Disagreeing with someone about Israel? Think about asking the hard questions — including whether you’re willing to consider that you might be wrong. Photo by AlexSecret/iStock by Getty Images

Re: “How to talk about Israel with someone you disagree with,” by Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove

To the editors:

I appreciate and affirm Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove’s desire to encourage us all to listen across differences in order to have productive conversations about Israel’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack. But I found Cosgrove’s list of suggested “good questions” to facilitate those conversations patronizing and deeply frustrating; they are symptomatic of the toxic discourse he aspires to overcome.

The questions seem to me to be, above all else, profoundly ungenerous, presuming interlocutors who are shallow and myopic, with nebulous motivations. The first question —  “don’t you think that if your demands for a ceasefire were preceded by a demand for the hostages to be released, those demands would be practically and morally stronger?” — assumes, for example, that people calling for a ceasefire have neither condemned Hamas nor spoken out for the hostages — an assumption that erases the fact that many of the hostages’ own family members, and many released hostages, are calling for a unilateral ceasefire. 

To achieve the progress toward listening that Cosgrove seeks, I would like to propose a few alternate questions one might ask in order to get someone to, as he writes, “interrogate their position and emerge from the tired and toxic slogans”:

• You say, correctly, that civilian casualties in Gaza are high because Hamas is using civilians as “human shields.” Why would it be OK to shoot through a human shield when the person being used as a shield is a Gazan civilian, but not when the person being used as a shield is an Israeli hostage?
• You are right to say that Hamas shows no concern for the Gazan people. Why would that give any other country the right to traumatize them more?
• I agree with you that Israel needs to defend itself, so that an attack like that of Oct. 7 can never happen again. But given the massive security failures and violations of deterrence protocol that allowed Hamas to succeed in its terrorism that day, why insist on an offensive campaign, rather than a recommitment to the defensive standards that would have kept Israel safe had they actually been followed?

Like Cosgrove, I too have moral clarity: No atrocity justifies any other atrocity. Ever.

And while I may not have Cosgrove’s professional religious expertise — just my own ordinary Judaism, which tells me not to “sweep away the righteous with the wicked” — I do have professional expertise in another area: martyrdom.

I am a medievalist historian of Christianity, with a primary focus on ideologies of martyrdom. Hamas is, more than an organization, a martyrial ideology. It simply cannot be defeated by military means. Indeed, a violent response only strengthens it and gives it fuel. Israel’s unrestrained military onslaught is playing directly into Hamas’ hands, confirming for their audience that Hamas’ worldview — in which Israel is a malicious entity that must be opposed, with which no compromise is tolerable, and against which no sacrifice is too great — is correct.

What my research has taught me: The only way to defuse a martyrial ideology is to do something that disrupts the narrative it sells.

Had Israel responded to the atrocities of Oct. 7 appropriately — by re-securing the border, focusing on negotiations, pursuing targeted rescues of hostages, and bringing those behind the attacks to justice in international courts — Hamas’ ideology would be exposed as bankrupt, and its actions cruel and craven. They would have vanishingly little support inside (or outside) Gaza.

In other words, the catastrophic human cost of this war is not only unjustifiable but counterproductive, serving only to strengthen Hamas, further endanger the hostages who remain in Gaza, and delegitimize Israel in the eyes of the world. The dichotomy we have been conditioned to accept between total war on the one hand and impunity for Hamas on the other is a false one. We could more effectively punish Hamas and bring it to justice without this war, without this death, without this horror.

It is not just the slogans Cosgrove cites as “tired and toxic” that are the problem. It is the entire structure of our habitual discourse about Israel, which reeks with false dichotomies — between Israeli lives and Gazan lives; between Israeli sovereignty and Palestinian sovereignty; between a two-state solution and annihilation; between Zionism and anti-Zionism; between endorsement of all of Israel’s actions and antisemitism. 

To help us all think and converse more rigorously, I have one additional set of questions to suggest. These are not questions to pose to anyone else, but ones that we must all ask of ourselves if we are to engage in discussions around Israel graciously and productively with those whose views and experiences differ from our own:

• What assumptions underpin my own position? What ideologies am I operating within, and are they based on reality?
• Have I listened — generously and empathetically, without condescension — to a variety of perspectives, and used them to refine my own thinking even before engaging in this current conversation?
• What more creative possibilities might there be between or beyond this person’s ideas and my own?
• Am I willing to truly consider that I may learn from this person? Am I willing to truly consider that I may be wrong?

It is only by asking ourselves these questions, first and foremost, that we will be able to maintain our broader mishpacha.

— Diane Shane Fruchtman
Associate Professor of Religion, Rutgers University

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