Opinion: I’m a rabbi and a former IDF soldier. This Yom Kippur I’m atoning for my part in the occupation

Forty-one years ago, I was posted with the Israel Defense Forces as a soldier, in the Palestinian village of Tekoa in the West Bank. From the roof of the school building my unit was based in, I could look into a Palestinian family’s backyard. Every once in a while when I sat there on guard duty, M-16 across my lap, I caught the eye of a woman bringing in her family’s laundry. There was disdain, bordering on pity, in her eyes that I felt deep in my soul. I was already rethinking the morality of the IDF, and the woman’s contempt knocked me off balance.
Today, I live in Los Angeles. I’m a rabbi and a professor who trains future rabbis. During the four years I studied Torah in a West Bank settlement, I saw and encountered many Palestinians but I never had a real conversation with even one of them. We lived in different countries, but sometimes it seemed like different planets.
This year, as Jews celebrate the High Holy Days, I feel a responsibility to model a different way of being Jewish. For this reason, earlier this month I joined a protest at the offices of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest Jewish pro-Israel organization in America. We were demanding that AIPAC stop pressuring Congress to continue funding Israel’s war in Gaza; the U.S. should halt military aid to Israel as long as we believe it is committing human rights violations. We invited AIPAC to join us in calling for a hostage and prisoner deal and immediate cease-fire.
Decades ago, when preparing for my reserve duty, I resolved to act with kindness and justice. I would refuse to take part in any unnecessary or unprovoked violence, I thought. However, once I donned the IDF uniform I quickly realized I was part of the military machine that allowed Israeli Jews to live in what Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a scholar of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, calls “occupied suburbia,” while forcing Palestinians to live in constant fear. As one Israeli soldier put it in 2014: “The whole thing is, ‘We’re here, fear us, we’re in control here.’”
This Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, my time as an IDF soldier has me carrying a need to repent for the occupation and call urgently for a cease-fire. There is a long list of sins — the Al Chet — that traditionally is recited several times during Yom Kippur services. It is written in plural, to signal that each individual accepts responsibility for the actions of the community. As we consider what we have to atone for this year, I think these transgressions listed in the Al Chet are a good place to start: “For the sins we have sinned unknowingly. For the sins we have sinned openly. For the sins we have sinned with intention and deception. For the sins we have sinned with internal thought.”
What sins in particular? To start, some in the American Jewish community have indiscriminately supported the state of Israel, even though in January the International Court of Justice found it plausible that the right of Palestinians to be protected from genocide was at risk and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent specific acts within the Genocide Convention. Israel has been criticized for not complying by groups including the United Nations and Human Rights Watch. And yet, the website of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles proclaims: “Our Federation and the Jewish community of Los Angeles stand in unequivocal solidarity with our homeland,” despite growing evidence of alleged war crimes.
Additionally, some in my community have been so focused on the necessary grieving for the more than 1,200 Israelis killed in Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7 that they have not been able to acknowledge and grieve the killing of more than 41,000 Palestinians, many of them children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, after Oct. 7 in both Gaza and the West Bank. In the Nova exhibition, for example, which documents the Oct. 7 massacre and recently came to Los Angeles, there is not a word about Oct. 6 or Oct. 8, 2023. In other words, there is no context except Israeli suffering. The occupation is not named; Palestinians are not named.
The children who were displaced from the school my fellow soldiers and I occupied 41 years ago are now entering middle age. I think about them as I teach the students in my classroom now. I hope these soon-to-be rabbis learn by my example that there is a rich and vital Judaism that opposes oppression, violence and war. I hope they learn that standing in opposition to wrongdoing is a mitzvah, a Jewish sacred obligation.
My protests, my call for a cease-fire, are part of the way I am still responding to that moment, decades ago, when I locked eyes with my Palestinian neighbor carrying her laundry while I held an M-16 and felt ashamed. As a rabbi and a teacher of rabbis, I’m repenting this Yom Kippur for having been a part of the occupation.
Aryeh Cohen is a rabbi and a professor at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. He is a signatory to the “Rabbis for Ceasefire” letter.