https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2026/02/what-jewish-left-doesnt-need-is-advice.html

What the Jewish Left Doesn’t Need is Advice that It has No Responsibility for What Zionism and Israel Has Done In Their Name

A Reply to Shaul Magid’s Argument for Jewish Indifference to Genocide and an Evasion of Responsibility

Shaul Magid is a rabbi, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Magid is also an opponent of Jewish anti-Zionism which he argues is irrelevant. Jews opposed to Zionism should turn in on themselves and ignore what is happening in their name.

In his article What Does the Jewish Left Want?, which is reprinted by Jewish Voice for Liberation, Magid argues that the Jewish left should ‘no longer focus on opposition to a state that many in the Jewish Left no longer support.’ In my response below I explain that if it doesn’t focus primarily on Zionism and the Israeli state, then this Jewish left is not only not a genuine left but it has no real purpose.

Shaul Magid

At a time when US and Western Imperialism is using Jewish people as its human shield, its moral alibi for support of the genocide in Gaza, to pretend that solidarity with the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism should be deprioritised is to do exactly what the Zionists want us to do.

It is to argue that Jews should become the bystanders to the slaughter in Gaza. Raul Hilberg excoriated, in Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders, the ‘dull awareness’ and passive indifference of those who looked on as the Jews were exterminated in the holocaust, be they individuals or the Allied countries.

Hilberg spoke of the ‘human wall’ that bystanders had erected, of indifference and social isolation. What Magid is arguing is that Jews on the left should adopt a similar approach today. It is profoundly immoral.

Magid argued, in opposition to Jewish Voice for Peace’s statement adopting an explicitly anti-Zionist position, that they had ignored

a series of real “Zionist” possibilities where “justice and equality” were paramount.

What Magid really wants is to have his cake and eat it. His article is an exercise in self-indulgence. The real question is whether Jewish intellectuals have the courage and honesty to call Zionism out for what it is. Clearly Magid doesn’t possess that courage. Magid says

Many Jews who define themselves as anti-Zionist do not think the state of Israel should cease to exist. Rather, they contest Zionist hegemony.

If that is the case then they are not anti-Zionists and that is Magid’s problem.

For Magid the internal battle within the Jewish community takes precedence over genocide and ethnic cleansing. Is it any wonder that Palestinians get tired of this Jewish preciousness at a time when Palestinian children are being starved to death in the name of Zionism’s Jewish redemption?

If you are an anti-Zionist then Israel as a Jewish state must disappear. Not the people but the state. Israel must become normalised, like any other state. It must be a state of its own citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion. Ctd....