The Day I Decided Not to Become a Jewish Warrior for Israel
Or, how I learned to stop conforming and think for myself.
A note from Lawrence
In 1982, three Israeli recruiters came to my Hebrew School and asked a roomful of twelve-year-olds to sign up for the IDF in exchange for a free trip and a cheap gold menorah. Everyone signed. I didn’t. That night my mother told the school exactly what she thought of anyone recruiting her son for anybody’s army.
This essay starts there and ends in Gaza. I say plainly that October 7 was a horror and that Israel had every right to defend itself, and then I say what I believe it did with the world’s goodwill instead. As a gay, half-Jewish American who has never felt that Israel was mine the way this country is, I can’t stay quiet about violence done in my people’s name. Silence is complicity, and these atrocities do not speak for us.
