The Jews who critique Israel

There is another tradition of Jewish thought, one which dissents from the world-view of modern Israel

There is a grief that keeps faith awake. It is a public sorrow that refuses to be domesticated by power, one that gathers itself into a voice naming injury, refusing easy protections, and demanding repair. Across Jewish history, such grief has sounded again and again, warning against the temptation to confuse survival with sanctity. In times of triumph, it is the note of conscience; in times of catastrophe, it is the cry of the prophets. Today, when Jewish identity is often fused with the conduct of a state, those prophets in exile still summon us to distinguish covenant from conquest. Such arguments are playing out in Israel itself, where writers, rabbis and historians continue to wrestle with the meaning of Jewish power and the moral limits of state action. These debates have sharpened as leaders negotiate the future of Gaza, revealing a deeper struggle within Judaism over what political belonging ought to serve. As, in a perfect doublethink, Israel continues to attack Gaza in the name of a ceasefire, reportedly preparing for another offensive, the question of the responsibilities that follow devastation are more live than ever.

This tradition of dissent is older than our present conflicts. In the early 20th century, Ahad Ha’am, the essayist born in what is now Ukraine, often called the spiritual conscience of early Zionism, warned that the dream of a homeland could corrode Jewish life if it ignored the rights of those already dwelling in the land. For him, a national restoration severed from righteousness would hollow out the enduring bond between Jewish ethics and Jewish identity it claimed to renew, a warning that continues to shadow debates to this day.

Later, Martin Buber, the Austrian-born philosopher and religious thinker whose work shaped modern Jewish thought, carried forward a vision of co-existence that refused to separate Jewish flourishing from the dignity of Palestinians. He advocated a bi-national arrangement, which he articulated in the 1920s and 1930s through Brit Shalom and Ihud, movements that called for a shared polity for Jews and Arabs. What others dismissed as political naivety, they saw as a form of Jewish fidelity: a way of honouring the prophets who spoke against kings when the weak were made to suffer, figures like Nathan confronting David, or Isaiah admonishing rulers who mistook strength for righteousness. Buber grounded this in his philosophy of “I and Thou”, where a genuine encounter with another human being was inseparable from encounter with the divine. For him, relationship with the Other was never secondary to worship; it was its very substance. To refuse such encounter, he warned, was to impoverish politics as well as the soul of Judaism.

Hannah Arendt, writing after the Holocaust, similarly cautioned against the nationalism of the newly formed state hardening into chauvinism. She foresaw how trauma, if translated into immunity from critique, could corrode discernment. To love one’s people, for Arendt, did not mean to excuse everything done in its name, rather to insist it remain answerable to the wider human family. Together, these figures remind us that Jewish thought has never spoken with one voice. Its strength lies in its multiplicity, and refusal to let history sanctify injustice.

In our present moment, the outstanding members of this lineage are Marc H Ellis and Judith Butler: Ellis, a Jewish liberation theologian shaped by Catholic Worker activism and Latin American theology; and Butler, the American philosopher whose work bridges ethics, language and political life. Though very different in temperament, both share a refusal to let memory become a licence for domination. Ellis speaks with a theologian’s pulse. For him, exile is more than a condition of geography; it is a discipline. Jewish life took shape through centuries of dispersion, where identity was sustained without armies or borders and where ethical responsibility often outweighed political authority. To “practise exile” is to resist the comforts of belonging when they come at another people’s expense. His writing returns biblical vocabulary – lament, repentance – to their principled work, insisting that the spiritual inheritance of Jewish suffering obliges solidarity with the vulnerable.

Butler, by contrast, approaches through philosophy. She tracks how claims of anti-Semitism can be misused to silence necessary critique. For Butler, clarity of language is an ethical demand: if every criticism of Israeli policy is cast as hatred of Jews, then genuine prejudice is obscured and moral debate foreclosed. This has led her into some positions that many readers find troubling. In a 2006 interview she described Hamas and Hezbollah as “progressive” within a defined analysis of global left movements, speaking about anti-imperial politics (though she did not endorse their methods). Likewise, she has called the events of 7 October “appalling” and “terrible” while resisting the term terrorism. These stances have generated intense debate. But they do not erase her wider argument about clarity and the dangers of rhetorical inflation. And the tension between Ellis and Butler is instructive. Ellis anchors his arguments in prophecy, giving dissent a liturgical gravity; Butler dismantles the categories that blunt moral reasoning. One insists on binding obligation, the other on analytic precision. Read together, they reveal how Jewish fidelity can take the form of disciplined dissent.

Shaul Magid, an American scholar of Jewish thought whose work traces the spiritual possibilities of non-sovereign Judaism, enters this landscape as another voice shaped by diaspora, extending the concerns of Ellis and Butler into a theological meditation on political imagination. In The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (2023), he extends this meditation by treating exile as a generative condition of Jewish political imagination. Writing from within American Judaism, he reframes distance as a stance of responsibility, one that resists enclosure and insists on the possibility of faithfulness beyond sovereignty. For Magid, to erase exile as a category is to impoverish Jewish life, dismissing diaspora traditions as somehow incomplete. He names his position “counter-Zionism”, in loyalty to an inheritance that refuses to equate sovereignty with sanctity. Some have described his work as laying the foundations for a liberation theology of exile, a summons to remember that estrangement may be the grounding of solidarity in a suffering world.

These insights matter urgently now. Public life is increasingly governed by definitions of anti-Semitism whose application, in practice, can stifle criticism of state conduct. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, for instance, was designed as an educational tool. Yet it has been invoked to discipline students, scholars and activists. On several campuses, invited speakers have been disinvited or censured on the grounds that critique of occupation risks offending the definition’s examples. What might appear a technical dispute over wording becomes, in practice, a contest over what can be taught, who may speak, and how language of duty is used.

Ellis warns against a memory of the Holocaust that is wielded as indemnity. When Auschwitz becomes a shield against moral inquiry, when the enormity of Jewish suffering is invoked in debates about Gaza in ways that discourage scrutiny of present policies, trauma has been domesticated into doctrine. Butler, likewise, asks that we guard against rhetorical moves that collapse grief into immunity, or protection into domination. Together they insist that Jewish memory cannot be honoured by silencing others’ suffering, only by standing with them.

From this ground we can turn to Peter Beinart, the American Jewish writer whose movement from establishment liberalism to principled dissent has made him one of the most closely watched commentators of his generation. He has carried these arguments into a wider public arena. His recent book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza presses for a reckoning of faith and politics. Once a liberal Zionist at the centre of American Jewish life, Beinart now argues that Judaism must place justice before tribal comfort. He grieves Israeli victims of Hamas’s 7 October attack without qualification, yet refuses to let that grief erase Palestinian lives.

Beinart also revisits scripture to recover its force. He has specifically returned to Purim, the festival commemorating the biblical story in which Jews face annihilation in Persia, only to be delivered into safety, a narrative that affirms vulnerability as much as it cautions against vengeance. Purim is seen as a tale of peril as well as a warning against triumphalism; the commandment to love the stranger returns as a rebuke to dispossession. And from these sources Beinart advances a radical proposal: one democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. His argument is a summons to imagination, to ask whether a Judaism that abandons the stranger can still be called Jewish.

What gives his book gravitas is its continuity. Ellis and Butler have already prepared the ground: Ellis by restoring prophecy as exile, Butler by demanding precision in categories of judgement. Beinart’s contribution is to carry their insights into civic debate with a clarity that unsettles consensus. He joins them in insisting that survival without equity corrodes the tradition it claims to defend.

Of course, objections remain. Many will say that such voices misunderstand the hard calculus of statecraft, that purity is an indulgence in a world of real threats. Others fear that any concession of power places Jews once again at the mercy of forces that have harmed them. For these defenders of a vigilant nationalism, the state is a fragile shield in a hostile world, and its toughness is understood as a form of collective survival. They speak from a memory in which weakness invited catastrophe, and they worry that critique risks loosening the protections that history once denied. But the prophets were never strategists of power; they were guardians of conscience. Their role was to remind the community that safety severed from truth becomes its own undoing.

This, finally, is what binds the lineage: a fidelity beyond consensus. Ahad Ha’am, Buber, Arendt, Ellis, Butler, Beinart: each has been accused of naivety or betrayal. Yet their dissent is better read as devotion, a commitment to keep faith awake by refusing to confuse sacred obligation with domination. To practise exile is to accept misunderstanding, even the charge of treachery from one’s own. Yet this is the test of memory’s integrity. If sorrow is transformed into immunity, it calcifies into myth. If it is kept alive as lament, it becomes a summons to repair.

Jewish history offers a language of conscience capacious enough to hold more than one sorrow, a tradition of prophecy that insists on solidarity across lines of power. In this lineage lies the possibility that Jewish fidelity and human solidarity might meet rather than diverge. To honour that inheritance now is to remember our prophets over our kings, our conscience over our comfort. And in practice this might mean something simple yet radical: choosing solidarity over silence, choosing memory as obligation rather than indemnity, choosing encounter with the stranger as a way of encountering God. In the present war this ethic would ask something simple and exacting. It would ask leaders to measure security by the lives they safeguard rather than the force they command, and it would ask communities to let their grief widen rather than narrow their field of compassion. It would ask that Jewish safety be pursued in ways that do not extinguish Palestinian futures. These are old principles placed in a burning moment, yet they remain the measure of whether fidelity can survive power.

[Further reading: What it means to be Jewish now]