Denying incontrovertible truths

I’ve wrestled for a long time about trying to say something insightful or novel about Israel, but two recent articles in The New York Times inspired me to take a different approach.

Rather than add to the mountain of analysis, I want to focus on something more fundamental: the pursuit of truth itself. Truth is one of the universals that cuts across science, religion (including of course the Abrahamic religions), and philosophy. At some point, the truth becomes so salient, so incontrovertible, that you must conclude that those who deny it have no ethical, religious or moral compass other than one: self-interest.

We’re often told that the situation in Israel and Palestine is complex. Even if that were once true, what has unfolded over the past year has made it devastatingly simple. Before we examine the specific truths we’re avoiding, we must understand why truth itself matters. This isn’t about taking sides or winning arguments. It’s about something more fundamental: the recognition that objective reality exists and that our survival — all of our survival — depends on acknowledging it.

The path of denying truth is not just morally or ethically wrong, it’s ultimately both futile and foolish. Truth is a lighthouse in the darkness, and trying to hide its light by blowing it out ultimately just leaves you out of breath. The rocks it illuminates don’t disappear just because we wish the light away.

Throughout history, every society that chose comfortable lies over uncomfortable truths eventually paid a devastating price. The truth doesn’t care about our feelings, our loyalties, or our political positions. It simply is. And when we deny it long enough, reality has a way of asserting itself in the most brutal ways possible.

Three Truths We Must Face Together

Truth 1: There is a genocide occurring in Gaza

This is perhaps the hardest truth for many to accept, yet it is the most thoroughly documented. When Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading Holocaust and genocide scholars, declares “I can recognize one when I see one,”[¹] we must listen. This is not a man given to hyperbole. This is someone who spent his life studying the worst of human behavior and resisted this conclusion until the evidence became undeniable.

The consensus among experts is growing and devastating:

• Amnesty International, after exhaustive investigation, concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza[²]
• Human Rights Watch has documented acts of genocide, including “using starvation as a weapon of war”[³]
• The South African government brought a detailed case to the International Court of Justice, outlining how Israel’s actions meet the legal definition of genocide[⁴]
• Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestinian human rights, has stated unequivocally that genocide is occurring[⁵]
• The International Association of Genocide Scholars’ president, Melanie O’Brien, has reached the same conclusion[⁶]
• Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote: “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians”[⁷]

To prove genocide, two things need to be proven: genocidal intent and genocidal action.

The evidence of genocidal intent is unambiguous:

• Israeli military doctrine called for periodically “mowing the lawn” in Gaza — treating Palestinian lives as weeds to be regularly cut down[¹⁰]
• Defense Minister Gallant: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly… There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, no water”[¹¹]
• Deputy Speaker Vaturi: “Now we all have one common goal … erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”[¹²]
• Heritage Minister Eliyahu suggested nuclear weapons, saying “there are no non-combatants in Gaza”[¹³]
• Finance Minister Smotrich: “There are no half measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat — total annihilation”[¹⁴]

When Israeli leaders speak of periodic devastation as policy and call for “total annihilation,” what else should we call it? These are not some nut-job politicians, these are the people that were elected by the (Jewish) people of Israel through what is widely recognized as a fair electoral process (though there are obvious issues with exactly who it is who gets to vote).

The evidence of genocidal actions these experts cite is overwhelming:

• Over 58,000 Palestinians killed, including more than 17,000 children[⁸]
• 174,000 buildings destroyed or damaged — up to 70% of all structures in Gaza[⁹]
• Forced displacement of nearly the entire population multiple times

I genuinely cannot understand how anyone can look at this evidence: the destroyed cities, the mass graves, the starving children, the systematic elimination of everything needed to sustain life and call it anything else.

Truth 2: Zionist and Western liberal values fundamentally contradict each other

This contradiction has been papered over for decades, but it can no longer be hidden. As Ezra Klein articulates so clearly, American Jews have thrived precisely because the United States “does not define belonging according to ethnicity or religion.”[¹⁵] Yet Israel is explicitly founded on ethnic and religious belonging.

The contradiction is structural, not personal:

• Liberal democracy depends on equal rights for all citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion
• Zionism depends on maintaining a Jewish majority and Jewish character of the state
• When Palestinian citizens of Israel proposed a law affirming “the principle of equal citizenship for every citizen,” the Knesset speaker wouldn’t even allow it to be debated, calling it a threat to “the foundations of the state”¹⁶

David Ben-Gurion himself said “Only a state with at least 80 percent Jews is a viable and stable state.”[¹⁷] This is fundamentally incompatible with liberal democratic values. You cannot have both ethnic supremacy and equal citizenship. You cannot have both demographic engineering and universal human rights.

Young American Jews understand this viscerally. They were raised on liberalism, equality, and justice. Now they’re told to support a state that explicitly rejects these values when it comes to Palestinians. The cognitive dissonance is unbearable, which is why so many are choosing their principles over ethnic loyalty.

This is why Zohran Mamdani’s statement that he believes in “Israel as a state with equal rights” leaves pro-Zionists dumbstruck. There is no reply because his position exposes the contradiction so starkly. You cannot simultaneously support equal rights for all and support a state premised on ethnic supremacy.

I don’t understand why acknowledging this contradiction is controversial. It’s a simple matter of logic. These are two incompatible organizing principles for society. Pretending otherwise helps no one.

Truth 3: Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism

The absurdity of this conflation becomes clear with a simple historical fact: Zionism as a political movement only began in the 1880s with Theodor Herzl. If anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, then was there no antisemitism before the 1880s? Were the pogroms, expulsions, and persecutions that Jews faced for two millennia not antisemitic because the victims couldn’t be “anti-Zionist” about a movement that didn’t yet exist?

The distinction is straightforward:

• Antisemitism is hatred of Jews as a people — a bigotry that has plagued humanity for millennia
• Anti-Zionism is opposition to a specific political ideology that emerged in the late 19th century

Consider who stands accused of antisemitism under this false conflation:

• Hundreds of thousands of Ultra-Orthodox Jews (Satmar, Neturei Karta) who view Zionism as theological heresy[¹⁸]
• Hannah Arendt, perhaps the 20th century’s greatest political philosopher[¹⁹]
• Noam Chomsky, one of the most cited living scholars[²⁰]
• Norman Finkelstein, whose parents survived Nazi death camps[²¹]
• Tens of thousands of members of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and other Jewish anti-occupation groups[²²]
• Rabbi Brant Rosen: “It is not antisemitic to oppose a political ideology. It is not antisemitic to support Palestinian rights. What is antisemitic is insisting that all Jews must think alike about Israel”[²³]

What Now?

At this point, the path forward is clear: people of conscience must either challenge the incontrovertibility of these facts, which I welcome, but only within a logical framework grounded in evidence, or accept this foundation of truth and use it to drive action.

To some extent, this is already happening. The era of unconditional support for Israel is ending. Pew Research shows that only 38% of Americans under 30 sympathize more with Israel than Palestine, compared to 64% of those over 65[²⁴]. Among young Democrats, support has collapsed even further. The generational shift is undeniable.

But the fact that change is occurring doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to accelerate it. Every day of delay means more Palestinian lives lost, more children orphaned, more families destroyed. Every day we fail to speak these truths clearly means another day of genocide enabled by our silence.

So what must we do?

First, we must stop allowing the conversation to be derailed by those who benefit from denying reality. When someone claims there’s no genocide, demand they explain away the evidence from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the ICJ, B’tselem and Israel’s own former leaders. When someone insists anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, ask them to explain why so many Jews are anti-Zionist. When someone claims Zionism and liberalism are compatible, ask them to reconcile that with Ben-Gurion’s own words about needing an 80% Jewish majority.

Second, we must act on these truths. If there is a genocide, then every nation providing weapons is complicit. If Zionism contradicts liberal democratic values, then we must choose which principle we actually believe in. If anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism, then we must stop allowing that weapon to silence legitimate criticism.

The truth has a way of asserting itself eventually. The question is how much suffering we’ll allow before we align our actions with reality. We can come together around these basic truths and use them as a foundation for justice, or we can continue enabling horror while pretending not to see it.

STOP PRESS: Since I wrote this article, B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization has also issued a statement saying that what is happening in Gaza is genocide[²⁵].

[¹]: Omer Bartov, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” The New York Times, July 15, 2025.

[²]: Amnesty International, “Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” December 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8465/2024/en/

[³]: Human Rights Watch, “Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza,” December 12, 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/12/israel-starvation-used-weapon-war-gaza

[⁴]: International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel),” December 29, 2023.

[⁵]: Francesca Albanese, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, United Nations Human Rights Council, October 2024.

[⁶]: Cited in Omer Bartov, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” The New York Times, July 15, 2025.

[⁷]: Ehud Olmert, “Israel Is Committing War Crimes,” Haaretz, cited in Ezra Klein, “Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another,” The New York Times, July 20, 2025.

[⁸]: Gaza Ministry of Health figures, cited in Bartov, The New York Times, July 15, 2025.

[⁹]: Haaretz investigation, cited in Bartov, The New York Times, July 15, 2025.

[¹⁰]: The phrase “mowing the lawn” has been used by Israeli officials and military analysts for years. See, e.g., Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, “‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 2014.

[¹¹]: Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister, October 9, 2023, statement to media.

[¹²]: Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Knesset, on X (formerly Twitter), October 2023, cited in Bartov.

[¹³]: Amichai Eliyahu, Heritage Minister, radio interview, November 5, 2023.

[¹⁴]: Bezalel Smotrich, Finance Minister, quoted in Haaretz, January 2024.

[¹⁵]: Ezra Klein, “Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another,” The New York Times, July 20, 2025.

[¹⁷]: David Ben-Gurion, 1947, cited in Klein, The New York Times, July 20, 2025.

[¹⁸]: See, for example, “The Rabbis Speak Out: The 130 Year Record of Religious Jewish Opposition to Zionism” (True Torah Jews, 2023).

[¹⁹]: Hannah Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” Commentary, May 1948.

[²⁰]: Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (1983) and decades of consistent criticism.

[²¹]: Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000) and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (2018).

[²²]: Jewish Voice for Peace reports over 15,000 members (2023); IfNotNow has mobilized thousands in protests; see also “Not in Our Name: Jewish Voices Against Zionism” documenting the breadth of Jewish opposition.

[²³]: Rabbi Brant Rosen, “Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism,” Jewish Voice for Peace, 2022.

[²⁴]: Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Views of the Israel-Hamas War,” March 2024.

[²⁵] B’tselem, “Our Genocide”, July 29 2025, https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide