The Burden of Loyalty

There is a word we Jews carry like an old coin passed from hand to hand: loyalty.

It gleams, even when it is battered. It carries weight even when it buys nothing. It belongs equally to covenant and kinship, to nation and neighbour, to principle and people. And today, in this season of fire, it is weightier than ever.

Israel is at war. Not one war, but eight fronts: in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, in the West Bank, in Yemen, in Iran, in the cyber domain, and — most insidiously — in the information war, where narratives are weaponised as surely as rockets. And while soldiers bleed in the dust of Rafah and along the cliffs of Metula, Jews abroad feel the tremors in our own lives. Antisemitism spreads like smoke, acrid and suffocating, from Bondi to Brunswick. Even among Jews themselves, that familiar toxin of self-hatred corrodes solidarity.

And so the question presses: what is loyalty now? Does loyalty to the State of Israel — to its very existence and right to assert itself, not to the accidents of its government — demand our silence?

The Classical Debate