Given the extraordinary intensity and duration of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, it is worth asking whether more is driving this response than the familiar structural explanations: internal political pressures, regional and geopolitical calculations, the asymmetries of modern warfare, and the undeniable brutality of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

These factors matter. Yet they do not fully explain a military operation whose scale and ferocity increasingly resemble collective punishment — and to many observers, the early contours of genocide.

As a Jew, I recognize how deeply our collective memory shapes national instinct. The legacy of existential vulnerability—of near-annihilation within living memory—creates a readiness to respond with overwhelming force, not only as self-defense but also as a form of vengeance and, more profoundly, as a kind of redemption. The impulse to assert “never again” can become entwined with an unspoken need to overcome our own inherited shame: the sense that our ancestors, through no fault of their own, could not stop the horrors inflicted upon them. Strength becomes a moral mandate; restraint feels like betrayal.

I write this as a secular Jew who values my heritage and understands the psychic weight history imposes on our community. But to rail against the war in Gaza is not to engage in antisemitism. It is to plead that we not repeat the very sins we most fear. Preventing another people’s catastrophe is not a repudiation of Jewish identity. It is one of its highest expressions.

Peter Pressman
Winter Harbor