One of the most prominent critics of Israeli policies in recent years has been the American economist and public intellectual Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs openly describes the events unfolding in Gaza, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon as genocide, condemning Israel’s military operations, forced displacement policies and practices of dispossession. In his view, the problem is not only the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe but also the fact that these actions are increasingly carried out in plain sight. He also emphasizes that many Americans are deeply troubled by the devastation taking place in the region.
At the same time, Sachs stresses a crucial point. As an American of Jewish background, he rejects the tendency to equate the policies of the State of Israel with Judaism itself. According to him, the crimes committed in Gaza and Lebanon are not products of Judaism but of a particular political ideology and state policy. For this reason, identifying the actions of the Israeli government with Judaism as a whole – or with Jews collectively – is both historically inaccurate and morally wrong.
This is precisely where we should pause and reflect. Criticizing Israel’s policies is both the right and the responsibility of every conscientious person. However, it is a mistake to conflate Judaism with the Zionism pursued by the Israeli state. The proper way to criticize an ideology is not to identify it with an entire religion but to evaluate it according to its political and moral consequences. In this respect, Sachs’ insistence on drawing a clear distinction between Israel’s policies and Judaism is both important and justified.
Judaism and Zionism belong to entirely different categories. While the former is a religious tradition spanning thousands of years and primarily concerned with faith, worship and morality, the latter is a modern political ideology with an extremist understanding of state sovereignty and far-right nationalism.
Jewish sacred literature contains numerous principles emphasizing the sanctity of human life. Among the best-known commandments of the Torah is, “You shall not murder.” The Hebrew Bible repeatedly commands the Israelites not to oppress foreigners but to protect them and treat them justly. God’s recurring reminder, “for you yourselves were once strangers in Egypt," serves as a moral foundation for extending justice and protection to others. Likewise, the prophetic tradition consistently condemns oppression, exploitation and injustice.
Of course, Jewish literature also contains passages that may appear harsh or violent when read in isolation. Certain texts concerning the “goyim” (people who are not Jewish) and various war narratives are frequently cited in contemporary debates. Yet Jewish thinkers and modern scholars have long debated how such passages should be understood.
For example, professor Charles S. Liebman, in his article “Attitudes toward Jewish-Gentile Relations in the Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Israel,” emphasizes that there can be no doubt that the Talmudic statement “even the best of the goyim should be killed” is not meant to be understood literally within its original context. However, when detached from that context and employed in contemporary settings, as, for instance, in a message sent by a military rabbi to Israeli soldiers, it can generate highly problematic meanings. Ignoring the historical circumstances, conflicts and polemical settings in which these texts emerged inevitably produces anachronistic interpretations.
This point is particularly important because Zionist ideology often appeals to Jewish sacred texts to legitimize political objectives. Passages detached from their historical and theological contexts are reinterpreted to support contemporary political projects. One striking example is the rhetoric of the “Amalekites,” occasionally invoked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the Torah, the Amalekites are portrayed as historical enemies of the Israelites, and their destruction is described as occurring in accordance with a divine command. Yet applying such ancient narratives directly to modern political and military conflicts transforms sacred texts into ideological instruments. It also raises an important question: Did God truly command the complete destruction of the Amalekites, or do these accounts reflect retrospective historical reconstructions shaped by authors writing centuries later?
The details of that debate need not concern us here. What matters is that many contemporary Jewish theologians and scholars argue that invoking the Amalekites in modern political struggles is not a religious necessity but an ideological choice.
In “Rethinking Amalek in This 21st Century,” professor Steven Leonard Jacobs argues that using the concept of Amalek in modern political and religious contexts to demonize contemporary groups such as the Palestinians is historically and theologically problematic, and that sacred texts should instead be interpreted not to justify violence but to promote understanding and reconciliation in conflicts.
The issue is therefore not the existence of sacred texts but the purposes for which they are interpreted and employed. For this reason, the rhetoric of the Amalekites is increasingly understood as part of a political discourse rather than a theological one.
It is also worth noting that criticism of Zionism does not come only from Muslims or Christians. Across the world, many Jewish thinkers, academics, rabbis and human-rights advocates oppose Israeli policies. They argue that the crimes committed by Israel should be understood not as expressions of Judaism but as issues of human rights, justice and conscience.
For this reason, one principle should remain clear: Criticism of Israeli government policies must never be transformed into hostility toward Jews. Likewise, Judaism should not be presented as a source of legitimacy for Zionist policies. Both approaches distort reality.
In the face of the tragedies unfolding in Gaza and Lebanon, the common ground shared by all people of conscience is the value of human life. What is needed today is the ability to distinguish Judaism from Zionism and to refuse to reduce an entire religion to the actions of a state or an ideology. This is the central lesson conveyed by Jeffrey Sachs’s remarks: No matter how strongly a state’s policies are criticized, attributing those policies to an entire religion and all of its followers is both historically false and morally indefensible.
