The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), an international news agency going back to 1917 with stellar journalistic credentials, ran an article in mid-August 2025 with the title, “Jew vs Jew rhetoric breaks hearts in a bitter internal debate about the Gaza war.” In it, Andrew Silow-Carroll argues that almost two years into this Gaza war, “the Jewish conversation has shifted”: “Jews who have taken to social media to condemn Hamas, anti-Israel protesters and the colleges and politicians they say have enabled antisemitism are now turning on fellow Jews — and not just anti-Zionist Jews, who if anything united the mainstream in a common disdain.”
And who are these two groups of Zionist Jews that are battling it out? On one side you have the “fierce defenders of Israel” and on the other, the “troubled” defenders (“troubled” about the sheer number of people killed and the use of starvation as a weapon of war). And the vitriol has spread like a cancer on social media. We read in one recent JTA opinion piece, “I find myself calling out: Don’t you get that we are at war with ourselves? And we have to find a way to put the pieces back, perhaps to create something new, or we will not survive.”
In this installment in my series on Israel-Palestine, I’ll look at three particular divides in the Jewish community; and I will close with a discussion particularly arising in Orthodox circles—a discussion I find encouraging.
The Israeli-US Jewish divide
In May 2025 a poll in Israel found that 82 percent of Israeli citizens wanted to expel Gazans and 47 percent supported killing them all. The Israeli survey done in partnership with Penn State University was published in the major Israeli newspaper Haaretz. And the more religious people are, it found, the more they favor ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Israelis in the survey are divided into secular, traditional religious, Orthodox, and Haredi (often called Ultra-Orthodox). The secular Israelis are the most reticent to move in these directions and the Haredi go the farthest. Finally, “the younger the Israeli is, the more likely they are to be far-right extremist,” the survey showed.
My immediate reaction in reading “82 percent” was: what about the 21 percent of Israeli citizens who call themselves “Palestinian Israelis”? The article by Ben Norton, founder and editor of the Geopolitical Economy Report where this article is posted, confirmed my own hunch: these Israeli citizens “are not considered to be fully Israeli. They are third-class citizens, and are denied equal treatment by the Israeli regime.” Netanyahu managed to pass the “basic nationality law” in 2019, and on that occasion, he declared publicly “with pride”: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens.” Hence, the “82 percent” are all Israeli Jewish citizens.
Norton mentions an interview in May 2024 in Haaretz with former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (2006-2009) from Netanyahu’s own party (Likud), who admitted that up to 2024, he denied that the Israeli regime was committing war crimes, but he now believes otherwise. Israel is deliberately using hunger as a weapon and committing “a war of extermination”:
“There are too many cases of brutal shooting of civilians, of destruction of property and homes. Looting of property, thefts from homes, which in many cases IDF soldiers have also taken pride in and published in personal posts. We are committing war crimes.”
He later added that the Israeli army is acting “recklessly, carelessly, and excessively aggressively.” What is more, Israelis “massacre Palestinian civilians in the West bank as well, and commit heinous crimes every day in the West Bank.”
All that said, you know from another post in this series, that the Israeli peace movement is stirring again and at least two Israeli human rights organizations are publicly condemning “our genocide.” Stunningly as well, over “600 retired Israeli security officials, including some former heads of intelligence agencies,” sent President Trump a letter in early August 2015 calling on him to increase pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza and secure the release of all hostages, because in their judgment “Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.” This doesn't mean they are pressing for a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict. But at the very least, they want this war to stop immediately.
The situation is very different in the United States, where “a majority of American voters now oppose sending additional economic and military aid to Israel, a stunning reversal in public opinion since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks.”
In a Times/Siena poll just out this week, we learn that . . .
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- 6 out of 10 voters want Israel to end immediately its war in Gaza, even without the release of the remaining hostages
- 40 percent said Israel was “intentionally killing civilians in Gaza, nearly the double of voters who agreed with that statement in the 2023 poll
- regardless of party, 7 out of 10 voters under 30 “said they opposed additional economic or military aid
- more surprisingly, whereas Democratic voters over 45 said they sympathized more with Israel in 2023 (2 to 1), now it’s the opposite: 42 percent of them sympathize more with Palestinians, while only 17 percent sympathize more with Israelis
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In light of this, it’s no surprise that the American Jewish population also reflects this trend. Another factor that pushes them in this direction is their strong distaste for President Trump and his weaponizing of antisemitism to assert his control over universities. In a poll that came out in May 2025 by GBAO Strategies (“a longtime pollster of Jewish public opinion”), we learn that “three-quarters of Jewish voters (74%) disapprove of Trump’s job performance (70% ‘strongly disapprove’). Most American Jews think Trump is ‘dangerous’ (72%), ‘racist’ (69%) and ‘fascist’ (69%).” In particular, . . .
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- “61% percent of American Jews said that arresting and deporting Palestinian protestors who are legal residents of the United States only increases antisemitism.” University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick explained that “Jews are attached to the idea of law. It’s in our DNA to believe in the rule of law, and that’s very scary to see that flagrantly abused.”
- 92 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that one can be “pro-Israel” and still disagree with Israeli government policies.
- Flagship American Jewish organizations (like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee) continue to defend Israel’s policies and demonize “Jews who criticize Israel as antisemitic.” As a result, they are no longer in step with the majority of American Jews on these issues.
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The US generational Jewish divide
In contrast to Israel where being under 30 tends to correlate with stronger right-wing views, young American Jews tend to be less attached to Israel and more critical of it. The same GBAO Strategies poll mentioned above informs us that . . .
“. . . among younger American Jews, fewer are concerned about antisemitism. While 95% of Jews over 65 said they were concerned about antisemitism, 77% of Jews aged 18-34 were. Asked their concerns about antisemitism on college campuses, 65% of younger Jews expressed concern (39% were ‘very concerned’).”
“Seven in 10 Jews aged 18-34 (71%) believe deporting campus protesters increases antisemitism. Attachment to Israel is also lower among this age group, with 55% saying they are emotionally attached to Israel (24% say they are ‘very attached’).”
Peter Beinart, an American Jewish journalist in his 40s known for his uncompromising critiques of Israeli policies, was interviewed recently on the occasion of his new book’s release, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Without minimizing the brutality of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, Beinart, a Modern Orthodox (see below) Jew originally from South Africa, believes that Israel’s response to it (“a horror,” he argues) makes it ethically impossible for her to continue using “the virtuous victim trope.” He explains, “By seeing a Jewish state as forever abused, never the abuser, we deny its capacity for evil.” What has been “very difficult and painful” for him, however, is that there has been “no reckoning with what it means for us that an entire society is being destroyed—that most of the buildings, hospitals, the schools, the agriculture, the entire basis of life for a population of 2 million people.”
The interviewer then asks whether the story of eternal Jewish victimhood will ever change. Beinart answers by expressing hope in the younger generation of Jews today. He expects them to show “a tremendous amount of creativity” in examining “the resources of our own tradition” in order to confront these things and to think about our ethical responsibilities in a situation in which (Israeli) Jews are not legally subjugated as they were in Europe and other places, but indeed do have legal supremacy.” Much in the Jewish tradition, he notes, provide Jews with the opportunity to see themselves “in a range of different capacities, not simply in the role of a victim whose obligation is merely to survive.”
The Jewish denominational divide
Whereas the Orthodox dominate the religious landscape of Israel, the three largest Jewish denominations or movements in the United States are Reform (35 percent), Conservative (18 percent), and Orthodox (10 percent). Whereas the Reform and Conservative branches of American Judaism have more centralized leadership and movement-affiliated institutions, the Orthodox are divided into Modern Orthodox, Haredi (or Ultra-Orthodox), Hasidic, and Open Orthodox. Orthodox Jews in general tend to overwhelmingly support Netanyahu and his prosecuting of the present war in Gaza.
In April 2025, 550 American rabbis signed a letter “objecting to President Trump’s crackdown on universities for what the administration calls tolerance of antisemitism, calling Trump’s executive orders and detentions of students who criticized Israel ‘cynical attacks on higher education.’” The letter, entitled “A Call to Moral Clarity: Rejecting Antisemitism as a Political Wedge,” was signed largely by Reform and Conservative rabbis, and only by “a handful” of Orthodox rabbis.
Four months later, when the UN was declaring a famine in Gaza, a number of rabbinic organizations issued statements expressing their distress at the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and calling on the Israeli government to allow food aid and medicines to come in. That said, as this article makes clear, these statements exemplified a spectrum of views. A group of Orthodox rabbis wrote, “We affirm that Hamas’s sins and crimes do not relieve the government of Israel of its obligations to make whatever efforts are necessary to prevent mass starvation.” The U.S. Conservative rabbinate (The Rabbinical Assembly) went a bit further. Though also calling for the release of humanitarian aid, it directly critiqued Netanyahu for allowing members of his cabinet to publicly call for Israel “to decimate the Gaza Strip.”
A statement by more than a thousand “liberal rabbis” around the world said it understands the IDF’s concern to protect the life of its soldiers, “[but] we cannot condone the mass killing of civilians, including a great many women, children and elderly, or the use of starvation as a weapon of war.” The American signatories were likely mostly from the Reform and Conservative traditions. But a shift seems to be happening, at least in some Orthodox circles, as I show in the next section.
Jewish and Christian convergence on the Hebrew prophets
Jeffrey Salkin, a Jewish contributor to Religious News Service, took a closer look at the statement by 80 Orthodox rabbis mentioned above. It was entitled, “A Call for Moral Clarity, Responsibility, and a Jewish Orthodox Response in the Face of the Gaza Humanitarian Crisis.” He begins by noting that “[when] Reform and Conservative rabbis issue a statement that raises concerns about how Israel is waging war in Gaza, many Jews expect that.” Then he adds, “When Orthodox rabbis issue a similar statement, that is something different.” Salkin reveals that “some of the Orthodox rabbis who signed are my friends, teachers and mentors,” and he cites three of them.
Many of these signatories were students (or spiritual students) of Rabbi Soloweitchik, who in a 1959 lecture issued this warning:
“Now, with the state of Israel, we are facing the test. Will we behave like any state, ethically? … Will we act like masters — or will we understand that Judaism does not know the concept of master and slave, victor and vanquished?”
One of Salkin’s friends who signed this statement once said: “The goal of Israel is not only to survive, but to thrive in Torah and flourish morally and spiritually.” One of the demands of the Jewish tradition is to “sense the pain of a people with whom we are at war.” As Rabbi Yitz Greenberg once stated, “The heart of Torah is justice, not revenge.” Hence, “moral scrutiny” is not a luxury but a basic requirement of Torah and the heart of the message of Israel’s prophets. As Salkin reminds his Jewish readers,
“Go to any synagogue on a Shabbat morning and listen to the haftarah (the prophetic reading). You want moral scrutiny and critique of people, priests and princes? Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah – it’s all there. To be a Jew is to believe love and critique are not antagonists. They walk hand in hand.”
Likewise, the Hebrew prophets’ message of social justice was central to the sermons of the Black churches that gave birth to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the verses the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. often quoted, is this one: “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24). Jesus was building on this tradition as well when he chose to read from the prophet Isaiah in his hometown synagogue as a roadmap for his ministry which had just started:
“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19).
I will end this series with some thoughts about this common theological ground between Jews, Christians and Muslims. I believe this is the kind of spiritual sustenance that can fuel a stronger movement for peace based on justice and compassion in order to end this conflict in the foreseeable future.