Heartbreaking images of children starving in Gaza have caused what some Jewish Americans call a “rupture” between supporters of Israel’s offensive in its current form and those who oppose how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is managing the war.
Frustrated by the bloodshed, pressure is mounting on the United States and the international community to take better control of chaotic food distribution sites.
“We’re seeing not only divisiveness, but hatred between us, and that’s not a good thing for the future,” said Rabbi Erez Sherman of Sinai Temple, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles. “So how do we not solve it? How do we work on that?”
But support for Israel remains ironclad among many American Jewish groups and rabbis, who argue that Hamas is preventing humanitarian aid from reaching innocent civilians.
“Israel has facilitated an extraordinary amount of aid to Palestinians in Gaza, in wartime, and that’s really an unprecedented situation,” said Belle Etra Yoeli, spokesperson for the American Jewish Committee, which recently ran a full-page ad in The New York Times with the image of an Israeli hostage who remains in Hamas custody.
“The Palestinian civilians who have been caught in the crossfire throughout this entire war because of Hamas’ actions should not be suffering,” she added. “Israel doesn’t want that.”
Nearly 1,400 people have been killed and more than 4,000 have been injured seeking food in Gaza, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said last week.
At least 859 people have been killed near sites operated by Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, a controversial American- and Israeli-backed organization, the United Nations said.
The foundation’s executive director, Johnnie Moore, said Hamas is largely responsible for the killings and dismissed news reports about people dying by Israeli gunfire.
“We have not seen the Israeli military do anything that remotely aligns with some of these accusations,” he said.
“It is a quite evident fact that Hamas has killed intentionally probably hundreds of people in proximity not to just our sites, to U.N. distribution sites, as a means of sort of misattributing those attacks either to the IDF or to being in proximity to GHF,” he added, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
To address escalating concerns over the humanitarian crisis, synagogues across Jewish movements in the United States have organized roundtables with the executive director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
At an event with GHF hosted last month by Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, reactions were mixed, according to Sherman, the rabbi, who led the discussion.
Some people were shocked that an organization that has come under so much criticism was allowed to present its case. Others appreciated hearing directly from people on the ground.
“How do you block evil from your midst while also feeding the hungry and supporting the orphan and widow?” Sherman said after the roundtable, referring to Psalm 146. “To me, it’s an impossible task, and I give credit to somebody who is at least trying to do that.”
Polling suggests Jewish Americans are divided over Netanyahu’s handling of the war. According to a Pew Research Center report, 53% of Jewish Americans say they lack confidence in his leadership, while 45% say they have confidence. About 6 million Jews live in the United States, or 2% of the population, according to the Pew Research Center.
The poll was conducted in April, before GHF began its operations in Gaza.
Supporters of Netanyahu’s government, including several Jewish American organizations, have said Hamas is spreading misleading information about who is to blame for ongoing violence at aid sites, a claim Hamas has repeatedly denied. They have also criticized detractors for losing focus on the remaining Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas.
“All of this can just be stopped anytime if Hamas puts down its weapons,” said Orthodox Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization that supports Netanyahu’s government.
An emerging concern echoed by several organizations and rabbis is that Netanyahu’s position is not creating a safer Israel or global environment for Jewish people. Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of nonprofit advocacy organization J Street, said the ongoing violence is exposing Israelis and Palestinians to unnecessary bloodshed.
J Street, which supports a two-state solution, opposed Netanyahu years before the war.
“If you say to people you must be pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel, then we’re condemning ourselves and our kids to a never-ending conflict,” Ben-Ami said Monday.
But according to Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari of Kol Tzedek, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Philadelphia, the war is creating an “existential rupture” that is pitting friends and family members against one another.
“It’s catastrophic,” he said. “We’re wrestling with the very question ‘Do we belong to each other?’”
Fornari was among more than 40 people arrested outside Trump Tower in New York City earlier this month as they shouted for the United States to stop arming Israel and feed Gaza. He was arrested for investigation of blocking traffic and obstruction, his third arrest since the war started on Oct. 7, 2023, he said.
Some posters and signs displayed outside Trump Tower referred to an ancient maxim about the moral obligation to speak out against injustice, Fornari said.
“It says anyone who has the power to speak out and chooses not to do so is responsible for it,” he said.
Handcuffed near Fornari was Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the CEO of T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization. Jacobs said she supported Israel’s military response to Hamas’ terrorist attack in 2023, which killed 1,200 people and led to the taking of 250 hostages. The strike, the worst one-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust, shocked the world.
Since then, more than 61,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including thousands of children, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, and much of the territory has been destroyed.
Jacobs began questioning Netanyahu’s strategy as more and more civilians in Gaza were killed, she said. In July, she denounced American Jewish leaders who had not spoken out against the humanitarian crisis unfolding thousands of miles away.
“Privately, Jewish lay leaders are anguished over Gaza. Publicly, they fear being labeled antisemitic,” she wrote in an opinion column in The Forward, a Jewish American newspaper.
Jacobs has been called antisemitic by other Jewish people who support Netanyahu and shunned by legacy Jewish organizations, she said. Some of it, she said, comes from a legitimate fear of prejudice.
In May, two Israeli Embassy staffers were killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and a Colorado pro-Israeli hostages group was attacked with two Molotov cocktails in June. There have also been reports of anti-Jewish slurs and signs at college campuses and pro-Palestinian protests across the country.
The cultural fallout has been playing out in living rooms and across kitchen tables. Sonya Meyerson-Knox, a spokesperson for the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, which has opposed the war since 2023, said a member was uninvited to Shabbat family dinners because of differing opinions about the war.
The group was suspended from several campuses, including Columbia University’s, over allegations it intimidated Jewish students and made them feel unsafe during pro-Palestinian protests last year. Jewish Voice for Peace maintains that its views are not antisemitic.
“It is not unique in Jewish history for Jews to be in fierce disagreement with each other,” she said. “What is unique is that there seems to be an effort to weaponize one-half of our community against the other.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
