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zionism
When Human Rights Principles Are Abandoned at Zionism’s Altar
The crisis in Gaza has exposed the stark reality that, for many self-proclaimed defenders of human rights, the value of human life is not universal but conditional.
Mar 16, 2025
In every struggle for human dignity and freedom, certain voices consistently speak out against oppression—except when it is Israel oppressing Palestinians. This selective moral calculus, in which universal human rights suddenly become conditional, exposes a glaring hypocrisy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the discourse surrounding Israel's war in Gaza, where the moral and legal principles upheld in other conflicts are selectively disregarded to justify Israeli and Zionist exceptionalism
The debate is not just about facts; it is about the fundamental inconsistency in how people—particularly those who otherwise champion human rights—respond when the victims are Palestinians, and the perpetrator is Israel. The contradictions expose how Zionism, in its modern form, necessitates a moral blind spot that demands impunity for Israeli actions while vilifying those who dare to apply the same legal and ethical standards to its conduct as they would to any other state.
The Moral Double Standard on Genocide
The word "genocide" carries profound legal and moral weight, and its application is strictly defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The convention specifies acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The standard is not whether a government claims to be targeting "terrorists" but whether, in reality, its actions exhibit intent to systematically destroy a group.
Israel's war on Gaza meets this threshold, as numerous legal scholars and human rights organizations have pointed out. The systematic targeting of hospitals, the deliberate starvation of civilians through a blockade, the bombing of "safe zones" after civilians were ordered to flee there, the shooting of scores of children execution style in the head, the killing of reporters and health workers, and the explicit statements from Israeli officials about making Gaza "disappear" all point to intent—one of the key elements of genocide. Yet, for some, acknowledging this reality is impossible, because to do so would mean confronting the full moral implications of their ideological commitments.
There is still a choice: to embrace a vision of justice that applies universally, or to cling to an exceptionalism that demands that one people's suffering be acknowledged while another's is erased.
Instead of reckoning with the overwhelming evidence, many deflect with rhetorical maneuvers. Some claim that genocide cannot be occurring because Israel's actions are a response to Hamas' attack on October 7. But self-defense, even if claimed, does not justify the deliberate and disproportionate slaughter of civilians, the destruction of an entire society's infrastructure, and the intentional infliction of conditions that make survival impossible.
Others shift the conversation to casualty counts, suggesting that unless there is evidence that every person killed was a civilian, genocide cannot be occurring. This is an absurd distortion of international law. The intent to destroy a population does not require the murder of every individual, nor does it hinge on whether some of the dead were combatants. The question is whether a group is being targeted as a group—and in Gaza, the reality is unmistakable.
Weaponizing Victimhood, Erasing Palestinian Suffering
A particularly insidious aspect of Zionist exceptionalism is its demand for exclusive victimhood. The suffering of Jews throughout history—especially in the Holocaust—is invoked to justify Israel's actions, yet Palestinians are not permitted to speak of their own suffering in equivalent terms. Any attempt to compare apartheid South Africa's brutality to Israel's treatment of Palestinians is dismissed as "anti-Israel propaganda." Any recognition of the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948—is treated as an attack on Israel's right to exist. And when Palestinians use the language of genocide to describe the systematic destruction of their people, they are accused of exaggeration, even as entire neighborhoods are leveled, families are wiped out, and civilians are starved.
This double standard is not accidental; it is foundational to Zionism's modern ideological framework. By positioning Jewish suffering as unique and beyond historical parallel, Zionist narratives demand unconditional sympathy for Israel while actively erasing Palestinian suffering. In this framework, Palestinians are expected to endure oppression in silence, and any resistance—whether military, political, or even rhetorical—is condemned as terrorism or propaganda.
Exceptionalism and the Refusal to Engage
When confronted with these contradictions, those who defend Israeli policies often claim their critics "don't understand the conflict"—a patronizing assertion that implies that only Zionist perspectives hold legitimacy. They dismiss human rights reports, legal findings, and international consensus as "propaganda," refusing to engage with the evidence because doing so would require acknowledging Israel's culpability.
This intellectual cowardice manifests in another telling way: a readiness to condemn oppression globally—except when it involves Israel. Those who were outspoken against apartheid in South Africa, who championed human rights for Black South Africans, who decried police brutality in the United States, and who condemned the persecution of Sudanese civilians and Uyghurs in China often fall conspicuously silent or become defensive when Israel is the oppressor. Their commitment to justice has an asterisk: "Only when it doesn't challenge Zionism."
This is the core hypocrisy. If apartheid was wrong in South Africa, it is wrong in Israel. If ethnic cleansing was wrong in Bosnia, it is wrong in Palestine. If genocide was wrong in Rwanda, it is wrong in Gaza. There is no principled way to support human rights in one context while excusing their violation in another.
The Consequences of Moral Cowardice
The refusal to confront Zionism's racism and exceptionalism does not just erode the credibility of those who engage in these double standards—it actively enables Israel's impunity. When genocide is denied despite overwhelming evidence, when Palestinian suffering is dismissed as "exaggeration," and when international law is selectively applied, the result is the continued legitimization of crimes against humanity.
The stark reality of this selective conscience becomes even more apparent when considering the sheer scale of atrocities. Since the Gaza war began in October 2023, Israeli forces have killed over 46,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are children, women, and the elderly. Nearly 1,000 Palestinian health workers have been killed, and between 116 and 193 journalists have lost their lives—figures meticulously documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Such staggering numbers, which would undoubtedly provoke global outrage if attributed to a geopolitical adversary of the West, are instead met with silence, deflection, or, at best, muted concern. When Palestinian journalists are assassinated, there is no global solidarity movement akin to "Je Suis Charlie." The war crimes in Gaza fail to elicit even a fraction of the performative outrage that has been mustered against far less egregious actions by other states.
This is not a failure of awareness—it is a deliberate and ideological refusal to apply the same human rights standards to allies as to adversaries. It is not that these activists, intellectuals, and liberal media are incapable of identifying war crimes; they simply refuse to acknowledge them when the perpetrators are "one of their own" or enmeshed in Western alliances. Their silence, or at best, their tepid responses, betray an ugly truth: For many in the human rights community, justice is not universal, but contingent on political expediency.
At its core, this selective conscience erodes the credibility of human rights advocacy itself. If principles are only defended when they align with Western strategic interests, then they are not principles at all—they are tools of power, wielded to bludgeon adversaries and protect allies. This moral inconsistency is precisely why human rights discourse has been increasingly met with cynicism in the Global South, where people see through the thin veneer of universalism and recognize it for what it is: a weaponized, politicized, and deeply selective enterprise.
The crisis in Gaza has exposed the stark reality that, for many self-proclaimed defenders of human rights, the value of human life is not universal but conditional. And that, in itself, is an indictment not just of Israel's enablers, but of an entire industry that has long pretended to stand above the fray, when in reality, it is deeply complicit in perpetuating injustice.
History will remember this moment. Just as those who defended South African apartheid were later forced to reckon with their complicity, those who today defend Zionism's brutal repression will eventually face the weight of history's judgment. The question is whether they will continue to evade reality until that moment arrives or whether they will have the courage to confront it now.
There is still a choice: to embrace a vision of justice that applies universally, or to cling to an exceptionalism that demands that one people's suffering be acknowledged while another's is erased. But let there be no illusions—one path leads to justice, the other to complicity. And history does not forget.
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The Shame of What We've Done: Assessing Jews' Responsibility for Israel's Actions
A new book by Peter Beinart analyses how the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel's agency in creating the resistance it faces.
Feb 02, 2025
The dominant self-conception of the Jewish story is innocence, repeated persecutions, and then redemption by creation of the Jewish nationalist State of Israel.
This narrative is critically examined in Peter Beinart's new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.
Beinart's book says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel's agency in creating the resistance it faces: "We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history's permanent virtuous victims."
The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in "diaspora" is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel's actions, on campuses and in the streets worldwide.
Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, is now an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, and a New York Times contributor.
He has been in a 20-year progression of seeing, more and more sharply, the "Jewish and democratic" state of Israel as anti-democratic and incompatible with Jewish tradition.
He writes that support for a Jewish state has become "idolatry," permitting endless killing, torture, and oppression of Palestinians "There is no limit. No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite."
Contemporary Jewish life is filled with that idolatry, he observes: "In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself."
The book attributes the horrors imposed on 2 million human beings in Gaza not only to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but to Jews: "Worshipping a country that elevates Jews over Palestinians replaces Judaism's universal God—who makes special demands on Jews but cherishes all people–with a tribal deity that considers Jewish life precious and Palestinian life cheap."
Beinart is not playing the peekaboo game of saying Jews are not responsible for Israel, and the other half of the time saying Israel is the Jewish State.
He's not saying "all Jews," but fairly saying "representative," "mainstream" Jewish organizations worldwide are now Zionist. Anti-Zionist organizations are dissident.
He observes that many synagogues have an Israeli flag on the bima (platform where the Torah is read) "and a prayer for Israel in the liturgy."
It was predicted and warned about, as the Zionist movement grew, that the effect of creating a Jewish nation-state would be Jews being seen in the light of that state's actions.
The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in "diaspora" is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel's actions, on campuses and in the streets worldwide.
Beinart places the Hamas violence of October 7, 2023 in context, as consistent with the history of suppressed peoples without peaceful means to contest their status, as is seen in slave revolts and anticolonial guerilla wars.
I note that Beinart's thoughts are resonant with what, almost 100 years ago, historian and then-Zionist Hans Kohn wrote of 1929 anti-Jewish riots after 12 years of Zionist colonization in Palestine under British authority:
We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August… They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt… We have been in Palestine for 12 years [since the Balfour Declaration] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the Indigenous people.
Israeli retribution since October 7, 2023 on the 2 million-plus population of Gaza and their means of life—homes, utilities, schools, universities, hospitals—has officially resulted in over 46,000 deaths and innumerable injuries directly from IDF attacks.
The medical journal Lancetestimates deaths as likely much higher, counting "deaths from starvation, disease, or cold."
Most of the population of Gaza was made homeless, huddled in improvised shelters, pushed by IDF warnings from one "safe zone" to another, often then bombed.
Beinart's book is an analysis of Zionist apologetics that are necessary to both regard oneself as moral and defend what Israel has done, from the 1947-49 Nakba—terroristic expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their communities within present-day Israel—to Gaza in 2025.
He denounces dehumanizing, demonizing, Zionist lies about Palestinian resistance: "These claims don't withstand even modest scrutiny. They're less arguments than talismans. They ward off dangerous emotions like grief and shame."
Using the model of the dismantling of apartheid South Africa, he tries to envision what principles could heal Palestine :
The details matter, but they matter less than the underlying principles. Wherever they live together, Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law. And they should work to repair the injustices of the past. The Israelis who were made refugees on October 7 should be allowed to go home. And the Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home. Historical wrongs can never be fully undone. But the more sincere the effort, the greater the reconciliation that ensues.
This would be a radical reconception of Jewish life in Palestine, that in abandoning the role of conquerors, Jews may live as Jewish Palestinians. He makes the point that whites relinquishing apartheid was a more peaceful process for South Africa than having it overthrown.
In the summary chapter of the book, Beinart says Israel's conduct is from a heretical Jewish tendency to believe Jewish people are sacred, rather than people with extra obligations: "So what if a few dreamers in Moorish Spain or the Silesian shtetl [Eastern European Jewish village] consoled themselves with the idea that deep within us lies a special spark of the divine? They didn't have the power to do anything about it."
This self-deification, first proposed by an Israelite named Korach, who challenged Moses' leadership, hadn't mattered as much until the creation of "Jewish" national power: "All that changed with the creation of Israel. Only once Jews control a state with life-and-death power over millions of non-Jews does Korach's claim of intrinsic Jewish sanctity become truly dangerous."
Beinart calls for liberation for Jews from the Zionist doctrine that Jews are only victims, never victimizers: "We can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world… We can lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world."
More than level of observance or denomination, the question of Zionism is going to be a fault line in Jewish fellowship, Beinart believes:
Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it's not clear what is left. But the benefit of recognizing that Jews are not fundamentally different from other people is that it allows us to learn from their experience. Jewish exceptionalism is less exceptional than we think. We are not the only people to use a story of victimhood to justify supremacy.
Israel's perpetual peril is the Arab population it has displaced but not exterminated. They are determined to redeem their birthright to live as freely in Palestine as Jews do.
Instead of conquest, Beinart proposes a model of restraint, cooperation, and respect—along a line of Jewish thinkers from Ahad Ha'am to Judah Magnes to Albert Einstein.
Many of the visions for Jewish settlement in Palestine were universalist and pacific.
In 1927, Zionist writer (and Chaim Weizmann protege) Maurice Samuel mused, in his book I, The Jew, that Jewish civilization "for 60 generations" demonstrated "that neither conquest or oppression was necessary to its survival… a group can survive without mass murder."
Whether trauma or hubris allows Zionists in Israel and elsewhere to trust that model—finding the image of God even in their "enemies"—is the question.
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Moving From Colonial to Liberation Medicine in a Time of Genocide
This transformative work requires reimagining medicine’s structures, moving people with racist beliefs out of positions of power, and creating systems for the most marginalized to lead.
Jan 26, 2025
Ignoring a genocide or pretending it is not happening is not a "difference of opinion." It is a racist ideology. This ideology does not belong in medicine. Decolonizing medicine requires understanding that we will not have health equity as long as racism is baked into the very structures of medicine. Decolonizing medicine is not about tweaking who is at the top of the pecking order or playing into liberal identitarianism, which, as Dr. King accurately diagnosed, “is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” Decolonizing medicine requires reimagining the order altogether, because the one that exists was created in a time of subjugating women, queer, Indigenous, chronically ill, Black/brown, immigrant and other people deemed “deplorables” by European colonial standards.
The "Other" in medicine—whether between doctor and patient or doctor and structure—this phenomenon is about power, who has it and who is denied it. Power differentials create health inequities, and the differences that exist today were established in a time of colonial conquest. The United States and all of the Global South were colonized by militaries, missionaries, and medics. If we want health equity, we have to transform these outdated and harmful structures of power. We must compost them and create the conditions for something more healing to grow.
To do that we must understand the history and context of how these power structures evolved, who is occupying the seats of power today, and why. People in power in medicine today will tell you that we do not want to mix politics in medicine. But medicine is politics practiced on the human body. To pretend it is any other way is to ignore the actual realities that are causing harm on marginalized people in a system that was not built to serve us. Those in power prefer to distract us with superficial adjustments rather than structural ones. They tell us we are “unprofessional” when we push for change that will close the gaps on disparities. We can no longer play their game of delay.
Yesterday, my colleague Dr. Yipeng Ge suggested we change our oath, from the Hippocratic oath to an oath crafted by the doctors in Gaza, one that uplifts that level of commitment to serve the people.
History and context are critical to understand so we can stop having people who kill and justify killing inside medicine. Having a genocidal war criminal for a physician is bad for patient outcomes. We do not have to study it. We can just look at physician Howard Maibach, a devout Zionist who injected 2,600 imprisoned people (Black/brown) with pathogens and poisons without their informed consent, reminiscent of the Nazi medical experiments. Before I was slated to speak at the American Medical Association’s first Grand Rounds for Health Equity where we discussed Maibach’s medical racialized violence, Maibach’s lawyer—also “Israel’s lawyer”—Alan Dershowitz pressured my university to prevent me from talking. Dershowitz is now representing Israel in the International Criminal Court hearings calling for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.
Now while Maibach is not a war criminal, he harbors deep-seated racist ideologies. The harm he did and the fact that he remains employed by the University of California reveal the university’s power structure. Maibach’s family donates heavily to the Friends of the IDF, providing material support for the genocide in Gaza. This is a problem. We need doctors who are fully committed to healing and health for all, not killing some because it happens to be in alignment with their political agendas. And we require doctors who allow for discourse, not silencing because “it’s complicated” when people of European ancestry decide it is time to kill again for colonial conquest.
To decolonize medicine is to remove those obstructions to our voices so we can advocate for the health for all, as it is our moral and professional obligation. Since October 2023, medical students from around the country have texted me horrific, violent, and even murderous things that pro-Israeli professors have said about Palestinian patients in their presence. Once these students find their courage to speak up, the world is not ready for what they have to share. This is why there is such active repression of medical students and their voices, as Israeli doctors called for the destruction of the entire healthcare system in Gaza and the powers that be in Western medical institutions repress those of us who do speak up. The silence of healthcare workers across the West is a part of Israel’s genocide, and a recent submission to the United Nations documents exactly how.
In spite of the forces against us, I hope medical students will find their courage and recognize that building a medicine that will serve all will require that courage in order to compost a colonial system. This work requires the daylight of truth. In that daylight, there are incredible doctors ready to build a liberation medicine, one that will be able to address the needs of all the people we serve, not just an elite few—everyone.
I am grateful to medical students like Umaymah Mohammad, whose courage shines as she shares her horror that a professor at Emory went to serve a combat unit during the genocide and came back as if everything was perfectly normal. It is not. Genocide is the most intense expression of racism. Dr. Josh Winer at Emory University is not fit for teaching medical students in a pluralistic society, especially not ones whose family is currently being annihilated by Israel. Umaymah was suspended for speaking up about this violation of her safety and civil rights. Her stance is a moral one—and a missing one—in a colonial medical system that supports genocidal physicians and silences ones who speak up to stop a genocide. The agenda could not be clearer. Please support Umaymah here.
Physicians and other healthcare workers who have been repressed in the West are finding each other, and we are working to teach our colleagues how to cultivate their courage to embark on this transformative work together. We recently held a webinar to launch our peer to peer curriculum—Cultivating Courage—which is a six-week course to learn and unlearn together as we map out what is needed to build a liberation medicine.
As people across the West wake up and realize that physicians who supported, endorsed, and even participated in genocide continue on in their careers as those who stood to make noise about a genocide were defamed, suspended, and even fired, they will start to ask themselves questions about their personal safety in the hospital. Physicians who are deeply racist provide poor care to the people they hate. This has been shown over and over again. And the issue is not simply a healthcare issue. It is a matter of civil rights.
People of color have the right to be served by physicians who do not hate them. Arabs and Palestinians have a right to be served by physicians who do not want to see them annihilated. In a pluralistic society, holding deeply racist beliefs should be enough to show that a person does not have the basic competency required to be a physician. Changing one’s belief is not simply a matter of showing up for a DEI workshop or implicit bias training. This work cannot be led by liberals who opened the door to the right-wing exploitation of civil rights laws to silence people of color across the Global North as the West started its bloody campaign in Gaza. This transformative work requires reimagining medicine’s structures, moving people with racist beliefs out of positions of power. It requires creating systems for the most marginalized people who uplift the health of all in practice, not just in speech, to lead.
The decolonization of medicine is happening right now, led by the doctors in Gaza. With moral courage and leverage, they “absorb what is useful” from Western medicine and “discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own,” in the words of martial artist Bruce Lee. That is the path ahead for physicians of conscience. It is the future of medicine. Yesterday, my colleague Dr. Yipeng Ge suggested we change our oath, from the Hippocratic oath to an oath crafted by the doctors in Gaza, one that uplifts that level of commitment to serve the people. Because in the times that are upon us—social upheaval and climate collapse, fascism and food systems deterioration—we will need a different kind of physician and a different kind of medical system. The time to start laying those seeds is now.
This piece was originally published on Marya’s Substack Deep Medicine.
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