Israel Is a Test Run

Today I want to talk about something that is horrible and tragic to talk about—not just for Palestinians, but also for Jews everywhere. As a secular Jew from New York, I grew up believing that our history, our ethics, and our values demand that we stand for justice, oppose oppression, and fight for human dignity and human rights everywhere.

Jews have always been at the forefront of struggles for justice. We helped lead the labor movement in the early 20th century. We marched in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. We were part of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. We organized against the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. People like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who walked with King and said, “When I march in Selma, my feet are praying.” People like Hannah Arendt, who warned us against totalitarianism, against the dangers of nationalism. Our history is one of fighting for justice, not defending occupation and genocide.

But now if you are a Jew who refuses to support Israel’s mass killing and starvation of Palestinians, you are considered an outcast or a traitor. You can be against Israel’s destructive policies without being anti-Semitic.

I love what’s great about the Jews: Our cultural and scientific genius, our empathy for other people’s struggles due to what we suffered historically.

What is happening now is a total perversion. Jews need to keep speaking out about and rejecting it.

Israel was meant to be a refuge for Jews. As we now realize, the idea that Israel was a “land without a people for a people without a land” was a convenient lie. It is terrible that no reasonable solution could be worked out over the last eighty years that was better than apartheid-like conditions for Palestinians.

I don’t absolve the Muslim world and Islamic fanatics for responsibility for this. But Israel often acted terribly. Sometimes many wrongs committed by both sides do not make any rights.

Today, what is being perpetrated in Israel is being used as a model for authoritarianism in the US. When the far right in the U.S.—Christian nationalists, authoritarian billionaires, and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation—look at Israel, they see what they want for America’s future: A hyper-militarized ethno-state. A nation built on walls, apartheid, mass surveillance, and fear. Where dissent is criminalized. Where you fall in line or get punished.

We’re seeing it starting already. Right now, in the U.S., international students are being deported just for protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. This is unprecedented. The U.S. State Department has initiated a program known as "Catch and Revoke," which employs artificial intelligence to monitor the social media accounts of student visa holders. This program aims to identify individuals expressing support for Hamas or participating in demonstrations against Israel's actions in Gaza, potentially leading to visa revocations. The first students have had their visas revoked—without trial, without appeal—simply for exercising their right to free speech.

If the U.S. government can deport students for protesting now, what’s next? Who else will they silence? How far will this go?

At the same time, we see the expansion of the surveillance state. Peter Thiel’s company, Palantir, is deeply involved in the Israeli military’s targeting of Palestinians. Palantir’s technology was used in ‘Project Lavendar,’ an AI-powered system that helped the IDF generate kill lists for airstrikes in Gaza. Some reports suggest these algorithms are responsible for the indiscriminate killing of thousands of civilians. Palantir doesn’t just work with Israel—it works with ICE, with police departments across the U.S., and the Pentagon.

The tools they develop to track, detain, and eliminate Palestinians will be used against migrants, against Black communities, against activists here in the U.S. Israel is a test run. Gaza is the laboratory, and we are next.