Avrum Burg, former Israeli President and Speaker of the Knesset from 1999-2003, wrote a powerful article calling on Israelis to take the opportunity of the ending of this war to reflect on their own doomed cultural and spiritual failures. It is an “existential” matter for Israel itself, Burg claimed. He begins: “There are moments in history when not only states change but entire nations. It is not borders that are redrawn but consciousness itself; not governments that are replaced but the collective soul that undergoes transformation. After 1945 the Germans awoke from the nightmare of Nazism and faced what had been done by them and in their name. After Vietnam, Americans emerged from the shattering of national innocence as a different people. The war in Gaza is such a moment for the Jewish people. It is not another round in the endless cycle of Middle Eastern violence but a historic turning point. It is a moment in which we must look in the mirror and recognize what we have become. And it is ugly.”
Burg writes that for centuries Jewish consciousness held “the conviction that we carried humanity’s memory of pain and were therefore bound to build a moral society that would never do to others what had been done to us.” But this changed with the war in Gaza, Burg writes. After Oct. 7, 2023, “Vengeance hardened into policy. And policy descended into racial supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and primitive nationalism.” Today, “it can no longer be said that the Jewish people are a persecuted nation.” The Jewish nation “was buried in Gaza,” he said. “Let us speak plainly: It is not only Gaza that lies in ruins, nor the kibbutzim along the border. The Jewish soul itself is shattered.”
After illustrating the moral and spiritual crisis for Israelis, who have tolerated a genocide against Palestinians being committed in their name, Burg calls upon the better traditions of Judaism. “The beating heart of Judaism was never physical force but spiritual refinement,” Burg continues. “The Jewish hero was never the neighborhood bully but ‘the one who conquers his own impulse,’ and ‘the one who turns his enemy into a beloved friend.’... In Gaza, the Jewish people broke. This collapse is not political; it is existential,” Burg declares.
He goes on to call for a “Global Jewish Fund for the Reconstruction of Gaza,” not as a political gesture, “but an ethical act of faith, a tangible expression of the commandment ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Burg concludes, writing: “This is not utopia. It is the only realistic path back to being a people of spirit. If the devastation in Gaza displayed the extent of our power, the rebirth of a humane civilization would prove that we still possess a soul…. The Jewish people after Gaza must choose: persecutors or compassionate beings; soldiers who ‘just follow orders’ or the founding brigade of a global army of peace. This ruin can be our end or the beginning of our repair.”
