Jewish communities must confront their complicity in Israel’s genocide
Jewish activists hold signs reading ‘Never again is now’ during a protest against Israel’s war on Gaza in New York on 4 August 2025
Antony Loewenstein writes in Middle East Eye on 13 November 2025:
There’s a desperate need for a moral reckoning among the global Jewish population after more than two years of Israeli-inflicted horrors in Gaza. From the mass starvation of Palestinians to AI- and-cloud-enabled killing, Jewish complicity, both in Israel and across the Diaspora, has been a profound moral failure.
I write this as a Jew who has spent decades opposing Israel’s suffocating hold on the Jewish Diaspora, and as a man whose family was murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.
Since 7 October 2023, we have witnessed a genocide on our watch, as Jews and as citizens.
Now is the time for accountability – including international war crimes trials – not only for those who actively participated in it, but for Jews who wholly embraced the carnage from London to Sydney out of racism, fear, revenge or sheer bloodlust.
Never forget that those who committed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 weren’t only the ones carrying out the physical violence; they also included those who promulgated hate speech on the radio. With an Israeli Jewish population that overwhelmingly views all Palestinians in Gaza as suspect, if not outright hostile, the need for this moment is clear.
It’s hard to describe what the post-7 October 2023 environment has been like in many Jewish communities. It has ranged from outright hostility towards any publicly expressed criticism of the Netanyahu regime to, perish the thought, any Jew disagreeing with the stated policies of an Israeli government that repeatedly announced its desire to eradicate all Palestinians.
And then there are the ethical contortions around the proper way a modern, humane Jew should feel about Israeli soldiers proudly celebrating killing, destruction and rape in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond. What, exactly, is the moral quandary in condemning genocidal behaviour and intent?
Still, far too many Jews dismiss or ignore these abominations as outliers – black sheep in the Israeli military or governmental establishment. It’s a convenient myth, but deluded thinking about the real nature of the Zionist state from its inception to today.
Palestinians have always been viewed as a threat to a Jewish majority in Israel. Ethnically removing or killing them has never been far from the minds of many Israelis and their supporters in the West.
Moral collapse