Blog Post: In the U.S. and in Israel-Palestine, We’re Facing Moral Destruction. But There Is Another Way.
February 2026
by Gili Getz
Friends, I wanted to share some thoughts as I process my storm of emotions. It helps me to write it.
As part of my solidarity and peace work, I’m exposed to a lot of videos and photos of Israeli settler and military violence in the West Bank. I try to limit it to what I need so I don’t overwhelm my system and can stay effective. Combined with seeing ICE violence, these images are starting to blend together in my mind. All I see are systems that tell me not to believe my eyes, while at the same time discrediting news agencies and reputable NGOs. It’s maddening and deeply destabilizing. The enemy of the system is reality itself.
Watching the on-camera murder of Alex Pretti – and the fact that his killer remains free and continues to terrorize others – triggered in me the horror of the murder of my friend Awdah Hathaleen, who was killed while documenting a well-known Jewish terrorist who invaded his village in the West Bank. Despite staying far away from his killer while filming the latter’s initial actions in the village, and despite all the video evidence of the murder, his killer was also set free to keep terrorizing: he is part of a system of occupation based on supremacy.
The late Awdah Hathaleen (Photo Courtesy of Gili Getz)
I feel relief that all the hostages are out of Gaza, and enormous gratitude for the relentless “Bring Them Home” pressure campaign by Israelis and Diaspora Jews against Netanyahu, who I fear delayed negotiations time and again and attempted to keep the hostages in Gaza to die, all so he could stay in power. And I feel deep disgust at Netanyahu now blaming Biden for the deaths of Israeli soldiers (only in Hebrew media, of course) and for Hamas gaining power in Gaza; just as I feel disgust at the reality of people still dying in Gaza, and life-saving aid not getting through.
I’m in profound despair over the crimes committed against Palestinians in the West Bank: systematic, daily state and settler terrorism carried out in our name. These acts shock the conscience and betray the most sacred Jewish values. They betray our humanity. Burning villages, pogroms, and daily terror as part of an ethnic-cleansing campaign that is hauntingly reminiscent of what was done to the Jewish people in our darkest hours.
The village of Ras Ein al-Auja was erased last week after armed, masked settlers relentlessly terrorized it. They stole and destroyed water tanks, harmed livestock, and terrorized a community of poor farmers with absolute impunity. Another village gone.
Other villages were set on fire. Residents were beaten by settlers while soldiers watched, blocked ambulances from arriving, and then arrested people from the villages. No settlers were arrested.
There is nothing activists or advocates could have done to prevent this. There were joint protests and ongoing efforts to get international support. But in the Land there is no one to call that can stop this, because it’s part of the government’s policy. Legislation in the U.S. Congress to sanction settlers is stuck, and Trump doesn’t value human life – only money. All that remains is to bear witness to a violent annexation process, land theft and forced expulsion that destroys lives and communities – and to beg the international community to act. This violence also destroys Israel.
It barely makes the news because the coup in Israel and the disintegration of society are overwhelming. The criminals running Israel spare no one: looting, destroying, and normalizing a police state the oppressing Jews as well, not to mention running torture camps for Palestinians.
In the hasbara culture within parts of our Jewish community, these basic truths are immediately met with pushback rooted in Jewish trauma over October 7th and the rise of antisemitism. The community culture is promoting a decoupling of this reality on the ground in Israel/Palestine from our experience as Jews in the world. It minimizes, denies, or outright justifies what is happening in a way, similar to how parts of the international left responded following the October 7th massacre by minimizing, justifying, or denying it. Same same.
They don’t want us to see reality. They deny both the Israeli and Palestinian capacity to commit atrocities.
Denial and endless “what about״ or “blaming the people killed” arguments are corrupting our institutions. Extensive reporting on organizations that were set up with the best of intentions, to benefit our people like the ADL (whose abandonment of civil rights was recently covered by the Forward) and on programs like Birthright (covered recently by Haaretz) demonstrates this. Birthright couldn’t even give an interview explaining what it has become. The ADL issued a “both sides”- style statement about ICE this past week. Maybe this is part of the moral destruction of Jewish institutions that traffic in anti-Palestinian bigotry and erasure, and who take MAGA money – just as some on the international left erased Israeli humanity after the Hamas October 7th massacre.
Dehumanizing entire peoples leads to profound corruption and collapse. It will not make any of us safe.
There is another way. What gives me hope is that more and more people are beginning to recognize this—not because we all agree, but because we understand that to be safe and free, we must come together. Our only chance is together. We must reject supremacy and hate as a way to keep anyone safe. A better world is possible. And out of this darkness, we will build it together.
Gili Getz is a Board Vice President of Partners for Progressive Israel.
Thanks for this. Dehumanization is what makes the targeting of civilians on either side possible and even seemingly justified. But in reality we are all irreducibly human, and at least since 1776 we all at least tacitly recognize that human beings, by virtue of the very fact that they are human, have “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” What is less clearly understood and accepted is that the human rights intrinsic to being human entail a related duty all human beings have to protect and enforce those rights wherever, whenever, and by whomever they are threatened or actually violated. Which is why only together, equally committed to the universal principle of justice not as a political football but as a moral law emerging from the nature of reality itself, can Palestinians and Israelis liberate themselves from the trammels of endlessly competing and incommensurable historical narratives and enact together a common world they both inhabit and share as equal human beings. Omri Boehm has just published a small book with huge implications that argues brilliantly for the conception I have sketched out here, “Radical Universalism, Beyond Identity” (New York Review Books).Highy recommended. It removes the scales from our eyes that lock us into the endless cycle of retributive violence.