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

The ancients knew something of this tension.

Socrates, standing before his Athenian judges, declared loyalty to truth above city, but when condemned he drank the hemlock rather than flee, showing another loyalty — to law and civic order, even when unjust.
Aristotle wrote of philia, civic friendship, as the glue of the polis. Loyalty, he taught, grows from shared purpose and virtue, and most importantly, to shared values. Loyalty, then, is not automatic and he insisted it cannot excuse corruption.

Cicero, in agreement with Aristotle, made loyalty sacred — but always conditional. To give loyalty to a ruler who commits injustice is to betray justice itself.

The Hebrew prophets thundered likewise: to be loyal to Israel meant to criticise Israel, sometimes with devastating clarity. Jeremiah did not flatter the kings of Judah. Isaiah did not keep silent when the people strayed. Their loyalty was covenantal – to God in Heaven not to one’s tribe.

And across the centuries, loyalty was refracted by new thinkers: Locke, who tied it to contract rather than inheritance, and Edmund Burke, who saw it as binding across generations. In our time, the most important thinker was George Orwell, who insisted that loyalty to truth is a higher patriotism than loyalty to party. In the terrible war in particular, Orwell’s insistence on truth has often become lost amidst the miasma of disinformation.

All of them understood: loyalty is not mute obedience. It is discernment, sometimes at great cost.

The New Fronts of War

For Israel today, loyalty is tested on multiple, simultaneous fronts. Each demands courage, but the most corrosive may not be fought with tanks or drones. It is fought with words, images, and lies.

The battlefield is obvious: rockets, tunnels, missiles, drones. But the information war is subtle, and it leaks into every living room. Images stripped of context travel faster than facts. Fake images dominate front pages. Narratives crafted in Tehran or Doha are recycled by students on Australian campuses and in the streets of our cities. The vocabulary of genocide is twisted and thrown back at Jews. This is not simply propaganda — it is psychological warfare, aimed at eroding Israel’s legitimacy and Diaspora Jews’ confidence in defending her.

Diaspora Jews find ourselves conscripted into this information war whether we enlist or not. Social media becomes a battlefield; dinner parties become skirmishes; universities turn into arenas where intimidation is dressed as debate. Theatres become showgrounds for the absurd. We carry loyalty not only in our hearts, but in our mouths — in what we dare to say, and in what we choose to withhold.

Our Diaspora Tension

Here in Australia, the consequences are visible and immediate. Protestors stormed Bondi — not Parliament House, not Martin Place — but Bondi, a Jewish suburb, where mezuzot mark doorways and Hebrew words fill the schoolyards. They came to provoke, to intimidate, to declare Jews unwelcome in their own community. The State response was hesitant, almost indulgent. The message: this, too, is tolerated.

In Victoria, Jewish families face the same atmosphere. Children are bullied in schools for wearing Magen David necklaces. Jewish students are told to “pick sides” by peers and sometimes by lecturers. Universities shrug at intimidation on campus. Synagogues and schools  harden security, aware they are targets. Workplaces whisper about “balance” while tolerating slanders that would never be countenanced against any other minority.

For Jews who believed Australia was different, safer, more decent — the change is chilling. Australia, once proud of its fair go, now risks becoming another country where Jews must watch their words, guard their children, and question their belonging.

This is where the burden of loyalty grows heaviest. For Jews in Australia, the tension is jagged. Our loyalties are bound in a threefold gordian knot:

• To Israel, both a people and a state, fragile and under siege.
• To Australia, our home, increasingly uneasy with our loyalties.
• To Enlightenment values, those universal promises of freedom of conscience, equality under law, tolerance and pluralism — that seem hollow when those who proclaim them ignore our plight.

And we are loyal to truth, which now feels not merely dangerously out of season but under siege from extremists without and relativists within.

To carry these loyalties together is to be increasingly pulled apart post October 7th. Speak too strongly for Israel, and one is accused of “double loyalty.” Speak too critically of Israel, and one risks abetting its enemies.

Yet the accusation is dishonest. Every human juggles multiple loyalties: to family, to faith, to homeland, to ideals. The soldier torn between duty to orders and duty to conscience. The immigrant divided between old country and new. The citizen who loves their nation yet protests its failings. Why should Jews alone be denied this complexity?

Still the question remains: when Israel fights for survival, when rockets fall and hostages are starved in tunnels, what does loyalty demand of us?

Loyalty is active. It requires moral judgment. It defends a people from unjust assault, but it also challenges betrayal from within. Tribalism, by contrast, is unthinking conformity. It demands silence, even when silence is complicity.

True loyalty, as the prophets knew, sometimes means speaking out. It sometimes means calling leaders to account. It sometimes means saying the unpopular thing, because covenant and conscience demand it.

But not always.

The Diaspora’s Responsibility

For those of us in the Diaspora, our position is different. Our children are not fighting in Gaza or on the ridges of Lebanon. Our brothers and sisters are not starving in the tunnels beneath Rafah. We are not voting in Israel’s elections.

That difference matters. It should chasten us.

Yes, we may detest the Israeli government of the day. We may deplore its decisions, its tone, its hypocrisies. And perhaps — in quieter times — we must say so loudly, because silence then is dereliction.

But in the midst of war, with disinformation flooding every channel, with Shules firebombed, our words are not neutral. Every public criticism we utter can be seized upon by those who would turn it into a weapon — against Israel, against our own Jewish communities, against the very possibility of solidarity.

This is not an argument for dishonesty. It is an argument for discipline. For understanding that sometimes the family quarrel belongs within the family. Inside the mishpacha, we may rage and lament and argue late into the night. But in the agora, in the hostile public square, restraint is itself an act of loyalty.

We must pause before criticism. We must pause and think sensibly of how our words, in the diaspora, can and are used against the Jewish people. Our words can corrode the loyalty and connection of others. They can weaken the very bonds they claim to protect.

And above all, we must remember: we do not vote in Israel. However detestable its government may be — and detest it we might, even must — we are not its citizens. To moralise from afar while soldiers fight and hostages starve is to mistake distance for wisdom.

This is a bitter pill. We are heirs to the prophetic tradition. To speak truth to power is our calling. But in wartime, when every word can be twisted into a dagger, restraint is also fidelity.

Silence as Covenant

This does not mean adoring silence. It does not mean a blank cheque to leaders who may squander it. It means recognising that at this moment, with Jewish life under siege on eight fronts, the greatest loyalty of the Diaspora is solidarity.

Detest the government we might. But still — we must hold our tongues in public for now.

The prophets spoke when Israel sinned against itself. But they also knew when to mourn in silence, when to rend their garments, when to sit with the people in sackcloth until the siege was lifted.

That is where we are. Our loyalty is not lessened by this silence. It is deepened, made heavier, made covenantal.

For there is a time to speak, and a time to keep silent.
And loyalty — true loyalty — is knowing which is which.

Adam Slonim is presenter of the Behind The Headlines podcast and a commentator.