Marty Levine
July 15, 2026
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” This was one lesson that Martin Luther King Jr. taught us as he explained why he was now speaking out against the American invasion of Vietnam in a speech titled “A Proper Sense of Priorities.”
It is a lesson that I have been painfully learning about my country and about my Jewish community.
The desire to sanitize our national history has become part and parcel of the Trump era and is not a quest for truth. It is a quest to be able to look away from our past, to ignore the harms that have been done in the name of advancing our national interests and to avoid the difficult job of repair, a job that will require making the comfortable uncomfortable and the secure insecure.
That same desire to remain ignorant and to avoid the uncomfortable parts of history plagues many in the American Jewish Community and those who lead the organizations that claim to speak for American Jews.
Just days ago, at my Shabbat services, we again got into a discussion about Israel. I would normally have written “about Israel/Palestine,” but this discussion was only about Israel. As with much of these conversations within the Jewish community, there was much discomfort with the current brutality foisted on the Palestinians in Gaza and the territories. The problem for many was Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, not Israel, and not the Jewish State. There was an underlying belief that the problem is just bad leadership.
As the discussion proceeded, I began to think about why my perspective on Israel/Palestine seemed so different than many of my fellow congregants.
I think, perhaps, it stems from my having been willing to let facts and historical truth disturb me enough to see reality differently and, perhaps, more accurately.
Recently, my youngest son, himself in the midst of looking at an Israel which is not the nation he wanted to find, referred me to a book, Haifa Republic by the Israeli philosopher and New School professor Omri Boehm.
Boehm wrote this book advocating for a single bi-national confederation which allowed both Jews and Palestinians a shared nation which would be Democratic but not give either people dominant control. He did this both reflecting back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement, before 1948 where Jewish thinkers and leaders of the Zionist movement recognized that this was what they were hoping for. He did this recognizing what so many do not want to see, that a Jewish state as it is being built is discriminatory, not democratic.
Here is a section of his take down of the Jewish and Democratic myth (forgive the length of this excerpt but, I think, Boehm’s words should not be paraphrased).
To see the consequences of such self-deception, consider the recently legislated quasi-constitutional Basic Law: Israel, the Nation State of the Jewish People, in relation to the country’s Declaration of Independence. For the first seventy years of Israel’s existence, its identity as both Jewish and democratic was defined by the declaration’s pledge that the Jewish state would ensure “complete equality . . . irrespective of religion, race or sex” …The Declaration of Independence has often been celebrated as a beacon of liberal Zionist politics, but the truth about it has always been messier and uglier. For some time now, it’s been an open secret that there will be no two-state solution, and that Israel has claimed for itself the whole of Palestine’s territory. Accordingly, the nation-state law asserts that “the right to self-determination” in the country is “unique to the Jewish People,” and flouts the pledge to universal equality, specifying that the “development of Jewish settlement” is from now on “a national value”… The point of this law is to put in place the legal infrastructure for future annexations… It is also actively used to expropriate Arab citizens and Palestinian inhabitants… The new nation-state law didn’t have to openly prioritize Israel’s Jewishness over its democratic procedures because another Basic Law, the one regulating the country’s elections, already does just that. Clause 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset specifies that any person or party who in word or deed negates Israel’s “Jewish and democratic character” must be banned from running for the Knesset. The spirit behind this clause is the familiar principle of “militant democracy”—roughly, the idea that democracies may legitimately exclude from democratic participation extremist political actors who aspire to abuse elections to undermine democracy from within… It undermines the right for democratic representation in defense not of democracy, but of ethnocracy, and of a particular state ideology, namely Zionism, and aren’t the same as those of Jews… Constituting a percent of Israel’s citizens, Arab Israelis cannot be expected to support the country’s Jewish character any more than African Americans could support the United States as a white country. Arab Israeli representatives are tolerated, but their standing is conditional… For the same reason that the Jewish state drove out its large Arab majority, it must regard the votes of those Arabs who did not flee as potentially subversive: they could “abuse” democracy to oppose the state’s Jewish character. But again, this is not a defense of democracy but a prioritization of the Jewishness of the state over democracy.
The willful ignorance that Dr. King warned about allows too many to see Israel as a nation that, as it promised in its Declaration Independence, provides “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex:” and that guarantees “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture…”
The disease of willful ignorance is widespread. In 2022, the Chicago Jewish United Fund (JUF) reported on the results of it decennial census of the Chicago area’s Jewish Community.
Respondents were asked if they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about Israel. The majority of respondents agree that it is important for Israel to exist as a democratic state (90% including 75% strongly agree, 22% somewhat agree) and as a Jewish state (80% including 58% strongly agree, 22% somewhat agree)… A little more than half of Jewish adults (55%) believe Israel lives up to its human rights values…
Only by remaining ignorant, by ignoring the unsettling facts on the ground and the historical record can one believe that these words are but a smokescreen for a very different reality.
Only by remaining ignorant can one continue to see the possibility that Israel can ever be at the same time Jewish and Democratic. These three words are easy to say, they flow off the tongue so easily. They lull one into believing that they are easy to reconcile. They become an incantation that excuses any of the horrific reality that is Israel/Palestine today. And they allow us to ignore questioning whether they have ever been true of Israel and those who willed it into existence.
We are saved from the need to demand changes that are uncomfortable and unsettling. Boehm then elegantly tells us why seeing this reality is so difficult: It will force you to challenge a commitment to that fantasy of a “democratic, Jewish state.”
The reason for the inability to offer an alternative positive agenda is not difficult to find. Committed as these liberals are to the principle of a Jewish democracy, they require separation from the Palestinians in order to ensure a Jewish majority. And though separation is now plainly untenable, democratic visions for Israel beyond the two-state solution are perceived as anti-Zionist forms of betrayal—quite literally, as treason. Accordingly, liberal Zionists can only seek refuge in criticizing Netanyahu’s corruption, fighting for the legalization of light drugs, and promoting women’s and gay rights: important objectives, but also ways not to talk about Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, and the future of a country where liberal democracy is ever more at risk.
Boehm’s political solution may not be the correct one. It may not be one you support. But if you disagree, please remember, as Dr. King taught us, “nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
And be sure what you are supporting is true to your own values.
Individually, we have to be braver and face the truth head on. To not do this is accept that might is always right. To not do this is to accept that brutality and inhumanity is okay as long as it is directed to “the other.” To not do this is to accept that we can be safe at the expense of others being harmed.
To me, this is a bargain with the devil; one that I refuse to make.
