Heretics, Converts and the Space Between

Written by Jeremy Stowe-Lindner, Principal in The Times of Israel 

There is a habit spreading through our politics and our community life that should worry us all. It is the temptation by a vocal minority to sort our community members and allies by doctrinal purity and to see disagreement as a test of loyalty.

The impulse to ‘out’ our heretics and cancel them quickly flattens the marketplace of ideas into slogans and crowds out the patient work of education and civic friendship. It is making us smaller.

The phenomenon is as common on the left as it is on the right, although judging by the size of the pro-Palestinian rallies, the Left is accompanying its cancelling of perceived heretics with cultivating converts as well – and doing so far more successfully than mainstream Jews are.

I have written before about why I am a Zionist and why that word should not require apology. Zionism is the simple millennia-old conviction that the Jewish people have the right to national self-determination in a portion of our ancestral homeland. That is compatible with dignity and rights for Palestinians. It is compatible, too, with acknowledging the anguish of the Gaza war and the abiding moral demand to protect innocent life. None of that should be controversial in an Australian Jewish school that wants graduates who can defend their convictions without surrendering their humanity.

With this in mind, I wrote recently about how we teach Zionism in an age of moral complexity.

The article was, in part, a description of the condition of our young people who live online, read widely, and carry multiple identities at once. Just like the citizens of Israel, diaspora Jews – even if an overwhelming majority are Zionist – hold a variety of opinions, attitudes, political convictions and belief sets, and are as visibly multicultural as other diverse societies.

If we give our diaspora youth a cartoon version of Israel – of monolithic belief, opinion and appearance – we set them up for a collision with reality and we hand their trust to the loudest demagogue they encounter at university.

The work of an educator is not to launder reality but to equip students to navigate it.

I recognise the concern behind a critique of this position, though. Jewish history encourages vigilance, and the horror of 7 October, let alone the genuine genocide of the Holocaust, makes vigilance feel so compulsive that it becomes exhausting.

But when vigilance becomes a purge of allies who disagree about emphasis or language, we harm our own cause. If we cast out those who share ninety per cent of what we affirm because they hesitate at a sentence or two, we will be left speaking only to ourselves.

The pro-Palestinian movement has fallen into this trap too, of outing its heretics, but in contrast, it has been much better at recruiting converts at the same time. The rallies here in Australia have been large, varied and persistent, from the Opera House and Harbour Bridge in Sydney to weekly marches in Melbourne. Official estimates for the Sydney bridge march hovered around ninety thousand, with organisers and some media suggesting far higher numbers. However you count, these are big crowds.

Rallies do not set foreign policy, but momentum matters. Australia’s government has announced it will recognise a Palestinian state at the United Nations. The timing of this, a prize for terror, has divided Australians and horrified much of the Jewish community.

What is clear is that we are losing the battle for converts. The scale of support for these marches reminds us that the contest is not just on the floor of parliament or in embassy corridors. It is happening in lecture theatres, unions, churches and local councils, where narratives harden long before votes are counted.

Universities have become the most visible arena. Encampments sprang up across campuses last year, including in Melbourne, and in at least one case protesters ended their occupation after securing what they described as an “important demand.” The precise demands vary, but the method is consistent: occupy space, shape the moral story, recruit the hesitant. Young people learn quickly that certainty, loudly delivered, attracts attention; nuance, however thoughtful, does not go viral.

Faced with this, heresy-hunting among Israel’s supporters becomes self-defeating. To ensure the breadth of our Zionist tent, we need to keep it broad.

I have been asked whether it is possible to be a Zionist whilst disagreeing with the policies of Israel’s current government. The answer is so obvious that I worry about the question. Of course it is possible. It must be.

Zionism is the belief in Jewish peoplehood and self-determination in the land of Israel; it is not a pledge of blind obedience to any coalition in the Knesset.

Healthy Zionism, like any robust national movement, includes liberals and conservatives, religious and secular, the left and the right. It includes people who think a ceasefire should have come sooner and people who think it should wait until the hostages are home and Hamas is defeated.

At the same time, we should not pretend that the slogans on our streets are all harmless. In many parts of the pro-Palestinian movement there is a plain rejection of Israel’s existence, a fantasy of a one-state solution with no Jews in it. We are entitled to name that for what it is – racist and genocidal – and to oppose it without apology.

Alongside this however, we need to get worse at finding heretics and better at inviting converts.

Invitation is a different art from excommunication. It speaks in full sentences rather than hashtags. It asks what people mean by “From the river to the sea,” not to excuse away violent intent but to discover whether the person in front of us even knows the meaning of the slogan they are repeating. When we see protesting displaying the map of all Israel superimposed with a Palestinian flag, we should permit ourselves a conversation about the implication of that Judenfrei proposition.

When we have Australian citizens on these marches parading the Indigenous flag, we have the obligation to enquire whether their (white European, Middle Eastern or Asian) claim to Australian citizenship and home ownership may possibly be less or more valid that the Jewish 3,000 year connection to, and continuous habitation in, the Land of Israel.

And we should be able to articulate the humanity and horror of Israelis held in tunnels and also of Palestinian families terrified in Rafah (and before anyone rushes to their keyboard, putting these two calamities in the same sentence is not an example of moral relativism). We should be able to acknowledge the failures of Israeli governments when they err whilst explaining the responsibility of Hamas for a war it sought and sustains.

As a school Principal, I try to think in generational terms. When we invite speakers into our community, when we plan curriculum and when we counsel students, we are deciding what kind of Australian Jews we will send into the world. If we teach them that nuance is treachery, we will raise quiet cynics who mouth lines they do not believe.

Conversely, if we model confidence with nuance, we will raise leaders who can argue for Israel’s right to exist and flourish, who can defend the necessity of a Jewish state, and who can mourn Palestinian suffering without surrendering moral agency to those who would prefer Jewish absence (or worse) to Jewish self-determination.

The broad Zionist tent is not a marketing phrase; it is a historical reality that has carried us through dark hours such as these. It is inclusive enough to hold both firm critics of government policy and uncompromising defenders of Israel’s security, provided the foundation is shared. That foundation is the legitimacy of Jewish peoplehood and the necessity of a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. On that foundation, there is room to argue, to rethink, to apologise, to forgive.

We will not outshout the largest rallies. What we can do is demonstrate what serious civic life looks like. We can remind ourselves that no movement that exiles its moderates can sustain itself.

And if our children and our students hear from us a tone that welcomes honest yet kind disagreement, they will carry it from home, through school, onto university and beyond, and we will be proud of the society that they help to build.