Bar the genocide liars from our shuls: Dermer

Former Israeli ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer told a Young Israel of Woodmere audience last Thursday that Jewish institutions should refuse to platform people who say Israel committed genocide in Gaza, calling the allegation both false and dangerous.

Dermer, who grew up in Miami Beach before making aliyah in 1996, took part in a Q&A led by YIW Rabbi Shalom Axelrod.

“The charge of genocide must be utterly and completely rejected — first and foremost by the Jews,” Dermer said.

He called on Jewish institutions to exclude people who make the allegation.

“No person who says that Israel perpetrated a genocide in Gaza should be allowed to enter this synagogue,” Dermer said, and such a person should not be supported by Jews anywhere.

Dermer, whose most recent position was as Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, said the allegation has implications beyond Israel’s international reputation, arguing that it affects how Jews who support Israel are viewed.

“When they say that Israel is perpetrating a genocide, this is not a hasbara (public relations) problem for Israel, it’s not a diplomacy problem for Israel, it’s a problem for you,” he told the audience of around 300 people, arguing that supporters of Israel could themselves be characterized as supporters of genocide if the allegation were accepted.

“The charge that Israel perpetrated a genocide is a blatant lie, and it is a dangerous lie, and we have to utterly reject it,” Dermer said.

Dermer also rejected the characterization of Israel as an apartheid state, describing it as another false allegation against the country.

He argued that the genocide allegation distorts the nature of Israel’s military campaign, pointing to Israel’s efforts to warn civilians and provide humanitarian assistance. Civilian deaths in the Gaza war are tragic rather than evidence of an Israeli policy to destroy Palestinians, he said.

“Now, do innocents die? Of course they do,” Dermer said. “There’s no war that doesn’t claim innocents.”

He said Israel’s military objectives must be considered in the context of Hamas’ presence among Gaza’s civilian population.

“We want to do everything to avoid civilian casualties, and they put civilians in harm’s way,” Dermer said.

He compared the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and hostage-taking to a hypothetical attack of similar scale in the United States, asking what the US response would be if tens of thousands of Americans were killed and thousands taken hostage.

“Remember, Israel has been in Sept. 12th for 78 years,” he said, adding that it has upheld its democratic values through all of it.

“The price of sovereignty is imperfection,” he said. A nation that fights for its survival cannot promise that none of its soldiers will ever make a mistake. The only way to guarantee moral perfection, he said, is to give up the means to defend yourself ­­— “Be a victim, be a perfect victim. You’ll be perfectly moral, and you’ll be perfectly dead.”

Instead, he urged, “Don’t judge Israel on a standard of perfection. Judge Israel based on how another country would act facing the threats we face.”

He compared Israel to the United States. America tolerated slavery, denied women the vote for well over a century, and withheld full civil rights for nearly two centuries, he noted. “That’s all true,” he said. That history “doesn’t mean America is not the greatest force for good” of any country in world history.

Values professed from safety count for little, he argued. Values held when a nation is at risk are the ones that matter. He predicted that historians a century or two from now would look back in wonder at a democracy that kept its values under the most extreme conditions.

Dermer turned to what Jewish sovereignty has given the Jewish people. He summed it up in three words: a voice, a refuge, a shield.

To explain the voice, he told the story of Jan Karski, the Polish underground courier who brought eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to President Franklin Roosevelt.

“We had to ask others to make our case,” Dermer said. “Today, we make our own case.” He noted that Israel’s prime minister would address the UN the following week.

The refuge, he said, answers a question that haunted Jewish communities for centuries: when antisemitism comes, where will we go? Since 1948, there has been an answer. He cited the Jews expelled from Arab lands after Israel’s founding, the airlift of Ethiopian Jewry, and the roughly 1 million Jews who came from the former Soviet Union after the Iron Curtain fell. Today, he said, Jews in Ukraine, France or anywhere else have a place to go under the Law of Return.

The shield, he said, may be the greatest gift. “For centuries, we had to beg prime ministers and kings and princes to defend us, to save our communities, to bomb the tracks,” he said. “Today, the Jewish people don’t beg others to defend us. We defend ourselves.”

Dermer also that supporters of Israel should acknowledge the difficulty of generating international sympathy for the Jewish state during ongoing wars.

He recalled seeing expressions of support for Israel early in the war.

“There’s a lot of sympathy when the Jews are victims,” Dermer said. “Let us see who stands with us when we march to victory.”

“I always want to have sympathy, and Israel can always do better at making our case. But sympathy is not going to save our people,” he said.

Dermer argued that Israel should accept criticism as the cost of deploying its military strength.

“I’d rather deal with the Tucker Carlsons and the Mamdanis and the El-Sayeds and fight them on CNN, BBC or wherever, and take out the Sinwars, the Nasrallahs and the Khameneis,” he said.

“And that’s what Israel did, and that’s better than the alternative. And it’s something we didn’t have for about 2,000 years. We should be grateful for that.”

“One hundred generations of Jews dreamed to have our problems,” he said.

That privilege carries a responsibility, he said, and it does not rest only on ambassadors and prime ministers. Each person who chooses to show up at a synagogue and strengthen a Jewish community like the Five Towns becomes a “partner with the State of Israel” in securing its future.

He made the point with a nod to his audience’s sacrifice that evening: putting aside Netflix and skipping Thursday Night Football, “at least until halftime.”