I read Norman Sondheimer’s account of marching for Israel with care, and I do not doubt his sincerity. He writes movingly about dignity, about the image of God in every person, about a people who learned in the hardest way imaginable what happens when their survival depends on the goodwill of others.

I share those commitments. That is precisely why I cannot let his essay stand unanswered.

The piece is built on a single motif, repeated gently throughout: it divides the world into legitimate “criticism of policy” and illegitimate “challenge to Israel’s existence,” and then positions the author safely on the reasonable side of that line. Palestinian suffering appears, but only as weather — “heartbreaking,” “a tragedy,” something that happens. It is never caused by anyone. There are no agents in his Gaza, only sorrow. And that absence is not an oversight. It is the entire architecture of the argument.

So let me supply what the march left out.

Begin with 1948, which Sondheimer’s history simply skips. His narrative runs from persecution and the Holocaust directly to refuge, as though the land were waiting empty. It was not. The creation of Israel involved the expulsion and flight of roughly 700,000 Palestinians, the depopulation and destruction of hundreds of villages, and a denial of return that endures to this day. Palestinians call it the Nakba – the catastrophe. You cannot tell an honest story of Jewish refuge that erases the dispossession that accompanied it. A people’s right to safety is real. So is another people’s right not to be driven from its home. Sondheimer asks us to hold the first while forgetting the second.

Then there is the word he never uses about the present: genocide. He calls Gaza’s civilian deaths a tragedy. I call them what a growing body of authority now calls them. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice – the world’s highest judicial body – found it plausible that Palestinians in Gaza face a real risk of genocide, and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent it. Those binding orders were issued, and then, by the assessment of the very institutions monitoring them, ignored as the situation worsened.

This is not a fringe charge. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and United Nations experts have concluded that Israel’s actions constitute genocide. In September 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars – the largest professional body in the field, including many Holocaust experts – reached the same determination. And in July 2025, two of Israel’s own most respected human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, declared that their country is committing genocide in Gaza. These are not enemies of the Jewish people. They are, many of them, Jews and Israelis who refuse to look away. More than 67,000 people have been killed.

I raise this not to win a semantic argument but because Sondheimer’s essay depends on the suffering staying abstract. Name it accurately and his framework collapses. The question is no longer “should the Jewish state exist,” a question almost no one in the mainstream is actually asking. The question is whether a state may do this, in our name and with our weapons, and whether decent people will keep describing it in the passive voice.

Sondheimer warns against slogans that “erase Israel.” I share his unease with rhetoric that dreams away anyone’s existence. But notice the asymmetry. He devotes paragraphs to chants that frighten him and not a sentence to the actual erasure happening on the ground: neighborhoods reduced to rubble, hospitals destroyed, a population starved and displaced again and again. Words on a placard in West Hartford are held to a stricter standard than bombs over Rafah. That is not moral seriousness. It is moral selectivity.

He invokes the violence of the wider region – Iran-Iraq, Syria, Yemen – to explain why Israelis “hear threats differently.” Fair enough. Fear is real and history is heavy. But fear cannot become a permanent license. The lesson of the 20th century, the lesson written into the Genocide Convention of 1948, is that no people’s trauma, however genuine, authorizes the destruction of another. That principle does not bend for the country one happens to love.

I want what Sondheimer says he wants: two peoples living in security and dignity, neither asked to surrender its identity or its future. We will not reach it by averting our eyes. The same tradition he and I both honor — the one that commands us to pursue justice and protect the vulnerable — does not permit us to reserve those obligations for one side of a border.

He marched because he believes silence is not an option. On that, at least, we agree completely.

Joseph Luciano lives in Bridgeport.