Reckonings
As an ICC-indicted Benjamin Netanyahu is wined and dined in Washington, a genocide most of the world voted to stop goes unpunished, and impunity all but guarantees it will happen again.
Rev. J. Mark Davidson
7/30/20264 min read
We saw with our own eyes the monstrous assault on Gaza (October 8 – present). Day after day, the war crimes. Collective punishment. Apartment buildings and hospitals bombed, whole families erased from the civil registry, thousands buried under the rubble, over 20,000 Palestinian children murdered, once-vibrant cities flattened. Gaza rendered unlivable. It was surreal, and remains surreal, to see this genocide unfold for over 30 months, and see the killing continue unabated, and nothing makes it stop.
There was a time when we might reasonably have expected morally grounded Jews in Israel to halt such madness. But whatever moral core may once have been present in Israel has largely disappeared. Israel has become a truly toxic place. 80-90% of Israelis cheered on this heinous massacre. Many attribute this to vengeful feelings in the wake of Hamas’ shocking attack on October 7th. But the truth is that most Israelis have long been consumed with bigotry toward Palestinians, and do not regard them as fully human. Thunderous, whole-stadium “Death to Arabs” chants have been commonplace at Israeli soccer matches for years. The virulent racism in Israeli society was chronicled by investigative journalist Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel in 2013, a full decade before October 7th. That book floored me. Such vile, unabashed racism! While there were some Israeli peacemakers and the tiny remnants of “the Israeli left,” who spoke out against the carnage in Gaza, most were immediately silenced, fired from their jobs, or imprisoned.
A friend who was outraged by the carnage in Gaza asked me, “Why is the world going along with this?” I explained that the world is most definitely NOT going along with the genocide. Most of the countries of the world are on record as being opposed to the mass slaughter of innocents in Gaza. On June 12, 2025, over 18 months into the most ferocious part of the bombing campaign, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding “an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.” The vote was 149 in favor, 12 against, and 19 abstaining. In other words, 82% of the world’s nations voted to stop the carnage. The ceasefire was not put into effect, because the General Assembly lacks the enforcement authority of the Security Council. The United States, which has veto power, used its Security Council veto to quash the resolution. Although the General Assembly vote was symbolic, it showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the world stood with the Palestinian people and voted overwhelmingly to shut down the genocide. If anything points decisively to the need to reform the United Nations to a truly democratic global institution, instead of a deeply flawed forum controlled by a small handful of “big powers,” this would be it.
This past week, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was incensed to see ICC-indicted war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being wined and dined in our nation’s capitol: “This is the creature responsible for the killing of more than a hundred of my relatives, as well as tens of thousands of children and entire families…He {and his criminal soldiers} reduced my city to rubble and left the bodies of my loved ones buried beneath the ruins…He moves freely throughout the U.S., and is welcomed as though everything is perfectly normal. How is he allowed to walk free with blood on his hands? The Palestinian blood on his hands is dripping onto the streets, restaurants, and government buildings of Washington, D.C. How on earth is this possible?” Abu Toha is rightly outraged at the absence of accountability. Genocide without accountability is profoundly destabilizing. It undermines the foundations of moral order. It feeds this pervasive sense so many of us have that the world is falling apart. Indeed, you could say that it has already fallen apart. Genocide is a massive laceration in the order of things. Accountability is the only thing that can repair the rupture and re-establish a sense of order. Without accountability, mass murder and ethnic erasure will inevitably be tried again. Indeed, Israel is violently uprooting Palestinian families in the West Bank on it way to annexation. So long as there is no cost for committing such atrocities, it is predictable that they will be repeated. Why wouldn’t other malevolent actors believe they too will get away with it?
Leading Jewish historian and Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholar Omer Bartov has written an insightful book, Israel: What Went Wrong? He argues that one of the things that went deeply wrong with Israel was that it didn’t have a constitution. Instead, Zionism became the state ideology. It kept transforming until today Zionism is “an insupportable state ideology of extremism, of militarism, of racism, and of genocide.” He believes Zionism is “not reformable.” The state of Israel may eventually be reformable, but it has to undergo “shock therapy. Israel must be totally “reinvented.”
Rabbi Elhanan Beck, a member of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta movement, a rigorously observant form of Judaism, has said that the ethnostate of Israel itself must be dismantled. He believes the wickedness Israel has committed against the Palestinians stems from the Zionist rebellion against God. Zionism is antithetical to the values of Judaism. Judaism is built on trusting God. Zionism is built on not trusting God and arrogantly taking matters into their own hands. This critique basically says that Zionism is guilty of severing Jews from their essential mooring in divine teachings. Unmoored, they have succumbed to evil.