NEW YORK – As Israelis and Jews around the world mark three years since the October 7 terror attacks, Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, an organization that empowers rabbis and cantors to be moral voices for human rights and democracy, issued the following statement:
“Three years after October 7, 2023, we, like so many Israelis and Jews around the world, are still struggling to process the horror of that day. Hamas murdered some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage. Families were slaughtered in their homes, and young people who went to dance at a music festival instead found themselves running for their lives. We continue to grieve those who were murdered and all that their families and communities lost that day.
“We also mark three years of devastating war and catastrophic suffering in Gaza, where more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, including some 20,000 children, and tens of thousands more have been injured and displaced. In the West Bank, Palestinians continue to face displacement and ethnic cleansing.
“For three years, too much of the discourse around Israelis and Palestinians has demanded that we choose a side: to recognize only the suffering of our own and only the wrongdoing of the other. Jewish tradition warns us against this kind of groupthink. In fact, there is a surprising ruling in the Talmud that says that if every judge on a court votes to convict, the defendant is acquitted. (Sanhedrin 17a) This rule acknowledges that when there is a unanimous guilty ruling, the judges have likely succumbed to herd mentality and have not sufficiently raised questions and objections. We learn from this that we, too, must avoid falling into the trap of tribalism. It is possible to grieve the Israelis murdered on October 7 and demand an end to the killing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We can condemn Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians while demanding accountability for Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
“Israelis are also still waiting for accountability for the failures that allowed October 7 to happen. Recent reporting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a warning shortly before the attack that Hamas was planning a major operation — and did not share it with Israel’s security chiefs — raises even more urgent questions about what the government knew and how it responded. Israelis deserve a full accounting of the failures that preceded the deadliest day in their country’s history. An independent state commission of inquiry must examine those failures at every level of government and the security establishment.
“Three years of grief should have taught us the cost of treating any human life as expendable. Israelis deserve to live in safety, without fear of another October 7. Palestinians deserve to live in freedom, dignity and safety, without bombs falling on their homes or Israeli forces driving them from their land. Our task now is to insist on a future in which the safety of one people does not require the suffering of another.”
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About T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights
T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights brings the Torah’s ideals of human dignity, equality, and justice to life by empowering our network of over 2,300 rabbis and cantors to be moral voices and to lead Jewish communities in advancing democracy and human rights for all people in the United States, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories.