As we head into the Jewish season of self-reckoning, many of us are struggling to make moral sense of this new era that began on October 7.

To be an ambivalent Jew today is not to be uncertain so much as torn between conflicting certainties. We know Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies is unavoidable. We know any nation in our place would have reacted to Hamas’s mass atrocities as we did. We know we face an enemy willing to commit any crime and that the IDF is fighting under conditions that would test the moral limits of any army. We know the young Israelis who have fought for months, many for nearly two years, are among the most heroic and self-sacrificing this country has produced. We know Israel is subject to a relentless campaign of lies, half-truths, distortions and convenient omissions. We know the outrageous accusation of genocide against Israel only diverts the world’s focus from radical Islamism, the truly genocidal side in this conflict.

But we also know that something has gone very wrong in Gaza. That two years of fighting the most brutal war in Israel’s history has inevitably affected the standards and behavior of parts of the IDF (though we don’t yet know to what extent). That the Netanyahu government, a coalition of the fanatical and the corrupt, is disgracing the Jewish state. That, if implemented, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s chilling description of the goals of this next phase of the war – total destruction and mass emigration of Palestinians – will implicate us in a war crime. That once-marginal fanatics among the settler community are protected by government patrons as they burn and injure and occasionally kill. That even as our nightmares return and Jews around the world face a familiar hatred hiding behind a new name, we are no longer innocent.

At the heart of this war lies a tension between two moral imperatives. The first is to protect innocent lives on the most complicated battlefield the IDF, or perhaps any army, has fought. The second is to deny terrorism the ability to hide behind innocents and thereby achieve immunity.

Even when fighting an existential war against enemies without moral restraint, there are limits to what is morally permitted to the Jewish state. And given the nature of our enemy and the threats against us, there are limits to the self-recrimination Jews should assume.

The Israeli public has avoided a moral conversation about the war for understandable reasons. Though two years have passed since the Hamas massacre, we are still grieving, enraged and afraid. Polls show that many Israelis are no longer certain about the country’s long-term prospects. Hardly the emotional state conducive to moral self-inquiry.

The wounds of October 7 have been pried open by a global lynch mob. Every red line has been crossed – from

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)