The Torah command, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is thought to be a Jewish gift to civilization. In fact, there are so many requirements for who your neighbor is as to render the teaching meaningless in a tribal society.

At Texas A&M, alt-right leader Richard Spencer praises Israel for its intrinsically racist and exclusionist policies, and Hillel Rabbi Matt Rosenberg has no answer. No Zionist can have one, and no wonder Israel’s defenders are queasy these days.

Opposition to intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in Israel is not confined to the far right. State funds support a shelter to “rescue” Jewish women who are married to “Arabs,” and the idea of conversion is linked to annihilation and betrayal in Hebrew tradition.

A call for boycott of the Israeli settlements by liberal Zionists including Michael Walzer, Peter Beinart, and Kai Bird in the New York Review of Books shatters a traditional taboo on such measures; and we should do everything to foster this debate and point out the limitations of actions that don’t target the state that promotes these settlements.

Israeli new historian Benny Morris writes himself into a scholary cul-de-sac by stating that there was “no ethnic cleansing” by Zionist forces in 1948, after he stated in a 2004 interview that it was “ethnic cleansing” and it was necessary and didn’t go far enough to make peace.

Israel is not an occupier, says Israel’s former ambassador to Canada, Peter Baker. But the history of Israeli expansion since 1948 could not be clearer: it seeks more and more land with as few Arabs on it as possible, and destroys not just the villages but the memory of those places.

Twice in the last ten days, the Netanyahu government has adopted a new spin-strategy: taking the term “ethnic cleansing”, which the world has increasingly become aware that Israel enacts, and turning it against its Palestinian victims.

Liberal Zionists blame the occupation for Israel’s woes, when they should blame the ideology of Zionism. As Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said in 1967, when the occupation began: “I want them [Palestinians] all to go, even if they go to the moon.”

The United States applies pressure on countries all over the world, including sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children. Yet any boycott of Israel is treated as terrorism or an inappropriate attempt to impose a solution from outside. Even some Israeli Jews are calling for boycott.

Rabbis from Rashi to Ramban have long tried to hide or apologize for bible teaching that a soldier must “satisfy his lust” with a captive women. Now the Israeli chief army rabbi Eyal Qarim’s comments have exposed the hideous point for all to see.