'Stop us' is a piece I wrote during the recent Israeli attack on Gaza. It was not published in mainstream media at the time and this is, therefore, its first publication. With the end of the current round of violence, the urgency that induced this piece might be thought to be outdated. In the 'postscript' I argue that this is not the case: the actions we take today - as well as today's inaction - bring about the moral atrocities of tomorrow.

Stop us

Anyone who cares about Israel, who has more than purely negative feelings towards the Zionist project, has a reason to stop Israel's attack on Gaza. These are the people to whom I am writing this plea, as an Israeli citizen.

Israel faces various existential threats, some over emphasized, some neglected. Israel's attack on Gaza is meant to address a serious, yet non-existential, security threat; namely, Hamas's rocket attacks on cities and towns in Israel. However, Israel's actions pose a much more substantial threat to its existence: by casually taking the lives of hundreds of innocent men, women and children Israel is disowning the values it has purported to cherish. It is as if my country chose to win the battle even at the price of losing sight of what the war is all about.

As a product of the Israeli education system, I remember what we are fighting for. We are not fighting for our existence; we are fighting for our independence. "After years of being pushed around," my Israeli teachers taught me, "we finally have our own country in which we can live by our own values and make our own rules."

Is the attack on Gaza compatible with our values and our rules? This question is absent from Israeli public discourse. Many find it irrelevant because "Israel has no choice but to react the way it does". This is a profoundly bad reply. By our own lights, the need to end our 'lack of choice' was the spark that set in motion the unbelievable project that culminated in the founding of the Israeli state. How can we legitimately appeal to it now to justify our policies as a free country? Having no choice should be the most painful defeat for any Israeli. We have a country and we have a choice.

True, the choice is hard. Israel's policy needs to be informed by various considerations - security considerations, economic considerations and moral considerations, to name but a few. But this is as it should be. Israel faces the difficulties that anyone who is lucky enough to have a choice faces. Israel faces the risk of making a wrong choice. By ignoring the fact that it chose to take so many lives rather than exhaust other, less lethal, strategies to mitigate the rocket threat, Israel is not only undermining its own values and vision, it is undermining its freedom.

I shall not watch my country blindly destroy its own achievements. I shall not watch my country take innocent lives without even acknowledging that in doing so it is exercising its own freedom to do bad. My generation of Israelis was born to a free country; I'm proud of that and shall not allow anyone, not even my own government, media and family, to deny it.

The innocent people who are being killed in Gaza are not destined to die and are not the victims of a natural disaster; I know the people who are killing them, they are the men and women of my beloved country. I urge you to stop us.


Postscript: There is No more Doubt to Benefit from

Israel's recent actions have put Israeli liberalism on the spot. Israelis who supported the attack on Gaza and the manner in which it was carried out, i.e. by massive killing of innocent civilians, disavowed their liberal convictions. For one, they explicitly endorsed collective punishment as a legitimate policy; but what's more crucial is that they accepted the claim that to defend Israeli citizens from Hamas rockets it is necessary to kill and injure masses of Palestinians, the majority of which are innocent. I shall call this last claim 'the necessity claim.' Israelis who considered themselves to be liberals and at the same time accepted the necessity claim most often did so because they thought that all other possible solutions were exhausted. This justification for the necessity claim may easily be refuted since it is difficult to deny that Israel did not attempt a less violent attack than the one it actually carried out. Therefore, such a hypothetical, more restrained, attack was possible and it is not clear why would such attack be less of a solution than the attack that was in fact carried out. Thus, it is not true that all other possible solutions were exhausted. The necessity claim should be justified in a different way.

Why would Israelis insist on holding that the attack on Gaza was necessary even when they find it difficult to deny that some less violent solutions were not given a chance? It seems to me that many Israelis thought that such a very violent attack is necessary for Israel's defense not because all other options have failed, but because they believe that Palestinians have a natural tendency to concede only to violence: the more brutal the attack on them is, the more willing the Palestinians are, according to this common Israeli belief, to concede to the aggressor's demands. Israelis who supported the attack on Gaza, therefore, endorsed an essentialist belief about Palestinians that differentiated the Palestinians from the community of reasonable human beings who are capable of dialogue. By endorsing such a belief, those Israelis did not only ignore countless historical counterexamples to their essentialist understanding of the Palestinian "nature", they have also renounced their liberal posture.

But not only supporters of the attack on Gaza disclosed their ideological commitments. The minority of liberal Jewish Israelis who opposed the attack on Gaza has discovered some of its ideological soft spots. These Israelis discovered that their political opinions, that were usually expressed only in certain contexts and discussions and absent from many interpersonal interactions, had, overnight, become omnipresent. Politics became inescapable during the attack on Gaza and these Israelis' political views transformed into a veil that separated them from their community wherever they went.

From the moment that everyone around them enthusiastically supported the mass killing of innocent people, these Israelis felt that by not opposing the killing they are rendering it legitimate. For these Israelis did not merely oppose the attack because it was a mistake, which might be unfortunate but nonetheless legitimate; they opposed the attack because it was morally illegitimate, an action that ought not be allowed. Thus, to distinguish their view from a common criticism of their governments' legitimate policies and to stay faithful to horror they felt at the thought that these things are done in their name, they had to constantly denounce the attack. Whenever they were silent became accomplices in their own eyes.

By denouncing the attack, these Israelis actively excluded themselves from social circles they considered to be their home. They were outsiders, sometimes even traitors, in the eyes of their own families, friends, coworkers and neighbors. These Israelis' belief that all human beings are born equal and the fact that they find the killing of innocent people appalling have brought about their condemnation by Israeli society. Suddenly it became clear: their politics is extremely personal. These Israelis' commitment to their liberal values cracked the liberal dam that kept their private lives from being flooded with political responsibility.

In a sense, the attack on Gaza changed nothing. The discrepancies between liberal Israelis' values and the values of their families and friends existed before December 2008. Nevertheless, the attack on Gaza changed everything because it raised the stakes. The grave implications of the different moral commitments became very real. Discrepancies that were once easy to overlook now caused a cognitive dissonance: how can my own mother/brother/best friend/teacher hurray such horrible actions? If I'm willing to let a thing such as this be done in my name, is there anything that would make me fight for what I believe in?

Now, as the current episode ended, while the implications of these moral discrepancies are known they may be forgotten. Liberal Israelis who opposed the attack might be tempted to relieve their moral sensitivities and let the apparent lack of urgency induce their inclination to overlook these moral discrepancies. But just as the launching of the attack hasn't changed anything, so its temporary end doesn't change anything. Now that the moral challenge is know, it should not be forgotten or ignored.

The lives of truly liberal Israelis should not be drained of political concerns; Israelis who 'avoid politics' deny their moral commitments, commitments that, as they now know, are part and parcel of who they are. By indulging in the all-too-common indifference to politics, Israelis are volunteering their names to the executioners of future atrocities.