Published: 29 July 2025
Last updated: 29 July 2025
“A child is a child is a child: Compassion knows no borders – Israelis mourn all sides.”
This statement may not sound controversial to most readers of The Jewish Independent, but it evoked a huge uproar after it appeared as an advertisement on a public Egged bus in Jerusalem last week.
While it’s not clear who was behind the sign, the advertisement reflects a growing sentiment from a minority of Jewish Israelis who are horrified about the hunger and deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Last Tuesday, thousands of protesters marched to the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv, carrying bags of flour and photos of Gazan children who reportedly died from hunger over the course of war.
“We are holding photos of Gazan Palestinian children who died of starvation, who simply starved to death,” protest organiser Alon-Lee Green said during the march. “They died as Israel blocks aid to Gaza, we are here demanding to stop the starvation.”
While this view may be widely held by many in the West – including Australia who signed a statement together with 27 countries condemning Israel for the "drip feeding of aid" and "inhumane killing of civilians" in Gaza – it’s still a radical view in Israel.
Comments2
Simon Krite30 July at 12:30 pm
There’s no question that empathy sits at the heart of Jewish ethics. We are commanded to remember the stranger, to uphold human dignity, and to feel compassion, even in war. But empathy, like all virtues, can be manipulated. When used selectively or for political effect, it stops being empathy and becomes something far more insidious, moral distortion.
Ittay Flescher’s piece wants to position itself as brave, humane, even prophetic. But it falls into the increasingly common trap of weaponising Jewish compassion against Jews themselves. His central message that “a child is a child” is true on its face. Of course every innocent child deserves to be protected. But Flescher doesn’t stop there. He presents this truth in a way that blurs the lines between attacker and defender, between a state struggling to protect its civilians and a terror organisation that proudly sacrifices its own.
Empathy does not require false equivalence. It does not mean erasing moral agency or context. When Flescher holds up Israeli flour-bag protestors and Gazan youth holding photos of murdered Israeli children, he wants you to believe this is symmetry. It isn’t. One side initiated a massacre and has rejected every path to peace. The other side, ours – has been forced into a war it never wanted.
Flescher’s narrative sanitises Hamas and subtly turns the lens inward, as though Israeli society’s greatest moral failing is its inability to mourn Gazan children loudly enough. He writes as if it’s our grief that needs correcting, not the ideology that targets our children and then hides behind its own. That’s a form of internalised self-accusation, and when publicly promoted by a Jew in wartime, it becomes something close to complicity.
Judaism absolutely teaches us to care, but it also teaches moral clarity. When empathy is weaponised to shame Israelis for defending themselves, or to paint our enemies as misunderstood victims while our own people bury their dead, we must name it for what it is.
So yes, empathy is a Jewish value. But empathy without discernment is more akin to surrender than virtue. If peace is ever to come, it will be built on truth, not on moral inversion disguised as compassion.
Another piece by Ittay, this Jew is not buying.
Kevin Judah White