Israel

"OPINION

Ezra Klein

Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

July 20, 2025"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/opinion/antisemitism-american-jews-israel-mamdani.html

 <Blockquote>“What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians,” 

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s former prime minister, wrote in Haaretz. 

“We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, 

not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. 

Rather, it’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. 

Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

What many young Jews see is what Olmert sees and they want no part of it. 

Are they to defend war crimes? 

Are they to defend, or even accept, the use of mass starvation as a tool of war? 

Are they to believe in equality everywhere but in the state that is meant to be their spiritual home?

...

To measure antisemitism by the consequence of policies and actions 

is to open debates that many would prefer to keep closed.

...

Israel has more than the right to exist. 

It has the strength to exist. 

The Jews who live there have more than the right to self-determination. 

They have self-determination. 

The same cannot be said for Palestinians. 

About two million Palestinians live inside Israel. 

They are, by any measure, second-class citizens. 

In 2018, three Palestinian members of Israel’s Knesset proposed a law to affirm “the principle of equal citizenship for every citizen” 

and outlaw “discrimination on grounds of nationality, race, religion, gender, language, color, political outlook, ethnic origin or social status.”

Yuli Edelstein, then the speaker of the Israeli Knesset, 

would not permit it even to be debated. 

“This is a preposterous bill that any intelligent individual can see must be blocked immediately,” 

Edelstein said. 

“A bill that aims to gnaw at the foundations of the state must not be allowed in the Knesset.”

...

The situation is immeasurably worse for the five million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. I

Israel decides where they can move and where they can go. 

Israel decides who can enter the West Bank and Gaza and who can leave. 

Israel decides what the Palestinian Authority can do and what it cannot. 

While I was driving across the West Bank on a reporting trip last year, the debate that raged in America over the protesters who chanted “from the river to the sea” disintegrated, for me, into farce. 

There is a single sovereign between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and every checkpoint and road closure was a reminder of who it is.

Outside of Israel, 

domination by the ethnic majority is what Jews have been taught to fear most. 

...

</Blockquote>