Why Israel Has Become the World’s Moral Battleground

Walk through Europe today and you see magnificent churches — soaring ceilings, stained glass, stone that has endured for centuries. You visit great synagogues too, some restored, some preserved as heritage sites.

But many of Europe’s synagogues are empty.

Not because Jews simply drifted away.

But because of the original genocide.

Entire Jewish communities — centuries old — were extinguished. In Kraków, Vilna, Salonika, Berlin, Budapest, synagogues that once pulsed with life now stand as monuments to absence.

And it was not only Europe.

Across much of the Muslim world — Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria — ancient Jewish communities that predated Islam itself have almost entirely disappeared. Some fled persecution, some were expelled, some left under mounting pressure. In many cities, the synagogues remain. The Jews do not.

The buildings stand. The communities are gone.

That history matters when words like genocide are used lightly today.

Why We Build Houses of Worship

Houses of worship were never only about prayer.

They were about community, purpose, hierarchy, and shared meaning. They told people who they were, where they belonged, and what stood above them.

Even those who doubted belief still belonged to something larger than themselves.

Parashat Terumah speaks directly to this human need.

The Israelites have left Egypt. They have stood at Sinai. Revelation has occurred. And yet God does not say, “Now carry this privately.”

“Ve’asu li Mikdash, v’shachanti b’tocham.” Make for Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.

Not spirituality without form. Not belief without structure. But a shared space — detailed, measured, beautiful.

Gold, silver, fabric, artistry. Order and discipline.

If God is everywhere, why architecture?

Because human beings are not.

We need visible centres to anchor invisible truths. We need shared space to sustain purpose. We need structure to prevent meaning from dissolving into preference.

The Mishkan was not built because God needs gold. It was built because people need order.

The Post-Church World and the Search for Mission

As churches and synagogues weaken across much of the modern West, the human need they once served has not disappeared.

People still long for:

A cause larger than themselves

But when covenantal frameworks decline, those longings attach elsewhere.

Politics becomes theology. Activism becomes liturgy. Movements replace meaning.

And every moral movement needs:

Often, it needs an enemy.

Rabbi Sacks and the Jew as the Enduring “Other”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminded us repeatedly that the Torah commands us, again and again, to love the stranger.

Because the hatred of the foreigner is ancient. Tribal societies instinctively fear the outsider.

But Rabbi Sacks pointed to something deeper.

Across history, hostility toward “the foreigner” often narrows onto one recurring figure: the Jew.

The Jew is visible yet distinct. Integrated yet separate. Never fully absorbed, never fully erased.

In medieval Europe, Jews were accused of blood libel. In Enlightenment Europe, of financial conspiracy. In nationalist Europe, of racial contamination. In the twentieth century, of global subversion.

And in the twenty-first century, of colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.

The language evolves. The pattern remains.

Antisemitism, Rabbi Sacks wrote, is the world’s most durable conspiracy theory — endlessly reinvented to suit the anxieties of each age.

Why Israel Becomes the Symbol — and the Target

For centuries, Jews were the second-class people.

In Europe they were confined, expelled, massacred. In many Muslim lands they lived under protection, but rarely as equals.

They had no sovereignty. No army. No power.

Then history shifted.

After the Holocaust — after the systematic attempt to annihilate European Jewry — the Jewish people regained sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.

The second-class people acquired power.

Power to defend themselves. Power to refuse expulsion. Power to fight back.

That transformation is not merely political. It is psychological.

The Jew was once the object of history. Now the Jew is a subject in history.

And that unsettles old narratives.

Power and the Burden of Memory

Israel carries more than military capability. It carries memory.

It reminds Europe of the Holocaust — not abstractly, but as a living failure.

It reminds parts of the Muslim world of Jewish communities that once lived among them and are now gone.

It reminds the West of colonialism — but in a way that resists easy categorisation. Jews are indigenous to the land, exiled from it, and returned to it. That does not fit neatly into post-colonial binaries.

Complexity is uncomfortable.

So complexity is reduced.

The survivor becomes the coloniser. The refugee becomes the occupier. The people nearly exterminated become genocidal.

This inversion resolves discomfort.

The Four Accusations: Apartheid, Racism, Occupation, Genocide

Criticism of Israel has increasingly consolidated around four words. They are repeated so often they are treated as conclusions rather than claims.

Apartheid. Racism. Occupation. Genocide.

Each once described a specific historical crime. Each now functions as a moral verdict.

Apartheid was a legally codified system of racial segregation designed to deny political rights based on race.

Israel does not meet that definition.

Arab citizens of Israel vote, serve in parliament, sit on the Supreme Court, and work across every sector of society. Inequality exists — as it does in many democracies — but inequality is not apartheid.

In the West Bank, the situation is not racial segregation but an unresolved national and security conflict governed by interim agreements signed by both sides.

To import the apartheid label is to substitute analogy for analysis.

“Zionism is racism” was formalised in a 1975 UN resolution later revoked for good reason.

Zionism is not a theory of racial superiority. It is the belief that the Jewish people, like any other people, have the right to self-determination.

Jewish nationalism alone is labelled immoral.

That double standard is not accidental.

The term occupation is often invoked as though it settles the debate.

But serious legal and historical analysis is more complex.

The 1922 League of Nations Mandate recognised the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land. The 1947 UN Partition Plan proposed two states. Jewish leadership accepted it. Arab leadership rejected it and chose war.

In 1967, Israel took control of the West Bank in a defensive war. Jordan itself had occupied the territory since 1948 without broad international recognition.

Since then, Israel has offered substantial territorial concessions — Camp David, Taba, and Olmert’s proposal — each rejected or left unresolved.

One may criticise policy. But invoking “occupation” without reference to defensive wars, rejected peace offers, legal frameworks, and Jewish historical and demographic connection flattens complexity into slogan.

Genocide is not war. It is not civilian casualties.

It requires intent to destroy a people as such.

That term was coined to describe the Holocaust.

To apply it to Israel is moral inversion.

Israel fights an enemy that openly declares genocidal intent toward Jews. It warns civilians, facilitates humanitarian access, and withdraws from territory. None of this erases suffering — but it negates intent.

The casual use of this word erases October 7 and weaponises the memory of real genocide.

The Erasure of October 7

When Israel is framed as genocidal, October 7 fades into abstraction.

Families murdered in their homes. Women violated. Children kidnapped. A movement openly promising repetition.

Moral language requires sequence.

Aggression came first. Defense followed.

Tragedy is not intent. Self-defence is not genocide.

Terumah Revisited: Power Under Restraint

Before land. Before sovereignty. Before power.

Israel was commanded to build a structure that would discipline it.

The Mishkan was not about dominance. It was about restraint.

Gold elevated — but under law. Authority exercised — but limited. Community formed — but bound by covenant.

Holiness is not a loud accusation.

It is ordered responsibility.

Jerusalem brings all of this into sharp focus.

Under Israeli sovereignty, the city remains a place where Jews, Christians, and Muslims pray in close proximity. Access is protected, sacred sites are preserved, and worship continues even under strain. That reality is rarely acknowledged, yet it matters deeply.

The Jewish vision that emerges from Terumah and from the idea of the Temple was never about exclusion or domination. It was about responsibility. The prophets imagined a moral centre — a place that reminded those with power that holiness demands restraint, accountability, and care for the dignity of others. A “house of prayer for all peoples” was not a slogan, but a discipline.

That vision stands in tension with the modern world.

Israel has become the world’s moral battleground because it sits at the intersection of collapsed faith, unresolved historical guilt, regained Jewish power, and the misuse of moral language.

Today’s struggle is not only fought on physical battlefields. It is fought through media narratives, legal forums, and relentless global scrutiny. It is fought in language — through repetition of accusations until complexity disappears and meaning erodes.

Israel must defend itself physically. But it must also defend moral distinction — between tragedy and intent, between self-defence and annihilation, between criticism and delegitimisation.

When those distinctions collapse, moral language collapses with them.

And when moral language collapses, no sanctuary — national or spiritual — can endure.

Terumah reminds us that before power is exercised, it must be ordered. Before sovereignty is claimed, it must be restrained. And before judgment is passed, meaning itself must be protected.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)