Marty Levine
July 13, 2025
The past 11 years, my “retirement years,” have been dedicated to advocating for changes that address racism, economic justice, and Palestinian freedom. These the ills of our current situation that I think can and should be remedied. I also understand that in order to make the significant changes that I am calling for I and many others will have to pay a price as resources and privileges are rebalanced.
The political battles have brought out voices that are frankly racist or believe that our economic system is fair and that the only reason people struggle economically is because they won’t work hard, or that think that God gave greater Israel to the Jewish people and that there are no Palestinians. These are the people who have a fundamentally different worldview from me and from whom I expect little agreement. I know we see the world very differently and hope that the policy battles can be won, ultimately, at the ballot box. I don’t expect them to change, only that we all play this game fairly.
More concerning to me are those who see themselves on my side of the political spectrum. They are people who will describe themselves as liberal or progressive. But whether it was Black Power, or wealth distribution, or Palestinian freedom, despite their agreement on philosophy, they just can’t support the significant and difficult changes that will address these wrongs.
So, it is not conservatives or MAGA supporters whom I worry most about, but those who claim to be progressive but stand quietly waiting and looking for magic answers for difficult problems.
If you think that the solutions I often propose are just plain too radical, this article is directed at you. And, in advance, I recognize that you may find it harsh and off-putting. I just need to get this off my chest.
In many of my discussions (perhaps some are really arguments) with these supposedly liberal and progressive men and women, I find difficulty in moving the conversation from one about immediate events to one that places today in its context and history. And, for me, this blocks understanding and provides a mechanism that allows people to hold on to positions that are anything but liberal or progressive. It allows people to justify actions that they would otherwise decry.
It is almost 2 years since that Shabbat morning when Palestinians violently broke out of Gaza. The horror of that attack, the number of deaths, the erasure of the line that supposedly separates soldier from civilian, the taking of hostages, and the amount of sexual violence, shocked Israelis and Jews around the world. It was a day unlike any other.
It set off an immediate Israeli military response supported by billions of dollars of military assistance from the United States that continues to this day.
As I spoke and wrote about October 7th, I found it difficult to ask my Jewish audience to take a step back from October 7th and understand the context from which it emerged. It was as if that horror was unrelated to the difficult history of Israel/Palestine, that it emerged unrelated to conditions in Gaza specifically, and for all Palestinians living under Israeli governance across the region that had existed for decades before October 7th. Any attempt to introduce context was too often described as proviolence, anti-Israeli propaganda, or antisemitic.
In 2022 I published “Speaking For Too Many in My Community the Truth Is a Sin” after watching with shock how easily the work of Amnesty International was trashed because it brought context to the reality that Palestinians were living in, conditions that many of these voices would be ready to condemn and protest in any other part of the world.
The proof of this conclusion comes in the speed, breadth, and venom of voices that immediately denounced the report, denounced the accusation, and accused AI of being antisemitic because it questioned official Israeli policies. These voices and organizations were so threatened by AI that they began to speak before the report was officially published. Publishing the day before the report was released, The Forward reported that “In response, The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith International and the Jewish Federations of North America slammed the “biased and one-sided report” and accused Amnesty of presenting an “unbalanced, inaccurate and incomplete review.” The report “inexplicably focuses on one aim: to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish and democratic State of Israel,” they charged.”
NGO Monitor, again before the report was released publicly, labeled AI as anti-Semitic. “Amnesty’s report can be considered antisemitic according to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which notes that: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor. Likewise, Amnesty’s report criminalizes Israeli laws and practices designed to safeguard Jewish identity – such as the Law of Return – which are enshrined under international law and parallel the practices of many nation-states.”
If the Hamas attack had no relationship to anything that came before it, its violence could be condemned, and the violent response to it excused. If its relationship to the ongoing Israeli enterprise of creating a Jewish-centric state in all of greater Palestine is ignored, then any all policies and actions can be justified as acts of self-defense against an evil, unredeemable adversary. It is then just self-defense and not part of an ongoing political strategy that has been emboldened by the United States’ willingness to look the other way.
Since the end of June, new reports have been published about continuing Israeli actions in Gaza. Let me share them with you and ask you to consider whether they can bust through the willful denial that has been in place.
On July 3rd Amnesty International published “Gaza: Evidence points to Israel’s continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians.”
Evidence gathered by Amnesty International demonstrates how over a month since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system, Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.
Heartbreaking testimonies gathered from medical staff, parents of children hospitalized for malnutrition and displaced Palestinians struggling to survive paint a horrifying picture of acute levels of starvation and desperation in Gaza. Their accounts provide further evidence of the catastrophic suffering caused by Israel’s ongoing restrictions on life-saving aid and its deadly militarized aid scheme coupled with mass forced displacement, relentless bombardment and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.
“While the eyes of the world were diverted to the recent hostilities between Israel and Iran, Israel’s genocide has continued unabated in Gaza, including through the infliction of conditions of life that have created a deadly mix of hunger and disease pushing the population past breaking point,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
Two days earlier Leonard S. Rubenstein and Feroze Sidhwa, writing in Think Public Health, published “Hospital Attacks in Gaza and Israel: What Counts as a War Crime?”
Since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, Israeli forces have struck health-care facilities and personnel in Gaza at least 1,844 times, killing hundreds of patients and health-care workers. According to the World Health Organization, 94% of hospitals in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. All are starved of the most basic medical supplies, electricity, and even clean water.
No misuse of a hospital could justify a wanton assault that destroys the entire facility, forces it to close, or undermines its proper functioning, let alone a systematic attack on Gaza’s entire health-care system. These attacks have left an entire society without access to basic services such as obstetric care for pregnant women, management of chronic diseases, or trauma and reconstructive surgery for tens of thousands of seriously wounded people, half of whom are children. The most basic health-care services that are readily available in even the poorest of countries do not exist in the Gaza Strip today.
On June 30th Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, released “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide” that looked at the alliance between private industry, non-profit organizations and the Israeli Government to produce the conditions of the occupation that Amnesty International condemned and which the International Criminal Court has deemed to be serious human rights violations.
- After October 2023, long-standing systems of control, exploitation and dispossession metamorphosed into economic, technological and political infrastructures mobilized to inflict mass violence and immense destruction. Entities that previously enabled and profited from Palestinian elimination and erasure within the economy of occupation, instead of disengaging are now involved in the economy of genocide. If you are among the many who cannot see beyond the violence of October 7th, who cannot understand that what came before it mattered or who sees invoking “self-defense” as a get-out-of-jail card, do either of these current assessments make any difference?
If not, then you will not find a statement made by Prime Minister Netanyahu during his recent visit with Donald Trump as ironic if not downright evil. Gaza for years before October 7th was a prison. Entry and exit were tightly controlled by Israel and Egypt. The shock to the Israeli system that occurred on October 7th was in part due to how strong the walls and surveillance systems were to keep Gazan locked in were. Throughout the past months of starvation, death and destruction, Gazans have struggled to create and recreate their homes and protect a way of life.
Ignoring the history and the reality, the PM spoke, as reported by Haaretz, as the champion of freedom, as if his goal was not expulsion and ethnic cleansing:
“President Trump had a brilliant vision. It’s called free choice. If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn’t be a prison. It should be an open place, and give people a free choice,” Netanyahu said, shortly after presenting Trump with his letter formally nominating the President for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“We’re working with the United States very closely about finding countries that will seek to realize what they always say that they want to give the Palestinians a better future. We’re getting close to finding several countries, and this will give Palestinians the freedom to choose,” Netanyahu added.
If I have not yet shown you that context is critical, that understanding how a moment fits into a larger picture before we can make a judgment and, certainly, before you defend the status quo, here are some statements about a war to consider:
We shall only talk of peace when we have won the war.
Now terror will be answered with terror.
God the Almighty has made our nation. By defending its existence, we are defending His work.
Our nation’s struggle for existence forces us to utilize all means, to weaken the fighting power of our enemy and to prevent further advances. Any opportunity to inflict lasting damage on the striking power of the enemy must be taken advantage of.
If I told you that they were all from the mouths of members of the Israeli government, Itamar Ben-Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich, or Benjamin Netanyahu himself, would you be troubled by them?
If I told you that they were said by Adolph Hitler (which they were), does it change your mind about them?
That’s why context and history are critical. And why we pay such a price when we are willing to ignore them because they push us away from our political convictions that demand radical change.
