When the Chosen Forget the Children
When power is the currency, children pay the price.
I was raised Christian Scientist, which means I grew up with a spiritual sentence fixed above the room like a north star: God is Love.
Not God is tribe. Not God is territory. Not God is revenge. Not God is bloodline, army, flag, wall, checkpoint, doctrine, or divine real estate deed.
God is Love.
That sentence never made me a conventional Christian. If anything, it made me spiritually porous. I was raised in a tradition that asked me to see beyond matter, beyond fear, beyond the lie that suffering is the final truth of the universe. I did not stay inside that tradition in any orthodox way, but it left something in me that I still consider sacred: the instinct to test every religion, every nation, every ideology, every holy book, and every political leader against the simplest possible measure.
Does this increase love, or does it excuse cruelty?
Years later, I married into a Jewish family. We raised two sons to become Bar Mitzvahs, sons of the commandment. I stood inside synagogues, attended services, learned enough of the rhythm to respect the depth of the tradition, and saw firsthand the beauty of Jewish continuity, memory, argument, humor, grief, and survival.
I also felt something I had rarely felt before.
As a white American male of 99.98 percent Western European ancestry, with the remaining trace percentages coming from South African and Colombian ancestry, I am not exactly built by history to expect prejudice. I know that. I do not pretend my discomfort compares to the hatred others have endured for generations. But I remember sitting among conservative Jewish men and hearing the morning prayer thanking God for not making them gentiles.
There I was. The gentile.
I had married into the tribe, helped raise Jewish sons, honored the rituals, and still there was that ancient line, spoken in front of me as if I were a category of human one should be relieved not to be.
I understood the theological explanation. I was told, more than once, that such prayers are not meant as insults but as expressions of obligation. The meaning, I was told, is not superiority but responsibility. One rabbi even explained the idea of “chosen” in a way I found beautiful: not that God chose the Hebrews above everyone else, but that the Hebrews chose God. In that version, chosenness is not ego. It is covenant. It is not a crown. It is a burden.
But something has gone terribly wrong when covenant becomes entitlement.
Something has gone terribly wrong when a people whose central historical wound is dehumanization can look upon another trapped and starving population and call that justice.
Something has gone terribly wrong when children become acceptable collateral in the name of a God they are too young to understand.
Since October 7, 2023, the moral structure around Israel has cracked in public view. The Hamas attack was real horror. No honest person should minimize the murder, kidnapping, sexual violence, terror, and trauma inflicted that day. The victims were human beings, not political abstractions. Jewish fear did not come from nowhere. Israeli trauma did not materialize out of thin air.
But trauma does not grant moral immunity.
A wound can explain behavior. It cannot sanctify atrocity.
The numbers are no longer abstract. More than 50,000 children in Gaza have reportedly been killed or injured since October 2023. A United Nations inquiry has accused Israeli forces of deliberately targeting Palestinian children and concluded that the destruction of children is part of the broader case for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare and attacks on civilians. The International Court of Justice has held that Israel’s continued presence in occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and that Israel must cease new settlement activity.
These are not campus slogans. These are not TikTok vibes. These are the institutions built after the last great catastrophe to prevent the next one from hiding behind flags and uniforms.
And yet the part I cannot shake is not only the state violence. It is the social permission around it.
Reports from Sderot describe people looking across the border through binoculars from observation points while Gaza burns. Some come solemnly. Some come from curiosity. Some seem detached. Some reportedly treat it like a spectacle. There have been reports of tour groups at viewing platforms, of people watching smoke rise from the ruins, of binoculars aimed at a place where children are not playing war but living inside it.
That image may become one of the defining images of this era: people standing at a safe distance, technologically assisted in their witnessing, watching the suffering of children through lenses.
High-tech binoculars as moral anesthesia.
There are also stories of young Israelis mocking Palestinian suffering online, including prank calls pretending to raise money for Palestinian children, the punchline being that compassion itself is ridiculous. Not every Israeli does this. Not every Jew condones it. Millions of Jews around the world are horrified by what is happening. Many Israelis are protesting Netanyahu’s government. Many Jewish Americans are sharply critical of the war. But the fact that such cruelty can become content at all tells us something terrifying about what prolonged dehumanization does to the soul.
This is where the word “chosen” becomes dangerous.
In its healthiest form, chosenness means responsibility. It means being chosen for conscience, chosen for discipline, chosen to remember the stranger because you were strangers in Egypt. It means, if anything, that you are held to a higher moral standard precisely because your people know what happens when a society accepts the logic of the oppressor.
But when chosenness is captured by ego, it mutates.
It becomes: we suffer uniquely, therefore our violence is uniquely justified.
It becomes: our dead count fully, theirs count conditionally.
It becomes: our children are sacred, theirs are demographic threats.
It becomes: criticism of our government is hatred of our people.
And that last move is a logic trap.
Antisemitism is real. It is ancient, adaptive, and dangerous. It mutates across centuries. It appears on the far right, the far left, in religious conspiracy, racial pseudoscience, financial paranoia, nationalist scapegoating, and casual internet cruelty. Jews have every reason to recognize it quickly and take it seriously.
But criticizing the government of Israel is not antisemitism.
Criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu is not antisemitism.
Criticizing occupation, settlement expansion, starvation, bombardment, home demolition, or the killing of children is not antisemitism.
It becomes impossible to have a sane moral conversation when every critique of state power is routed through the accusation of ethnic hatred. That accusation may protect people from honest accountability in the short term, but in the long term it does something catastrophic: it trains the world to associate Jewish identity with the actions of the Israeli state.
That is not protection. That is spiritual malpractice.
Netanyahu is not saving world Jewry. He is making it harder for Jews around the world to be heard, believed, and protected. By wrapping alleged war crimes in Jewish destiny, he drags Jewish identity into the blast radius of his government’s decisions. He invites the worst people in the world to conflate Jews with occupation, Jews with starvation, Jews with settlement violence, Jews with every image coming out of Gaza. And then, when people recoil from the images, his defenders say, “See? They hate Jews.”
No. Many people hate cruelty.
Many people hate watching children pulled from rubble.
Many people hate seeing families starved, doctors targeted, journalists killed, neighborhoods erased, and civilians told to flee from one unsafe place to another.
Many people hate the moral insanity of calling all of that self-defense forever.
This is not hatred of Jews. It is hatred of a machine that is using Jewish fear as fuel.
The settler issue may be the clearest expression of the deeper problem. There is no spiritual dignity in taking another family’s home. There is no sacred history that makes theft holy. There is no covenant that converts displacement into righteousness. If God needs a child removed from a house so someone else can feel prophetically fulfilled, then that is not God. That is ego wearing a beard and carrying paperwork.
This is where I find myself returning to myth.
I do not claim that the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim God is literally Marduk. History is too complex for that. But archetypally, there is something powerful in looking at the ancient Near East and seeing how gods of storm, war, order, kingship, and masculine authority rose into supremacy. Marduk, the great god of Babylon, becomes king of the gods by defeating chaos. Yahweh, too, emerges from a world of many divine figures and becomes the one God, the only legitimate God, the God who tolerates no rival.
Before that hard monotheism fully crystallized, ancient Israelite religion appears to have been more plural than later theology admits. The names El, Yahweh, Baal, and Asherah appear in the archaeological and textual record. Inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud refer to Yahweh and Asherah, though scholars debate exactly what “Asherah” means there: goddess, consort, cultic object, sacred symbol, or some combination. Either way, the record shows a more complex religious landscape than the final edited canon allows.
That matters because religions do not only preserve revelation. They also preserve redaction.
A tradition decides what remains and what must be buried. It decides which divine voices are holy and which become idols. It decides whether the feminine is wisdom or temptation, partner or threat, Shekinah or silence. Over time, the sacred feminine is often displaced, domesticated, allegorized, or erased. A living plurality becomes a single throne.
And once there is only one throne, the men closest to it often claim to speak for God.
The Torah did not invent patriarchy, but it helped encode a patriarchal religious order that later traditions inherited and intensified. Men pray gratitude for not being women. Men interpret covenant. Men guard lineage. Men argue law. Men command armies. Men decide which children must die for history to proceed.
The shofar, traditionally a ram’s horn, calls people to repentance, memory, and awakening. But archetypally, the ram also evokes the Age of Aries: the age of conquest, sacrifice, patriarchal law, blood covenant, and warrior identity. The ram replaces the child in the binding of Isaac. The horn announces the sacred assembly. The masculine animal becomes an instrument of divine sound.
That is beautiful when it calls the soul to humility.
It is terrifying when it calls the tribe to war.
If the Abrahamic religions still carry the psychic architecture of Aries, then the task of our age is not to destroy them but to redeem them from conquest. The commandment must evolve beyond obedience to tribal power. The covenant must mature beyond land possession. The chosen people, if the phrase is to survive at all, must be chosen to protect the child who does not belong to them.
Especially that child.
The Palestinian child in Gaza does not know Marduk. She does not know Yahweh. She does not know Christian Science. She does not know Zionism, Hamas ideology, American foreign policy, settler theology, international law, or the difference between biblical Israel and the modern state of Israel.
She knows hunger.
She knows explosions.
She knows the sound adults make when they cannot protect her.
She knows that the sky can kill.
If she survives, what will she learn about Jews? What will she learn about God? What will she learn about the West? What will she learn about the moral lectures of people who watched her childhood vanish through binoculars?
Every atrocity is also a seed.
What is being planted in Gaza now will grow. It will grow in grief, rage, memory, and myth. It will grow inside the children who survive, and inside the children watching from elsewhere. It will grow in the global imagination. It will grow in the way future generations understand Israel, Judaism, America, and the whole broken machinery of “civilized” power.
Israel may win military objectives and lose something far more important.
It may lose the moral coherence that made its survival meaningful.
That is the tragedy. A state created in the shadow of genocide now stands accused of crimes that the post-Holocaust world built laws to prevent. A people who taught humanity to remember suffering now risk being represented by leaders who demand selective memory. A tradition filled with argument, prophecy, lamentation, mercy, and moral genius is being reduced, in the eyes of millions, to a government that can no longer tell the difference between defense and domination.
But this can still be interrupted.
Not by Hamas. Not by antisemites. Not by people who secretly enjoy Jewish vulnerability. They have no moral authority here.
It must be interrupted by Jews, by Israelis, by people who love Judaism enough to refuse its conscription into cruelty. It must be interrupted by fathers and mothers who look at Palestinian children and say: not in our name. It must be interrupted by rabbis who remember that commandment without compassion becomes machinery. It must be interrupted by soldiers who refuse illegal orders, journalists who refuse euphemism, citizens who refuse spectacle, and diaspora Jews who refuse to let Netanyahu define what Jewish safety means.
And it must be supported by the rest of us without hatred.
As someone raised under the sentence God is Love, as someone who married into Jewish life, as someone who helped raise sons of the commandment, as someone whose own ancestry places me uncomfortably close to the European soil where the last catastrophe took root, I cannot look away from this one.
I will not pretend that criticizing Israel is antisemitic.
I will not pretend that Jewish trauma justifies Palestinian erasure.
I will not pretend that children become less innocent because adults build ideologies above their heads.
If chosen means anything, it cannot mean chosen to dominate.
It must mean chosen to stop first.
Chosen to grieve first.
Chosen to repent first.
Chosen to protect the stranger first.
Chosen to look through the binoculars, see a child, and remember God.
Not the God of conquest.
Not the God of ego.
Not the God of men thanking heaven they were not born as someone else.
The God above the room.
The God underneath every commandment worth keeping.
God is Love.
And love does not starve children.
SOURCES / NOTES
[1] UNICEF, “‘Unimaginable horrors’: more than 50,000 children reportedly killed or injured in the Gaza Strip,” May 27, 2025.
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unimaginable-horrors-more-50000-children-reportedly-killed-or-injured-gaza-strip
[2] UNICEF USA, “More Than 50,000 Children Killed or Injured in Gaza,” May 29, 2025.
https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/more-50000-children-killed-or-injured-gaza
[3] International Criminal Court, “Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant,” November 21, 2024.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges
[4] International Criminal Court, “Benjamin Netanyahu,” defendant profile, State of Palestine situation.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu
[5] International Court of Justice, “Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024,” Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.
https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176
[6] Reuters, “Top UN court says Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal,” July 19, 2024.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/top-un-court-deliver-opinion-israels-occupation-palestinian-territories-2024-07-19/
[7] Israel Democracy Institute, “Large Majority of Jewish Israelis: Israel Making Substantial Efforts to Avoid Causing Suffering to Palestinians in Gaza,” August 5, 2025.
https://en.idi.org.il/articles/60357
[8] Haaretz, “Large Majority of Israeli Jews Untroubled by Reports of Famine in Gaza, Poll Finds,” August 5, 2025.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-05/ty-article/.premium/large-majority-of-israeli-jews-untroubled-by-reports-of-famine-in-gaza-poll-finds/00000198-7ab3-d0ce-a5de-fbb374f30000
[9] Israel Democracy Institute, “Surveys and Polls,” ongoing Israel polling archive.
https://en.idi.org.il/tags-en/1465
[10] Pew Research Center, “Negative views of Israel, Netanyahu continue to rise among Americans — especially young people,” April 7, 2026.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/07/negative-views-of-israel-netanyahu-continue-to-rise-among-americans-especially-young-people/
[11] Pew Research Center, “Most people across 36 countries have negative views of Israel and little confidence in Netanyahu,” June 4, 2026.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/04/most-people-across-36-countries-have-negative-views-of-israel-and-little-confidence-in-netanyahu/
[12] The Washington Post, “Many American Jews sharply critical of Israel on Gaza,” October 6, 2025.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/06/jewish-americans-israel-poll-gaza/
[13] The Washington Post, poll document, September 2–9, 2025 survey of American Jews.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/289d34b1-d676-434d-bfcc-90200d7a1626.pdf
[14] Associated Press / Newsday, “Some visitors to Israel have a new stop on their tours: Devastated sites from the Oct. 7 attack,” June 24, 2024.
https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/israel-gaza-hamas-oct-7-tourism-sderot-w37017
[15] Jewish Currents, Maya Rosen, “The Rise of October 7th Tourism,” July 3, 2024.
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-rise-of-october-7th-tourism
[16] Le Monde, Lucas Minisini, “‘The best show in town’: From a hilltop in Israel, observers have a sinister view of Gaza bombings,” July 23, 2025.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/07/23/the-best-show-in-town-from-a-hilltop-in-israel-observers-have-a-sinister-view-of-gaza-bombings_6743627_4.html
[17] The Irish Times, Sally Hayden, “From a viewing platform in Israel, observers watch Gaza’s destruction through binoculars,” July 27, 2025.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2025/07/28/from-a-viewing-platform-in-israel-observers-watch-gazas-destruction-through-binoculars/
[18] My Jewish Learning, “Thank You For Not Making Me A Gentile.”
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/thank-you-for-not-making-me-a-gentile/
[19] My Jewish Learning, “Who Has Not Made Me a Woman.”
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/who-has-not-made-me-a-woman/
[20] My Jewish Learning, “What Is a Shofar?”
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/shofar/
[21] My Jewish Learning, “Shofar History and Tradition.”
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/shofar-history-and-tradition/
[22] Jeremy Smoak, “Religion at Kuntillet ʿAjrud,” Religions, MDPI, 2019.
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/3/211
[23] Richard S. Hess, “New Evidence for Asherata/Asherah,” Religions, MDPI, 2025.
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/16/4/397
