THE 614TH COMMANDMENT – PART IV Jewish Moral Responsibility in the Age of Israeli Power

This essay is part of a four-part series. Parts I–III explored Jewish continuity as a moral imperative after the Holocaust; the line at which morally framed critiques of Israel collapse into erasure; and the challenge, particularly for Jews on the left, of reclaiming moral grounding without surrendering their values. Part IV turns to the ethical responsibilities that arise when Jewish continuity intersects with the exercise of power in Israel. It asks how survival, sovereignty, and moral memory must guide the use of that power, particularly in relation to policies affecting Palestinians and the broader moral integrity of the Jewish people.

“The authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.” Emil Fackenheim, March 1967

Jewish continuity now confronts a moral challenge it did not face for most of Jewish history: the challenge of exercising power.

Diaspora Jews do not wield Israeli power, but Israel wields power in the name of Jewish self-determination, creating a moral relationship that can’t be ignored without compromising the ethical foundations of Jewish continuity. American Jews and Jews worldwide are not responsible for the decisions of any government, coalition, or military. Yet those decisions unfold within a moral space shaped by Jewish history, continuity, and ethical tradition. Jewish continuity cannot remain ethically intact if the exercise of Jewish power is treated as morally irrelevant.

The exercise of Israeli state sovereignty does not relieve Jews of moral responsibility; it intensifies it. Diaspora Jews do not wield that power, yet its consequences unfold in ways that are real and ethically significant. When a people shaped by centuries of vulnerability exercises authority over the lives, land, and political horizons of another people, the moral stakes increase. The challenge is no longer only to endure or to be recognized; it is to determine how Jewish ethics and experience guide the use of power.

Recent decisions by the Israeli government to dramatically expand settlements in the occupied West Bank sharpen this question with unavoidable clarity. These policies are no longer framed merely as security measures or temporary realities. They are increasingly articulated, openly and unapologetically, as instruments to foreclose Palestinian self-determination altogether. When senior ministers declare that settlement expansion is meant to “bury” the possibility of a Palestinian state, the moral stakes change. This is no longer a dispute over tactics or borders. It becomes a confrontation with the ethical meaning of Jewish power itself.

Jewish history has taught what it means to be a people denied political agency, land, safety, and future through repeated displacement, persecution, and near-annihilation. Zionism emerged not as an abstract ideology, but as a response to that condition: a demand that Jews would no longer exist at the mercy of others. The moral legitimacy of Jewish self-determination rests on that history. But legitimacy rooted in past vulnerability does not grant moral exemption in the present. If Jewish survival was once imperiled by statelessness, Jewish moral survival now depends on exercising power with restraint, responsibility, and a constant awareness of how measures taken for self-defense can slip into coercive domination.

Settlement expansion, particularly when pursued as a strategy of irreversible control, raises precisely this concern. A policy designed to deny another people a viable political future can’t be insulated from ethical scrutiny simply because it is enacted by a state born of trauma. Trauma explains the need for vigilance, security, and self-protection; it doesn’t sanctify policies that seek to render control permanent by denying another people self-determination. The danger is not only to Palestinians, though that danger is real and immediate. The danger is also internal: that Jewish continuity becomes confused with territorial expansionism (the Netanyahu government’s version of manifest destiny), and moral memory is reduced to a shield against accountability rather than a guide to ethical action.

This is where the distinction between survival and supremacy becomes decisive. Jewish survival after the Holocaust demanded presence, memory, continuity, and dignity. It didn’t demand the permanent negation of another people’s aspirations. To insist otherwise is to transform a moral response to genocide into a doctrine of moral immunity. That transformation doesn’t strengthen Jewish legitimacy; it corrodes it.

Criticizing settlement policy on these grounds is not a concession to those who deny Israel’s right to exist. On the contrary, it is a refusal to allow Jewish self-determination to be defined solely by its most coercive uses of power. The prophetic tradition within Judaism has always insisted that the greater the power one holds, the greater the moral scrutiny that power demands. Kings, not only enemies, were subject to rebuke. True moral commitment has never meant silence in the face of injustice committed by one’s own side.

Nor does this critique require romanticizing Palestinian leadership, minimizing terrorism, or ignoring the very real security threats Israelis face. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tragically complex, marked by violence, mistrust, and competing historical claims. But complexity can’t excuse policies whose stated aim is to make coexistence structurally impossible. Security is a legitimate concern; permanent domination is not the same thing.

There is also a broader cost. Policies that entrench occupation and foreclose political resolution fuel the very global delegitimization of Israel that Jews increasingly confront. They strengthen those who argue that Jewish appeals to history are merely instrumental, that Jewish memory serves only Jewish power. When moral limits are abandoned internally, external critique becomes harder to answer, even when it slides into bad faith or antisemitism.

For Jews committed to continuity, this moment demands moral courage of a different kind than in the past. It demands the courage to say that Jewish existence does not require the denial of another people’s political horizon. It demands the courage to separate Jewish legitimacy from any particular government or coalition, especially one that openly rejects coexistence. And it demands the courage to affirm that Jewish moral agency did not end when Jews regained sovereignty.

The deepest challenge of Jewish power is that it removes the clarity that comes with victimhood. When Jews were powerless, the boundaries of right and wrong were brutally clear. When Jews are powerful, those ethical boundaries must be drawn with even greater care and vigilance. That work is harder but it is essential if Jewish continuity is to remain more than survival measured in terms of population or territory.

Jewish history doesn’t command Jews to rule without restraint. It commands Jews to remember what it means to be denied dignity, voice, and future. That memory is not honored by policies that permanently deny those same things to others. It is honored by insisting that Jewish survival and Jewish morality are inseparable, even when they pull in different directions.

If the post-Holocaust imperative was to refuse disappearance, the present imperative is to refuse moral deafness. To exist as Jews, visibly and unapologetically, must include the willingness to ask whether the uses of Jewish power reflect the lessons Jewish history paid so dearly to teach.

The endurance of Jewish life has never depended solely on strength. It has depended on the insistence that survival without moral responsibility is not, in the end, a victory worth claiming.