Gaslighting is not a Jewish value
Conscience and compassion have been weaponised to service pure evil
Who would have thought that hundreds of rabbis would endorse vicious blood libels against the Jews? And worse still, call this a Jewish moral response?
An open letter signed by more than 400 rabbis from around the world has called on the Israeli government to end what it describes as “the callous indifference to starvation”.
The rabbis wrote: “The Jewish people face a grave moral crisis threatening the very basis of Judaism as the ethical voice that it has been since the age of Israel’s prophets. We cannot remain silent in confronting it.”
On the contrary, it is these rabbis, along with progressive rabbis and other Jews in America making similar claims, who are posing a moral crisis for the Jewish people.
In the face of an unprecedented global campaign of lies demonising Israel as a means to its destruction, there is a duty based in Jewish values, as well as in common decency, to call this out as a great evil. Instead, these 400 rabbis have actually joined it.
The letter’s signatories say: “We cannot condone the mass killings of civilians, including a great many women, children and elderly, or the use of starvation as a weapon of war.” And they decry “the policy of withholding of food, water and medical supplies from a needy civilian population”.
The lay leadership of Britain’s Jewish community, the Board of Deputies, said much the same thing. Referring to Israel’s decision to allow air drops of aid into Gaza and open the way for more UN-supervised food distribution, the board said that “the new measures announced by Israeli authorities to address the humanitarian crisis are essential if long overdue”.
It is profoundly shocking that these rabbis and lay leaders should be parroting such falsehoods and distortions.
Israel is certainly not using starvation as a weapon of war. On the contrary, it has allowed into Gaza tens of millions of tons of food since the war began. It has also instituted with the United States the only means of delivering food safely to Gazan civilians to stop Hamas stealing it for its own purposes.
There is no evidence of starvation. Images of skeletal children published by The New York Times, The Guardian and other media outlets were fraudulent. These children weren’t skeletal because they were being starved in Gaza. They were either suffering from dreadful congenital diseases, or the pictures had been taken in Yemen.
The giveaway was that adults and other children in the pictures were obviously well-fed. The Times and Guardian cropped one horrific picture they prominently displayed to exclude just such a normal-looking child.
These were nothing other than blood libels. Yet the 400 rabbis made no protest about this. Instead, they repeated the starvation lie.
Yes, there is hunger and misery in the Gaza Strip as a result of the war started by the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. But this has been caused not by Israel but by Hamas.
The letter urged the Israeli government to permit the entry of “extensive humanitarian aid into Gaza under international supervision, while guarding against control or theft by Hamas”.
But international supervision, in other words, under the aegis of the United Nations, is precisely what has enabled Hamas to steal this aid either for their own use or to sell it on the black market at prices Gazans can’t afford.
International pressure created by the starvation lie forced Israel to allow this process to resume. It has only worked to strengthen Hamas, which aims to bring about true starvation to increase global pressure on Israel to surrender.
This malevolent circus is in effect what the 400 rabbis were demanding and the Board of Deputies hailed as “long overdue.”
The rabbis called on Israel “to respect all innocent life”. Israel, however, has gone to greater lengths than any other country has ever gone in time of war to protect innocent life. It has used astonishingly precise targeting of terrorists. It has extensively alerted civilians to evacuate before raids on such targets. It has moved hundreds of thousands of civilians around Gaza to protect them from the bombing.
All this has meant that Israel has created a far lower ratio of civilians to combatants killed than any other army has ever achieved — and this despite Hamas using the whole of Gaza’s civilian population as human shields and cannon fodder.
Yet every single measure Israel has taken to protect Gaza’s civilians has been turned against it, to demonise and delegitimise the Jewish state by accusing it of failing to protect innocent life.
Now these 400 rabbis have repeated this calumny, which is designed to paint Israel as so evil that the nation itself does not deserve to exist. Aiding that shocking campaign is most definitely not a Jewish value.
So why are so many Jews repeating these lies?
Some of them — many in America — subscribe to left-wing ideologies that are anti-West and anti-Jew. Some in Israel who are saying similar things are left-wing “post-Zionists” who are consumed by bitter hatred of their country.
Yet the belief that Israel has gone too far in its reaction to the atrocities of October 7, and that it has killed too many civilians and caused starvation in Gaza, has taken hold among many, both Jews and non-Jews, who are not ideological and even think of themselves as Israel supporters.
One reason is that the deeply distressing images of skeletal children pack an emotional punch that doesn’t fade. Reason takes a back seat.
The relentless bombardment of words and images denoting intolerable suffering in Gaza has been so overwhelming — striking the deepest chords of our humanity, even though the words and images may be false — that this manipulative campaign has had its intended effect. Conscience and compassion have been weaponised to service pure evil.
Of course there should be compassion for the innocent. Yet how innocent are Gaza’s civilians? They voted for Hamas. Even though many have now turned against it, opinion polls have repeatedly shown that the vast majority of Gazans supported the October 7 massacre, and want to kill more Jews and destroy Israel.
Many ordinary Gazans poured across the shattered border on that Black Shabbat behind the Hamas stormtroopers to slaughter, rape and torture Israelis. Ordinary Gazans were filmed abusing the kidnapped Israeli hostages, both living and dead, as they were paraded through Gaza’s streets on that terrible day.
Unlike the Germans during the Holocaust, among whom there were at least some who tried to shelter or otherwise aid the Jews, not one Gazan civilian has helped rescue the hostages, nor reportedly showed them any kindness during captivity.
Gaza’s civilians are an enemy population. Yet Israel is aiding them, in accordance with Jewish values of compassion even to the enemy.
The 400 rabbis declare they abhor the violence of Hamas, unequivocally support the legitimacy of Israel’s battle against it and call upon it immediately to release the hostages.
These are hollow words. All but destroyed militarily, Hamas is now deploying its most powerful weapon of all — ignorant and credulous Western public opinion.
The devastating strategy being pursued by Hamas and its Iranian and Muslim Brotherhood backers is to weaponise the Holocaust itself against the Jews by presenting them as evil and even demonic people who starve the innocent to death. For these 400 rabbis to join in this infernal campaign is monstrous and unforgivable.
This weekend, on the fast of Tisha B’Av, Jews commemorate the destruction by the Romans of the two Jewish Temples in Jerusalem and the long exile of the Jews from their homeland. The ongoing trauma and suffering caused by October 7 and the war will make this an even more painful occasion than normal.
Tradition teaches that the destruction of Jerusalem was caused at root by Jewish disunity. But worse than disunity is Jews siding with their mortal foes. Worse still are Jews who do so while claiming that they alone represent Jewish moral codes. That distortion, perpetrated by the 400 rabbis, undermines not just Israel but Judaism itself.
Gaslighting is not a Jewish value.