“There is no one like Avrum Burg. No one who understands Israel and Judaism as intimately, from the inside—and yet has been willing to exile himself from the halls of power by speaking honestly about Israel’s crimes and the corruption of our religious tradition. This book is like Avrum: warm, humane, fearless, and Jewish to its core.”

—Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

“In recent years, an avalanche of books has invoked the Jewish diasporic tradition to move beyond Zionism. Avrum Burg—former Speaker of the Knesset and President of the Jewish Agency—offers something more original: the first sustained attempt to answer the deep-seated crisis of Israeli Jews through that very tradition. Ever since The Holocaust Is Over, in which he warned that the abuse of Holocaust memory would hand Hitler a posthumous victory over Judaism, Burg has established himself as one of Israel's clearest moral voices. In this remarkable new book, he brings that intellectual project to its culmination, recovering the diasporic Jewish inheritance that Zionism suppressed after the Holocaust in order to free Zionist imagination from captivity in a ghetto of fear and violence.”

—Omri Boehm, associate professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and author of Radical Universalism

“As humanity plunges into barbarism, governed with impunity by brute force, violence, and technofascism . . . Avrum Burg reminds us that another democratic vision exists. We can demand the enforcement of hard-won human rights treaties, universal application of international law rooted in the sanctity of every life, and much more. The choices we make now will shape the world we leave to our children. Either we accept forever wars, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, or we forge a different future, grounded in freedom, accountability, and equal human dignity and rights for all.”

—Rula Jebreal, foreign policy analyst, journalist, novelist, and screenwriter

“Avrum Burg, former paratrooper, Speaker of Israel’s Parliament, and head of the World Zionist Organization, sees Israel as an ‘enormous achievement’ gone disastrously wrong—for Palestinians, for Israelis, and for Jews around the world. His eloquent analysis shows how the Israeli army and civil society operate as factories for reproducing both fear and oppression. In a voice that is both personal and prophetic, Burg urges the world to take its share of responsibility for the cruelties it has enabled, but his main message is for Jews. We must learn from the Holocaust, as both a Jewish and a human tragedy, how modern societies can institutionalize depravity and, by recovering what it has really meant for two thousand years to be Jewish, rescue ourselves from the savagery and despair of an experiment that failed.”

—Ian Lustick, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, coauthor of Israel's Lobby, and author of Paradigm Lost

“Avrum Burg’s searing and inspiring Peace Is the Only Final Solution for Jews is a profound moral reckoning with the history of Israel. Some books seek to explain the disaster that is now the Middle East through political history; Burg’s is the first that attempts a psychogram of the Israeli soul. Few writers are better placed to do it.”

—Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum 

“Avraham (Avrum) Burg brings the clarity of moral conviction to the devastation of the present moment in Palestine/Israel, confronting his people with their culpability and demanding they find the humanity and the courage to change. He is clear-eyed about the darkness yet offers hope where so many have given up.” 

—Ayelet Waldman, author of A Perfect Hand