Confronting Our Own Violence
By Daniel Bral
It is almost trite to note that the story of the Jewish people is punctuated by persecution. It is a story that has transcended the boundaries of Jewish memory to become sewn into a broader civilizational story that has elicited a spectrum of emotions ranging from empathy and atonement to blame and justification and even outright denial and erasure.
This historical association of Jewishness with victimhood is what makes a role reversal incomprehensible.
After millennia of statelessness, Jews became sovereigns. Instruments of force that hardly knew Jewish hands were suddenly at our disposal.
Jewish power—until then equal parts historical oxymoron and historical trope—needs no apology. But abused power corrodes the souls of both the wounded and the wielder.
Many have philosophized about the “victim-turned-victimizer” trope to narrate modern-day Israelis. Though the conflict is too complex to be reduced to a moral binary, there is one particular dynamic that embodies the trope in its rawest form—and it bears and stains the Jewish name: settler terrorism.
It is tempting to dismiss settler terrorism as run-of-the-mill hooliganism. But the phenomenon, as it mis-fits within the arc of Jewish history, gnaws at something deeper, almost metaphysical, about our statehood-sparked evolution as a people: the changing of societal lots, the new identity power has carved out for us, fidelity to the values that sustained us in exile, etc. It begs for a reckoning with policy, but perhaps more importantly, with peoplehood.
Settler terrorism is disorienting on a visceral level because it collides with the way Jews have historically understood ourselves. Seeing Jews as perpetrators of violence is anathema to a history in which we have been the prototypical victim. That dissonance produces compounding layers of shame.
A sense of shame in its association—of having the terrorism tag branded onto the Jewish name.
A sense of shame in its relentlessness—that it doesn’t rest or have mercy on its victims, be they young or elderly, setting fire to farmland or home.
A sense of shame in its flexibility—that it unfolds in daylight and darkness, but rest assured, always broadcasted for the world to see.
A sense of shame in its betrayal—unleashing pogroms designed to trigger another people’s exile from their land, co-opting the very sins of our persecutors.
A sense of shame in its empowerment—no pretense of government intervention, let alone care, because it is state-sanctioned—by the only government in the world that bears the Jewish name.
And a sense of shame in its globalization—that random citizens from other countries feel so compelled to travel thousands of miles to put their bodies on the line to protect other human beings from Jews.
It is this multifaceted shame that may explain why many Jews—those on the land and in the diaspora—prefer to look away. As self-soothing as feigned ignorance might be, avoidance is a form of complicity that has only entrenched the settlement movement to Israel’s own detriment.
The crushing truth is that settlers are us—Jewish—as antithetical to Jewish values and history as their actions may be. We bear responsibility for ensuring their marginalization because we bear responsibility for the upkeep of our people’s moral wellbeing.
Doing so requires deconstructing our conceptions of self. Though we often prop ourselves up as exemplars of ethics, Jews are, indeed, like anyone else—fallible. Just as some non-Jews grade Jews and Israel according to moral double standards as a tool of their prejudice, we too subject ourselves to the double standard of exceptionalism. We tie ourselves to unattainable standards of perfection that only guarantee failure and fodder for our most eager critics.
Introspection, however, cannot be divorced from action. Jewish institutions—Israel’s de facto defense firms—must realize that their public relations efforts are sabotaged by these state-sanctioned settler strikes. The occasional condemnation rings hollow considering readers recognize an unwillingness to condition advocacy on its elimination. Worse still, instead of being financially complicit in the enterprise’s elimination, some institutions are financially complicit in its sustenance. A course correction can begin right in their own backyard by ending the excommunication of typically younger, progressive Jews who have assumed that moral mantle precisely because institutions abandoned it.
As altruistic as protecting Palestinians may appear, it is equally a matter of self-interest. Settler terrorism—the occupation more broadly—and our longstanding passivity toward both represent a moral degradation that is steadily corroding the Jewish soul. Can we credibly idealize Jewish values if we are indifferent to Jewish-perpetrated violence? Can we ask others to take interest in Israel’s security when we stand by as our fellow Jews actively undermine it? Are we failing those who came before us, those who will come after, and one another?
If we are to be worthy inheritors of a tradition defined by moral aspiration and ethical struggle, we must act. And that demands nothing less than a Jewish spiritual reawakening.
Daniel Bral is a writer on Israel, American Jewry, and peace. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Haaretz, and other publications. @danielbral.