Can an Israeli State Poised for Constant Violence Deliver True Peace to Jews?
The Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran might be a military success but the deteriorating plight of the Palestinians may well produce more future conflict
Dear Readers:
Last week, in the wake of Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran, we published an agonizing meditation by , an Iranian dissident who fled to the United States, about how the bellicose ideology of Iran’s ruling mullahs had brought catastrophe to his country, the brunt of it borne by ordinary Iranians. Machine-Chian documented the long-running disconnect between the regime in power in his native country and his fellow citizens, many of whom didn’t seek nuclear weapons, much less exhibited a desire to be in a constant state of war with its neighbor. He did not support the Israeli or U.S. attack on his country. But he hoped that something better, something more responsive to the Iranian people, would somehow rise out of the rubble.
Today, we publish a sermon that Rabbi Michael Holzman recently delivered in which he reflects on whether Israel’s seemingly successful military operations will bring true peace to his people. He does not question the operations but wonders whether ignoring the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, co-residents of the Jews, would bring the country closer to the longed-for peace that the scriptures prophesied about or make it even more elusive?
In this empathetic and introspective rumination, Holzman reflects on what cannot stay unresolved if genuine peace is to be achieved.
Both Machine-Chian and Holzman’s essays are in keeping with The UnPopulist’s bedrock belief that the polarization and conflict that marks our times will subside when each side stops pointing fingers—and guns—at the other, and turns to minding its own.
Berny Belvedere
Senior Editor
As a rabbi, it is important to me, just as it is important to the congregation I serve, to devote a portion of our service to offer up a traditional prayer for peace. And every week since Oct. 7, we have weaved into that reflective time additional prayers and readings for the state of Israel. This last week, however, was different. For the first time in 20 months, we can see on the horizon a glimmer of what might be called peace. Talking to colleagues and friends, both here and in Israel, I hear a palpable sense that this war, 632 days long, might be coming to a close. A friend told me that her daughter’s camp trip to Israel was canceled and then un-canceled. My Shalom Hartman Institute rabbinic study program, which they had refused to cancel, has been truncated but will start up in July relatively on schedule. Attitudes have shifted from the war toward the future.
Part of this is the usual tradition of Israeli resilience, the stubborn outlook that insists on life in a neighborhood of enemies. This is how a Jewish state came into existence, the fruit of a people with no other choice, a homeland and refuge for not just outcasts but traumatized survivors. They go on in the face of violence because they have no concept of the normalcy we take for granted. So they invent a normalcy, a calm, a sense of peace, despite the fact that their children must go into a warzone in what for us would be Richmond, or Winchester, or Annapolis, or Frederick, a 90 minute drive from Jerusalem to Kibbutz Be’eri.
But it leads me to ask: Is this the peace we have been praying for? Is this the prophetic vision of life beneath one’s vine and fig tree? Is this what our Jewish souls communicate when we ask God to bless our people Israel b’chol eit, u’vchol sha’ah, that is, in every moment, in every hour, with peace? Do our words have integrity if we speak of peace but accept, support, visit, even celebrate, an Israel that lives perpetually crouched, always poised for violence?
The strategist would say: “As Jews, we have no choice, our enemies are clear in their intention to destroy us.” The historian would say: “Just look at the records, visit the sites, see the ruins where prior generations let down their guard, where we ignored the obligations of self-defense.” The political philosopher would say: “This is what it means to have a state, to be sovereign, to have tanks and warplanes and a place to park them.”
But I am not asking strategic, historical, or political questions. I am asking a theological question, and thus a question about what’s in our souls. I am asking what, for us, is the true meaning of the word Hatikvah—which, translated, means “the hope” and is the name of the Israeli national anthem. What exactly are we hoping for? I am asking about the way we should make sense of the tingle we feel when the music soars an octave and we hear od lo avdah tikvahteinu (“Our hope still has not died”). I am asking what exactly we want for a peaceful Israel? What do we want if the war truly might end, if the 19 year olds can come home? Those tingles, those words, the inner desire in our souls tell us not only what we want for Israel, but who we are, what we stand for, what we tell our kids when they ask us hard questions.
And the era of hard questions will not end once this phase of fighting stops. Despite the pride we should feel at Israel’s ability to defend itself, the most difficult questions remain unresolved. When Israel finally decides to declare an end to the fighting, will it have achieved the peace we have been praying for?
The question is urgent. As Israel opens up, and American Jewry returns to Israel this summer, and as we add this war to the list of wars from which Israel emerged victorious, we also know that the last 20 months have changed us. They have changed American Jewry in four fundamental ways. First, despite the recent military victories, we can no longer think of Jews in Israel as the safest Jews in the world. In fact they are quite vulnerable. Second, we see that despite all the work our community has done over the past century—and especially since the Holocaust—to fight hatred, we Jews will always be hated. Third, we have witnessed a massive reorganization of the American political structure, so that support for Israel has become an overtly partisan issue, an intentional weapon of the Republican Party created by the Israeli right wing. And fourth, we have seen a gaping divide open within the Jewish community, one that mirrors all the other divides in American society, in which extremists reject nuance, complexity, and the messiness of pragmatism, all the things one needs to have an intelligent conversation about a real country with real problems. In short, we feel less safe, more hated, politically manipulated, and internally divided.
I raise this because there is a tendency to ignore these changes in moments of victory, moments when it seems like we have defeated our enemies. There is a tendency to focus on the successes, the ingenuity and courage of the soldiers in the Jewish state. There is a tendency to get excited about the next trip and to gloss over these things.
But all good news will not change any of the facts I just mentioned, because Israelis will continue to be the targets of terror and violence. The one issue that remains largely unresolved in this conflict, the one where Israel can claim no victory, the one which reflects the most ostentatious use of Jewish military and vigilante violence, and the one leaving Israeli Jews as hostages in captivity, is the relationship between the seven million Jews and the seven million Palestinians living in various parts of the land. This is the unsolved crisis, the ongoing wound making a bloody gash across the land of milk and honey. The Israeli messianic ultra-nationalists, both religious and secular, will not allow this issue to be resolved. The Bibi political machine will do everything it can to stoke acts of Palestinian violence as a way to justify the oppression. Land will continue being stolen. Roving Jewish mobs will continue their pogroms in the West Bank, once a source of outrage, now common. And the Palestinians will comply by lending support to their own extremists, even when alternatives might exist. Meanwhile, as we plan our next trips, the American Jewish mainstream will do everything it can to avert our eyes to the reality of this inequality, oppression, and suffering. All of this remains.
So when I ask, “Is this the peace we are praying for?” I offer that unless we pray for a just and fair resolution for Palestinian society, there will be no real peace for Israel, for Jews, and for the world. No amount of military domination will stop the violence against Jews, the hatred, the political manipulation, or the internal division. No number of complaints that, “We have no partner on the other side” will change the status quo. If we want violence to stop, then support for a fair Palestinian state, and a road to get there, however long, should be a mainstream Jewish desire. It should be part of our prayer for peace.
In the months ahead, I deeply pray that the Jewish people will find an end to fighting, that the soldiers of the IDF can go home, that the people of Gaza can survive and regain dignity, that the settlers in the West Bank will be restrained, that the ring of enemies surrounding Israel will be utterly defanged. But my prayers continue: I pray that what comes beyond the immediate future will bring a new status quo to all the people in the land. We cannot forget that last part if we are to pray these words with integrity.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Thank you, Rabbi for this thoughtful and "forward looking" sermon. And thank you Bernie for publishing it here.
Nevertheless I remain pessimistic about the entire situation. It is not my place to tell either community what to do.
I don't know how a nation can handle the traumatic anxiety that drives them to extreme and even irrational security measures.
I don't know how a community handles the inter-generational traumatic grief and self harm to which they seem addicted. The "Masada Myth" vs. the Nakba.
The healing of trauma and the shame that powerlessness can cause is difficult to accomplish in individuals--- impossible for nations and communities. Overweening pride and self harm are both strategies to cope with shame.
Rabbi Holzman, thank you for your essay. That said, I was struck—and frankly dismayed—by a glaring absence in your sermon: a clear and direct acknowledgment of the massive Palestinian suffering caused by this war. You speak movingly about Israeli soldiers and their bravery, about Birthright camp trips being cancelled and rescheduled, and even about “the ingenuity and courage of the soldiers in the Jewish state.” But where is the recognition of the horror imposed upon Palestinians by these soldiers?
Tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them children, have been killed, entire neighborhoods erased, families decimated. That this goes unnamed in a religious reflection about a never ending war that is approaching two years is troubling. As someone who writes from a moral and spiritual position, surely you must see the dissonance in writing thousands of words without directly acknowledging the wilful, large-scale killing of civilians by a state you ask God to bless “in every moment, in every hour.”
What deepens this moral gap is the celebratory tone in parts of your reflection: the pride in the IDF, the sense of victory and resilience, the readiness to move towards “the future” while the ashes of Gaza still smolder. It comes across as a victory lap for a war well-fought.
Importantly, the plight of the Palestinians is framed as a pragmatic dilemma, not a spiritual imperative. That framing stands in stark contrast to how the rest of the world is increasingly seeing this war: not as a complex tragedy with “both sides” at fault, but as a one-sided campaign of destruction.