To my fellow Jews who have found a great purpose in anti-Israel activism, who have in recent months voted for stridently anti-Israel politicians, or plan to vote for others whose opposition to Israel has become central to their politics, I wish to exercise a privilege our sages reserved for those who have reached the age of fifty: the privilege of offering advice. I am years past that threshold, so please allow me to share a few thoughts.

Over the years, and especially since October 7, I have made it a point to speak with people who share your point of view. It has never been my way to argue or to lecture, to excoriate or even cajole. Rather, I have had a sincere desire to listen. I don’t pretend that listening has settled the argument between us — only that it has earned me the standing to make one.

What I have found is not that you are a “self-hating Jew,” an expression I don’t use because I don’t believe it is true. I think something more complicated has happened. I may have your story wrong — you know your own heart better than I ever could, and I offer this only as the story I have heard most often, from people who arrived at your convictions honestly. I think you grew up hearing the origin story of the nascent Jewish state, the one proffered in books like Leon Uris’s Exodus, where heroic young Jews, outnumbered and outgunned, reclaimed their ancestral land after some 2,700 years of exile — and did so in a manner unparalleled in its morality.

You may have gone to Jewish day school and heard the same themes. You heard them again around the Shabbat table in your home. And then you heard another story. You may have read 1948, by the Israeli historian Benny Morris, with its factual accounts drawn from recently unsealed documents of those years, which contradicted some of the stories of your youth. And no doubt you went to college, as nearly all young Jews do, and read the stories of the Palestinians themselves — similar in ways to the Leon Uris book, but portraying the Nakba, the violence, the treachery, the perfidy of the Zionists as they craftily stole the lands of the blameless Arabs of Ottoman Palestine.

You also learned that there is a power dynamic at play across the globe — oppressor versus oppressed — and that the former, in every case, is bad, and the latter, good. You see yourself as good, and you are perhaps ashamed that you clung so easily, so guilelessly, to what you were taught as a child. Now you seek to rectify that wrong. And you will do it by declaring: Not In My Name.

I’m not going to try to argue you out of what you’ve concluded about the settlements, how Israel came into being, or about particular........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)