“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.”

Read Yossi Klein Halevi’s full op-ed in Times of Israel