'Every day I will read the name of a Palestinian killed in Gaza.' Jeremy Milgrom on Israel's moral crisis
Reform Rabbi and human rights activist Jeremy Milgrom begins by reading every day the names of Palestinian victims to denounce Israel's moral, political, and religious decline. Israeli society has become fragmented, marked by extremism, the misuse of biblical texts, and fear. Milgrom describes how the balance of power is changing in Israeli society and calls for a revival of the tradition of mercy to hear “the cry of the oppressed” before it is too late.
Milan (AsiaNews) – Jeremy Milgrom, a Reform rabbi and peace activist, holds a volume of over a thousand pages, filled only with names. "When I saw it on the table in a church in Bologna, I was about to cry," he says.
The book, titled “The Names of the Memory of the Gaza Genocide. An unjustifiable count and a pending appeal” (in Italian) edited by Yassine Baradai, lists the names of 58,383 Palestinians killed between 7 October 2023, and 15 July 2025, accompanied only by their dates of birth and death.
"I told myself I didn't want to return to Israel without this book. I will take it with me, I will try to read it every day, and share it with my family and friends. Every day we will read a few names. And perhaps, if we read the names, we will stop adding more. We will stop the massacre, we will stop shedding blood. Because when we said 'never again’, it must apply to everyone, not just ‘never again for us Jews’,” the rabbi adds during an event held yesterday by the parish of San Fedele in Milan.
Jeremy Milgrom was born in the United States, studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and moved to Jerusalem in 1968, at the age of 15. In the 1970s, he served in the Israeli army, including in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which he lost his best friend.
Over time, he became an avowed pacifist, committed to human rights and dialogue with the Palestinians. He was among the founders of the organisation "Rabbis for Human Rights" – which today is at the forefront of countering settler violence in the West Bank – and of the interfaith initiative "Clergy for Peace," which brings together Christian, Muslim, and Jewish leaders.
To understand what is happening in Israel today, we need to return to a well-known speech, that of former President Reuven Rivlin in 2015 on the "four tribes" of Israel.
Rivlin spoke of four main groups: secular Jews, national-religious Jews, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Palestinian citizens of Israel. These groups live side by side, but almost never together. These groups still "have their own schools and often don't meet. Palestinian Arabs with Israeli citizenship and many ultra-Orthodox do not participate in the integration processes through the army. Therefore, about 50 per cent of Israeli society does not go through the experience that, for better or worse, creates a common language: military service," explains Milgrom.
The last two years, with the war in Gaza and tensions in the West Bank, have produced a frightening form of unity. “War holds society together in a terrible way. That's what governments that go to war do: they try to unify, to stifle dissent. One of the four tribes has been silenced in recent years: Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, about 21 per cent of the population. They are intimidated, persecuted, and say very little out of fear."
The rift is not just between Jews and Palestinians, but today it affects the Jewish world itself.
Milgrom recounts a personal experience that sums up this trend well: "My partner's son is a combat soldier. He grew up in a secular and liberal environment. But since he returned home from military service, I no longer recognise him: his right-wing comrades brainwashed him. And it's tragic to see how the most extremist segments (not just the settlers, but especially them) are dragging everyone to the right.”
It is a political process that comes from afar and is evident in the personal biographies of everyone, including politicians. “Look at Rivlin. When he was a presidential candidate, Netanyahu did everything to prevent his election, even going so far as to suggest abolishing the office to prevent him from becoming president. The presidency is theoretically a non-political office, but the 'Netanyahu tribe' was ready to dismantle it to maintain control. It's an example of how various powers in Israel are eroding democracy. We are in a very delicate and precarious situation.”
Regarding political solutions, Milgrom is clear: "For at least 20 years, I have no longer believed that the two-state solution is possible nor desirable. Under the model we were talking about, the Palestinians would have achieved little: a sort of Hong Kong of skyscrapers, with no land for farmers, no real economy, and no possibility of returning to their villages and cities within Israel. The one-state solution, however," the rabbi explains, "would mean stopping talking about a 'Jewish state' and talking about a state for all its residents, a state for two peoples. It's a revolution for which most Israeli Jews are not yet ready. We are very far away."
And he adds: "The reason why Zionists refuse to consider a one-state solution, which would be the rational one, is that they are frozen in the past, still tied to the colonialist idea of having arrived in an empty land. Added to this are fears linked to the Palestinian armed resistance, which allow Israelis to view everything through the lens of their (in)security.”
For Milgrom, these fears are intertwined with “exclusivist attitudes based on the biblical commandment to eliminate every trace of the idolatrous Canaanites," an interpretation that, he specifies, “should not apply, because Judaism considers Islam an advanced, non-idolatrous monotheism.”
“Traditional genocidal texts, such as the one on Amalek, and apocalyptic scenarios have been reactivated,” he continues, “along with the extreme messianism spread by Tzvi Yehudah Kook (the founding rabbi of the religious nationalist movement) and his disciples. All this, combined with Western Islamophobia, leaves very little room in Israel for the universalist vision of 19th-century Judaism, which survives only in the diaspora.”
Yet there is hope. “In the diaspora, a non-, anti-, or post-Zionist Judaism is growing, promoted by intellectuals and rabbis who support initiatives like Jewish Voice for Peace or Rabbis for a Ceasefire," he explains. “This is what gives me hope for the future of Judaism, because what I see developing in Israel is a toxic Judaism.”
In particular, in this political landscape, Jeremy Milgrom finds disturbing the way biblical and midrashic texts (midrash is Jewish biblical exegesis) are being used as a religious justification for violence.
“There's a story about King Saul, for example, who has the priests of Nob massacred because they fed what he considered an enemy. The midrash says that Saul, in the past, had been too merciful to the wicked, and then concludes by stating that if you are compassionate to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the merciful.”
“Today,” the rabbi notes, “this phrase is quoted everywhere. It becomes proof that you mustn't be merciful to the ‘bad guys’ because otherwise you betray the ‘good guys’. But how can you build a religion on this? How do you educate people? Do you educate them to be cruel? Do you give people an excuse to be barbaric? Yet that's what's happening.”
Another key text is the one the midrash applies to the scene in which Saul pursues David, and David spares him in the cave. “The midrash says that if someone is chasing you to kill you, you must be the one to kill them first. Today it's used as a doctrine of 'preventive war': don't wait for the attack, strike first. But in the biblical story, David doesn't do this. He could kill Saul, and he doesn't. The meaning of the text is the opposite of what is drawn from it.”
In any case, even though there are particularly harsh texts in the Bible, “we have also been educated to call God 'the God of mercy’. We say we must imitate him: if God is merciful, we must be too. Muslims begin every prayer with 'Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim,' which means 'In the name of God, the Compassionate and the Merciful.' When we say it, we imitate it. That's how God wants us to function.”
For Milgrom, the problem is not the Bible itself, but its combination with a context of fear and nationalism. “For 1,800 years, the Jews had no armies or instruments of organised violence. The practical tradition was a tradition of nonviolence. With nationalism, in a context of conflict, we throw away our history of nonviolence and search the texts for theological justifications for violence.”
This is a worrying operation promoted by the far right, but which in reality has nothing to do with Jewish traditions. “Think of the ‘Hilltop Youth’, the extremist youth group in the West Bank: what they do on Shabbat – violence, arson, assault – is clearly a violation of the Shabbat. Yet the rabbis don't intervene; some encourage them.”
Milgrom returns to the Bible to advocate nonviolence. He begins with Chapter 23 of Exodus, in which "we are commanded not to oppress the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. The text says that if we oppress them, they will cry out to God, and God will hear their cry and cause our children to become orphans and our wives to become widows. It is perhaps the most terrifying verse in the entire Bible.”
“I don't want that to happen. So I say: before their cry reaches God, it must reach politicians. We must ensure that it's not 'up there' who intervenes, but 'down here’, where we can save lives and obtain justice.” The rabbi also quotes Cain and Abel: “When God asks Cain, 'Where is your brother Abel?' he replies, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' The Bible doesn't answer. The question remains open. We must complete it: yes, we are each other's keepers. If we don't respond like this, it doesn't matter how beautiful our churches or synagogues are.”
To his biblical quotes, he adds an Israeli slogan from the 1990s. “There was a very popular song that said, 'Everyone talks about peace, no one talks about justice.' That was 30 years ago. Today we barely talk about peace, let alone justice.” But he adds to his reflection a quote from the American preacher Theodore Parker, made famous by Martin Luther King: “‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ History will take a long time, but justice will eventually arrive. In the meantime, we must do all we can: study, listen, learn.”
Finally, Rabbi Milgrom returns to the verse that haunts him: the threat against those who oppress the widow, the orphan, the stranger. “I don’t want our children to become orphans and our wives widows. I want their cry to reach us before it reaches God. And for us, finally, to hear it.”
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