"That rare exceptional moment in Israel/Palestine, namely, a brief window of time in which more Israelis had been killed by Palestinians than Palestinians had been killed by Israelis, is closed."
October 17, 2023Dear Hardip Johal et al., for the Vancouver Sun,
Jews of conscience, and thinking people in general, can only scratch our heads after reading Rabbi Moskovitz's op-ed. Just what on earth is this thing he tries to pass off as logic? That rare exceptional moment in Israel/Palestine, namely, a brief window of time in which more Israelis had been killed by Palestinians than Palestinians had been killed by Israelis, is closed. We have returned to the norm: since Saturday October 7, Israel has killed at least twenty-eight hundred Palestinians in Gaza, as the New York Times reports, while nearly half that number of Israelis have been killed. How on earth can a person ignore the larger fatality count and yet pretend to rally to his side, as Moskovitz puts it, "all who value human life"? Palestinians, it turns out, have human life too: as Shakespeare would have it, if you prick them they bleed. Ostrich morality, a head deep in the sand, ill suits a rabbi. None of us from any background should be swayed by those who sideline pain and loss on the part of the weak while claiming morality for the strong alone.
Sincerely yours,
Dan Freeman-Maloy