“I read a Facebook post recently saying that you could not engineer a war more carefully calibrated to deepen the divide between Israeli and American Jews. The more Americans pay for this war, it said – in lives, in dollars – the more that divide will grow. One commenter said he hopes the writer is right. Another said he hopes he is wrong.

Late last summer I returned to Israel after four years in northern California. During the 12-day war in June, I was safe in my Berkeley home. This time around, I run four floors down to the bomb shelter from my Jerusalem apartment every time a siren sounds, in what has become one long day divided by alerts and booms. The war structures my day, interrupts my children’s routine, our sleep, our breathing.

There is a real chasm between American and Israeli Jews’ physical experience of this war, and often also their interpretation of it. Many American Jews look at the war and ask whether it is legal, whether its leaders are acting out of necessity or political interest, whether it will entangle the United States in another disastrous Middle East war. They carry the memory of Iraq. They fear for American democracy, already strained and brittle, and worry that this war will deepen those fractures still further. From the other side of the ocean, Israelis overwhelmingly see the war as self-defense and an inevitable continuation of the existential war against Iran. Many see it as necessary not only for Israel’s survival but also as part of a broader battle against the threat to the West. These are not small differences. They are differences in fear, responsibility and moral and political judgment…”

Read the full piece on JewishJournal.com