August 4th, 2014 I. At a wedding celebration dinner a few weeks ago, in place of the usual light-hearted chatter were grave comments about the unrest in the Middle East. Some rockets had been fired from the Gaza Strip. Israel was on the cusp of launching a major military offensive. Many, probably most, of the people at the dinner have close family members living in the region, and everyone was understandably concerned. The breaking news that day was of the brutal abduction and murder of Mohammed Abu Khedair. No one has managed to explain to me how the murder of this innocent boy, who apparently had nothing to do with any recent violent or political activity, was supposed to be an act of revenge for the abduction and murder of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Frankel, but that is how the crime was portrayed in news reports and spoken about at the dinner. I watched as one dinner guest heard about the "revenge killing" for the first time. "Boruch Hashem," he said. This means, "Blessed be God," and in this case served as a pious expression of the sentiment, "I'm glad." "There should be more such killings," he continued. He wasn't asked to leave. No one shouted him down. No one even expressed disagreement.

II.People in my professional circles have been blindsided and dismayed bya flood of statements by Israeli academics and pro-Israel AmericanJews that appear to be calls for the Israeli military to ignore humanshields and collateral damage, to brutalize the family members ofenemy combatants, and even to engage in ethnic cleansing. Most of theattention has been directed to Mordechai Kedar's statement that rapingwomen would be the only effective deterrent to Palestinian terroristattacks (a statement that administrators of Bar Ilan Universitydefended) and to Yochanan Gordon's opinion piece in the Times ofIsrael entitled "When Genocide is Permissible." But there have manymany others, less bizarre but for that reason more dangerous.I, too, am dismayed, but I have not been blindsided. Any member of thereligious Jewish communities in America can report that statementslike these are made with impunity all the time. Racist sentiments areso common that people feel that even their deliberately radicalannouncements will be accepted as variations on a theme that mostpeople in the room are already humming.Let us look beyond the irony that the people subjected to the mostfamous genocide attempt in all of history, and who have dedicatedmuseums and powerful works of art to the horrors of ethnic cleansing,have also provided an arena where those same sentiments canbrew. Weird as that is, it only distracts us from the more horribleirony that these Jews have deeply violated their religion in theirmisguided attempt to adhere to it. Every Jew would do well to askhimself today whether they agree with Rabbi Shimon Schwab's 1976statement in the journal Mitteilungen. "Zionism is not at allidentical with Judaism. In fact it is diametrically opposed to it," hewrote. "We are Jews who hate racism because we all have been theforemost victims of racism. We hate racism because all men werecreated in God's image, be they white, black, or yellow." I have askedmyself that question, and I have also asked myself whether if I hadquoted these words at the right time, as I should have done, I wouldhave been met with disagreement, shouted down, or perhaps even askedto leave a wedding dinner party.III.On Thursday there will be a rally in South Bend to demonstrateAmerican support of Israel. I am glad that my city has public spacefor the expression of all sorts of political opinions. I am aware thata great many Americans support Israel and its current militaryendeavors. This is a good opportunity for them to voice their support.Personally, I do not support Israel. I have serious objections to manyof the activities undertaken in Operation Protective Edge. Some ofthem, I think, are downright atrocities. I have similar views aboutpast military exploits by the Israeli government. And, just to put allmy cards on the table, I have deep objections, some political, somehumanitarian, and some religious, to the very existence of the Stateof Israel.Some readers might be surprised that a Jew would cite "religious"objections to the existence of the State of Israel, but theseobjections are actually well-known. They are based on a fundamentalprinciple of Jewish faith, recorded in the Talmud, that the exile ofthe Jews is a divine decree, and that it is our sacred obligation toaccept this decree, to live humbly in the lands into which we havebeen dispersed, never to attempt to resettle our ancestral land byforce or to establish our national sovereignty by our own power, butto wait in repentance until God redeems us. It is for this reason thatRabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky was appointed to speak on behalf of thetraditional Jews of Jerusalem to the United Nations, where on July16th of 1947 he explained the Jewish theology of exile and desire ofhis community to live under Palestinian rule, concluding, "Wefurthermore wish to express our definite opposition to a Jewish statein any part of Palestine."Deeper still than the sacred duty to accept our exile, traditionalJudaism is simply anchored in an aversion to violence as a means tosolve problems. As the saintly Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan wrote in hisBiblical commentary: "The Torah teaches us not to resist the nationseven when they fight against us. We must follow in the footsteps ofthe patriarch Jacob in his encounter with his brother Esau ... Allthat happened between Jacob and Esau happens to us constantly withEsau's children. We must adopt the methods of the righteous Jacob, tomake the three preparations that he made: prayer, a gift, and escapethrough war, that is, to flee to safety. As long as we walked on thatwell-tread path, God saved us from their hands. But since we havestrayed from the path and new leaders have arisen who chose newmethods, leaving behind our ancestors' weapons and adopting themethods of our enemies, we have fared worse and worse, and greattravails have befallen us." (Chofetz Chaim al Hatorah, Devarim)IV.But it is not my purpose, here, to defend my own opinions aboutOperation Protective Edge, the legitimacy of the State of Israel, orthe justice of any particular military campaign. All of these mattersare controversial, and I don't expect to resolve thosecontroversies. I am writing because I believe four things: that Jewsall over the world are in danger because of growing anti-Semitism;that most people in the world are prepared, as I am, to describe someof the military activity by Israel, as well as some of the aspects ofthe Israeli occupation of Palestine, as unjust and inhumane; that thecurrent war has brought to the public eye racist and genocidalsentiments by members of the Israeli academy, the Knesset, andsuperficially religious Jews in America; that many Jews will attendthe rally Thursday in order to "stand with Israel" and in order to"demand that the U.S. Government give unwavering support to Israel."For these reasons it is not enough for me to stay quiet. I am writingin order to disrupt any possibility that the horrible conflation ofZionism and Judaism become further entrenched this week. And I amwriting to draw attention to the uncontroversial fact that whateverthe merits and legitimacy of the State of Israel and its militaryactions may be, it does not speak or act in the name of the Jewishreligion or in the name of the Jewish people.V.During the 1982 war between Israel and Lebanon, Rabbi Yitzchak DovKoppelman, the head of the Rabbinical Academy in Lucerne, Switzerlandwrote these words, which were printed in the Jewish Guardian thefollowing year:"We hear terrible news that Jews are being killed, may God spare us,and this is certainly bitter. [The custom is to recite chaptersof Psalms communally during a time of great distress on the Jewishpeople.] Yet I have never seen anyone recite a chapter of Psalms forthe thousands and tens of thousands of Jews who were led away from theTorah by [the Zionists]. ... No one cries out concerning the Jewishsouls who have been sullied by [them]: 'They are murdering Jews! Theyare murdering Jews!' In fact, the crime is worse than murder, for hewho causes another to sin is worse than a murderer."I always thought that by "sullying the Jewish soul" Rabbi Koppelmanwas referring to leading people away from observance of the JewishSabbath, tithes, and prayer. These trends, to me, are painful towitness happening in Israel these last decades, but they aren't thesort of thing that I could expect friends outside of my religiouscommunity to recognize as tragic. When I read Gideon Levy's article"Netanyahu's offspring" earlier this summer, I realized that thelong-term effect that Zionism has had on the souls of many people isactually much more blatant---something that anyone, Jew or Gentile,who hasn't lost touch with his or her own soul can plainly see. And Iwould certainly rather be murdered myself than to be so spirituallydamaged that I could feel the loss of Mohammed Abu Khedair as anythingother than a tragedy and unspeakable evil. May God comfort his familyand bless those few Jews who visited their mourning tent.Today is the eve of the anniversary of the destruction of the Templein Jerusalem, the greatest calamity in the history of Judaism and thebeginning of our long and bitter exile. The holy rabbis of the centurythat saw the rise of Israeli nationalism as a response to this exilehave taught me that I will sanctify God's name if I declare publiclythe Jewish belief that the Zionist mission is a struggle against God'svery will. I will not stand with Israel on Thursday, but I will standwith these rabbis tomorrow and mourn all horrible wars and senselesskillings together with the loss of our Holy Temple.

Curtis Franks is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the Hebrew Orthodox Congregation in South Bend, Indiana.

UPDATE: Prof. Franks asked me to add the following "addendum" to his letter: