Saturday 31st of May 2025
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we mourn the dead on both sides, but.....

IN 30 YEARS, IT WILL BE PROVEN BEYOND DOUBT THAT THE HAMAS INCURSION INTO ISRAEL ON OCTOBER 7 2023 WAS THE DEVIOUS WORK OF NETANYAHU... MEANWHILE, EVEN SO, NO-ONE SHOULD DEFEND ISRAEL MURDERS OF PALESTINIANS IN GAZA. YET A RABBI THINKS "OTHERWISE"...  

 

 

BY Daniel Rabin

Rabbi

 

You come home after a long day. Maybe from work, trying to raise kids, putting food on the table. You just want a bit of peace. Maybe a bit of footy. You scroll through social media or glance at the headlines.

And then you see it: Israel starving children, committing genocide, a colonial occupier. I get it. If that’s all you see, it’s understandable why you’d start to believe Israel must be the aggressor, the villain in this story.

But I want to offer another perspective. I know I won’t change the minds of those who’ve dug in or have an ideological agenda. I’m speaking to those who are still open. Those who feel uncomfortable but aren’t sure what to make of it all.

Since October 7, I’ve been to Israel three times. I’ve met families shattered by the massacre. I’ve stood in homes torched by Hamas. I’ve spoken with young soldiers preparing to return to the battlefield. I’ve met hostages and their families, many still waiting in agony.

 

Just stop and think about that for a moment. Over 600 days since they were brutally taken from their homes. Still alive, we pray. Still held in conditions we cannot imagine. Not by a rogue faction, but by Hamas, the governing authority of Gaza. An organisation that would rather keep hostages in terror dungeons than offer its own people peace.

Some say, “Yes, Hamas is bad, but that doesn’t justify the killing of civilians”. Every innocent life lost is a tragedy. I weep for the suffering in Gaza. But what’s often ignored is why this war is so devastating. Hamas embeds itself in schools, hospitals and apartment buildings. It fires rockets from playgrounds and stockpiles weapons under homes. It uses its own people as shields. It relies on their suffering to fuel global outrage. And tragically, it works.

There’s a growing narrative that Israel is deliberately starving Gaza. This week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called Israel’s actions “outrageous” and its explanations “without credibility”. But the very next day, an aid warehouse stocked with supplies was discovered, controlled by the UN. That’s the complexity. Aid isn’t just being blocked; it’s being stolen, hoarded and weaponised by “armed gangs” as described by the UN.

Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has condemned the “looting and theft” of humanitarian aid by Hamas-affiliated gangs, acknowledging their role in exacerbating the crisis. Should Israel do more? Maybe. But to ignore Hamas’ role and blame Israel alone is not just unfair, it distorts the truth.

And this didn’t begin on October 7. For years, Hamas fired rockets into Israeli towns, terrifying children and disrupting lives. Imagine rockets aimed at Melbourne or Sydney, every day, for years. Families running into bomb shelters. Children growing up afraid of the sky. No government would tolerate that. Why should Israel?

Israel invested in defence and protection. Hamas invested in terror tunnels and weapons. The billions poured into Gaza could have built more schools, hospitals and opportunity. Instead, it built a war machine.

Yet in the West, the narrative has become dangerously one-sided. Israel is called genocidal, apartheid, a colonial project. These aren’t just inaccurate. They’re inflammatory. The claim of colonialism is particularly absurd. Israel is the story of an indigenous people returning to their homeland. The Jewish connection to the Land of Israel dates back more than 3000 years. If that’s not indigeneity, what is?

None of this means Israel is beyond criticism. Could the war have been prosecuted more effectively? Possibly. Could Israel negotiate more creatively? Maybe. But negotiate with whom? With Hamas, a group that kidnaps babies, launches attacks from civilian areas and vows to do it again? These are not easy choices. This is not a clean or conventional war.

 

I’ve had people say to me, “But you’re a rabbi, how can you support this war?” The answer is that I don’t support war. I support truth. And I support life. It’s because I’m a rabbi that I mourn every innocent life. That I pray for peace every day. For Israelis and Palestinians, alike. But compassion doesn’t mean silence in the face of terror. It means being honest about who is perpetuating the suffering.

Here’s what’s remarkable. The soldiers I met don’t want war. They want to go home. To study. To start families. To live. And yes, to live in a world where the people of Gaza can do the same. Where children on both sides can grow up with dignity and safety. That world is not a fantasy. But it will never exist while Hamas remains in power.

Israel didn’t want or start this war. It was dragged into it, broken-hearted, after its worst day since the Holocaust. And yet it is being judged as though it is the aggressor.

Meanwhile, I’ve received hateful messages online. “Baby killer.” “You should have died in the gas chambers.” After two people were murdered leaving the Jewish museum in Washington, I saw people comment, “They deserved it”. This is the climate these slogans are fuelling. And it’s not just overseas. It’s here, in Melbourne, in our schools, on our streets.

 

I’m writing because I believe most Australians are fair-minded. I believe that if you saw what I’ve seen – if you met the mothers of hostages, the first responders, the young soldiers who just want to come home – you’d understand that this isn’t a war of choice.

It’s a war Israel must win if there’s to be any hope for peace. And it’s a truth we must defend if we want our society here in Australia to remain decent, thoughtful and humane.

You may not agree with everything Israel does. But if you believe in truth, humanity and justice, you cannot ignore what Hamas is.

Rabbi Daniel Rabin is senior rabbi at Caulfield Shule in Melbourne.

 

https://www.smh.com.au/national/i-get-why-many-people-think-israel-is-a-villain-as-a-rabbi-that-s-not-how-i-see-it-20250529-p5m39c.html

 

HAMAS WAS "CREATED" BY NETANYAHU IN HIS FIRST STINT AT ISRAELI PM, IN ORDER TO "DIVIDE" THE PALESTINIANS... WHILE GAZA IS BEING DESTROYED, 25,000 PALESTINIANS ON THE WEST BANK GOT EVICTED TO MAKE ROOM FOR MORE JEWISH SETTLEMENTS....

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

shame....

 

When Israel acts shamefully, we Jews must be willing to be ashamed of it

 

Nicola Redhouse

Writer

 

A few weeks ago I signed a statement from members of the Jewish community calling for an end to the Israel-Gaza war, and an end to the “humanitarian crisis” unfolding under the Netanyahu-led government.

The statement was meant to be published as a paid advertisement in TheAustralian Jewish News, but I found out last week the editor was not willing to run it as it was written.

I have avoided signing statements on this war until now. Here in Australia, there has been fierce conflict over how we respond to the horror of Hamas’ terror of October 7 and the subsequent decimation of Gaza and its people. What date to mark the beginning of “it all”? What label for what kind of trauma is being inflicted, and for what reason? I have kept a notebook of alternating news reports of the same event to observe this dissonance at how we describe what we are witnessing.

But this week, driving my children to school, I heard British plastic surgeon Dr Victoria Rose, who works at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. Every 40 minutes, she said, a child dies there. The children dying are between 1 and 11 and many are dying because they are so malnourished their bodies cannot fight the infections from their burns and wounds. The hospital is running out of the disinfectant they need to operate. These are unequivocal accounts of a humanitarian crisis that can and must be stopped.

 

There have been times since October 7 that I have felt dizzy trying to find my sense of what is true about this war. I know my personal experiences of concrete antisemitism over the years, words said to me, to my children – “Jewish pig”, “gas your family” – swastikas sent to my child in a school group chat. And there is no doubt that those who wield such words to me will find community in opposition to Israel. To diagnose what exactly is behind denial or minimisation of the atrocities of October 7 is less concrete, but at the very least perverse.

ut I find my feet again when I hear of these children. When I think of how their deaths will not contribute to the return of the hostages. When I think of the IDF soldier recently jailed for refusing to return to service, Captain Ron Feiner, who has served 270 days since October 7, who said:

“I’m horrified by the never-ending war in Gaza, by the abandonment of the hostages, by the continued killing of innocent people, and by the complete lack of political vision … I must resist in every way I can to bring this war to an end.” He is among 300 such soldiers who have refused to serve.

I have a love for Jewish tradition’s ethical grandeur, its long struggle for dignity in exile, and its rich intellectual inheritance. And it is precisely because of this love that I must speak of Jewish ethical responsibility.

A rabbi in my community used these words when I challenged his opposition to protests earlier this week: “Israel, like any nation, is not without flaws”.

In the face of the destruction of more than 400 Palestinian villages, the permanent exile of more than 700,000 people, and the ongoing mass death inflicted in Gaza, this response is pallid. Like describing apartheid in South Africa as a “zoning issue”.

My moral clarity comes instead from the words of a Holocaust survivor protesting in Israel: “I don’t think we can remember our suffering without acknowledging the suffering of Gaza ... It occupies the same place in my heart.”

The rabbi offered more: “Walk with your head high”.

But what if dignity requires that we sometimes must bow our heads? What if the radically Jewish act, at the same time the most truly human act, is to listen more carefully – especially to those whose cries we are most reluctant to hear? To hear of the shrapnel and infections and malnutrition of the Gazan children.

 

How can we treat one people’s trauma as sacred and another’s as all but non-existent? Justice that operates with such distorted vision is not justice, after all. It is tribalism in moral dress. Ethically speaking, love that cannot feel shame is not love – it is vanity; and nationalism that cannot feel shame is not love of country; it is mere jingoism.

What to do, too, with the conflation of the identity of the Jewish people with the state of Israel? This is not only a definitional error; it is a theological and moral one of huge significance. Judaism long survived without sovereignty, and even when sovereignty returned, the emergence of Israel did not annul the prophetic tradition that long taught us to hold power accountable, to speak truth to it, and to mourn when justice is denied – even by our own. Maybe especially by our own.

Jewish tradition has never required uniformity of judgment. But it has required a reverence for truth. And above all, it has demanded that we never mistake power for righteousness, or the survival of the state for the flourishing of the soul. As the statement I signed says, “what is happening in Gaza is so catastrophic to Palestinians and Israeli hostages, that any constraint against open criticism is no longer tenable”.

When I think about the possibility of being called a traitor for those words or my words here, I think of this: one measure of our capacity to love Israel truly is our willingness to be ashamed of it when it acts shamefully – not because we hate it, but because we long for it to be better than it has become, for it to act in ways consistent with what is best in our religious and philosophical traditions.

 

This is not disloyalty. When we speak of “covenant” – the solemn bond between Jewish people and God – we should remind ourselves it includes the possibility of rebuke. Spoken not from outside, but from the beating heart of a people still struggling to be worthy of its deepest moral vision.

Nicola Redhouse is a freelance writer and the author of Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind.

 

https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/when-israel-acts-shamefully-we-jews-must-be-willing-to-be-ashamed-of-it-20250522-p5m1j2.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.