Let me state my position plainly: this criticism is not directed against individual Jewish people or against Judaism. Antisemitism is evil, just as hatred of Palestinians and Muslims is evil. My criticism is directed toward particular Zionist organizations and Israeli political, military, and religious leaders whose decisions have produced dispossession, occupation, war and the deaths of innocent people.
Israel condemns Hamas for actions similar in kind to actions committed by Zionist armed organizations during the struggle to establish the State of Israel. Groups such as Irgun and Lehi bombed buildings, assassinated officials and attacked Palestinian communities. Women and children were killed. Villages were emptied and destroyed. Palestinian families were driven from their homes, and refugees were not permitted to return.
The bombing of the King David Hotel, the massacre at Deir Yassin and the assassination of United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte are established history. Some of the men associated with these organizations later became respected political leaders in Israel. Violence that Israel remembers as part of its “war of independence” is called terrorism when Palestinians employ it.
That is a historical and moral contradiction.
Since 1967, Israeli governments have occupied the West Bank, confiscated Palestinian land and constructed settlements that the international community considers illegal. Palestinian homes have been demolished. Communities have been isolated by checkpoints, walls, military zones and settler roads. Settlers have attacked Palestinian farmers, damaged their property and uprooted or burned olive trees that sometimes sustained the same families for generations.
These are not merely random acts by a few extremists. Settler expansion has been protected, financed and advanced by government policy. In July 2026, the United Nations reported that hundreds of olive trees had recently been bulldozed or damaged and that more than 1,380 settler-related incidents had been documented in the West Bank since the beginning of the year.
Hamas did not exist in 1917, 1948 or 1967. It was established in 1987, after Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had already lived under Israeli occupation for twenty years. The occupation, refugee camps, settlement expansion, failed negotiations and absence of meaningful Palestinian freedom created the conditions in which Hamas gained influence.
Israel did not single-handedly create Hamas, and Palestinians remain morally responsible for their own choices. Nevertheless, Israeli policies helped create the anger, desperation and hopelessness upon which Hamas built its movement. Israeli authorities also initially tolerated Muslim Brotherhood-connected organizations as a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. That policy helped provide space in which the movement that became Hamas could grow.
What Hamas and other armed groups did on October 7, 2023, was evil. The deliberate killing of civilians, including women and children, and the taking of hostages cannot be justified. Occupation does not make the murder of civilians righteous.
But condemning October 7 does not require us to remain silent about what Israel has done afterward.
Israel has inflicted destruction upon an entire population. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been reported killed, including enormous numbers of women and children. Families have been buried beneath their homes. Hospitals, schools, churches, mosques and refugee camps have been attacked or destroyed. Most of Gaza’s inhabitants have been displaced, many repeatedly. Hunger and deprivation have been used in circumstances where civilians cannot escape.
The exact numerical ratio depends upon which reported deaths and time period are counted, but the essential truth does not depend upon one statistic: Israel’s response has killed vastly more Palestinians than the number of Israelis killed on October 7. Military superiority does not create moral superiority.
I am especially disturbed when Israeli government officials, religious-nationalist leaders and public figures use language advocating the removal of Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza, renewed settlement or collective punishment. We should not falsely say that every Israeli or every Jewish religious leader supports these ideas. Many Jews in Israel and around the world have courageously opposed the war. Nevertheless, influential leaders have used dehumanizing and eliminationist language, and such language must be condemned before it becomes an excuse for further atrocities.
Israel demands that the world remember every Israeli victim while treating Palestinian victims as unfortunate statistics. It calls Hamas’s violence terrorism while describing its own much greater destruction as self-defense. It demands accountability for Palestinian crimes while resisting accountability for its own conduct.
In plain language, Israel calls foul while continuing to foul.
The life of an Israeli child is precious. The life of a Palestinian child is equally precious. God does not value one child according to nationality, religion or ethnicity. “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).
Justice cannot mean condemning the crimes of Hamas while excusing the crimes of a powerful state. Evil does not become righteous because it is committed by an established government, carried out by a uniformed military or supplied with American weapons.
I pray for Jewish people. I pray for Palestinians. I pray for the hostages and their families. I pray for those grieving in Israel and for those buried beneath the ruins of Gaza. But prayer must not become an excuse for silence.
“Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate” (Amos 5:15).
October 7 was evil. Collective punishment, forced displacement, starvation and the mass killing of Palestinian civilians are also evil. Condemning one while defending the other is not justice. It is hypocrisy.
A nation cannot sow occupation, dispossession and violence for generations and then pretend to be astonished when hatred and violent resistance grow from that soil. That does not excuse Hamas, but it helps explain why Hamas came into existence.
There will be no lasting peace until Palestinians are treated as human beings possessing the same God-given dignity, freedom and right to life that Israel demands for its own people.
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