Our Seder night this year was a small affair, with just close family. I’m not very religious, so for the last few times we’ve been hosting Seder, we’ve used a Haggadah I’ve put together that focuses on telling the full story from the Bible. Within that, there is a space entitled “Other stories” for discussing tales of enslavement from other peoples – last year, this was the African slave trade and the oppression of the Uighurs.

This year, it hit us like a thunderbolt: the people suffering the most severe oppression are the Palestinians, and the oppressors are the Israelis. Every day, we are hearing stories of atrocities perpetrated by Israeli forces in Gaza; every day, more Palestinians are forced from their homes. The difference between their plight and that of the Jews in Egypt is that we were able to flee from our oppressors and find some vacant territory to which we could migrate. The Palestinians are unable to do so.

Just War theory includes a doctrine called proportionality: even if a war is just in all other ways, it cannot be just if the degree of force used is so massive as to be utterly out of proportion to the initial events that triggered the war. If a terrorist commits a single murder, it’s unjust to annihilate a whole village in reprisal. The October 7th attacks were heinous – but it cannot be right to use them to justify the devastation of the entirety of Gaza.

It worries me greatly that several of my Jewish friends and family members seem unable to see this. Have they so absorbed the idea that the attack was so bad that any level of violence is justified in response – even tens of thousands of deaths? Do they consider Palestinians to be so subhuman that anything the Israeli government does to them is just fine? Do they really think that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitism, regardless of how it behaves?

The word genocide is an unhelpful distraction in this context. Clearly, Israel is not attempting to exterminate all Muslims or all Arabs in the way that Hitler attempted to exterminate all Jews. As a result, when faced with accusations of genocide, it’s all too easy for Israelis to let themselves off the hook by denying them. What cannot be denied, however, is that Israel is engaged in major league ethnic cleansing: they’re turning Gaza into such a hell-hole that no person could reasonably expect to live there. I assume that they hope that at some point, other countries will open up their doors to a flood of Palestinan refugees, willingly or not, but that’s guesswork on my part. In any case, it presupposes that Israel has a single coherent strategy, which may well not be the case.

But regardless of this, I don’t believe that Israel’s real priority is the return of the hostages. And since the arrival of Benjamin Netanyahu, I don’t believe that Israel has shown any intention of making a just and lasting peace with the Palestinans – their overwhelming strategy for many years has been one of oppression and landgrab, dressed in the name of needing to maintain security.

I’m not denying that there is a great deal of anti-semitism in the world, much of it founded on a tissue of ancestral lies and hatreds. But right now, the actions of the Israeli government are the biggest thing feeding the anti-semitic fires. It’s time to tell them to stop. To tell them that the Jewish nation is not a barbaric people in this way, that they do not represent us and that we do not support them.

Yesterday, from the window of the Paris apartment where I am currently staying, I saw a large and powerfully crafted demonstration demanding the freedom of Palestinian prisoners. As a Jew, I felt frightened, but I also felt like I was on their side.

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