As a liberal Jew, I have stopped apologizing.

"Good" liberal Jews genuinely feel compassion for those killed and displaced on both sides. They want peace. But they are also embarrassed.

A protestor stands up for Israel and the U.S. at a “pro-Palestinian” demonstration. (photo: Ted Eytan/Wikimedia Commons)

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This is a guest essay written by Carra Glatt Ben-Baruch, a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Several years before moving to Israel, I was discussing its politics with someone at a Hillel event. I do not remember who it was, or exactly when, but I have had reason since then to remember the conversation.

Preparing to launch into a defense of Israel, I opened with the necessary qualification: “Of course, I don’t support Netanyahu, but…”

“Don’t do that,” he interrupted. “I hate that we always feel like we need to do that.”

That was apologizing. It was the dance we did, as “good” liberal Jews and “good” liberal Zionists: the reassurance that, whatever our apostasy on this one cardinal issue, we were still on the “right” team.

I do not support Netanyahu, but Israel is not an apartheid state.

The settlements are a problem, but Israel has the right to defend itself.

I believe in a two-state solution, but Israel should not be singled out unfairly.

I acknowledge Israel is not above criticism, so please let me march with my Star of David flag at your rallies and teach at your universities and go to your parties.

The problem was not with the opinions themselves, which I still agree with in some form. It was with the reflexive need to share them, even when it was tangential to the points we were making, and even when it expressed a level of nuance the conversation at hand did not deserve; even amongst ourselves, as another kind of tribal marker, no less a signal than wearing a kippah or talking about Passover cleaning.

It was reasonable. It was moderate. It was uncomfortably close to this: “I’m one of the good ones.”

Experiencing October 7th and its aftermath as an Israeli has not fundamentally changed my politics. And it has not changed my need — that common, dangerous need — to be liked. But in my better moments, I can admit the truth.

For all my reason and moderation, for all my compassion and decency, I am not one of the good ones. I have left that tribe. I have found a new one — or a very, very old one.

My tribe are the tens of thousands displaced from Israel’s north and south, in areas that no crooked United Nations resolution calls “occupied.”

They are the million-odd in the Haifa area, including my in-laws, who are now under daily rocket attacks from Hezbollah, which has no territorial dispute with Israel. They are the two men killed when a rocket exploded in the building where they were working in the northern coastal city of Nahariya on Tuesday as the terror group fired dozens of rockets and drones at northern and central Israel.

They are the couple who were killed by a rocket while out walking their dog last week and Bezalel Carmi, 72 years old, who died, as well as 32 people wounded — some seriously — in a suspected terrorist truck ramming in Tel Aviv a few Sundays ago. They are the 3,000 Israeli fans who traveled to Amsterdam to see the football match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax last week, only to be hunted, beaten, and harassed by Arab and North African gangs after the game.

They are the families slaughtered in their homes on October 7th. Their pictures scroll across my Facebook feed often enough that, when I come across an old friend’s family photo, I sometimes mistake it briefly for another memorial.

They are the soldiers, the sons and fathers, daughters and mothers, who have died defending us. Recently, my husband helped deliver holiday gifts to 20 bereaved families living within a few neighborhoods of our home.

They are my son, who, even in relatively quiet Jerusalem, spent time in a safe room hiding from an Iranian attack before he was one month old. And my daughter who, at 2 years old, seemed for the first time to recognize that there was something unusual and upsetting happening around her. I have 16 and 18 years before they pass in an instant from children to soldiers, and thus legitimate targets. I hope they will be brave, and I hope they will not be.

They are my tribe. They should be yours, too, whether you are Israeli or not, whether you are Jewish or not — and not, I should clarify, because we have suffered. By that metric, the Palestinians in Gaza have much better claim to your sympathy.

Instead, we should be your tribe because we are right.

Determining the justice of conflicts by who has suffered more or who has more power and privilege is inane. Those in the West who reflexively condemn every Israeli operation that results in any civilian deaths as unacceptable are much less quick to offer alternatives.

How should a country respond to deadly and destructive rocket attacks that have left whole cities uninhabitable? How should we respond to an invasion and mass slaughter and hundreds of kidnappings? How should we respond to neighboring enemy nations repeatedly threatening our destruction all while building up enormous arsenals?

How can an army fighting a group operating in densely populated civilian areas possibly avoid civilian casualties, even if it takes great care to do so? What is the basis for the belief that the Israeli military has not done so? Not the actual statistics, which reflect a lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties than other contemporary conflicts, including those conducted by Western powers.

One popular answer to many of these questions is to urge a ceasefire. Were there a ceasefire, we are told, the killing would stop. There would be no more rockets. No more abandoned cities. But that just raises a new question. Every past military conflict between Israel and Hamas and Israel and Hezbollah has ended with a ceasefire, and all of those ceasefires have been violated — by Hamas and Hezbollah. Ceasefires that left these groups in place were part of the path that led to October 7th.

So, why would we believe that a ceasefire today would be anything but slow-acting suicide?

The other answer, of course, is negotiated settlement: the two-state solution. Yet no one seems able to explain how this is to be brought about at all, let alone in a way that adequately addresses Israeli security concerns.

The Palestinians have, over the years, rejected multiple credible offers of statehood. They have shown consistent unwillingness to accept a two-state model that would not effectively end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

In the meantime, major Israeli gestures toward increasing Palestinian autonomy, including the total withdrawal from Gaza in 2006, have been met with disastrous consequences for Israelis, from suicide bombings, to the rise of Hamas, to the first pogrom on Israeli soil.

So, why should we see the prospect of the two-state solution, at least for the immediate future, as anything but a fantasy at best and a nightmare at worst? And even in the most utopian vision of Israeli and Palestinian coexistence, why would we believe that a settlement with the Palestinians would bring us relief from attacks from groups in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran?

I have yet to hear good answers to these questions — not from world leaders, not from activists, and certainly not from perpetually conflicted, perpetually apologetic liberal Jews. Yet still they condemn and equivocate and wring their hands.

I think I know why.

Most charitably, it is an honest unwillingness to confront the limits of the contemporary liberal vision. Not every conflict can be solved at the negotiating table. Evil exists and must sometimes be fought. Even in just wars, the innocent cannot always be spared.

Less charitably, it is something else. On some level Western leaders must know that they are admonishing Israel to act in a way that they would never act themselves. But support for Israel has become a liability.

Once, a Jewish state was a salve for Western shame over the Holocaust. Now, supporting that state is an awkward obstacle in winning the votes of rising Arab and Muslim constituencies — or of an increasingly fanatic, increasingly influential progressive Left. An obstacle, too, to forming alliances with Arab states, with their oil and the money it has made them.

I believe these leaders were sincerely horrified by the October 7th attacks. No doubt they will be sincerely horrified should Israel and its people be violently destroyed. But not so horrified that they would not much rather that this inconvenient war hold off until the next election cycle.

The interests of good liberal Jews are not nearly so cynical. They genuinely care about the Palestinians. They feel a natural compassion for those killed and displaced on both sides. They want peace.

But they are also embarrassed. When they are honest with themselves, good liberal Jews — the reasonable majority, not the extreme and still-unrepresentative fringe — know or at least suspect that there are no good answers to my questions.

Acknowledging that, however, would be to shake the foundations of their identity, not as Jews but as liberals. And so they qualify. They apologize. They urge restraint and cry for a ceasefire. Because it would be easier, would it not, to shed the moral burden, the double consciousness; to be placed once again unambiguously at the vanguard of the “right” side of history?

I get it. I really do. Seven years after my move from the U.S. to Israel, I am still enough of an American Jew to feel it myself. The shame of being suspected, misunderstood, condemned — no less by those who I would normally see as virtuous. But I am enough of an Israeli Jew, now, to see where the virtuous, scarcely less than the wicked, have brought us.

This past Yom Kippur, I saw a man from my community, one of the many who has, for the past year, been in and out of military reserve duty. He was out of uniform but carrying his gun, indicating that he was on a brief leave. Earlier this year, when he was stationed at the Israel-Gaza border, he told his young children that he was in the North, at that point by far the quieter of the two fronts. I wonder what he is telling them now, when he really is serving in the North and it is not any longer the safer alternative.

After Yom Kippur services, a few of us went over to speak to him. He had gotten home just the day before and would be returning tomorrow. “I hope not for long,” he said, and then paused. “But for long enough. There’s still a lot to do there.”

No one could have had much better reason to want a ceasefire than he did. And yet here he was, casually making the case against it.

So, I can live with the embarrassment.

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A version of this essay also appeared in the Times of Israel.