Dignity does not stop at the border
I was born in Argentina. My parents brought me to Israel when I was eight. I grew up there, lived on a kibbutz and fought in the 1973 war before becoming a U.S. citizen in 1985.
This week, The New York Times reported that a growing number of retired Israeli generals, intelligence chiefs and former prime ministers are accusing West Bank settlers of ethnic cleansing, carried out with government support. One of them said, “Once a society behaves this way, that society is doomed.”
Caring about Israel does not mean defending Netanyahu. The people making this accusation are not outsiders. They spent their careers building Israel’s security establishment, and they are the ones telling us the greatest threat to the country now comes from within it.
They are putting words to something I have believed for years. Dignity does not stop at a border. A state that abandons it forfeits its own claim to security.
New Hampshire Democrats vote in a primary on Sept. 8. Israelis vote in a general election on Oct. 27, the first since the war began. Both are choosing, in their own way, which country they want to live in. Whoever New Hampshire sends to Congress should be asked, clearly, whether they would use American leverage to hold any government, including Israel’s, to that standard.
Dignity doesn’t have a foreign policy exception. Neither should the people who want to represent us.