1.

   Evil has been on my mind a lot over the past two and a half years—really since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in December 2022 and began his assault on Israeli civil society. The October 7, 2023, attacks were—and continue to be—a horrific shock to everyone in the region and the world, bringing Hamas into focus as an evil organization in its own right. But the attacks did not obviate the fact that Bibi, as Netanyahu is called in Israel, was at the head of an apparatus that strengthened and misread Hamas for many years. Neither does it mitigate the reality that, since the attacks, Bibi has remained unfazed in his efforts to concentrate power and dismantle the social fabric of the country he leads. It was clear to many of us, from the earliest days of the current and ongoing war, that Bibi would use military action for political survival. There was hope that pressure on the hostage issue would force him to negotiate an end to the war. But he withstood the pressure and, as he often does, manipulated his way through one crisis after another. In the end, as in the beginning, only one thing concerned him: staying in power and wreaking destruction.

There was no lack of criticism and condemnation of Israel and Bibi, both outside and inside the country. There was—and continues to be—debate about genocide, a term plausibly used to characterize not only Israel’s actions, but Hamas’s as well. The issue was raised, among many others, by genocide scholar Martin Shaw in New Lines Magazine as early as November 2023. He explained that the war, as a whole, could be described as “asymmetrical counter-genocide,” saying that Hamas’s attacks on Israel amount to “genocidal massacres,” while Israel’s bombing of civilian and social infrastructure has what he called “genocidal intent” and could be argued to have at least “a genocidal element.” But if this is a war of “counter-genocide,” then it’s a struggle between two evils in which intent is not proportional to ability. Some might argue that Hamas is an evil that is so great in its intent—regardless of whether it can deliver on it—that it must be eradicated with disproportional force. But there is also a counter-argument, which holds that evil should not be fought with evil, though this argument is found in the New Testament, not in the Hebrew Bible.

In Judaism, the drive toward wrongdoing is called yetzer hara, which is variably translated as the evil inclination, the evil impulse, or the evil spirit. This rabbinic concept is adapted from a phrase appearing twice in Genesis, which has it that “the human heart is inclined toward evil.” It makes evil one of the core characteristics of human nature, suggesting that doing good is not a natural trait—that it has to be cultivated and practiced by each individual. Genesis frames goodness not as a given, but as a choice. From the concept of yetzer hara, Rabbinical Judaism generated a second concept, yetzer hatov—the good inclination, impulse, or spirit—which plays a balancing function. This frames the choice to do evil or good as a power struggle between two competing influences. Jewish folklore externalized these concepts, turning the idea of a yetzer, a human characteristic, into an anthropomorphized figure, like a demon, a devil, or an angel. In Jewish folklore, yetzer hara became a synonym for supernatural evil, a variant of Satan, who aims to derail good intentions and spread destruction in the world.

In the Zohar, the medieval Jewish book of mysticism which is a foundation for the Kabbalah, evil was further developed and symbolized by the Sitra ahra—the Other Side of the Sitra di Kedusha, or Holy Side. The Zohar describes the Sitra ahra as growing out of the sefira or emanation of divine judgment or Din—a kind of divine anger that burns like fire. Whereas in the rabbinical and folkloric versions of evil there was a kind of tug-of-war between the external and the internal yetzer, in which the individual tried to choose good, in the Zohar evil was perpetrated by “persecutors” and “destroyers” from above, who came down to earth to influence human life in a way that would bring those inclined toward evil to their ends—thereby purifying the world. Evil in the Zohar grows out of holiness and, in its most radical sense, has a holy purpose. A world devoid of evil is also devoid of holiness. The two are inseparable. In its most mystically radical and, we can say, messianist version, evil can be framed as a tool of holiness—in essence justifying evil.

On the one hand the Jewish concept of evil recognizes that there is evil in each of us, and that it is our duty to choose good. On the other, it endows evil with a function that can serve holiness. These two conceptions are not always compatible—and are sometimes in direct conflict. One emphasizes the aspect of personal responsibility, the other the idea that even the worst evil in the world is part of God’s plan. What is largely lacking in both conceptions is a collective conception of evil, the possibility that a Jewish source of power may cause evil—both to other groups and to groups of Jews as well. Jews are largely unable to conceive of an evil force rising from their own communities and societies, and lack a conception for Jewish leaders who could perpetrate and perpetuate evil in a manner that harms not only others, but also themselves. There have always been spiritual and communal leaders in places of power who have exploited their roles, causing harm to those within their reach—their families, congregants, or disciples. There are larger social ills underlying their manifestation, along with social and cultural norms that enable them, and they tend to be explained by the pathological tendencies of individuals who commit crimes and exert a corrupting, sometimes devastating, influence on the people around them. But standard accounts of evil within the Jewish tradition typically fail to address evils promoted by Jews who hold real-world power, or the way that other Jews under their authority find it difficult to acknowledge those evils as such. The moral blindness exhibited in Israel’s relations with Palestinians in Gaza, over many years, is obvious today, but it’s not as easy to understand its sources without resorting to stale formulas and cliches.

2.

In Israel, it is not uncommon for the liberal press to use the word evil. A quick glance at the archives of Haaretz shows several articles with the word evil in the title: former deputy attorney-general Yehudit Karp’s “Save Us From Our Evil Government, Which Obliterates Jewish Morality and Israel’s Values” (November 12, 2024), Palestinian journalist Hanin Majadli’s “If ‘Good Israelis’ Are Blind to the Evil in Gaza, the War Will Never End” (January 3, 2025), IDF veteran Uri Tyroler’s “Why I’m Done Serving in the IDF Reserves Under This Evil Israeli Government” (April 3, 2025). Looking further back, you find Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy’s two op-eds, “Stop Living in Denial, Israel Is an Evil State” (July 31, 2016), which argues that “the occupation regime… cannot be explained without evil,” and a more recent piece, “The Legitimization of Evil Will Remain With Israelis Long After the War in Gaza Ends” (December 31, 2023), in which he laments “the moral collapse in Israel.” His earlier article also refers to sociologist Eva Illouz’s essay, “Rethinking the ‘Banality of Evil’” (July 30, 2016), in which she says that Israel “bears a family resemblance with other evil regimes.” Ilouz is perhaps the only one in the popular press to attempt a conceptual analysis of the nature of evil specific to the Israeli context, but she relies mostly on theories by German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr—a Christian thinker whose argument is that evil originates in national groups. None of this reflects on the Jewish concept of evil, or, more to the point, the difficulty for Jews of acknowledging the evil in our own ranks.

I was curious to see what non-Jews were saying on the issue and found a November 2024 essay in the Indian magazine Counter Currents by Brian Victoria, a scholar of Buddhism who asked plainly: “Is Israel Evil?” His reply was not categorical. He notes that everywhere in the world and all throughout history, leaders have long “skillfully manipulated” their people into evil deeds through fear and terror. He concludes: “A ‘country’ lacks both agency and freewill, and therefore cannot be evil. However, as Hitler and many others have proven again and again, the acts of a country’s leaders certainly can be!” He notes, finally, that in this specific war, “the responsibility clearly lies with current Israeli leaders and their supporters in Israel who believe they have the right (God-given in the minds of many) to either ethnically cleanse or kill Palestinians.” Reading this piece, I wondered whether, as an Israeli who is not only not a supporter of these leaders, but a vocal opponent, I was absolved of this sin. And, if so, what did it mean to be part of a nation that I believed was engaged in evil? Was I an accomplice? A “mere” bystander? A potential victim? Or maybe all three?

Some of the emotions that arise from the death and destruction in Gaza—and the increasingly clear picture that the IDF is there to stay and maybe even to resettle parts of the strip—include shame, guilt, and anger. It’s hard to accept that atrocities are being committed in your name and ostensibly on your behalf. You can change your social media profile picture to have the words NOT IN MY NAME appear in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and in this way signal to others that you are not complicit in the unfolding evil. But you still live in the country, your children still go to kindergarten there, you still try to maintain a life with a semblance of normality—all while knowing that, ninety minutes away from your door, a civilian population of two million people is struggling to survive bombardment, disease, and hunger. I was speaking to distant relatives, religious Zionists I consider “good” people, and they said that while the situation in Gaza did not make them happy, it was better than the alternative: a Hamas-style government in the West Bank that could attack all of Israel. “Do you want to be driving with your girls on Route 6,” asked the father of the family, “and to have an anti-tank missile blow you up?” I said that of course I did not want something like that to happen, but added that I believed there had to be some middle ground between destroying an entire part of the world and not having your car blown up. Shrugging, he said, “Show me that middle ground.” I noted that I didn’t work for a think tank, but added that if Jews, as a nation, could come up with all kinds of inventive weapons systems and surveillance devices, we could surely apply some of that ingenuity to ending our conflict with the Palestinians.

That’s what I said. But really, when faced with these questions I mainly feel a deep urge to escape—to run away from all the craziness and intransigence, from this impossible life of death and mourning, not only for civilians in Gaza, but also for the hundreds and thousands of Jews, Muslims, and Christians whose lives and families have been destroyed in Israel. It is sad, hard, heavy, and, above all, morally and spiritually corrupting to exist with these conflicts and juxtapositions every day. You want to find a place in the world where you can feel not only safe, but also without the moral weight of belonging to a society you feel is essentially evil. You want to be free of the guilt associated with living a Jewish life in the Land of Israel. As an American citizen, you consider returning to the United States. Then you read an essay like the one by Brian Victoria, who reminds you that the bombs dropped in Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and “many other countries” have been “paid for with the tax dollars of all Americans,” that no one is “‘innocent’ of complicity in evil”—and, more generally, that “none of us is free of the evil of self-concern at the expense of others.” Leaving is an option. And it may even bring a measure of relief. But it won’t absolve you of evil, especially since such thoughts and feelings pursue millions of Americans nauseated by the policies of the Trump administration, and by the compliance of millions of other Americans in positions of power.

3.

   In my first column for Salmagundi, I grappled with Masha Gessen’s New Yorker essay, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” (December 9, 2023), as part of a “war of words” that erupted after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, igniting a new version of debates that had existed for well over a century. I focused mainly on Gessen’s grammatical tendency to slip from analogies to equivalences, from comparing what Israelis were doing to Nazis to saying they were doing what Nazis did. The word “evil” appears several times in Gessen’s essay, but mainly in relation to Nazi actions, not yet directly applied to Israel. But in early 2025, actor Wallace Shawn upped the ante on this rhetorical tendency toward equivalence between Jews and Nazis, saying on “The Katie Halper Show” podcast that Israel is “doing evil just as great as what the Nazis did”—calling it “demonically evil” and insisting that “you can’t be more evil.” In case there was any doubt, he repeated his claim: “The Israelis… did many of the things that the Nazis did to the Jews.”

What caught my attention about Gessen and Shawn—both of them born to Jewish families—is that by distancing themselves from the Jewish state, they were each, in their own ways, able to avoid the burden of belonging to a country perpetrating evil. Yet their Jewishness has always been a quandary to them. Gessen has repeatedly spoken about growing up with a “negative” Jewish identity—in the sense that being Jewish in the Soviet Union presented more disadvantages than advantages. Shawn said that his parents “were atheists and had no real interest in their religion,” and that he “grew up with no real interest in it either,” adding that “the cord was cut.” Writing in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Matthew Schultz has called Shawn and others like him “As-a-Jew Jews” because, for them, censuring Israel as Jews is part of their Jewishness: “To be a good Jew,” Schultz writes, “is to condemn Israel.” In this way, these Jews can never be associated with the evil of Israel. They position themselves outside of the evil that is embodied for them by Israel. They lack the Jewish conception of evil that admits there is evil in each of us.

Of course Gessen, Shawn, and Halper are all Americans, citizens of a nation that has long been associated with evils of all sorts. And while all three have discussed and protested American evil in one way or another, it appears that the Jewish variant is particularly unsavory to them. In a recent interview, Halper said that “Israel is a menace” and a “terrorist state,” and then added: “Now, to be fair, so is the United States, but I say the ratio of terrorism to non-terrorism in the case of Israel is greater than it is for the United States.” Listening to this statement, I could hardly untangle its bombastic hubris. I did a quick online search to see how many civilians were killed by America since 9/11. I found this reported by Brown University’s Watson Institute. “At least 408,000 civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen died as a direct result of the post-9/11 wars” and “an estimated additional 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in these war zones, bringing the total death toll of the post-9/11 wars to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.” To be clear, I’m not sure anyone can really calculate the precise ratio of non-terrorism to terrorism in the case of any state. But I doubt that America’s ratio is less than almost any other country in the world. And I’m not even touching on what Trump is doing to America and to the rest of the globe as I write. I can only chalk up a statement like this to delusional righteousness—a need to place evil outside of you even when you are steeped in it yourself. And this tendency to position evil outside yourself while at the same time being unable to acknowledge the evil within—this itself is a denial of reality that brings more hate, misunderstanding, and anger.

Admittedly, it is very complicated to belong to a group or a country you believe is committing war crimes or other atrocities. Yet most of us come from countries where a measure of flagrant wrong-doing has sometimes been government policy. The Haaretz columnists who repeatedly point to the monstrous deeds authorized by the Netanyahu government remain in Israel, not only Gideon Levy, who is known for his extremist views, but also journalists like Dahlia Scheindlin and Carolina Landsmann, whose analyses are often insightful and accurate, and who are more measured in their argumentation. If they are correct about the irreparable damage that Bibi and his goons are causing to Israel—not to mention their plans for Gaza—then what does it mean for them to still live in Israel? The newspaper for which they write has already been boycotted by the state at a time when Israel fell to the bottom third of World Press Freedom Index. I can put this more strongly: the longest-running Hebrew newspaper in the State of Israel, the name of which literally translates as The Land, could be plausibly banned in the foreseeable future. What are its writers and editors still doing here?

The question can be put generally: What are thinking people supposed to do when they discover that their country engenders evil? How do you continue to live in such a place? It is a question asked more and more frequently not only by Israelis but by a great many Americans in the age of Trump.

4.

   It’s hard not to think back, almost a hundred years in the past, to Brit Shalom—the dovish Zionist group whose name, translated as “Covenant of Peace” or “Peace Alliance”—which urged the creation of a binational Palestinian state for Arabs and Jews rather than two states for two peoples. The group included intellectual and civil leaders like Henrietta Szold, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem, among many others, and peaked during the mid-1920s. By the time of the Hebron massacre in 1929, the divide between them and paramilitary Zionist groups was painfully clear. Whereas the Haganah defense force’s failure to stop the massacres led to the founding of Etzel—shifting from defense to offense—Brit Shalom put out a pamphlet, “Practical Proposals for Cooperation Between Jews and Arabs in Palestine” (1930), trying to propose a workable path toward coexistence. It was a lost cause. In 1933, as Hitler came to power, Brit Shalom disbanded—in many ways as a response to his success. In the internal struggle of Jews in Palestine, militarism won over pacifism long before the Jewish state was established. And the members of Brit Shalom? They all stayed.

It must have been clear to these intelligent people that the nation’s path would be decided first by military concerns and only second by humanitarian ideals. It had to have been clear, too, given the split between the militant groups, that the defensive use of the military would always be accompanied by an internal conflict, wherein more aggressive elements would seek to expand their hold both on land and on power. Scholem, for his part, seems to have intuited the horizon of evil in these tendencies. He turned his attention to Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah who ushered in the greatest crisis in modern Jewish history, and who for many generations was considered by Jews the symbol of Jewish evil. Zevi’s messianic vision of a return to the Land of Israel has led some scholars to consider it a kind of mystical proto-Zionism, and Scholem’s work is seen by some as a warning against mixing religious fervor with political ideology. What is particularly striking about this turn in Scholem’s thought is that, just as European Jews were facing their greatest external threat since the Inquisition, he dug deeper into one of the most destructive internal influences in its history. The threat to Jews from without, it seems, did not obviate his exploration of the threat from within their ranks.

I sometimes wonder whether acknowledging Jewish evil gave Scholem the fortitude necessary to spiritually and intellectually cope with the full range of atrocities he encountered—regardless of their source. An emphasis on our propensity to commit evil, on psychological and ordinary human impulses, must surely undercut an exclusive focus on political and ideological factors. When Wallace Shawn says that “the Israelis” are “demonically evil,” what is he signaling about himself? That he knows evil when he sees it, and that he is not susceptible or complicit? When I say that Israeli leaders are perpetrating evil, and that their evil influence spreads over the entire population, what I am saying about myself? That I myself bear responsibility for the evil done in my name, even if I oppose it, and that I am, at the same time, a potential victim of this same evil? Unable to stand up to Albert Camus’s challenge to be “neither victim nor executioner,” I become, however improbably, both.

This is a position that many Israelis find difficult to stomach, if only because they lack the understanding of Jewish evil that animated Scholem’s work. Judaism’s traditional emphasis on free will typically represents evil as a choice rather than an essence. It’s the deed that is evil, not the person, and the power to turn from the wicked to the righteous path is ours always. This also corresponds with the folkloric perception of evil as an impulse, inclination, or spirit that influences us from outside, again individualizing its manifestation and framing it as a battle of wills. As a people scattered across the world for two millennia, there was little precedent among Jews for the notion of collective evil—which is perhaps why the case of Sabbatai Zevi became so symbolic. It is one of the few instances in modern Jewish history when Jewish leaders—Sabbatai Zevi and his self-proclaimed prophet Nathan of Gaza—actively led a campaign of social upheaval that ended in destroying the fabric of religious and cultural life in Jewish communities around the world.

5.

   Perhaps the closest Jews have come to conceiving of Jewish evil in the 20th century is in their grappling with the Judenrat, admin- istrative Jewish councils created by the Nazis to ensure that their orders were followed. Those who failed to comply with Nazi orders were killed. Others killed themselves rather than collaborate. Others still believed that compliance was the only way to ensure that at least some Jews would be spared from the transports that ended in gas chambers. After the Holocaust, everyday survivors would accuse surviving Judenrat members of treason against the Jewish people.

The issue is embodied in what came to be known as the Kastner trial, in which a refugee who had come to Jerusalem in 1938 was put on trial in 1954 for libel after accusing Rudolf Israel Kastner—a government spokesperson and activist in David Ben Gurion’s leftist Mapai party—of being a Nazi collaborator. Judge Benjamin Halevi, who later served on the Eichmann trial, ruled against Kastner in 1955, famously saying that he had “sold his soul to the devil.” In 1957, Kastner was assassinated in a murder that highlighted the political divide in Israeli society and exposed the continuing relevance of the Holocaust. The case was mentioned in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), where she speculated that: “Without Jewish help in administrative police work… there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower.” For many Jews, the Judenrat became a symbol of the evil that Jews can do to their own by collaborating with those who seek their destruction. That’s why, this past February, when the father of a hostage held in Gaza wanted to censure Bibi, he told him: “You are the head of the Israeli government, not the head of the Judenrat.” Bibi was seen as being part of a Nazi-style “selection” in which some hostages were saved while others were condemned to suffering or death in Hamas’s tunnels. And there is no greater evil, for many Jews, than Jewish leaders collaborating with groups who actively seek the destruction of Jews.

A primary dimension of the Kastner trial had to do with his role in the transportation of about 470,000 people from the Jewish society he represented to their deaths, while saving 1,684 Jews whose identities he knew. But the specifics of the trial itself also reflected Israeli political divides. Kastner’s accuser was represented by a lawyer who helped found Menahem Begin’s Herut Party, the precursor to Bibi’s Likud, while he was seen as a leftist politician. These circumstances are mentioned in Gessen’s New Yorker article, but the dots aren’t directly connected—perhaps because they don’t nicely line up. Gessen quotes Arendt’s 1948 open letter in the New York Times, which called Herut “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties,” frames Kastner’s murder as “the beginning of a discursive standoff in which the Israeli right argues for preëmptive violence and sees the left as willfully defenseless,” and later suggests that the Eichmann trial “helped to solidify the narrative that, to prevent annihilation, Jews should be prepared to use force preëmptively.” This builds Gessen’s implicit argument that rightist ideologues use violence to silence leftist voices in Israel and to repress Palestinian national ambitions in the West Bank and Gaza—an entirely cogent and plausible argument in itself. But it ignores the inconvenient fact that the same Hannah Arendt who likened the Herut Party to the Fascist and Nazi parties in 1948 also said in relation to Kastner’s relationship to Eichmann in 1963 that “the role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” Kastner was not, pace Gessen, merely a “leftist politician.” He was a Jewish leader whose past was as dark as—if not darker than—Menachem Begin’s.

The difficult reality is that there are no innocents in this cautionary tale, and this is what makes it so complicated—and also so confounding. The conception of the Judenrat as Jewish evil is significant as it allows Jews to see that individual leaders can harm large parts of their own society, setting the stage for fathoming how such leaders could lead a campaign of starvation and destruction in Gaza. But this kind of messy history should not be used to serve political agendas. Truly to face the layers and facets of evil, we need to apprehend and acknowledge their every variant, and not only those that serve our own ideological ends.

6.

   A conception of an internal destructive power from which we cannot dissociate—one that is part and parcel of our shared heritage—is tragically lacking in the collective consciousness of Jewish society, both inside Israel and without. So it is not surprising that many Jews cannot acknowledge the horrors visited by Israel on the people of Gaza, while others simply cannot acknowledge the degree to which their own people have been targeted and maligned in unconscionable and unjustifiable ways. A messianic zeitgeist, whether on the right or on the left, might partially account for this apparent lack of consciousness and empathy.

In his intellectual biography of Scholem, Amir Engel quotes Scholem writing in 1929 that “the Zionist ideal belongs on one side and the messianic ideal belongs on the other. One kingdom does not touch the other except in the hollow clichés of town hall meetings that sometime instill in our youth a renewed spirit of Sabbateanism, which is destined to fail.” The sad fact is that these town hall meetings are characteristic of every political society, all of them characteristically averse to genuine intellectual and spiritual self-reckoning. Reading Scholem’s warnings, you might well ask whether Jewish life has always been destined to suffer from a tendency towards messianic zeal—and its constituent evils. Sabbateanism, which was solidified in the Land of Israel and promised an end to exile, ultimately led to the collapse of Jewish societies both in Israel and elsewhere.

It’s been hard to convince most Israelis that Netanyahu and his cohort are perpetrating evil and in so doing destroying not only innocent people in Gaza but also the moral and social fabric of Israel as well. But there is one tiny source of consolation: There are millions of people—Jews and non-Jews—who feel guilty, angry, and powerless to engender any substantive change, yet who act in small ways to counterbalance evil. Some Israelis volunteer for civil or political organizations working for peaceful co-existence. Many continue to protest the government and its policies. Others still go into the field and stand between Israeli settlers and the Palestinians they are trying to displace—protecting them with their bodies. They stay and fight and hope against hope for a better future in a country whose leaders are turning them into pariahs.