Avrum Burg: ‘Israel’s Perversion of Judaism Makes Necessary a Global Jewish Peace Camp’

Oct. 19—Avraham (“Avrum”) Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and a long-time peace activist, is passionately concerned that the type of war being carried out against Palestinians in Gaza may also destroy the Jewish soul. Yet it is precisely this moment which offers Jewish civilization a chance to throw off the alien invasion of “brutal power, racial supremacy, and political isolation,” he argues. His article today posted to his Substack, "Israel’s Perversion of Judaism Makes Necessary a ‘Global Jewish Peace Camp,"’ is a moral call to arms, worthy of extensive excerpts, as well as widespread circulation. 

Burg writes: “The Jewish world stands today before one of the most difficult moral questions in its history. For generations the Jewish people were victims of oppression, expulsion, and the denial of rights. Out of that experience of suffering they gave humanity one of its greatest moral gifts: the understanding that there are boundaries that must never be crossed, and that every human being is born with dignity and rights that cannot be taken away. From this consciousness, and in the shadow of the twentieth century’s lessons, came the recognition that every nation has the right to self-determination. Out of that belief the State of Israel was born, not only as a historical correction but as an expression of the universal idea that all peoples deserve to live in freedom, dignity, and security.

“Yet the very principle that justified Israel’s creation now calls it to account. The right of self determination does not include the right to deny another people’s identity, nor to erase its existence. A state that rules another nation in the name of liberty for itself alone undermines the moral foundation on which it stands.”

Israel has adopted an “ideology of brutal power, racial supremacy, and political isolation.” But Jewish civilization and Jews “are not bound to the policies of the state,” no matter how much it flaunts itself as being “Jewish.” Hence, "the further Israel moves from the shared values of humanity, the greater the need for a Jewish voice that will say clearly to the world, and to ourselves, that being Israeli and being Jewish are not the same. The war in Gaza made this truth impossible to ignore. Israel’s actions … are utterly alien to the Jewish tradition. A tradition built on the sanctity of life, on responsibility for the other, and on the belief that power must serve moral ends cannot coexist with a culture of humiliation and violence…. [A] global Jewish Peace Camp must be created now to prevent the next and greater horrors already on the horizon…. The new Jewish vision seeks to heal the distortion of a Judaism that became drunk with power. It aims to reconnect Jewish history with universal ethics, national memory with human responsibility, and the power we hold with the justice we claim to embody….

“This is the moment to decide what we wish to bequeath to those who come after us: the Judaism of survival or the Judaism of repair. The first was born of fear; the second must be born of responsibility…. No more injustices in our name, no more domination in the name of imagined security, no more humiliation of one human being by another. The new Jewish vision is a call to renew the covenant between Judaism and humanity, between conscience and justice, between a past worn down by the addiction to power and a future built upon the courage of repair. It calls upon Jews everywhere to stand again where Judaism has always belonged, on the side of life, peace, justice, and of equality.”