How does it feel to be a reporter whose family funded a state that commits war crimes, and he reports on war crimes?
I can tell you that.
I covered the genocide in Bosnia for The Washington Post , wrote a book about it, and reported from Iraq and Afghanistan, among other conflict-ridden countries. And my ancestors were key financiers of Jewish emigration to Palestine, then under British control. The Warburgs and Schiffs donated millions of dollars to the cause, and during the Arab-Jewish war that began in 1948, they helped raise huge sums for the new state of Israel. When Golda Meir made an emergency visit to the United States to raise funds, one of the philanthropists she met with was my uncle, who headed the Joint American-Jewish Fundraising Committee.
As Israeli forces grind and pulverize Gaza, committing what the International Court of Justice defines as a "possible" case of genocide, my family's history of philanthropy collides with my knowledge of war crimes. When Israel drops bombs and shoots civilians, blocks food aid, attacks hospitals and cuts off water supplies, I remember the same atrocities in Bosnia. When the people in the flour queue in Gaza were attacked, I thought of the murdered Sarajians who were waiting in the bread queue, and of the perpetrators who in both cases claimed that the victims were killed by them.
Atrocities tend to rhyme.
When I was reporting from besieged Sarajevo, I stayed in a hotel located on the front line, and Serbian snipers routinely shot civilians walking under my window. When I would go in or out of the Holiday Inn, sometimes I was the one being shot at. One spring day in 1993, I heard the familiar crack and whistle of a sniper's bullet, followed by a terrible scream. I went to my window and saw a wounded civilian trying to crawl to safety. Writing in The Washington Post more than three decades ago, I described the man's desperate cries as "the maddened screams of a person already deranged. It came from the lungs, from the heart, from the mind."
I thought about Haris Bakhtanovic — I found him the next day in a nearby hospital — while watching a recent harrowing video from Gaza. The video shows a nana, Hala Hrays, trying to get out of a neighborhood surrounded by Israeli forces. Walking cautiously, she holds the hand of her five-year-old grandson with a white flag in hand. Suddenly a shot rang out and she fell to the ground dead. Sniper rifles have powerful sights - shooters can see who they're shooting at. The attacks on old nana Hrejs in 2024 and on Bakhtanović in 1993 happened in broad daylight and were not accidental.
Millions of Jews in America feel a connection to the creation of Israel. Perhaps our ancestors gave or raised money for it, perhaps they went there and fought, perhaps they donated money to Zionist organizations. What is a Jew to do now? Each of us makes our own decisions, but my experience with war crimes has taught me that being Jewish means standing up against any country and nation that commits war crimes.
Against each one.
In my book about Bosnia, I noted how being Jewish and seeing the actual genocide made me understand, better than before, how difficult it is to be a minority and how necessary it is to speak out about crimes when they are committed. That imperative is even stronger if your government supports crimes or your tribe commits them.
Israel and its supporters claim that what is happening in Gaza is a legal and just response to the attack by Hamas fighters on October 7. It is clear that Hamas has committed war crimes: Israelis have been shot in their homes on kibbutzim, people attending the Nova music festival have been massacred. We have seen the pictures and videos, and while some of these accusations have turned out to be false, the evidence of brutal crimes is solid. Hamas still holds more than 100 hostages.
This does not give Israel permission to respond however it pleases. An eye for an eye — or a hundred eyes for one — does not exist in international law. A key principle of the law of war is that an attack that endangers civilians must be militarily necessary, and any civilian casualties that occur must be proportionate to the military gains. In simpler terms, this means that you cannot kill many civilians for a small gain on the battlefield, and you certainly cannot target civilians, as appears to have been the case with the killing of Hala Hrajes and many other Palestinians. More than 30,000 people have been reported killed in Gaza, most of them civilians, including more than 13,000 children.
The victims of genocide - that the Jews were in the Holocaust - were not given the right to commit it themselves. Of course, a war crimes court would have to rule on whether Israel's actions in Gaza qualify as genocide, but there seems to be enough evidence to indict because the legal definition of genocide is: "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." The key word here is "in part". The level of killing committed in the Holocaust is not required to meet that legal standard.
This presents all Americans, not just American Jews, with a fait accompli. The US government is Israel's main supporter, thanks to the bombs and other weapons that continue to be delivered to the extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We are all complicit in this.
The idea of Jews protecting Palestinian rights is not as new as you might think. Before the Holocaust, my ancestors belonged to a “non-Zionist” movement that supported Jewish immigration to Palestine but opposed the creation of a Jewish state. The non-Zionist position was based on concerns that a Jewish state would lead to violence and fuel accusations that Jews were disloyal to America.
For example, in the New York Times of May 21, 1917, a headline read: “Mr. Schiff Not for Zionism: He Supports Establishment of Jewish Population, Not State, in Palestine.” The story is about my great-great-grandfather, Jacob Schiff, a “gilded age” financier who financed efforts to help persecuted Jews escape from Europe. The idealistic non-Zionist goal was for Jews settling in Palestine to reach an agreement with the Arabs already living there, in which neither side would gain complete control of the government. Two decades later, in 1936, my great-grandfather, Felix Warburg, who married one of Schiff’s daughters, accurately warned that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to “bloody heads and disaster.”
Jewish settlement in Palestine continued, of course, and the Holocaust accelerated that momentum toward a national homeland—for which my ancestors dutifully opened their wallets. But there is also a largely forgotten history of what happened then in a corner of the American Jewish community that resisted. As Geoffrey Levin writes in his pertinent new book, Our Palestine Question, from the very founding of Israel, “there were American Jews who were deeply troubled by Israel’s policies toward Palestinian refugees and Arabs living under Israeli rule,” Jews who were fiercely committed to the issue.
These Jewish opponents were troubled, among other things, by the exodus of more than 700,000 Arabs that occurred when Israel was founded; the Arabs call it the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Israel did not allow these Arabs to return to their homes and, over the course of decades, established a repressive apparatus of military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Although Levin’s book was published just before this latest convulsive conflict, he astutely observes that “some American Jews now see their support for Palestinian rights as a meaningful expression of their Jewish identity.”
My Jewish identity has always been a bit fuzzy because my ancestors were German Jews who assimilated at a rapid pace; when I was growing up, we even decorated a Christmas tree. (They donated and spent their money at the same pace; by the time I came of age, their wealth had mostly evaporated.) I began to feel more Jewish when I reported on the genocide of Bosnian Muslims. What Levin is suggesting—that defending Palestinians is increasingly an act of Jewish identity, especially for younger Jews—sounds right to me too.
Near Senator Charles E. Schumer’s Brooklyn apartment, I recently saw this long-ignored movement find new strength. I live a 10-minute walk from the building where the Democratic majority leader lives, which the New York City police barricade whenever a protest is in sight. Although Schumer is now calling for a snap election that could topple Netanyahu, he supports military aid to Israel and is the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States. The protesters have been pushed a few hundred yards further into Prospect Park, and when I passed by there last month, I found about a hundred of them.
Some waved professionally printed, colorful signs that read “Leave Rafah alone — stop the genocide” and “Ceasefire now — let Gaza live.” But there was also a woman with a brown waist, holding a piece of cardboard with a handwritten message: “Jewish nurse against occupation.” She was protesting not only the killing of civilians, but also the decades-long military occupation of Palestinian territory, which is the underlying problem.
These protesters are part of a movement that includes Jewish protesters wearing T-shirts that say “Not in Our Name.” Their powerful voices undermine the argument that all protests against Israeli violence are anti-Semitic. They help legitimize global opposition to what is happening in Gaza, and they defend not only Palestinian lives, but Jewish lives as well, by challenging the ill-conceived idea that Jews are solely to blame for what Israel is doing.
After graduating from college, I did not start the path of activism. I chose journalism, and then the wars chose me. As the years passed, I realized that exposing war crimes—wherever they occurred—was central to my identity as an American, a journalist, and a Jew.
Translated from English by Senada Kreso
Text originally published in The Washington Post .