Vayera: A Society so Rotten

When God expresses intent to destroy the cities Sodom and Gomorrah for the irredeemable wrongdoings of their populations, “Abraham came forward and said, “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” (Genesis, 18: 23) Abraham proceeds to negotiate with God, first asking for the cities to be spared if Abraham can find 50 innocent people among them, a deal which God accepts. Abraham then tries his luck by presenting another offer: “‘What if the fifty innocent should lack five? Will You destroy the whole city for want of the five?’ ‘I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there,’ came the reply.” (Genesis 18:28). After a few more exchanges, the final number of innocents that would save the cities is 10. 

And yet the cities are not saved. In the end, God smites all the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah for their depravity and wrongdoings. In this parable, there existed a society so thoroughly rotten that not 10 innocents existed and that God chose annihilation rather than repair. 

In my circles and media bubble, I take in a lot of discourse about Israeli society being rotten. Afflicted by 80 years of continuous transgression, I hear pundits on Democracy Now and social media influencers describe Israeli society in the bleakest terms: constantly shifting right, investing deeper in genocidal militarism, not containing a legitimate, viable resistance movement. 

In the episode of On the Nose titled “NAZA and the Function of Perpetrator Cinema,” Arielle Angel describes NAZA as “a film about Israeli society and about how the most liberal, educated, and enlightened socio-economic elites among [it] could carry out such mass killing.” Her guest, Palestinian film maker Rammi Yusuf, continues that the soldiers of Unit 8200 interviewed for the film “do not consider themselves part of the settlement enterprise, they don’t consider themselves right wing, [one soldier] says ‘I’m not from an Arab hater unit.’ These are the liberal elite…so this does really change the narrative that it's not all Israelis.” It isn’t just the right-wing fringe that has perpetrated the genocide in Gaza, it is also the most respectable, center-left Tel Aviv elite who sat behind their computers, pressed fire, and then went out to get craft cocktails with their friends. 

NAZA received a record breaking 25 minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival, and it received massive backlash from Palestinian journalists and public figures. Why does it take a film by Israeli directors for the world to believe that the destruction of Gaza over the last three years was genocidal, when over 200 Palestinian journalists were murdered reporting that fact? These criticisms, the journalism of Palestinian reporters, and the investigations of NAZA, reveal the rotten depth of ethnonationalism in Israeli society and beyond, and pose the same questions God and Abraham debate: is the society irredeemable? Where are the innocents (and resistors) among it? What should be done with such a broken people? 

Thank God, there are many anti-Zionist Israelis working from within and without occupied Palestine to support Palestinians in their resistance struggle, but their numbers are unequivocally insufficient. As this week's elections demonstrate, no far-left Jewish faction wields any political power, and either ruling coalition that comes to fruition will be ethnonational and hyper-militant. The question of “innocence” as proposed by Abraham in the context of Sodom and Gomorrah is moot: all of us–every American and Israeli–are complicit through financial, political, familial, and direct implications in the war crimes committed in Palestine and many other places. But the question of resolution is pertinent and terrifying. In this week's Parashah, God chooses annihilation of the society and all its inhabitants, ruling it to be so rotten that there was no chance of repair. Is there no other way? May our present day context be different somehow. May we levy every prayer and action to ensure a different reality in which Palestine is free, the State of Israel no longer exists, and there is rehabilitation and repair to every extent possible of those who currently inhabit Israeli society.