Upholding the values that define us as a people

Ambassador Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, is demonstrating both courage and integrity in urging the leaders of the State of Israel to adhere to “the vision that Theodor Herzl or the founders of Israel had for the state — a vision rooted in safety, democracy and moral purpose for all its citizens.”

He deserves broad support from those of us who want Israel to remain a Jewish state rooted in principles of equality, justice, and, yes, Jewish values.

In an article published in the Arab News, he has condemned the far-right rhetoric emanating from the likes of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir that “risks eroding Israel’s moral standing, weakening its diplomatic relationships and threatening the foundations of its security.”

Citing Smotrich’s call to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state” and Ben-Gvir’s contention that his “rights in the Land of Israel are more important” than those of Palestinians, Ambassador Lauder warns ominously that:

“The consequences of such rhetoric are tangible and immediate. These statements provide adversaries with material to advance their own agendas, portraying Israel as resistant to peace and reinforcing cycles of radicalization. When extremism takes hold on one side, it too often fuels extremism on the other. It is incumbent upon Israel’s leaders to break this cycle and to demonstrate a commitment to peace and justice.”

Along similar lines. Marie van der Zyl, the immediate past president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the WJC’s commissioner for gender equality, recently wrote in London’s Jewish News that one of the core Jewish values, the “central tenet of pikuach nefesh teaches that the preservation of life overrides almost all other commandments,” and that accordingly, “we must now lend our voices to calls for increased humanitarian access and urgent action to alleviate the conditions affecting civilians in Gaza.”

Van der Zyl did not issue her plea in a vacuum, emphasising that:

“The events of 7 October remain an open wound. I continue to stand in full solidarity with the victims of terror and with the families of the hostages still in captivity. Their suffering must remain at the forefront of our hearts and minds. This is not to diminish, in any way, the serious and ongoing threat that Israel faces from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran — threats which remain real and grave, and which the Jewish people cannot afford to ignore. But at the same time, the suffering of civilians in Gaza — many of them children — also demands our moral attention. These are not competing concerns. Judaism teaches us to care deeply for all human life. . . .

“As Jews, we know what it means to be vulnerable. We know what it means to go without. Our history has taught us not only resilience but also the moral obligation to act when others are in need. Jewish ethics require us to respond to suffering — not because it is easy or comfortable, but because it is right.”

We cannot allow these critical mainstream Jewish voices to go unheeded.

In the interest of full disclosure, I served as the WJC’s general counsel for 14 years and as the global organisation’s associate executive vice president for four years before stepping down from both positions at the end of August 2023. Ambassador Lauder was my boss, and Marie van der Zyl was a valued colleague. Both remain good friends whom I respect tremendously.

The fact is that we as Diaspora Jews cannot have it both ways — we can either stand with the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who demonstrate regularly against the policies of the Netanyahu government and call for an end to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, or we can side with Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Justice Minister Itamar Levin, Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli, and other extremists in that government whose goal is a hegemonistic dominance by the Israeli fundamentalist far right over not just the State of Israel but over the West Bank and Gaza as well. We cannot do both.

In July 1967, weeks after the Israeli victory over multiple Arab armies in the Six-Day War, Nahum Goldmann, then the president of both the WJC and the World Zionist Organisation, said that Israel cannot prevail as the Sparta of the Middle East. He was right then. His words remain prophetic today.

If we reject as antisemitic the calls for a Palestine that extends “from the river to the sea” — that is, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean — we cannot condone delusional pseudo-messianic desires by the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir to exert a perpetual Israeli dominance over that same territory. The more than five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot and will not be relegated to a permanent state of disenfranchisement.

This does not mean that the Palestinians should obtain statehood now, or next month, or even next year. A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, in my view, the only feasible political option that will enable both the Israelis and the Palestinians to co-exist. But such an outcome will take time to achieve and must be predicated on confidence-building, the establishment of at least the beginning of a process that can provide a measure of trust between the leaders and the populations on both sides.

After October 7 and after the ravages of almost two years of intense warfare, no such trust exists. But if Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy can be brought to the table, as seems likely, it should be possible to get Israeli and non-Hamas Palestinian leaders to speak with one another — something Benjamin Netanyahu has studiously refused to do since becoming prime minister for the second time in 2009. It is often forgotten, however, that he and Palestinian Authority President Yaser Arafat not only sat together and publicly shook hands at Wye River, Maryland, in 1998, but that they signed a memorandum for resuming the implementation of a peace process.

The Arafat-inspired, if not Arafat-led, second intifada ended any immediate hopes for an Israeli-Palestinian political accord at the time, but in 2005-2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert revived the peace process in negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Once again, it was the Palestinian side, led by Abbas, that rejected — or refused to agree to — the substantial territorial compromise proffered by Olmert.

Twenty years later, and thousands of both Israeli and Palestinian deaths later, the resumption of some form of good-faith interactions, even if not yet negotiations, is the only way to bring the bloodshed and suffering to an end.

But this will require, at the outset, an immediate stark increase in humanitarian aid to the Palestinian population of Gaza. It will require the removal of Hamas as an impediment to getting food and medical supplies to civilians in Gaza. It will require guarantees that the savagery of October 7 can never be repeated. It will require considerable pressure from President Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff to persuade both sides to moderate their respective ideological intransigence and political grandstanding. It will also require a willingness on the part of Israeli and Palestinian leaders to recognise and accept the imperative famously expressed by the long-time Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a conflict between right and wrong but a conflict between two rights.

And it is incumbent on those of us in the Diaspora who seek a non-lethal end to the bloodshed and the suffering to speak out publicly and forcefully in support of Jewish leaders such as Ambassador Lauder and Marie van der Zyl who embody and express those Jewish values that have made us who we are as a people and, equally important, who we must continue to be.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of  Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).