More Ethics Less High-tech

Israel v. Judaism

In global interviews and conversations, one question keeps returning: how could the Jews, a people who once saw themselves as a moral messenger for all humanity, commit such horrific crimes in Gaza? It is a question that cuts to the rawest nerves of our identity, our faith in our righteousness, and our understanding of who we are.

There are terrible answers: “These are not crimes,” “They started it,” “It was self-defense,” “We had the Holocaust.” There are also circumstantial ones: generations of indoctrination, a national education system built on conformity, social pressure to serve, blind trust in commanders. A mental structure in which moral questions are always postponed for later; because “now there is a war”, and that “later” never comes.

But when you look at the accumulated results, the truth can no longer be denied. Tens of thousands of dead. Entire cities erased. And all in our name, in the name of a state that presents itself to itself as a bastion of morality and enlightenment, yet remains blind to what it has done in Gaza. To the humanitarian disaster deliberately wrought by its finest sons and daughters. Not errors, but crimes. And from that follows the conclusion we struggle so hard to avoid: if the whole nation is an army, then we all bear responsibility. And we are all complicit.

Two Collapsed Defenses

Every nation is capable of the greatest atrocities. History is filled with proof. The Jewish people once had two profound defenses against such degeneration. The first was circumstantial: we simply had no power, and we turned that powerlessness into an ideology and a different kind of strength. The second was essential: a spiritual and intellectual tradition nourished by debate, by thought, by the sanctity of life, and by love of the human being.

Modern Israel dismantled both. It built immense physical power, some of it justified, much of it inflated by fear and paranoia. In parallel with the disproportionate investment in the machinery of war, official Israel abandoned the spiritual dimension of education. Less history, philosophy, literature, and civics. Fewer questions of justice and meaning. More mathematics, applied sciences, engineering, and coding. A society that became efficient and materially successful, yet morally impoverished.

The younger generations of Israelis were born into a world of achievement. They were trained to measure success in quantities, rankings, and profits. They know how to build smart technologies, systems of control and surveillance, but they were never taught to question or doubt, to ask what the use of such power means.

Once, Jewish education taught us to think, to challenge, to ask questions of conscience. Once we dared to ask, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” Today, our leaders have no shame dismantling the very system of justice itself. Israeli education trains its graduates to function within the distorted moral order that has taken hold. This society produces, year after year, soldiers capable of operating sophisticated machines of destruction without grasping the value of the life they destroy.

How cruel the irony. The so-called start up nation, proud to call itself the only democracy in the Middle East, has created the most sophisticated and repressive death industry in the region, exporting its poisonous fruits to any authoritarian buyer for profit. The cult of security has turned high tech into an endless military service. Civilian companies develop for the defense establishment new tools of killing, occupation, and violation of human rights, while the army feeds the civilian market with skilled manpower and profitable technology. Thus an entire economy has been built on domination, oppression, smart sensors, and a dead conscience.

The true crime of this high tech world is not only the weapons it produces but the consciousness it shapes. A mindset that believes even morality is a technological challenge. That if we just build another algorithm, another digital wall, we can control reality itself. A world of remote killing, without touch or smell. A reality with no space for ethics, because ethics cannot be measured or monetized. And there is no exit strategy for the soul.

Over time, another toxic layer has been added: nationalist religiosity that provides theological justification for the worst injustices. Instead of deepening the human spirit within Judaism, the system turned it into a caricature. No longer a Judaism of compassion and repair, but a zealous religion of perpetual holy wars - the Jewish jihad at its worst. The “chosen people” fighting endlessly because war has become their essence. The result is a society torn between aggressive religiosity and defensive secularism, oscillating between the arrogance of “God is with us” and alienation from everything human.

If the faith deviation called “Israeli Judaism” had legal standing, I would challenge it to sue me for defamation. Because I do defame it, and rightly so. I would not hire a clever lawyer. I would represent myself, a simple Jew “as we once were.” I would summon the Prime Minister to explain what the word “Amalek” means in his decision making process. I would call Minister Smotrich to testify about his racial doctrines. I would bring the Chief Rabbis to answer for their sermons on Jewish superiority, misogyny, and xenophobia, and the army rabbis to explain how they turned a defense force into a fundamentalist crusade. All of them, too, for their deadly silences.

In the court of Jewish history I know how this trial would end. They would be convicted on all counts. For slandering Jewish civilization, for distorting its meaning, for desecrating its name.

The Judaism I grew up with was a moral system, not a cult of power. A way of life that sanctified life, not death. It placed the human being, not the land, at its center. It did not seek to rule the world but to repair it. It did not demand blind loyalty but offered a moral commitment filled with doubt and conscience. That Judaism was defeated, by messianic brutality on one side and by the weakness of humanist secularism on the other. Without its classical defenses, the Jew is like any other person: when he loses his moral intelligence, he loses his humanity. And then he, too, commits crimes against humanity. Gaza bears witness.

The path of repair must begin right here. In the new Israel, we must invest far less in technological invention and far more in moral innovation. It is time to stop defining ourselves by our capacity to justify mass killing, and to begin defining ourselves by our capacity to listen, to understand, and to show compassion.

Only when we place the spirit of humanity above the machine, the question before the solution, and the human being before obedience, can the work of repair truly begin.

Israel after the crimes of Gaza does not need more advanced tanks or sophisticated algorithms. It needs an education system that teaches people to think and to feel. Citizens unafraid of moral questions. Believers and thinkers committed to the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Scientists who remember that knowledge without conscience is an existential danger.

For in the end, all the technology in the world, every smart system, every precise weapon, is worthless when placed in the hands of a hardened heart. Like ours have been in these terrible years.