A senior United Synagogue rabbi said this week that the community should not shut out Jews who had qualms about Israeli actions in Gaza.
Hampstead Synagogue's Rabbi Michael Harris, speaking at a conference on modern Orthodoxy in London, said that he had felt "uneasy throughout the past summer that the community's official bodies were making no room for people who had moral qualms about some of what Israel was doing in particular instances."
Rabbi Harris confided that he himself had vacillated between rage at Israeli casualties and antisemitic demonstrations at home and "feeling that if we accidentally kill one child, we have already lost - because the deepest Jewish value is respect for human life".
He argued that diaspora Jews were driven by a sense of guilt about not living in Israel and so when Israel was under attack felt they had to be seen to be doing something.
"Therefore they go into default mode of defending everything Israel does," he said.
Diaspora Jews feel guilty about not living in Israel
But excluding people who had qualms was a "bad mistake".
Another speaker, Rabbi Asher Lopatin, the president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah of New York, said that the American community was "petrified" of J-Street, the lobby group which is critical of Israeli settlement on the West Bank.
But such groups could reach out to students and others and provide a "gateway into an involvement with Israel rather than a gateway out of it", he contended.
The wide-ranging two-day event covered feminism, theology and innovation in Jewish law among other topics. Entitled "Judaism - Learn Behind the Labels", it was organised by David Chait, the founder of the Modern/Open Orthodoxy Facebook group.