As a Jewish student, I often feel alienated from my faith. Ashamed, even. Searching for answers, I have found it helpful to put myself in the shoes of Jews around the world. Some of them are in the holy land, Israel. Perhaps a young student just like you walks the streets of Tel Aviv—I wonder if you can picture it.

It’s Friday, and the Mediterranean sun just won’t wait. With your friends Moshe, Mordechai and Menachem, you decide to skip class and hit the beach.

It’s a quintessential scene: hummus and tahini vendors, Israeli men making inappropriate passes at every woman under 70, arak in cold lemonade. You sip drinks, smoke a joint and play some volleyball. This soil was promised to you, baby, you might as well enjoy it. Suddenly:

“WHAM!”

A white flash erupts in a column in the city center, two kilometers to the northeast. A wave of heat to the face. There was no warning. Nothing until the blast. Now the sirens cry out in a horrible screeching chorus. Defense drones swarm the air. The military police come first, then the firetrucks and medics. Burned but alive, you watch in stunned silence. You are lucky to have skipped class; the university is in the center of town, and now lies a heap of smoldering rubble.

This hasn’t happened yet. But it might. If a hypersonic Kheibar missile bearing a kiss from the new Ayatollah flattens the city into a radioactive latke, it will be difficult to judge what has happened.

From a sensible point of view, this is bad. Tens of thousands will have died; some of them war criminals, yes, but most are innocent civilians, young children and women.

From a Jihadist point of view, this is good. Israel is the Little Satan (America is Big Satan) and must be pummeled into oblivion. This view is both antisemitic and anti-Zionist. More pressingly, it is murderous and cruel. The Iranian regime throws away the lives of its citizens with absurd abandon—it’s a good thing the laws of aerodynamics prevented the Ayatollah from strapping three eager young men to the missile to be martyred carrying out the great deed. Infidels swarm on every horizon—there is more than one sufficient occasion to make oneself a shahid.

But these frameworks tell us nothing our intuition could not provide.

From a “historical justice” perspective, things are alarmingly complex. The destruction of the Israeli state and the Jewish people are legible political aims of Iran’s Shia regime. This is perhaps the only point on which Al Jazeera and the Jerusalem Post both seem to agree. The Israeli intelligence complex has surmised that if Iran does not have any weapons, it will be less likely to act on its threats. To my mind, this is one of two motivations behind Netanyahu’s current war, the other being a distraction from Israel’s genocide of the Gazan people.

Maybe if 19,000 Israeli children were slaughtered in the raid—the same number as killed in Gaza—some would call it justice. The ridiculousness of this claim attests to the fact that there is no justice after a genocide. The crime is too immeasurable to fit on the scales. Genocide is final. It cannot be adequately reconciled, emotionally or politically. This was as true after the Holocaust as it is today.

When my great grandparents were burned alive at Dachau, I imagine their last words were the Shema, the most important prayer in Judaism.

ְׁש ַמע יְִׂשָר ֵאל יְהָוה ֱאֹל ֵהינּו יְהָוה ֶא ָחד

Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One

Today’s Israel hears nothing. It has closed off its ears. It is deaf to the pleas of starving Palestinians and the dropping of its bombs on Iranian schoolgirls. It blasphemes the dying words of my great grandparents, given up to eternity. Having profaned the faith of Jews around the world, Israel may not be far from abandoning its citizens. I wonder, if a bomb were to drop on Tel Aviv, whether Israel would hear the screams of its own dying.

ְׁש ַמע … יְהָוה ֱאֹל ֵהינּו יְהָוה ֶא ָחד

Hear … the Lord is our God, the Lord is One

Nate Berg is a member of the Class of 2027.