Avrum Burg, a former speaker of Israel’s parliament and once a leading figure in the Labor Party, is warning that Israel has lost its moral compass. A protégé of philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Burg says the country is being driven by religious nationalism at the expense of democratic and Jewish values.
“Two wrongs do not balance each other out,” Burg said, referring to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians and Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. “To pretend they do is to abandon the basic values of justice.”
Burg, who was also head of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization, frames the crisis as a collision between state power and Jewish ethics. He says silence in the face of government policy amounts to complicity. “If I do not stand up and take a position as an individual, I become the indifferent collaborator with murder,” he said.
His critique draws on the legacy of Leibowitz, who argued decades ago that the occupation would corrupt both Israeli politics and Judaism itself. Burg says that prediction has come true. “Behind the rhetoric of security lies an old project,” he said, pointing to the influence of far-right leaders such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. “It is the advance of religious nationalists who seek to replace democracy with a state built on supremacy.”
Burg also questions the role of Zionism. He describes it as “scaffolding,” a temporary structure that enabled the establishment of the state in 1948. But instead of being dismantled, he argues, Zionism hardened into dogma. He points to Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law, which defines Israel as the nation of the Jews alone, as the moment Jewish supremacy was enshrined in law. “This is not democracy at all but ethnocracy,” Burg said.
In response, he has called for global Jewish action. Burg is proposing that one million Jews — fewer than 10% of the world’s Jewish population — sign a petition demanding international accountability for Israel’s conduct in Gaza. He suggests cases could be brought before the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court.
“It’s not a way to go against the state of Israel,” Burg said. “It’s the way to go for our humanistic commitment. If in order to achieve humanity for the innocent people in Gaza goes through stopping Israel, let’s stop Israel.”
Burg argues that such a move would reclaim Judaism’s universalist legacy of justice, compassion and self-critique. He invokes the prophets who confronted kings, and the Jewish communities of exile who built traditions of study and ethics without sovereignty or force.
“What Israel now calls democracy,” Burg said, “is in reality an ethnocracy that denies equality to millions of Palestinians and even many within its own borders.”
Burg’s warning comes as Israel continues its war in Gaza and as divisions deepen at home. For him, the crisis is not only political but existential: whether Judaism will be defined by conscience or by power.
