Trashing Jewish values risks Israel’s survival as we know it

During the past 17 months, 886 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and 7,368 were injured. In 2024 alone, 841 homes in the West Bank and 219 homes in East Jerusalem were demolished. Additionally, as of the end of June 2024, 9,440 Palestinians have been detained on "security grounds," including 226 minors.

There were 1,860 instances of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians from October 7, 2023, to December 31, 2024; under the watchful eyes of the police and the military, settlers regularly attacked Palestinian villages, setting fire to homes and cars, forcing thousands to abandon their homes and villages where they lived for hundreds of years.

As recently as January 2025, Israel launched a large-scale military operation in the West Bank, displacing 40,000 Palestinians, which is in line with Finance Minister Smotrich's call for the annexation of the West Bank.

Given what the Jews have endured for centuries in foreign lands, it was once hard to imagine that any Israeli government would be capable of treating another human being the way that the Jews have been treated. The Netanyahu-led government has steadily been trashing the values that provided the moral foundation of Israel, built on the ashes of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust; this tragic moral collapse of Israel has infected the Israeli public.

There has been hardly any pushback from Israelis, 80 percent of whom were born after 1967. For them, the occupation has become a way of life-the suppression and incarceration of Palestinians is normal, dispossession of their land is a given, demolishing their houses is unvarying, and night raids are another good measure to instill constant anxiety and fear in their hearts.

The Israelis, many of whom have grown numb to the Palestinians' daily suffering, should wake up for a brief moment and watch what is being done in their name, internalize the daily tragedies that are being inflicted on so many innocent civilians whose only guilt is being Palestinians. Isn't that evocative of the Jews' persecution, whose guilt was just being Jewish?

This total betrayal of Jewish values should send shivers through their spines as it has for every decent human being.

Netanyahu does not want peace. Maintaining perpetual conflict with the Palestinians would allow him to usurp more Palestinian land through coercion, intimidation, and violence than what he can gain through a peaceful negotiating process.

He persistently paints the Palestinians as an existential threat while using night raids, home demolitions, and more to provoke them into committing acts of violence to justify the occupation on national security grounds, while gobbling up their land bite by bite.

Netanyahu opposes a Palestinian state but offers no alternative to a two-state solution. He must show the world another option where both sides can live in peace and security short of that. Is the annexation of the West Bank the answer? It will do nothing but erase Israel's Jewish character and deprive it of living in security and peace, defying its founders' vision and its reason for being. Ninety percent of all living Palestinians were born under occupation. They are left hopeless and despairing and have nothing left to lose. A fourth generation of youth will now live to avenge the calamity that has befallen their people. What fate will await them? They would rather die as martyrs than live hopelessly in servitude. It will not be if but when a new inferno erupts at a magnitude never seen before.

Netanyahu is champing at the bit to exile the Palestinians from Gaza, courtesy of Trump, who is clueless about the horror that will unfold should he act on his brazen idea. However, Netanyahu's dream of a greater Israel will be nothing but a lasting nightmare.

Israel will never be able to sustain itself on the ashes of the Palestinians. By forsaking Jewish values, Netanyahu is destroying the moral foundation on which the country stands. The Israelis must remember that the values that guarded the Jews' survival throughout the millennia must be restored to ensure the survival of the country and, indeed, its very soul.