safety through strength has proven to be a lie.
We can imagine differently. The task before us is not merely to critique the status quo, but to envision alternatives.
What would it mean to create a Jewish identity that does not rely on domination or exclusion? What would it look like to build a society that honors the dignity of all its inhabitants, that recognizes Palestinian liberation as inseparable from our own?
What does it mean to create and uphold a holy land that belongs to none of us and all of us? To build a world without borders, nation-states, capital and empire?
These are not easy questions, but they are necessary ones. They require us to draw on the best of our tradition and the voices of each new generation.
The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spoke of ethics as the interruption of the self by the Other. To truly see the face of the Other is to recognize their humanity and to be called into responsibility.
The Palestinian struggle is an ethical interruption, a challenge to the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are and what we deserve. It forces us to confront the ways in which we have been complicit in systems of oppression and to ask what it would mean to be accountable, or in Jewish terms, commit to teshuva—the act of acknowledging and repairing harm.
Teshuva will not be easy. It will require us to confront painful truths about our history and present.
It will call us to build relationships of trust with those we have been taught to see as enemies. It will demand we exchange exclusivity for solidarity—for only by being in relationship can we truly be safe.
The time has come to let go of the narratives that have held us captive and to embrace a new story. The real fears of antisemitism and white supremacy will not disappear.
They will be fought in conjunction with Islamophobia, anti-Black racism and all forms of oppression that seek to destroy us all. We have the ability to write a new story for our people.
It is a story of liberation, not of empire. It is a story of covenant, of a shared commitment to the flourishing of all life. And it is a story of hope, rooted in the belief that another world is not only possible but already on its way.
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Stephanie Gray is a Senior Consulting Services Manager at Sacred Spaces.
