The responsibilities of the office provide countless opportunities to influence markets in ways that could favor a president’s private interests. Yet federal law does not require presidents to place their financial assets in a blind trust.

In a qualified blind trust, an independent trustee assumes control of the assets and manages them without the president’s direction. The arrangement is intended to prevent the president from knowing what he owns and steering public policy toward personal gain.

But a trust does not become blind simply because assets are placed in it. The president knows which assets were originally transferred, and those assets remain potential sources of conflict until the trustee sells them or reduces their value below the regulatory threshold. What the trustee subsequently buys is concealed from the president. That is when the trust becomes genuinely blind. The Office of Government Ethics explains this distinction in its guidance on qualified trusts.

Every president so far has been a man, which is why I use the masculine pronoun here.

For most of the past half-century, presidents with potentially conflicting assets have used blind trusts or comparable arrangements. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush placed assets in blind trusts, although the precise form of those arrangements varied.

Jimmy Carter provides a less admirable example. Carter named Charles Kirbo as trustee of his personal assets. Kirbo was not merely a lawyer or financial professional. He was Carter’s close friend and longtime political adviser. In my view, this is another instance in which there was less to Carter’s character than met the eye. A trust managed by a close friend and confidant was not very blind.

Barack Obama chose not to create a blind trust. Instead, he held Treasury securities and broad index funds. These holdings did not address the issue as comprehensively as a blind trust would have, but they presented little company-specific risk. His administration also made his financial disclosures publicly available.

Obama’s decision made it harder to criticize Donald Trump merely for failing to create a blind trust. I have found no prominent examples of American journalists demanding that Obama follow the practice of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush.

Joe Biden likewise did not establish a qualified blind trust. He held relatively uncomplicated, publicly disclosed assets that generally did not create the kinds of conflicts a blind trust is designed to prevent. His annual disclosures were reviewed and certified by the Office of Government Ethics.

Neither Obama nor Biden had anything resembling Trump’s sprawling business interests. Their disclosures were substantive, and I have found no well-supported allegations that their holdings produced conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, neither man created a blind trust.

When Trump came into office with great wealth and extensive business interests, he openly declined to establish a genuine blind trust. During his first term, the director of the Office of Government Ethics said that Trump’s arrangement was “not a blind trust” and “not even close”. Trump again retained his business interests through a trust overseen by his children when he began his second term.

Two considerations help explain Trump’s position. First, the law did not require him to establish a blind trust. Second, his two immediate Democratic predecessors had not created blind trusts either. Trump and his defenders could point to that precedent, even though the financial circumstances were radically different.

Democratic lawmakers did challenge Trump and introduced legislation that would have required presidents to divest conflicting assets. Nevertheless, the failure to demand the same symbolic standard from Obama and Biden weakened the broader argument that every president should make this sacrifice, whether or not his particular holdings present an obvious conflict.

The Constitution provides other protections, but their reach remains unsettled. The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits federal officeholders covered by its language from accepting benefits from foreign states without congressional consent. The Domestic Emoluments Clause applies specifically to the president and prohibits him from receiving additional emoluments from the federal government or any state. Unlike the Foreign Emoluments Clause, it contains no provision allowing Congress to approve such payments.

Several lawsuits during Trump’s first term raised questions under these clauses. Lower courts considered important issues, but the Supreme Court dismissed the cases as moot after Trump left office without resolving their merits.

None of this reaches the central point. The case for a presidential blind trust has never been merely legal. It concerns reputation, credibility, and the obligation to act, or at least to demonstrate that one is acting, in the public interest.

That is why people who have admired the United States, even during its periods of crisis and malaise, have difficulty recognizing it today. The presidential blind trust offers a useful way to understand what has gone wrong.

A blind trust asks something important of those who want to be president. It asks them to surrender control of their investments while they hold office. Why take such an extraordinary step? How many ordinary citizens would give up control of their assets for four or eight years to qualify for a job? What public interest is served when a president makes that sacrifice?

The answer begins with the recognition that a president is not a messianic figure who appears once in history. George Washington may have come closest to occupying such a place in the American imagination, but he resisted the trappings of royalty. The Senate considered elaborate titles, including “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of Their Liberties.” The House rejected such ornamentation, and the government adopted the simple title “President of the United States”. Washington himself referred to the presidency as the office of the “Chief Magistrate”.

Washington understood something that Obama, Biden, and Trump failed to register. Presidential blind trusts are educational measures. They teach the public that honor and credibility must be earned. A president will inevitably make decisions that displease some citizens. Those citizens need to know that he, too, has accepted burdens and made sacrifices.

The issue is best understood in terms of credibility. When a physician urges a patient to lose weight, does the advice carry the same authority if the physician plainly disregards it? Presidents govern for a time, and then both they and the country move on. What presidents leave behind depends in no small measure on the credibility with which they led.

This brings us to the breadth of the present crisis, reflected in the failures of Democratic and Republican presidents alike. The problem is larger than either political party. It lies in the elite class that leads both.

The crisis of solidarity appears on the Left in Hillary Clinton’s infamous reference to a “basket of deplorables”. It appears on the Right in Trump’s indifference to the harm many of his policies do to the fabric of American society. Like a slow-growing cancer, it may eventually destroy the country if it is allowed to spread.

Day-to-day events distract us from the withdrawal of economic and cultural elites from their obligation to foster solidarity and move society forward. That withdrawal is reflected in both parties' failure to insist on a single ethical standard for every president: to entrust potentially conflicting assets to an independent trustee and to accept the sacrifice as part of the office.

The technical differences are real. Trump’s finances remain opaque in ways that Obama’s and Biden’s were not. Obama and Biden relied upon comparatively low-conflict holdings, public disclosure, and ethics review. Those measures performed some of the practical work of a blind trust.

But technical compliance does not answer the deeper problem. Democrats and Republicans alike have treated the blind trust as a matter for lawyers and accountants rather than as an opportunity to teach the responsibilities of democratic leadership. They have failed to understand its value as a public act of restraint, sacrifice, and solidarity.

That failure reflects a potentially fatal arrogance.

Tradition regards King Solomon as the principal author of the Book of Proverbs. More members of America’s elite should heed its warning about the price of arrogance:

לִפְנֵי־שֶׁבֶר גָּאוֹן; וְלִפְנֵי כִשָּׁלוֹן גֹּבַהּ רוּחַ

Lifnei shever ga’on; velifnei khishalon govah ruach.

“Pride goes before ruin,
Arrogance, before failure.”

Proverbs 16:18, NJPS

_{This piece was researched and edited with the assistance of AI tools, which I used to help check facts, locate sources, assess readability, and refine prose. I independently reviewed the material relied upon. All arguments, opinions, and conclusions are my own, and I take full responsibility for any errors.}

​

This is worse than a simple falsehood. It is a cynical lie perpetrated by both wings of what we can call the anti-Zionist E1 Syndicate. One wing is made up of Israeli Jews who have surrendered their Zionism for a messianic, often religion-based, fanatical, and at times brutal project to recreate in Israel the multi-ethnic conditions of rivalry and mutual victimization that brought neighboring Lebanon to its knees.

The other wing consists of cynical realpolitik practitioners, some from the European right, but mostly drawn from the European and Third World left and international institutions, who seek to undermine Israel’s safety by removing the conditions that make it possible for the country to defend itself. The two wings of the syndicate are unlikely to acknowledge each other, but viewed from outside their shared alternative world, their partnership is clear. The evidence lies in the long record of the seeming opposite wings of the syndicate working together: saying the same things in service of goals that each side, in its own delusional way, understands differently.

Make no mistake. Smotrich is an extreme-right bigot. So is Ben Gvir. Netanyahu is a failed prime minister, desperate to hold his right-wing coalition together long enough to reconstitute it after the elections. These four years will be remembered as among the least productive, most damaging, and most politically ugly in the history of Israeli governance. The governing elites in much of the EU, Britain, and Norway are equally as bigoted as Smotrich, but put on a classier act, couching their bigotry in the seductive language of human rights and national liberation for the Palestinians. But what to do? Facts are facts, and they have an inconvenient habit of intruding on the lies told about them, creating realities that messianists of the left and right alike struggle to manage.

Here is a map of the relevant region of Jerusalem and the West Bank, adapted by Perplexity AI from a UN-OCHA map of the West Bank:

You notice the large gray areas east of Jerusalem. Those are currently IDF “firing zones,” closed military areas used for exercises. They are temporary by definition and could be limited or eliminated entirely in a peace accord. Second, note the short distance between Jerusalem and Jericho: as the crow flies, it’s perhaps 20 kilometers; on Route 1, which winds through the terrain, it’s 28 to 30. So if the checkpoint marking the start of that trip were moved as far east as E1 requires, extending contiguous Jewish settlement, the Jerusalem-to-Jericho corridor would narrow by about 13 km. As Perplexity AI explains the situation: “Multiple sources describing the plan agree on the same relocation: from its current position near the Palestinian town of a-Za’ayyem (essentially today’s Jerusalem municipal boundary, around km 66–67 on Route 1) to a new point east of the Kfar Adumim settlement, near the Good Samaritan Museum interchange, roughly km 78–79 on Route 1.” That narrowing of the potential corridor between Jerusalem and Jericho by 11- 13 km is significant, but in the context of a peace negotiation conducted in good faith between Israelis and Palestinians, it is hardly insurmountable.

During the Oslo process, and again at Taba in January 2001, negotiators came closer than is generally remembered to resolving the geography, which was much more challenging than the one critics now say E1 makes unbridgeable. Oslo II designated four crossing points between Gaza and the West Bank, and in October 1999 Israel and the PLO actually opened one of them, a supervised, time-limited passage between Erez and Tarqumiya, roughly 45 kilometers long. It ran for about a year before collapsing with the Second Intifada. At Taba, the two sides went further still, agreeing in principle that the West Bank and Gaza “must be territorially linked” and that a new safe passage should run to the Hebron district, though they left unresolved exactly what regime, and whose sovereignty, would govern that link. Alongside it, negotiators converged, imperfectly, on annexing settlement blocs holding roughly 80 percent of settlers, and narrowed the land-swap gap to a few percentage points of West Bank territory. The sides never signed an agreement on any of this, and refugee numbers remained a genuine sticking point to the end; historians still dispute how much of Taba’s failure to assign to Palestinian intransigence versus Israeli and American missteps in managing the process. But the underlying claim, that a Gaza–West Bank link, and much of the rest of a two-state map, was geographically unworkable, does not hold up: twenty-five years ago, negotiators worked out, in precisely this degree of detail, a passage three to four times longer than the corridor E1 would leave open. It is hard to credit the claim that a 13-to-15-kilometer corridor east of Ma’ale Adumim is what stands between the West Bank and a viable Palestinian state.

Which brings us to the anti-Zionist E1 Syndicate’s reaction to the E1 decision.

It’s not hard to understand why Smotrich is inflating the significance of the E1 decision, declaring: “The construction that I’m leading in E1 cuts off the dream of establishing a terror state next to Jerusalem.”

Smotrich is a desperate politician who may well find himself outside the Knesset after the elections: his party is already polling below the 3.25 percent threshold required to win a seat, and the arrival of a new party led by retired Brigadier General Ofer Winter, uncompromised by participation in the government or the IDF command structure that were responsible for the failures of October 7. Winter courts the same voters as Smotrich, and has made the Finance Minister’s odds even worse.

Smotrich desperately wants to show results for his base, especially hoping to win back those disgusted by his appeasement of Haredi draft dodgers. His demagogic electioneering, fully backed by Netanyahu, who characteristically lets others do the heavy lifting while hoping to reap the benefits for himself, makes a kind of practical electoral sense, however cynical or unethical. Politicians often go off the deep end during election season, then quietly walk back their promises once elected.

But how do we explain the near-hysterical response from the EU, or Britain’s bizarre overreaction? Something deeper is at work here: a psychological layer where practical politics meets entrenched prejudgment, foreclosing rational behavior.

Put bluntly, the EU foreign policy establishment operates from a mental architecture that frames the conflict between Arabs and Jews preponderantly in terms of what the Jews are doing wrong. This mischaracterization has repeatedly led them to sabotage their own self-proclaimed peace initiatives. It has made a serious reckoning with Palestinian dysfunction and bigotry all the more difficult, and it is a delusion that has now persisted across generations.

Just look at some of these responses. Taken together, they suggest something other than diplomatic logic is at work, a deeply settled misunderstanding of this conflict’s dynamics, and of where outside intervention could actually help bring peace:

With his usual penchant for calm, diplomatically astute commentary on events in our region, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called E1 an “existential threat” to a contiguous Palestinian state.

Britain’s Ed Miliband, always a man of peace and goodwill toward all parties, stated that “This Israeli Government’s publication of a tender for the E1 settlement project is an unacceptable and destructive act.”

France/Germany/Italy/UK/Netherlands/Norway/Canada came together to declare: “Not only will they take us further from peace, but they further undermine Israel’s international standing.”

The EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, the former prime minister of Estonia, has it all figured out: “Implementation of the E1 plan would divide the West Bank in two, isolating East Jerusalem, and further eroding the viability of a two-state solution... Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, including in the E1 area, are illegal under international law.”

Ursula von der Leyen went on X to inform us: “The Israeli Government’s decision to publish construction tenders for the E1 settlement project is unacceptable. We have long opposed this step.”

What is so interesting is that these outsiders persist in promoting a stance that leads the local parties nowhere. They do so in the face of the desperate need to get us back to the core of the problem: the inability to cope with the reality that the conflict is a competition between two essentially just causes, each of which the other side must recognize before it can justify making peace.

October 7, 2023, made this even more complicated. Before that date, every withdrawal or compromise Israel signed based on a concept called “taking risks for peace” enjoyed a popular majority, so long as a credible leader like Menachem Begin (who oversaw Israel’s largest territorial withdrawal by land area), Yitzhak Rabin, or Ariel Sharon (who removed more settlers than anyone else) could promise the public they would be safe. This is because the core of the Zionist project has always been building a state, not conquering territory.

October 7 persuaded most Israelis that for the Palestinians, the core of their national project is not building a state, which, to accomplish through a peace accord, would require accepting, in principle, the fundamental justice of Zionism. Rather, it is destroying Israel at any cost. This is why the current leading candidate to replace Netanyahu, Gadi Eisenkot, says: “Anyone who is thinking about a two-state solution after October 7 is just delusional.”

Here’s a thought to carry forward: the desperate electioneering behind the government’s E1 decision, and the high-pitched, anxious, fundamentally irrational reactions it drew abroad, are both illustrations of what these elections are really about.

Netanyahu’s government has spent four years in thrall to poorly thought-through, often messianic thinking on issues that shape nearly every part of our lives. For the most part, the opposition is not “left-wing,” not if that means socialist beyond Israel’s existing welfare state, or pretending the Oslo process could simply resume as though October 7 never happened.

These elections are not about left-right ideologies in conflict. Rather, they concern the restoring of rationality to the highest levels of national decision-making, sending the current ministers and their parliamentary lackeys to the opposition benches to reconsider what they got wrong. The sooner a stable new coalition accomplishes that, the better.

Barrack was born in 1947 in Culver City, California, to a family of Lebanese Christian immigrants; his grandfather had left the town of Zahle in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley around the turn of the century, and Barrack grew up the son of a grocer and a secretary (TRT World). He earned a law degree from USC and took an early job in Saudi Arabia working for the royal family, building connections that shaped his career, including a friendship with Paul Manafort formed in Beirut around the same time. After a stint in the Reagan administration, he turned to real estate, founding Colony Capital in 1991 and building it into a firm managing tens of billions in assets, with his own fortune peaking around $2 billion (Los Angeles Times; Business of Business). He met Donald Trump in the 1980s while brokering the sale of the Plaza Hotel, and the two remained close for decades; he later chaired Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, which raised more than $100 million. In 2021, he was indicted for acting as an unregistered agent of the United Arab Emirates, and acquitted on all counts in 2022. In 2025, he was confirmed as US Ambassador to Turkey and given added envoy responsibilities covering Syria and, at times, Lebanon.

He has repeatedly argued that autocratic and monarchical rule suits the Middle East better than democracy, telling the 2025 Doha Forum that he does not “see a democracy anywhere” in the region and that whatever Israel claims, “what has worked best... is a benevolent monarchy”, a line he repeated at the Antalya Forum months later. He treats political crises the way an investor treats market disruption, as something to be used rather than judged. He testified under oath in his own trial that he once urged Trump to use the outrage over Jamal Khashoggi’s murder as leverage to end Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Qatar. His loyalties have followed money and patronage more than any fixed ideology, moving from a Saudi and UAE-aligned posture earlier in his career to a Turkey-centered one now. And he leans hard on his Lebanese ancestry as a claim to authority and empathy, an invocation that turned against him after remarks about Lebanese journalists that critics called “animalistic” and that one commentator likened to “a 19th-century colonial officer.” At bottom, he is a dealmaker who prefers personal relationships and private channels to institutions and process, the instinct that built his fortune and now defines his diplomacy.

He recently ran into trouble on two fronts within days of each other. First, he criticized an Israeli strike on a Syrian air base near the Turkish border as an unnecessary escalation, a comment Israel found presumptuous given that officials said they had shared intelligence with Washington beforehand. Then, in a podcast interview days later, he said Israel still occupies the Golan Heights against UN resolutions and the broader international order, undercutting Trump’s own 2019 recognition of Israeli sovereignty there. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called the remarks “riddled with inaccuracies” and out of step with the president’s own position, and Republican senators added their criticism. Barrack’s response was smooth rather than contrite: he said he had only described the territory’s historical and legal status, reaffirmed that Trump’s 2019 recognition stands unchanged, and reframed the episode as an argument that negotiated settlements outlast force, walking back the politics while keeping his underlying point intact.

Israel’s response went beyond words. The Hebrew daily Maariv reported that Israel had decided to stop sharing intelligence with him altogether, an official quoted as saying he was simply “not on Israel’s side.” Separate Israeli officials described him in print as someone who promotes Erdogan’s interests rather than Washington’s, one calling him “Erdogan’s man” outright.

What is more telling is what came after on the American side. In May, when his formal envoy title lapsed, Secretary of State Rubio moved quickly to praise him and promise he would keep “a leading role... in Syria and Iraq.” This time, facing a rougher and still-unconfirmed story that he had been recalled to Washington for “consultations” (The National), the State Department has simply declined to comment. That silence, from a press office that clearly knows how to defend him when it wants to, proves nothing dramatic on its own. But between the cutoff in Israeli cooperation and the quiet withdrawal of cover from his own government, it reads as a man under pressure from both directions at once.

Barrack’s troubles look less like the story of one indiscreet ambassador and more like a symptom of how this administration operates across the region as a whole. He holds no real ideological position on the Middle East beyond the deal in front of him. He is not a monarchist defending old orders, not a democrat pushing reform, not an Arab nationalist or an Islamist with a cause to serve. He is a dealmaker who converts loyalty into a line item, willing to align with Ankara, Damascus, Jerusalem, or Washington depending on who is paying and what they want to hear that week. Men like this tend to undo themselves in time, for reasons that are structural rather than personal. States are not simple clients; they carry their own contradictions, factions, and rival interests, and a transactionist working on their behalf eventually has to sell incompatible stories to different buyers at once. Either his sponsor keeps him only as long as he is the cheapest option and drops him the moment someone outbids him, or the competing pressures he juggles force promises that cannot all survive contact with each other, and the arrangement collapses under its own weight.

Barrack is watching both failure modes unfold at once. Turkey finds him useful because he amplifies its role in Syria and Gaza. Israel has concluded he serves Ankara’s interests over its own and has begun cutting him off. Washington, rather than defending him as it did months earlier, has gone quiet, the posture of a patron weighing whether he is still worth the trouble. None of this is really about one bad podcast appearance or one badly phrased comment on the Golan. It is what happens when a government sends a salesman to do a diplomat’s job in a region where every party he touches is shrewd enough to notice that his only real allegiance is to whoever is currently paying him the most, whether literally or politically. In this, he is an accurate expression of what afflicts his senior boss, President Trump, in the conduct of American foreign relations.

“In his general enthusiasm, he embraces the next man, who is RALPH, stone cold sober.

FENNYMAN (CONT’D)

I am to be in your play.

WHORE

(to RALPH)

And what is this play about?

RALPH

Well, there’s this Nurse

FENNYMAN, beside himself, shouts for silence, announcing

FENNYMAN

Mr. Shakespeare has given me the part

of the Apothecary!”

Ralph, keen to impress the Whore, starts recasting Romeo and Juliet as the Nurse’s story. But Fennyman, lost in his own fantasy, cuts him off before he can finish even though Shakespeare gave him only a minor role, far smaller than Ralph’s. Fennyman’s interruption stops Ralph’s self-serving rewrite of the plot.

The second scene is from Annie Hall, co-written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman. When Marshall McLuhan steps out from behind a lobby movie poster to correct a blowhard pontificating about his own theories, Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, turns to the camera and says: “Boy, if life were only like this!” If only bureaucrats who rewrite their mandates in their own interest faced a comeuppance as swift as the one visited on that professor or on poor, frustrated Ralph.

What does this have to do with the ICC? Bureaucracies, like professors and aging would-be Lotharios, share a common weakness: seeing themselves at the center of events and entitled to reshape their mandates by bending the facts. Left unchecked, they need to be shown the error of their ways and confined to their proper scope.

That is why Secretary of State Rubio’s declared intent to take on the ICC’s bureaucratic empire-builders deserves our support. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he declared: “The ICC was born at the turn of the century. At first, it was marketed as a narrow backstop to prosecute the gravest crimes. Now the ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states, and to prosecute and arrest our citizens. Americans never agreed to any of this.”

The ICC’s problems run on several levels, and a more thoughtful bench would have weighed them more heavily. First, although 125 countries are parties to the Rome Statute, they represent only about 32-33% of the world’s population, roughly 2.65 of 8.23 billion people. The gap exists because the world’s most populous nations sit outside the Court’s jurisdiction. China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Pakistan alone represent nearly half of humanity, joined by Russia, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Ethiopia, and North Korea as non-members. Nearly all of South America, most of Europe, and roughly half of Africa belong; Asia and North America are largely absent. The Court’s reach is shrinking, not growing. Regarding it as an instrument of Eurocentric neo-colonialism, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger deposited formal withdrawal notices in June 2026, starting the Rome Statute’s mandatory one-year clock, though all three remain bound members until their exits take effect in June 2027.

The second problem is structural and afflicts the entire UN system. Federated states face a similar dilemma. America’s states vary enormously in size and population, and the founders’ solution was a bicameral legislature: equal representation in the Senate and population-based representation in the House. That’s why California holds fifty-two House seats while six states hold just one.

The UN attempted a similar balance, less successfully. The General Assembly, modeled on the Senate, gives every country one vote regardless of size. This one-state-one-vote arrangement is imperfectly offset by the Security Council, where the great powers of 1945 secured permanent seats and veto power. Population and Council privilege are loosely correlated, but the structure excludes major powers such as India, Indonesia, Brazil, Germany, and Japan. At the same time, ten non-permanent members rotate without any veto.

This arrangement leaves the General Assembly and its affiliated agencies vulnerable to bloc politics dominated by authoritarian states, visible above all in the body’s outsized fixation on Israel, the most-condemned nation in UN history, an obsession the facts on the ground do not justify. The deeper problem is structural: the UN has no judiciary equivalent to the third pillar of the American system, no constitution against which a court could measure and declare illegitimate, prejudiced, or bigoted conduct by its political organs.

Finally, the ICC and its sister institution, the International Court of Justice, have a personnel problem. Nawaf Salam, Lebanon’s prime minister since February 2025, sat as an ICJ judge in The Hague from 2018 to January 2025, was elected the Court’s president in February 2024, and resigned the bench the moment he was nominated for the premiership while presiding over South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Throughout his tenure, he sided against Israel’s position in every recorded roll-call vote in the major Gaza-related cases, at times filing separate opinions urging findings even harsher than the majority’s. Picture how that looks from Jerusalem: one day a judge is sitting in judgment of you, the next he is prime minister of a hostile state. What kind of neutral court operates that way?

The ICC has set a trap for itself that threatens the sovereignty of roughly two-thirds of the world’s citizens who live in states outside the Rome Statute. A more thoughtful bench would have respected that sovereignty and left it to the UN’s political organs to persuade holdout states to join. Instead, the current judges went the other way.

Like Ralph rewriting Shakespeare to flatter himself, the Court took two extraordinary steps dressed up as legal caution. First, rather than ruling independently on Palestinian statehood, a question that remains hotly disputed under the traditional Montevideo criteria of defined territory, effective government, and capacity for foreign relations, the judges took a shortcut. They treated the UN Secretary-General’s acceptance of Palestine’s 2015 accession as dispositive, itself resting on the General Assembly’s 2012 vote granting Palestine “non-member observer state” status. A political body’s contested judgment did the work a judicial body should have done itself. Second, having taken that shortcut, the Court invoked ordinary territorial jurisdiction, the same doctrine that lets any domestic court try a foreign visitor for a crime committed on its soil and the one the ICC had already applied to American personnel in Afghanistan since 2020, to claim authority over Gaza and, by extension, over Israeli nationals who never consented to the Rome Statute. The doctrine itself is unremarkable; what’s remarkable is resting it on a disputed entity’s capacity to convey it. Rubio grasps the stakes: if the ICC can do this to 10 million Israelis, it can do it to 350 million Americans.

As the conservative legal website Legal Insurrection noted, Rubio put it plainly: “The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.” Despite Washington’s repeated refusal to ratify the Rome Statute, he wrote, “Americans found themselves in the crosshairs anyway” and offered examples: ...

Legal Insurrection adds: “... Rubio’s op-ed makes clear the administration has no intention of allowing history to repeat itself. Instead of reacting to future ICC investigations after Trump leaves office, the administration is attempting to eliminate the conditions that could make such prosecutions possible, expanding sanctions, pressuring friendly governments to abandon the court, and stripping the ICC of the international legitimacy and cooperation it would need to pursue American officials.”

Two of the states on this roster have already spoken up, and both cheered Rubio on. Israel’s government dismissed the ICC as a “kangaroo court” with no jurisdiction over Americans or Israelis, and Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomed Rubio’s pledge to act forcefully against what he called “a corrupt clique in The Hague.” In Moscow, Kremlin investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev praised Washington for opposing “the extraterritorial use of law and imposing its will on others.” The rest of the list — Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Belarus, Bhutan, Brunei, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Mauritania, Micronesia, Monaco, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niue, Oman, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Qatar, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Togo, Tonga, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vatican City, Vietnam, Yemen, Zimbabwe — and soon Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — has stayed publicly silent. But it’s a safe bet they share Israel’s and Russia’s underlying interest: seeing the ICC either removed from the scene or reduced to a manageable non-threat to the sovereignty of states that chose not to join.

Thank you, Secretary Rubio, for showing the way

_{This piece was researched and edited with the assistance of AI tools, which I used to verify facts, check readability metrics, and refine prose. All arguments, opinions, and conclusions remain entirely my own. Any errors are mine, not the machine’s.}

Historians will debate the full answer for decades. The present crisis cannot wait for them. It demands workable strategies now.

Start by resisting the urge to personalize the failure. The relative collapse of Jewish defensive messaging is too large to fix by swapping out this or that organization’s leader, and in any case, there is no deep bench waiting to do the job differently.

A large part of the answer is generational. Diaspora leadership in the major population centers outside Israel was formed by people who lived through roughly three generations of a golden age. The great Jewish communities of the Middle East, North Africa, and the former Soviet Union were mostly erased or severely depopulated, their remnants relocating largely to Israel. But for the 90 percent of Diaspora Jews living in Western democracies, the decades since World War II brought extraordinary cultural, religious, economic, and political flowering.

Good times select for a particular kind of leader — one attuned to a thriving community. Such a community rewards expert fundraisers, generous donors, and efficient managers. It has little use for leaders whose thinking might unsettle a seemingly successful enterprise. It does not go looking for what President George H. W. Bush was famously accused of lacking: “the vision thing.”

One neglected skill above all: identifying threats over the horizon. Even states struggle at this. It was probably too much to expect of overwhelmingly civilian communities, cushioned by prosperity, led by people who had excelled precisely because conditions were safe and prosperous.

What do you do when your community faces a crisis of this scale, unexpected and perhaps unpredictable, especially when you have no personal experience of threats that have crawled out of your society’s gutter and settled into the middle of the Overton window, legitimizing open anti-Jewish bigotry in a way it hasn’t been for generations?

The reckoning has to start by naming the threats we’ve witnessed since October 7, 2023:

A sweeping assault on the legitimacy of your people’s historical and current homeland, where close to, or already, a majority of world Jewry lives, waged across international institutions, academia, mainstream media, and social media, arenas where you never built a strong presence.

A catastrophic security failure in the homeland itself, where Hamas murdered large numbers of people for being Jewish or for standing with Jews, a massacre that large populations abroad found “exhilarating” and “energizing,” in Cornell historian Russell Rickford’s notorious phrase, and that gave fresh energy to antisemitic and antizionist activity worldwide (Telegraph).

The discovery that many presumed allies understood your situation in bigoted terms you never imagined they held, and either turned against you outright or suddenly felt free to reveal a hostility to your vital interests that had been there all along.

A wave of physical violence against Jews in your own country, unprecedented since World War II.

And if you know your history, you recognize something older still: prejudices embedded in the foundations of your civilization, dormant since the revelation of the Shoah, now reawakened.

One threat on that list is self-inflicted: a persistent failure by the Government of Israel to make its own case. This is worsened by leaders whose political skills run in one direction only: speaking to their base, not past it. Netanyahu supplied a textbook example while this essay was being written. On a friendly podcast, he said: “Someone said the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic Republic of Britain. We are making sure there won’t be another one here, in Iran,” echoing a line likely borrowed from Vice President Vance’s 2024 remark. It may have played well with the Likud Central Committee, and perhaps with anti-Muslim activists in Britain, but it offers nothing to anyone actually trying to understand the concern behind it. When a government’s rhetoric is calibrated only for its base, its capacity to persuade anyone else disappears.

Diaspora leadership cannot fix Jerusalem’s messaging. But it faces a milder form of the same disease, and its response has been energetic but ineffective. Much of it recycles methods and memes that worked under far more favorable conditions. The cringe-inducing 2026 Blue Square Alliance Super Bowl commercial is a paradigmatic example. New coordination mechanisms have gone up internationally. Campaigns have been sincere, often well-conceived and technically polished, and, by the only test that matters, that of outcomes, insufficiently effective. Public opinion on Israel and the conflict tells the story.

The problem sharpens when we examine the ideas behind the defense itself. Its foundational idea appears to be Natan Sharansky’s 2003 “3D Test”: demonization, delegitimization, double standards, meant to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. The test was later folded into example eight of the IHRA definition, whose text traces to a 2004–2005 working draft published by the EUMC, the EU’s since-dissolved racism-monitoring body, a real gap-filler, since before it there was no widely accepted definition of “antisemitism” at all. That example reads: “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

Holocaust memory has been the movement’s other mobilizing idea. ADL has built its branding around “Never Is Now!” The logic is explicitly genealogical: antisemitism as “the vile and ever-mutating virus,” one continuous phenomenon running from medieval blood libel through Nazi propaganda to “space laser” conspiracies to today’s headlines. Each new incident becomes legible as the latest chapter of an ancient story, rather than a discrete political event that might demand its own explanation.

AJC’s “Combating Antisemitism Playbook” goes further, repositioning antisemitism as a threat to “the civic fabric of America” itself, not a parochial Jewish grievance: “combating antisemitism is not only about defending Jewish life; it is about strengthening the civic fabric... where diverse communities work together to uphold dignity, security, and democratic values.” It’s a calculated move to recruit non-Jewish allies and government actors who might otherwise treat antisemitism as someone else’s problem, built on four stated convictions: a whole-of-society approach, reliance on data, the IHRA “consensus definition,” and coordinated domestic and international action.

Data does its own rhetorical work. The emphasis on incident counts — J7’s 23,000 incidents and 136 percent increase, ADL’s tracker, OSCE and FRA hate-crime figures — is deliberate strategy: it converts a contested argument about meaning and intent into a seemingly neutral, quantified emergency that is harder for skeptics to wave away. AJC states the doctrine outright: “We Rely on Data.”

Humanization completes the strategy. Major Jewish organizations launched the 10/7 Project within months of the attack, with an explicitly narrative mission: “uplifting the stories of the innocent victims,” keeping the hostages visible to policymakers, and “setting the record straight” against Hamas-driven misinformation. It is a classic humanizing move, faces and names against abstraction.

Every one of these ideas is sound, as far as it goes. But the outcomes say they haven’t been enough to move the unpersuaded, because Diaspora Jewish leadership has largely ignored its most effective weapon.

David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition” (2013) hands Israel’s defenders a weapon they’ve been fighting without: an explanation for why the hatred never runs out of fuel. His five-hundred-page argument is that for two thousand years, the West, which he defines for the purposes of his examination as the societies built on a foundation of Islam or Christianity, has built its own self-image by inventing an enemy called “Judaism,” a false, corrupting way of thinking that needs no actual Jews to attack, only a target to blame for whatever a society already hates about itself, from plagues to capitalism to revolution. Nirenberg closes by asking whether “Israel” has inherited that job, warning that millions now explain the world’s problems “in terms of ‘Israel’” exactly as earlier generations explained them in terms of the Jews. Later writers have pushed the point further: British scholar Eve Garrard argues, in a speech to the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, that a culture already primed by anti-Judaism doesn’t need Israel’s actual conduct to manufacture hatred of it; the hatred comes first and recruits the facts afterward, then launders itself as ordinary politics. That is the fight Israel’s advocates keep losing: they argue policy against what is, underneath, theology. No rebuttal of a single IDF operation or UN vote will disarm an accusation whose real engine is a thousand-year-old habit of mind. Until that habit is named in public, loudly, specifically, by its right name, Israel’s defenders will keep winning individual arguments while losing the war for the story.

This is what has to change. Few Diaspora Jewish leaders, I suspect, have read Nirenberg’s five hundred pages. They should. It is a magisterial work of intellectual history, and it belongs on the required reading list for anyone who takes on a leadership role in this community, because it hands us a sharper weapon than any our enemies have yet faced. When hatred comes first, and the facts scramble to catch up, the only adequate response is to name the hatred and shame it. Call out anti-Judaism. Call it out everywhere you find it.

_{This piece was researched and edited with the assistance of AI tools, which I used to verify facts, check readability metrics, and refine prose. All arguments, opinions, and conclusions remain entirely my own. Any errors are mine, not the machine’s.}

That instinct has a name, and comedy got there first. In his 1969 sketch “Nixon Gets High,” the late David Frye played Richard Nixon with uncanny precision: an aide brings the beleaguered president some confiscated marijuana and suggests he’d gain “more insight into the problem” if he “turned on.” Frye’s Nixon hears not a drug reference but a threat. “Turned on... whom?” he deadpans.

That’s the Nixon reflex: assume every crisis is really about who’s about to betray you, and strike first. It’s also, unmistakably, the Trump-Netanyahu reflex. Both men are scandal-driven, both face potentially damaging results in fall elections, and both have spent their careers treating alliance as leverage rather than loyalty. So when the pressure mounted this month, Netanyahu did exactly what Frye’s Nixon would have recognized on sight: he turned on Trump.

As Jewish Insider reported, Netanyahu delivered a rare, direct slap at Trump. At a cabinet meeting, he announced that Israel flatly rejects the 15-point document issued by the Trump-sponsored Gaza Board of Peace.

The White House response was notably muted. The Los Angeles Times reported “no immediate White House comment,” and the BBC reported that the administration was privately “not bothered,” treating the statement as campaign rhetoric ahead of Israel’s election. A senior US official told journalist Barak Ravid: “We understand Bibi’s political needs... We have no problem with it as long as he continues to do what we ask, especially regarding restraining attacks in Gaza.”

In other words, the administration assumes Netanyahu is bluffing to get credibility that will shore him up on the right as he heads into his election campaign. His rejection is temporary, the sort of move Trump himself might make under similar pressure. So long as nothing too extreme happens in Gaza, Washington will look the other way.

Still, the episode is a rare open rift between two men who, as Trump once told Netanyahu’s wife Sara, “have a lot in common.” He was right, to a degree: both possess sharp political instincts, a go-for-the-throat command of media, a habit of irresponsible rhetoric, and the ability to arouse passionate support and equally passionate opposition. But this public spat over the Board of Peace’s Gaza plan is a chance to ask where the two men actually differ.

Fortunately, both have spent decades in public life and left records substantial enough to judge. I won’t dwell on the policies they share; one area where they diverge sharply is economics. Trump’s economic policy is short-term, whim-driven, evidently unconsidered in its details, and — so far as a non-economist can tell — unsuccessful in its results.

Netanyahu’s is far more considered, consistent, and, for better or worse, sustained over a very long time. Consider two markers as they evolved across each man’s time in office: the current account and national debt. Here the two countries have diverged rather than moved in tandem. The United States pushed further into deficit, from -2.4% of GDP in 2016 to -3.6% in 2025, while Israel’s surplus narrowed from 3.7% of GDP in 2009 (Bank of Israel) to 1.5% in 2025 — a larger absolute decline, but one that left Israel comfortably in surplus, a position the United States has not occupied in decades.

On sovereign debt, the trajectories point in genuinely opposite directions, and the gap has widened rather than narrowed. When Netanyahu began his second term in March 2009, Israel’s debt stood at roughly 79% of GDP (Bank of Israel); by 2025 it had fallen to 68.5%, even after absorbing the fiscal strain of the war that began in October 2023. When Trump took office in January 2017, U.S. debt already stood higher, at 104.8% of GDP, and has since climbed to 123.3%, meaning the United States entered this seventeen-year window already more heavily indebted, relative to the size of its economy, than Israel was at the start of its own comparison period, and has only pulled further ahead since.

The core difference is self-discipline. Netanyahu deserves real blame for pushing austerity too far, cutting the armed forces and stripping social services further than Israel needed or could bear, as October 7, 2023 made painfully clear. Still, there is no question that he maintained a strict, disciplined budget for a very long time. Trump seems incapable of anything like that.

What does this mean for Americans and Israelis? It injects fresh instability into an already unstable alliance. If Washington assumes Netanyahu, or his successor, will cave after the elections, or if Israel assumes the US will once again reverse course on a presidential whim, either side may act on that assumption, and act wrongly. With elections weeks away, Trump’s power possibly curtailed in Congress, and polls suggesting Netanyahu may not survive as prime minister, this is a poor moment to bet on the 15-point plan, or on any real movement in Gaza. But it is a good moment to draw a longer-term lesson. Comparing the two men’s economic records is a reminder that Netanyahu’s iron discipline makes him dangerous to his rivals precisely as the pressure on him mounts.

Some articles are so good that they make a familiar subject suddenly look new. Others have the opposite effect: they send the reader back to the sources in search of the argument the author may have intended to make. Too much commentary on the Middle East falls into this second category, shaped by fixed preconceptions and wishful thinking.

A recent Spectator article, “The Strange Death of Islamism,” by the former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, belongs there.

Wood is an experienced, award-winning journalist, best known for his reporting from Iraq and Syria. His Israel-Palestine coverage has also attracted serious criticism. In 2010, the Jewish Chronicle challenged an unsupported analytical generalization in his report on Facebook photographs posted by a recently demobilized Israeli soldier, while CAMERA criticized the omissions and framing of his Nakba segment.

An Argument Larger Than Its Evidence

Wood begins with a large claim:

“Political Islam is in retreat across the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. ‘The strange death of political Islam’ is an idea that’s in the air at the moment. Rule by clerics, and by others who claim to speak in the name of God, is going out of fashion in the Islamic world.”

Perhaps. But this requires formidable evidence.

Wood borrowed his title from George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, a book about the collapse from within of Britain’s once-dominant Liberal Party. The analogy is suggestive, but it does not survive Wood’s own account.

Britain’s Liberal movement imploded. Two major Sunni Islamist experiments in government, by contrast, were ended by force. The Islamic State’s caliphate was militarily defeated by a U.S.-led coalition and its local allies. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government was removed in a military coup.

Wood regrets this, not because he endorses Islamist ideology, but because he thinks those regimes were not given enough time to fail on their own terms. That is a strange standard. The fact that external forces ended them does not erase the failures that had already become visible under Islamist rule.

What Devji Actually Argues

Wood also draws on Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam. He summarizes Devji’s argument by saying that Islamism is over in much the way communism was over after the Cold War.

That is too broad.

Devji’s book is brilliant, original, and thought-provoking. But it is not primarily a forecast of Islam’s collapse as a faith, nor a country-by-country account of Islamist parties. It traces the rise and possible exhaustion of “global Islam” as an abstract political and historical subject: Islam imagined as a single civilizational actor in world affairs.

That makes Devji’s argument more original, but less directly transferable to current politics. The book is best understood as a study of a weakening political imaginary, not as proof that Islamist parties, state religion, or militant movements are disappearing. Critics have also argued that its global scope rests too heavily on South Asian material and gives insufficient attention to Arab intellectual and political history.

Bad Ideas Do Not Die Easily

Bad ideas often have long afterlives. They survive even after their failures have become plain and their human costs catastrophic.

At the Soviet Union’s formal dissolution, roughly 59 million people still belonged to legally existing Communist parties worldwide. A broader count, including former CPSU cardholders and direct successor parties, would run above 70 million.

Nor has Soviet-style collectivist rhetoric vanished from democratic politics. In his inaugural address, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

None of this is an argument against social democracy. I support a generous welfare state within a market economy. A humane society should not allow its members to fall below a basic floor of security and dignity. But neither my pro-market social democracy nor my human-rights commitments would find much sympathy in today’s Democratic Socialists of America or at a MAGA convention.

The point is simpler: political ideas do not vanish merely because their failures have been exposed.

The Palestinian Case

For Israelis, this question is not academic. If Islamism’s prestige is really declining, what might that mean for Palestinian politics?

The answer, for now, is: less than one might hope.

If any case should have discredited Islamist government, it is Hamas’s administration of Gaza. Yet Hamas remains the strongest organized alternative to Fatah. In PCPSR’s October 2025 poll, 35 percent of respondents identified with Hamas, compared with 24 percent with Fatah. Among those intending to vote in a legislative election, Hamas led Fatah by 44 percent to 30 percent. That does not mean Palestinians are content with Hamas’s rule. Support for Hamas is bound up with armed resistance, Palestinian nationalism, the failure of the Palestinian Authority, and the absence of a credible alternative. Arab Barometer found that only 32 percent of Gazans trusted the Hamas government, while 67 percent did not.

This is the crucial distinction: Hamas retains political and national appeal even where confidence in its governance has weakened.

A Vacuum, Not a Transition

Palestinian politics may therefore be a special case. The alternatives to Hamas lack national legitimacy, offer no credible resistance strategy, have shown little institutional competence or anti-corruption credibility, and possess no viable approach to advancing Palestinian aspirations while reckoning with Israel’s permanent existence.

Under such conditions, declining enthusiasm for Islamist governance does not necessarily produce a turn toward peace-minded democracy. It may simply deepen a political vacuum.

That is the central weakness in Wood’s thesis. Even if Islamism has lost some of its glamour, its failures do not automatically produce a better alternative. In Palestinian politics, the likely result is not yet post-Islamism. It is a more fragmented political field in which Hamas retains influence because no rival can credibly replace it.

_{This piece was researched and edited with the assistance of AI tools, which I used to verify facts, check readability metrics, and refine prose. All arguments, opinions, and conclusions remain entirely my own. Any errors are mine, not the machine’s.}

That second meaning is the relevant one in Israel-Palestine diplomacy. On 30 April 2003, the Quartet, the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations, presented Israelis and Palestinians with a “Quartet Roadmap,” described as “performance-based and goal-driven” and intended “to realize the vision of two States, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.” It failed. It also became a template for years of diplomatic wishful thinking.

The Roadmap called for Palestinians to take decisive action against terror and for Israelis to curb settlement expansion. Both sides were supposed to recognize the other’s right to live in free and independent states. Two decades later, it is hard to look at that framework without noticing how little of it remains intact.

The failure was not mysterious. Experts have long pointed to two central obstacles: ongoing terror attacks and Israeli military responses to them. Perplexity AI points to almost 11,000 rocket and mortar attacks on Israelis in the decade after the Quartet released its Roadmap, alongside eight major IDF-named operations over the same period.

That history is impossible to ignore as diplomats now recycle the same vocabulary in Gaza. The Board of Peace’s recent “Road Map” was first reported in May 2026 and then republished on 31 July 2026, the day after President Trump announced that Hamas had agreed to disarm. Whatever the intent, the result looks uncomfortably familiar: a diplomatic document designed to sound serious, and likely to run into the same wall of reality.

Like the earlier Quartet Roadmap, this new plan is a list of well-meaning points written by diplomats for diplomats. It is heavy on formula and light on leverage. The parties “reaffirm” commitments, are required to “fully complete” actions under the “Sharm Sheikh Protocol,” (sic), and will be monitored by an International Verification Committee that is supposed to verify each step.

The document’s governing principle is equally sweeping: “Gaza shall be governed according to the principle of One Authority, One Law, One Weapon.” It also says that “weapons of the militias shall be decommissioned and stored.” In plain English, that means the plan depends on armed groups surrendering power they have spent years killing to preserve. The demand for a “Social Peace Agreement” in accordance with Palestinian norms and laws is equally revealing: it assumes away the brutality of Hamas rule and the likelihood of retribution from its victims if Hamas turns in its weapons.

The governance problem is even bigger. The plan envisions a new body, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, as a Palestinian-led civilian authority during the transition. That authority is then supposed to hand power back when “a reformed Palestinian Authority resumes its responsibilities.”

But temporary institutions in Palestinian politics have a habit of becoming permanent. The Palestinian experience is full of “transitional” arrangements that never really transition.

Then there is the law. Palestinian law will govern Gaza, but which law? Since the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections gave Hamas a majority, and since the 2007 Hamas coup expelled PA forces from the Strip, Gaza has operated with a separate de facto legislative process that the PA does not recognize. In the West Bank, Abbas has largely governed by presidential decree.

That is not a technicality. Any postwar arrangement that does not answer the question of legal authority is just paper over power.

A useful source here is a 2023 report from the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, published in Ramallah and based on research completed before 7 October 2023. The report, entitled “A Comprehensive Reference Guide to the Palestinian Security and Justice Sectors offers a baseline survey of Palestinian security institutions in both Gaza and the PA.

Funded by the EU and the Swiss government, the report thanks the Palestinian Ministry of Interior and its Security Assistant Office for their collaboration. It should be read as a serious scholarly work, though one clearly shaped by close contact with the Palestinian Authority. It describes Hamas as the “de facto government.” It uses footnotes, but no bibliography.

Even so, it is useful precisely because it exposes the scale of the problem. It notes deep conflicts within Palestinian security institutions and the damage those conflicts did to state-building. It also maps the organs of governance responsible for security in Gaza and the PA. What it does not resolve is a central question now confronting the new roadmap: what happens to the 86 laws legislated in Gaza and the more than 400 “laws and decisions” issued by Abbas in Ramallah?

What could go wrong? Almost everything. More to the point: what is likely to go right? The new roadmap resembles the old one in its refusal to confront the ideological and political forces that have repeatedly wrecked peace efforts. It assumes that a paper architecture can substitute for a shift in thinking that can legitimize a political settlement.

The Quartet’s Roadmap failed because it ignored the real drivers of failure: Islamist rejectionism, the violence it produced, and the refusal of diplomats to recognize the religious understandings that undergird the conflict. The same risk hangs over the new Gaza plan. As long as aid flows, violence may be temporarily suppressed. But temporary calm is not peace.

Hamas has repeatedly shown that it can accept pauses, tactical adjustments, and diplomatic language when they serve its interests. That does not mean it has changed. It means it has learned how to wait.

_{This piece was researched and edited with the assistance of AI tools, which I used to verify facts, check readability metrics, and refine prose. All arguments, opinions, and conclusions remain entirely my own. Any errors are mine, not the machine’s.}

And anyway, it’s a fascinating document in both content and format. The prose is simple: its longest word is “self-determination,” used twice, once for “a free Palestine” and once for “all U.S. territories and colonies.” According to my Perplexity AI, it reads at a 9th-grade level. I counted 27 cartoons.

The comrades at DSA worked hard to repackage their sales brochure into something easy on the eyes. I asked Perplexity AI to summarize what they’re selling:

Thriving Working-Class Communities

• Freedom to Flourish: public recreation/learning spaces, paid family leave, a 32-hour week with full pay, a living minimum wage, free pre-K–college, and canceled student debt.

• Healthcare for All: universal healthcare at no cost, including reproductive and gender-affirming care, plus public hospitals and free medical school

• Housing for All: publicly-owned social housing, strict regulation of investment properties, universal rent control, right to counsel for tenants

• Finish Reconstruction: end legacies of slavery/colonialism, strengthen anti-discrimination laws, honor treaties and tribal sovereignty, enact reparations.

• End Mass Incarceration and Police Immunity: demilitarize police, disempower police unions, redirect funding toward abolishing police/prisons, end qualified immunity.

• Feminism for All: protect bodily autonomy, ban sex discrimination, ensure fair pay for care work

• Green New Deal: federal jobs guarantee, massive public investment in renewables, phase out fossil fuels

Working-Class Foreign Policy

• End the U.S. War Machine: defund the Department of War, end foreign wars, close overseas bases, end U.S. war-crime immunity, back the ICC.

• Free Palestine: right of return, resistance to occupation, self-determination with Jerusalem as capital; end U.S. aid to Israel; prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders for genocide in Gaza

• End Blockades, Embargoes, and Sanctions: on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran

• Abolish ICE: end detention/deportations, amnesty regardless of status, citizenship path for permanent residents

Working-Class Democracy

• Democracy for All: voting rights for permanent residents and incarcerated people, D.C. statehood, territorial self-determination

• A Real Democracy: end dark money and Citizens United, abolish the Electoral College, replace the President and Supreme Court with bodies subordinate to Congress

• A Democratic Congress: multi-party democracy, proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, abolish the Senate.

• Economic Democracy: public ownership of major corporations, aggressive wealth taxes

• Democracy at Work: strengthen the right to unionize and strike; support union reform caucuses

I hope you read that list with interest, because I’d like to revisit this deformed vision of democratic socialism from an unexpected angle.

My Flipboard app has a gift for surfacing things I never asked for. While drafting this essay, it served up a doozy: felinefam.com’s July 28, 2026 article, “How to Keep Cats Away From the Christmas Tree.” As a Jew allergic to cats, I have neither a tree nor a feline to defend, so I’m spared this particular tsuris.

Still, a few things stood out. First, the timing: five months before Christmas. Has July quietly joined the holiday season? Second, there is apparently an epidemic of cats treating Christmas trees as jungle gyms. Who knew? Third, and most puzzling: what algorithm decided I needed to know this?

However, those three odd aspects of the article are not what I wanted to focus our discussion on here. Where it gets interesting to me happened when I asked Perplexity AI to rate the cat-tree article. It came in at a 10th-grade reading level, a full grade above DSA’s political program. Somehow, explaining how to keep a cat off your Christmas tree requires more linguistic sophistication than explaining how to restructure the American economy, society, and constitution.

For comparison: Eduard Bernstein’s 1899 book Evolutionary Socialism, the seminal text of democratic socialism, reads at a college/graduate level of 15.2. The 1848 Communist Manifesto comes in at 13.4. Bernstein, Marx, and Engels, it seems, assumed their readers could think. The Democratic Socialists of America in 2026 assume otherwise.

That gap is not an accident. It reveals deep condescension toward the working class the program claims to serve. A 9th-grade reading level isn’t accessibility; it’s a bet that the audience won’t ask hard questions.

And there are plenty of hard questions to ask. Who pays for universal healthcare, free college, and canceled student debt, and how? The program doesn’t say. Why “disempower police unions?” Since when did democratic socialists start rooting against unions? “Free Palestine?” Why does the well-being of a factory worker in St. Louis hinge on the resolution of a conflict 6,000 miles away on the West Bank? Why rewrite the Constitution to make the presidency and judiciary subordinate to Congress? What could go wrong with dismantling checks and balances between co-equal branches?

The tragedy is that this “program” substitutes slogans for substance. American workers face a real crisis: decades of wealth-concentration flowing from the middle and working class to a handful of billionaires, leaving today’s young people with worse prospects than my generation or my kids’ ever faced. That crisis deserves serious economic thinking.

Instead, the DSA delivered a 27-cartoon pamphlet: an exercise in moral vanity that skips the hard mental work of developing proposals to build an economy that serves people, rather than one where people are enslaved by the economy.

As my late grandmother Dora Blinder z”l would have put it: א שאנדה און א חרפה — a shande un a kharpe: a shame and a disgrace.

_{This piece was researched and edited with the assistance of AI tools, which I used to verify facts, check readability metrics, and refine prose. All arguments, opinions, and conclusions remain entirely my own. Any errors are mine, not the machine’s.}

Still, things are happening.

In a final push before the elections, the Netanyahu coalition, with its famously iron coalition discipline, pushed through a remarkable package of laws: extending compulsory military service from 30 to 32 months; freezing the arrest and prosecution of Haredi draft evaders until November 30, 2026 (a law the Supreme Court suspended the very next day, pending review); enshrining “Torah study” as “a fundamental value,” with quasi-constitutional status; curtailing the attorney-general’s oversight power by allowing the government to disregard her legal opinions without prior court approval; creating a new nine-member regulatory authority, appointed mainly by the communications minister, to replace existing broadcast oversight bodies; expanding gender-segregated classes in master’s and doctoral programs; increasing funding for West Bank settlements and Haredi institutions; diverting funds earmarked for development in the Arab sector to the Shin Bet security agency; extending the security detail for the Netanyahu family regardless of the election result; and finally, dissolving the Knesset and fixing elections for October 27, 2026.

The current Opposition — the leaders who hope to be at the heart of the next coalition and serve in its government — promise a campaign to repeal these and similar initiatives taken by Netanyahu’s coalition over the past four years. Speaking from the Knesset plenum ahead of the vote on the Torah Study Basic Law, Yair Lapid framed the coming election as a mandate to undo the coalition’s agenda.

Lapid, head of Yesh Atid (“There is a Future”) and the formal leader of the Opposition, declared: “The next Knesset will be a Knesset of repair. We will come here not to destroy, not to fight, not to steal, but to repair the State of Israel together.” He tied this directly to accountability for October 7, pledging that the next government would establish a state commission of inquiry “so that Israel’s citizens will know that we have taken the first step toward repairing the fracture and healing the wound.”

Avigdor Liberman, leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel Our Home”), was blunter: “What we are seeing in the Knesset today, and what we will see throughout this entire week, is a liquidation sale of the State of Israel and all of our basic values,” adding, “Let it be clear: In the next government, we will repeal all of these laws.”

Yair Golan, head of the left-wing party The Democrats, said: “The 25th Knesset will be remembered as the most extreme, divisive, and destructive Knesset in the history of the State of Israel,” and promised: “We will repeal every one of these destructive laws, one by one. We will repair all the damage caused by this government and this Knesset.”

If the Opposition’s leaders play their hand wisely, they can turn this wave of disgraceful legislation into a tool for shifting votes away from coalition-participating nationalist parties like Likud, or the far-right parties led by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, toward Opposition parties on the right, such as Liberman’s or Eisenkot’s. The point is not ideological conversion from right to left; it is moral dissonance. These new laws codify value statements that sit uneasily with values the religious-nationalist right claims to hold. How does a right‑wing Orthodox Jew living in a West Bank settlement, who believes in the sanctity of the Jewish return to the land of Israel and the holiness of its wars, reconcile that worldview with rampant draft evasion — facilitated and encouraged by religiously motivated anti‑Zionist Haredi leaders, and enabled by this coalition?

What we see is an important potential weakness in Netanyahu’s coalition’s voter appeal. Most voters who oppose Netanyahu are already accounted for. They cluster around the Center/Center-Left and the Center-Right. Opposition to Netanyahu’s coalition has generally hovered just above 50% of voters for most of the last four years. That is why this legislative wave of pro-Haredi legislation could make a strategic difference in the sense that kicking the ball into your own goal can lose you a soccer game.

It would not take a massive movement of votes from right to center, or from extreme right to mainstream right, to bring down Benjamin Netanyahu. Two Knesset seats — perhaps 80,000 votes — would suffice to block the current coalition partners and fundamentally change the nature of the next round of coalition negotiations. Indeed, even before this latest wave of legislation, much of the opposition to Netanyahu comes from disenchanted right-wing voters who will support parties just to the left of them, right-wing like Liberman’s and center but leaning rightward, like Eisenkot’s.

Will the Opposition leaders be able to do that? Their record against Netanyahu is poor. He has won many more elections than he has lost.

Speaking to NPR in 2019, Hebrew University political scientist Gayil Talshir called Netanyahu “the magician”: “He has a great nose for politics, and he knows how to maneuver both his ideology and his political partners and also how to read the global map of developments.” She added that his defining talent is ideological flexibility in the service of survival: “That’s his power, his ability to change the ideology in accordance with his own political needs.”

Still, it is possible that this latest legislative blitz jumped the shark for too many people who have been a part of Netanyahu’s base for many years. In his effort to burnish his credentials for post‑election coalition talks with the Haredim by delivering on policies of which they did not dream that they had a realistic chance to achieve just a few years ago, Netanyahu may, finally, have gone too far.

​

Since the turn of the century, we in the MENA region have lived through the volatility of US policies. For Americans, it may be startling to realize how extreme the variations in US policy in our region have been. America shifted focus and sometimes signaled contradictory intentions about what it hoped to accomplish. We had radical interventionism to the point of invasion and occupation, moderately pro-Iran policies, an administration where Mideast policy seemed determined by the President’s mood each morning, another administration whose policy can be described as confused, and now refusal to commit ground troops to Iran, while bombing the country, while paying close attention to the interests of Muslim Brotherhood-dominated countries like Qatar and Turkey. For more than a generation, being a US ally has been a roller coaster ride. It is this pattern, this lack of steadiness more than any single decision, that is encouraging reassessment across the region.

Serious thinkers about the region’s future have been contemplating what once seemed unthinkable: What do we do if America really fades as a force for regional equilibrium? What if she continues her zigzagging, confused, unreliable course, increasingly signaling to allies they cannot expect to be treated as allies?

Sometimes we can understand American errors. The regimes with which US Administrations have to deal in MENA are often hard to stomach, and many questions in our region defy simplistic analyses. For example, many in the region noted Obama’s turning his back on the then pre-eminent US ally in the Arab world, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. America found itself supporting free elections, in line with American values. However, free elections brought in the authoritarian, anti-democratic Muslim Brotherhood government, which contributed to Egypt’s decline and strengthened Islamists in the region.

Obama may not have had a morally attractive option. But judged purely on reliability, the lesson has become difficult to ignore. Alignment with the United States no longer guarantees consistency, and regional states must plan accordingly.

This external uncertainty reflects something deeper inside the United States itself. It is impossible to understand American zigzagging in the MENA policies without understanding the socio-economic dysfunction Americans have lived through since the turn of the century. We in MENA are not alone in wondering what is going on in the USA. Americans seem to share a similar unease about their country.

Semafor.com published news of a poll released by Gallup less than a week before the USA’s 250th birthday. It shows the following results for “Pride in being an American, by party:” Republicans 70%; Independents 28%; Democrats 14%.

This follows on a Gallup poll of Overall Life Evaluation at the end of 2025: “As of Quarter 4, 2025, the percentage of American adults who rate both their current and future lives high enough to be classified as “thriving” dropped to 48.0%, down over 11 points from the 59.2% high measured in June 2021, six months after the first public rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. The latest estimate is the sixth lowest of 176 (primarily monthly or quarterly) measurement periods dating to January 2008. The five measurements that were lower were during either the Great Recession (October, November and December 2008) or the early stages of the pandemic (in the first and the last half of April 2020).”

Set against this discouraged self-portrayal of Americans, it is important to remember that American history offers examples of similar periods of national dismay followed by resurgence. Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, despite their differences, each restored a sense of national direction at times of economic and social strain. Crucially, they also reestablished a degree of predictability in American policy—at home and abroad—largely absent today.

I am partial to Roosevelt’s vision of America and critical of Reagan’s. However, both presidents entered office when the country faced economic dislocation on a scale comparable to today’s, if not worse. These periods were reflected in the social malaise and self-questioning seen in recent Gallup polls. What characterized America in the period following Roosevelt, and to some degree in the post-Reagan years - until the end of the Cold War and for a few years beyond - was the elements of predictability and confidence in the conduct of US foreign relations.

​What are the chances of electing a presidential candidate who can follow the leadership example of Roosevelt or Reagan? Looking ahead to 2028, it is hard to see either party running a candidate capable of meeting the challenges.

A major component of the problem is the American political system’s refusal to confront the country’s core economic and social issue: the movement of wealth from the broad middle class (which in post‑Roosevelt America included much of the working class) into the hands of the top 1 percent. Whether that concentration continues will determine whether the United States returns to the growing, self‑confident society it was in the decades after World War II, or settles into being another cynically run, economically polarized country that ultimately fades, as earlier “super‑powers” did. Americans now face a simple but fateful choice: an economy that serves society and allows most people to prosper, or a society increasingly organized to serve a dynamic, creative, but minuscule slice of the population. Much of the world’s future depends on how they decide.

Which brings us back to how America looks from the MENA region. To us, the chain of causation is not mysterious. Economic concentration has fractured the American middle, leaving millions uncertain about their place in the future. That uncertainty feeds political turmoil, and that turmoil is expressed abroad as abrupt shifts and mixed signals. When a superpower’s domestic anxieties show up as foreign‑policy whiplash, its allies learn a hard lesson: they may no longer be able to count on it.

Taken from recent news, here is an impressive collection of events hostile to Jews:

The Irish antizionist author Sally Rooney has done Jews and Israelis a great service. She has eloquently and passionately shown us what we are up against. As Britain’s The Jewish Chronicle reported from her speech on June 16 in Dublin: “the ‘liberation of Palestine really does represent the liberation of the world’ and referred to Israel’s conduct as ‘the darkest [moment] that we have witnessed in our lifetimes.’”

Across the Atlantic, Congressional Representative Dan Goldman led a seemingly magical life, a modern-day Prince Charming. He is good-looking, intelligent, charismatic, and a wealthy heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. His political career took off when he led the prosecution of President Trump during his first-term impeachment trial. He leveraged that into a few terms in Congress.

Goldman’s career came crashing down on June 23 in the Democratic primaries, largely due to uproar over his moderate support for Israel. He lost to Brad Lander, a Progressive who is Jewish but seems never to have met an antizionist he did not like. In defeat, Goldman joined Antonio Reynoso (the Brooklyn borough president) and fellow incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. It was a great day to be antizionist and progressive.

Being a dyed-in-the-wool antisemite didn’t hurt either. See the Poetica Cafe incident, where the chain of cafés declared Goldman was not welcome because they do not “serve genocide enablers.” Just another day in New York, where the mayor calls AIPAC supporters “monsters” and then doubles down on the overtly dehumanizing slander.

It is already apparent that California’s progressive State Senator Scott Wiener is facing the same kind of ugliness that contributed to Goldman’s defeat. The Jewish Insider reports an incident last Friday where he was chased out of a transgender community march in San Francisco. In a video posted by a local anti-Israel activist, the activist follows Wiener, attacking him for ‘being terrible on Gaza,’ adding, ‘You do not belong here anymore, Scott. And it breaks my f—ing heart.’ Soon after, other hostile activists curse at Wiener, with one calling him a ‘genocidal piece of sh—’ and another saying, ‘F— you and your Zionist handlers.’

Consider Wiener’s strange fate at the hands of bigots. A member of the LGBTQ community, he has attended the march since its inception in 2004. Wiener’s record on the “genocide” slander is even more interesting since he adopted the slander, but it wasn’t enough. At a candidates’ forum in San Francisco, he was asked in a lightning round whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza; he didn’t hold up a “yes” placard and was booed. A few days later, on January 11, 2026, he stated on X: “I do believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.” As a result, the California Legislative Jewish Caucus forced him to step down.

We can learn a lot from the coincidental events as far apart as Dublin and California? There is a common methodology, a deeply embedded way of thinking that characterizes Western societies—that is, in this context, all societies founded on Christianity or Islam. The phenomenon is what Professor David Nirenberg calls “anti-Judaism”: an intellectual tool that constructs Jews, often fictitiously, often in societies with few or no Jews, like today’s Arab Muslim societies in North Africa and the Levant that have rid themselves of almost all their Jews. Such societies use that construct to debate flaws in their own societies. [David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).]

So Americans who come together for a parade to demonstrate their belief that the US is insufficiently welcoming to trans individuals will set the borders of their community by seeking to expel a Jewish gay political leader who was too slow to adopt anti-Jewish libels like “genocide.”

So progressive candidates around the country define themselves by their (or more commonly, their opponents’) relationship with AIPAC. AIPAC is the premier national lobbying group representing Americans who support a strong US-Israel relationship. Still, it is only one of 12,000 registered lobbying entities. It ranks 191st in size by reported lobbying expenditures. In foreign policy alone, there are hundreds of similar organizations, including lobbies for good relations with Armenia, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others. Then there are domestic-policy lobbies addressing gun rights, abortion, environmental regulation, civil liberties, and more. The AIPAC in the minds of left-wing and right-wing bigots bears little resemblance to the AIPAC of the real world, but it does help to demonize Jews, Israel, and those who oppose anti-Jewish bigotry.

So an Irish author obsessed with the costs of Western imperialism in the Third World will set up Israel and its defeat as key to the liberation of the world.

This making of fantastical Jews as intellectual tools to attack perceived flaws in society is an old game. St. John Chrysostom played it. Karl Marx, the Prophet Mohammad, Shakespeare, and Hitler all participated. Jews become the stand-in for whatever you think ails your society, religion, or political cause.

One aspect of Jewry’s current wrestling with anti-Judaism is the pronounced failure of the world’s Jewish community leadership to call it out, to name it and shame it. It is a signal deficit in our current battle against the hatred of Jews and its exploitation by our enemies. One failure among many, perhaps, but a significant one.

Re: Consultation​

Shalom Dr. Shlekhter-Eytses,

As per our telephone conversation, I would like to consult with you regarding a current patient whose case has me puzzled. A bit of background is in order. My patient is a single male in his mid-twenties. He is religious, with some yeshiva background, and also has a BA. cum laude from an American University in the joint topics of Gender and Subaltern Studies. Unable to find work in his fields, he has worked in the restaurant industry for several years, holding jobs as a dishwasher and waiter, and was recently promoted to host. He is not in a relationship, believes himself to be heterosexual, and thinks that, therefore, he is uninteresting.​

What follows is the transcript of my latest session with this patient. I need to explain the way this session went, since it was quite unusual. My secretary was unfortunately out sick, so I asked patients to wait in the waiting area and called them in one by one. I was still filling out my records of the previous session when this patient walked in, without waiting to be invited.

He took a seat opposite my desk. I must have looked up, with a questioning look on my face, because I had no opportunity to say anything. He immediately began speaking and continued in an uninterrupted barrage of words for several minutes. Fortunately, seeing that he was about to say something, I just had time to turn on the tape and record the session (such as it was):

“Hello, Doctor. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice. Oh, no, I do not feel any inclination to harm myself if that is what the look on your face is all about …

Explain? You know, Doctor, you have a very expressive face. That must come in handy in your profession. You know that I am very particular about my health. My body is a temple. Some things I just don’t eat, especially highly processed food. And especially Bamba. Yeah, you know what that is, the peanut-flavored, slightly crunchy, then melts in your mouth snack. (At least, I’m told that is what it is like. I don’t touch the stuff myself. Wouldn’t think of it! Never! No way!)

Oh yeah, you wanted me to explain myself. I’m sorry. My mind is wandering. I was thinking about Bamba. I mean, really, really thinking about it. You know that it contains peanut butter, puffed ground corn, sunflower oil, and salt. Did you know that? I didn’t know that. Did you?

So now I come to why I am suddenly interested in Bamba. You see, the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn voted about a month ago to boycott Israeli products. You know, only around 4700 of their 17,000 members actually voted in favor of a boycott, but I guess that is enough Jew-haters in a room to carry a motion, these days, in progressive institutions in Brooklyn. They took all of the Bamba off their shelves. All of it! For everyone in the store, not just for Jew haters! It’s a Bamba shanda, a Bamba disgrace, a shame on the Park Slope Food Coop!

OK, so in response to the Park Slope Food Coop Bamba Shanda, pro-Israel activists in New York started to give out Bamba packets around New York City, organized Israeli food fairs, and used it to protest the boycott, which is, of course, bigoted and racist, based on national origin.

So, Doctor, I started thinking that those boycotters must have missed the point. Oh, I see it in your face. You are wondering what I think the point is! Did I tell you how expressive your face is, Doctor? Really!

OK, anyway, I realized the secret lies in Bamba’s gematria. You know about gematria, don’t you, Doctor? Every Hebrew letter has a numeric value. So here is the Hebrew for Bamba: ב=-2 ; מ=40 ; ב=2 ; ה=5. Bamba = 49!

Now think about 49, Doctor. Think about it in depth. What do you have when you have 49? You have seven times seven! Seven is the number of Kabalistic Sefirot related to the soul!

Wow! Huh! How about that?! Think of the word מחיה mehayeh! Also equals 49! Something reviving, rejuvenating! Think of the words tuv-lev טוב-לב! Yup! It equals 49! Literally good heart, but also kindness, benevolence.

Are you as excited as I am by this discovery, Doctor? Look, it is possible I have been all wrong about Bamba all these years, since I’ve never eaten it. In the Divine scheme of things, revealed through Gematria, I discover that not only is it 49, the same as the sefirot of the neshama, the soul, but it is the key to understanding everything wrong with the life they are living in the Park Slope Food Coop. Not only is it shameful, a shanda for them, but look what they did. Taking Bamba off the shelves, they took off a mehayeh, something that gives life, something that shows tuv-lev, kindness and benevolence.

I am so excited, Doctor. It’s always so exciting to come to you for therapy. You guide me with such wisdom. I’ll make a follow-up appointment with the secretary over the phone.

Stay safe, Doctor, in these crazy times. And eat Bamba! It is literally, well, at least in gematria, a mehayeh!”

With that, my patient left the room as suddenly as he entered.

I ask your advice on three questions:

1. Is he crazy, or is his a sane response to the insanity of taking Bamba off the shelves of a food coop?

2. Assuming that you may find his response to a minor event in a country far away from Israel to be over the top and indicative of an imbalanced personality, do you recommend having him examined for possible hospitalization?

3. Can you stand Bamba? I know that I can’t, but my kids love it.

Respectfully,

Dr. Neshama Nervn-Kopf

Some history explains how we got here and Netanyahu’s role. Since independence, Israel supported US interests in the Middle East, even when some in Washington questioned the connection’s value. For Israel, this partnership had several rationales:

In 1948, with a small Jewish population in Israel and many Jews in America, Israel understood the risk of bad US relations affecting Jews worldwide.

The 3 million Jews in the antizionist USSR were also affected by Israel’s relationship with that country, though Israel had little recourse. Early leaders considered closer ties with the Soviet Union, but Ben-Gurion’s camp chose to build strong ties with the US.

Second, Israeli political values, parliamentary democracy, free speech, pioneering spirit, economic growth, fiscal discipline, trade unionism, moderate social democracy, and economic equality, aligned more with New Deal Democrats than with America’s communist rivals.

Third, as a new nation, Israel had to learn to act as a country rather than a movement. Foreign relations were sometimes inexperienced and often mimicked other powers as interests shifted.

Only the US gave Israel the lasting support it needed. Despite ups and downs, the relationship stayed strong and bipartisan, as bipartisanship waned elsewhere in American politics.

Then came Netanyahu. He spent important years growing up and later studying in the US, and saw himself as an expert. His mistakes in bipartisan US policy may stem from overconfidence in his own judgment.

Netanyahu saw the American left losing ground and the right rising. He felt aligned with the Republican Party’s Romney wing, sharing many of their values. He and Romney even worked together early in their careers.

Obama’s election posed a challenge. Netanyahu had to deal with a president who was not very friendly and keen to lessen America’s Mideast role by supporting Iran, wrongly believing Iran could be moderated. Any Israeli leader would have struggled with Obama’s Iran policy. That policy failed, especially regarding Iran, Syria, and Libya. Obama’s supporters often ignore the resulting chaos, which may have left the region in worse shape than Bush’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

​Netanyahu’s disagreement with Obama’s Middle East policy became pivotal. Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, with its implied comparison between Palestinian suffering and Jewish suffering in the Shoah, broadened Democrats’ Overton Window on Israel, while Netanyahu’s 2015 Congressional address marked Israel’s shift away from seeking bipartisan support. This split was not a result of strong progressive influence in the Democratic Party at the time, but it may have opened the party to more critical voices on Israel.

Netanyahu mishandled his dilemma. Opposing the JCPOA was reasonable. His stance was justified and later vindicated. Still, he could have opposed the JCPOA without confronting Obama directly or aligning with Republicans. He needed to oppose it without harming Israel’s relationship with Democrats, but either missed or ignored that. His opposition didn’t influence US policy; the flawed JCPOA was enacted. Netanyahu failed to prevent a risky policy and left behind lasting resentment toward him, which reflected on Israel, in the Democratic administration.

Netanyahu doubled down, aligning not just with Republicans but with the MAGA movement, pinning his hopes on Trump. Now, with Trump’s Iran MOU and his remarks about Israel as “a very small partner,” Netanyahu’s Israel faces the consequences of this gamble.

Now, we’re stuck. The post-Trump Republican Party may not be a reliable partner for Israel. The Vance wing, swayed by figures like Tucker Carlson, seeks distance from Israel. Meanwhile, antizionist progressives have gained Democratic influence, raising the possibility that the 2028 winner may not support close ties with Israel.

Netanyahu’s split with the Democrats cost us a valuable asset, possibly for good.

Now the tough question: What’s next? First, Netanyahu must be removed from office. If he loses the next election, a major obstacle to US-Israel relations will go away. Will that be enough for a turnaround? Doubtful.

Netanyahu’s successor must rebuild Israel’s social solidarity; improve the government’s response to crises; strengthen parliamentary checks and ties among religious, secular, Jewish, and Arab communities; and, most important for Israel’s international strategic position, rebuild ties with the US Republican and Democratic parties. That will require some initiative, some movement toward the Palestinians.

Here is the snag: Trump’s MOU surrendered many key points to Iran and made serious long-term errors regarding Israel. Repairing Israel’s relations with the Democrats may not require the immediate creation of a Palestinian state, but it does require renewed efforts in that direction. After October 7th, the Israeli public is not, and should not be, persuaded that it can make the kinds of concessions required to reach a reasonable, stable resolution of the problem of Palestinian statehood.

It will take more than a generation to move beyond the Israeli attitude that is justifiably suspicious of Islamist attitudes among Palestinians, and progress will hinge on whether attitudes among Palestinians will have changed. Currently, no one seems to be working on that piece of the puzzle.

With that added complication in mind, it becomes all the more important that the US be in a position to offer credible security guarantees. With his bizarre collapse in negotiations with the Iranians, Trump has undermined the credibility of such guarantees, possibly rendering the whole process moot until the US can restore its reputation for trustworthiness in the region.

Additionally, the Democratic Party’s openness to bigots and supporters of third-world terrorism makes it unclear if the current Democrats can set aside their hostility toward Israel as such and deal fairly with a post-Netanyahu Israel.

If anyone claims there’s a quick fix for Netanyahu’s mess, show them the door.

On Israel’s Independence Day in 1955, David Ben-Gurion gave a speech that he concluded with words that ring true with our situation today: “Our future does not depend on what the Nations say, but on what the Jews do.”

I often think of Ben-Gurion’s insight when I consider how much has depended on what the Jews do since the wave of antisemitism began with the Hamas attack on Israelis on October 7, 2023. Yet, judging by outcomes, the Jews as a global community have not effectively met the challenge. The problem seems to lie chiefly with Jewish leadership. Worldwide, it seems stuck. Since October 7, it is hard to point to any initiative from Jewish communities in Israel or the Diaspora that effectively stymied the growth of antisemitism and its partner-hatred antizionism.

​There is no need to go on at length about the current state of antisemitism worldwide. Things are unacceptable and worsening. In March, Tel Aviv University released its Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2025. It shows no country with a significant Jewish population where antisemitic incidents in 2025 were lower than in 2022.

​The 2024 report described that year as a peak year, showing a 340% global increase relative to 2022. The 2025 report found a further modest increase over 2024.

​The picture painted by the Tel Aviv University report is clear, undeniable, and corroborated by other credible research: Jewish Agency / World Zionist Organization Annual One People Report; Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Annual Report 2025; ADL Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025. Despite certain methodological distinctions, the picture is the same.

​Tracking how Jewish communities internationally have responded is a broader challenge. I find it like trying to herd cats. Communities are autonomous. Much depends on the training and skills of their professionals, and perhaps even more on the personalities and skills of their lay leaders.

One of the first things you notice when examining the Jewish response is the near absence, since October 2023, of an authoritative international coordinating body to lead a global struggle against a global threat. ADL took a leading role in creating a body to fill that void: the J7 Large Communities Task Force Against Antisemitism.

Founded in July 2023, before the pogrom, the J7 should be important. It is modeled on the G7, an informal forum of seven major advanced economies that meets annually to coordinate policy on global economic, political, and security issues. Currently, though, the J7 is of negligible importance.

​It has representatives from what the organization inaccurately calls “the seven largest Jewish communities outside of Israel - Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US.” These are seven of the largest Diaspora Jewish communities (each with over 100,000 Jews). However, due to domestic politics in problematic countries, they exclude Russia’s approximately 123,000 Jews and about 120,000 Brazilian Jews. This creates an important structural tension. Communities most politically exposed due to their governments’ rhetoric lack a seat at the table.

​To be fair, the J7 has undoubtedly made a modest contribution in some narrowly defined areas. Examples given by J7 spokespersons are:

• A March 2026 meeting took place with UN Permanent Representatives, urging action on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias at the UN. The J7 framework allows each national Jewish organization to go home and tell its government that these are not just concerns of our local community but also of the Jewish communities of our country’s allies.

• AMIA, the community services and mutual aid Argentine national Jewish organization, hosted a J7 meeting on the 30th anniversary of the AMIA bombing that released a statement called the Buenos Aires Global Guidelines, aimed at expressing best practices in combating antisemitism, which have been endorsed by about 40 countries and important international organizations.

• The political and representative umbrella body of Argentine Jewry, DAIA, evidently negotiated a system with the TikTok platform to report antisemitic content more efficiently (although the details remain outside the public domain) and shared it with other J7 constituents to prevent duplication of efforts.

The J7 continues to function as a project indistinguishable from ADL. Its meetings are coordinated with ADL conferences, and the five working groups on policy and advocacy, tech policy, security, extremism, and education have produced no impact.

More disconcerting, as someone who follows current events in the Jewish world, I must confess that until researching this article, I was unaware of the J7’s existence. It would be interesting to hear from readers in the comments if they know of it. While anecdotal, this suggests that since the J7 is the most high-profile attempt to unite international Jewish communities under one coordinating roof, something is not working.

Here, in bullet-pointed format, are some of the main criticisms of the response by Jewish leadership worldwide to the crisis of antisemitism generated by the attack of October 7, 2023:

• The response has been reactive on several levels. The organized response, called the 10/7 Project, was launched two months after the pogrom, by which time the public had been exposed to a global bigoted narrative that was largely unopposed. As American-Jewish historian Mitchell Bard noted in January 2024, “Israel’s detractors had a full two months to shape the narrative. By the time the 10/7 Project began, it was too late.”
  
  

• Many Diaspora Jewish leaders had ongoing difficulty recognizing the massive growth in antisemitic incidents coming from the political left. This fact and the responses to it continue to afflict efforts to combat antisemitism. Lifelong habits predisposed them to suspect the political right, with some justification. However, as combatantisemitism.org noted, by 2024, 68.4% of incidents documented globally came from the left.

(Note that the site’s definition of antizionist activity as “far left antisemitism” is contested by other Jewish organizations that use more restrictive definitions and produce somewhat different numbers, but the overall picture is very much the same. Sources include: the ADL, Britain’s CST (Community Security Trust), Britain’s JPR (Institute for Jewish Policy Research), France’s CRIF/Ipsos Survey 2024, and Tel Aviv University’s Antisemitism Worldwide Report 2024.)

One result of downplaying antisemitic activity from the left immediately after October 7, 2023, may have been an overreaction once the phenomenon was better understood. This took the form of downplaying antisemitism from the right in 2024-2025. For example, the ADL described Elon Musk’s Nazi salute gesture as merely “awkward enthusiasm.” The Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism strategy (”Project Esther”) ignored right-wing antisemitism entirely and faced non-participation rather than public challenge from mainstream Jewish organizations. The Conference of Presidents issued no public criticism of Trump-aligned antisemitic incidents or rhetoric in 2025. The Reform Movement, the Conservative Movement, and smaller organizations pushed back, but the dominant institutional perspective was silent or accommodating. While this criticism mostly targets ADL, it illustrates the confusion afflicting Diaspora Jewish leadership since October 7, 2023.

• The Government of Israel has not handled the antisemitic nature of much opposition to Israeli actions in the war carefully. This has caused significant damage to the worldwide effort to combat antisemitism. The Government tasked the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs with coordinating efforts rather than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which may be part of the problem.
  
  The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is led by Amichai Chickli, an extreme right-wing minister in what is known as the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history. Chickli did not clarify matters when he stated at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels (April 2024) that the “essence of ‘new antisemitism’ is the virulent campaign aimed at denying Israel’s right to exist” and that it differs from classical antisemitism, without showing what connects this new antisemitism with the old.

• His Ministry created an echo-chambered response using the “preach to the base” tactics that helped build political careers on the Israeli right. However, this neglects dialogue with the middle ground—those whose opinions are not yet formed and whose choice you seek to influence.

The Ministry’s approach fails to competently address when to differentiate between criticism of Israel (accurate or not) and expressions of bigotry. This is likely because the Minister and his staff lack the skills to examine questions from the perspective of a well-intentioned follower who is not a direct participant in the conflict.

An example will illustrate the problem. An argument needed to be made to the public about structural factors that create antisemitic results. At the very least, they transfer what lawyers call the “burden of proof” from accusers to the accused of antisemitism.

The Ministry suggests that the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant result from antisemitism. It pointed out that the ICC operates in a biased political ecosystem, the UN’s well-documented obsession with Israel, and the record of some justices and bureaucrats raises serious questions about the court’s capacity to deal with Israel fairly. However, they buried this argument in their “State of Antisemitism Report for 2024,” submitted to the government.

Raising such a charge alongside an obviously antisemitic act like firebombing a synagogue, as the Ministry did in its “Top 10 - Representative Events” list in the 2024 report, without explaining that antisemitism has types and categories, and that we recognize their nature as we do other bigoted behavior using different tools in different contexts, convinces the pro-Israel base but fails to reach the unpersuaded and uneducated.

The seriousness of this failure cannot be exaggerated. Of course, there are very good grounds to support the contention that profoundly ingrained bigotry lies at the heart of the current anti-Israel campaign. Certainly, I feel that this is true. However, the Ministry is not tasked only with persuading the author of the Anan Sahadei blog or its readers. On the other hand, systemically hostile antisemitic and antizionist players are unlikely to care what the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has to say about anything.

The challenge lies with the unconvinced and unknowledgeable. Perhaps the main audience requires remedial education. The Ministry has done a poor job meeting this challenge, especially considering it is the most well-resourced player on the Jewish side of the battle against antisemitism.

In Israel, with its parliamentary democracy, the buck stops with the government. Responsibility for dysfunction in the Diaspora is more diffuse. Still, both Israel and the Diaspora share an ongoing inability to remove failed leaders. Netanyahu, whose social and financial policies over more than a decade and a half, sabotaged the internal societal response to October 7, 2023. His security policies made the military debacle possible, and his inability to effectively make the case for Israeli actions contributed to our current situation. He is still in office as of June 2026.

Leadership of Jewish organizations in the Diaspora appears to be a lifetime sinecure. I asked my Perplexity AI to survey Jewish organizations worldwide and identify leaders who resigned or were replaced since October 7. There were fewer than a dozen worldwide. While I do not share all their opinions (some conflict with others), I commend them for their sense of personal responsibility and honor. None are first-tier leaders, CEOs on the professional side, or Chairs or Presidents on the lay side.

​It appears that Israel will have an opportunity to refresh its senior leadership cadre in the Autumn. Jewish Diaspora organizations face a more difficult challenge since they lack some of the checks and balances that a parliamentary system provides, even one as flawed as Israel’s. Will they be able to meet it?

The bottom line is that so far, our battle against antisemitism has not been victorious. We continue doing the same things and expecting different results. Current trends are against us. It is easy to be discouraged. How do we respond?

​Here, Ben-Gurion’s advice is critical. What we do is what will determine our future.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines verisimilitude as “the quality of seeming true or of having the appearance of being real.” In journalism, it refers to statements that look true but may not be. The article on “Truthlikeness” (which it defines as a synonym for verisimilitude) at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reminds us that, when we act in good faith and under certain circumstances, such as a well-structured scientific experiment, the concept of verisimilitude can help us get closer to the truth. But, this only works as long as we keep in mind the truth-like nature of our findings. It is vital to remember that something merely “truthlike” is not the same as actual truth, and confusing the two can mislead us and our audiences.

To illustrate verisimilitude in contemporary reporting, Megan K. Stack’s presentation in her June 8, 2026, article “Israeli Expansionism Is Shaking the Middle East” is a clear case of mistaking, or perhaps misrepresenting, verisimilitude as fact.

Take her stand-alone opening line: “In the past, Israel has traded land for peace. These days, it’s trading peace for land.” The article provides no support for this statement. Nor can it.

At present, there is no specific Arab offer to trade land for peace that Israel could accept; what exists is a renewed rhetorical embrace of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative’s “almost all of the land for peace” formula, which Jerusalem has never accepted as a concrete basis for negotiations.

Further grounding this critique, Ms. Stack’s article has been taken apart in two analyses worth reading. One is by Mark Goldfeder, Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, on X, and the other by veteran Jewish journalist Gary Rosenblatt on his Substack blog.

Their critiques highlight the article’s shortcomings. In the broader context of how verisimilitude is marketed over truth in media, addressing these failures becomes more urgent.

A core issue with Ms. Stack’s article is that by removing the agency of the Arab parties involved, she misrepresents the security situation. This leads readers to a distorted understanding of the complex realities on the ground.

After October 7, 2023, the Hamas attack on Israel exposed a critical flaw in the longstanding Israeli security doctrine, a topic widely discussed in public sources.

An excellent summary of the defense doctrine crisis in the months after the massacre is in an article by Col. (res.) Shay Shabtai, published by the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University on January 9, 2024.

Another resource is the government publication of the Nagel Commission’s conclusions, established to restructure the Defense budget due to changes caused by the war. I wrote about the Nagel Commission’s report shortly after its release.

The Commission’s significance was greater than it might appear. In the convoluted way the Netanyahu government operates, creating a budget structure requires articulating the security concept behind spending. A more logical method would have been to hold a National Commission of Inquiry into the October 7 disaster and then shape the budget around its findings, but Netanyahu blocked that option for personal political reasons.

Despite these challenges, the Commission did credible work, especially given its mandate to focus solely on the future and not create headlines about the October 7 disaster. One key finding was that Israel must return to a strategy of preventive attack rather than absorbing attacks against it.

This brings us back to the point that the logic underlying these actions is profoundly lacking in Ms. Stack’s article and likely in her one-sided grasp of the situation. Should Israeli doctrine ignore the lessons of October 7, risking a repeat of such a disaster?

She summarizes her perspective on Israeli security doctrine as follows: “For years, Israel favored cold (or at most lukewarm) wars with unfriendly neighbors: containment, subversion by spies, the occasional assassination or one-off airstrike on a weapons facility or training camp. Not anymore. Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, aggression and expansionism have come to define Israel’s foreign policy.”

Leaving aside the odd phrase “lukewarm” to describe wars, which is a bone-chilling and insensitive turn of phrase, after October 7th, carrying the defense into enemy territory rather than fighting on our own land is a classic military decision with solid reasons. This is a significant reaction to changing security realities, which Stack’s account misses.

For a broader context and comparison, history offers many examples of the dilemma of where to conduct a defense. Once examined, it is hard to make the assumptions underlying Ms. Stark’s op-ed. It follows that she did not consider them.

One example that was successful in defeating the enemy was the Soviet doctrine in World War II, which, as it sought to repel the German invasion, built layered defenses in its own territory, presuming that the enemy would overcome the outer layers while the Soviets prepared powerful counteroffensives. While successful in defeating Nazi Germany, only a huge country like the USSR could contemplate such a strategy, and even they only did it because they had no alternative after the Germans successfully invaded.

Of course, Israel is small, famously about the size of New Jersey. In a publication by the US War College, US Army officer Garri Hendell discusses the dilemma faced by small countries when considering an assault by larger neighbors. Interestingly, Hendell does not reference Israel when writing: “To bridge this gap, what advantages smaller nations do possess, they must exploit to the fullest: the population’s commitment to national survival, the inherent advantages of the defense, an innovative defense sector, and the defender’s intimate knowledge of their own countries’ geography.”

He critiques the military plans of a number of small American allies, writing: “A more troubling aspect of these plans is their almost wholly reactive nature.” He adds: “… being small(er) is no excuse to completely surrender the initiative in maneuver warfare“ and: “Maneuver can be just as important supporting the defense as it is in the offense.” In other words, Hendell advocates more or less the kind of active but ultimately defensive policy that Israel exhibits today, and Ms. Stack fails to understand when she sees it in action.

As a long-demobilized first sergeant, I offer these comments without claiming expertise in national security. Based on her essay and available background, Ms. Stack also does not appear to have formal training in this field. Her authority as a commentator seems to derive from field reporting and literary work, which invites consideration of her op-ed from that perspective.​

With Stack’s article following so closely on the heels of the infamous anti-Israel “canine rapist” op-ed, we, as consumers of the journalistic product that she writes and the NY Times publishes, must examine how the apparent aim of presenting verisimilitude may lead to a failure to pursue deeper, more accurate analysis. At this point, we do well to seek our information from other sources than the NY Times.

​Author’s Note: I was remiss in neglecting to thank my friend Jennifer Beyer-Gomulka for providing me with a copy of the NY Times article (I cancelled my subscription some time ago), my wife Martha for her editing, my colleague Mark Goldfeder for his WhatsApp and X discussions of his reservations on Ms. Stack’s article, Gary Rosenblatt for his take down of the NY Times’ “Israel always wrong” coverage and his always trenchant writing. In preparing this essay I used Perplexity AI for research, and Grammarly for grammatical and style editing.

The Bund’s story, alongside its considerable achievements, must also include its ultimate failure. Its institutions and communities were annihilated in the Shoah, and its achievements vanished with them. Any serious history of the Bund must ask why a program grounded in Marxism, working‑class solidarity, and most profoundly in what Bundists called doykayt (literally “hereness,” the belief that Jews should build their collective future in the countries of Eastern Europe where a majority of the world’s Jews then lived) proved so catastrophically inadequate when the test came.

Despite her years of study, which included the formidable achievement of learning Yiddish, and her evident affection for her subject, Crabapple barely attempts this reckoning. She treats the Shoah as an unforeseeable natural disaster, irrelevant to the historical evaluation of the phenomenon she seeks to chronicle. She writes about the Bund with romance and about Zionism with contempt, in ways that obscure more than they illuminate. In what follows, I argue that this failure of analysis matters not only for our insight into the Bund itself, but also for how we think about Jewish safety, solidarity, and progressive politics today.

If you want to know what the Bund thought it was achieving and how its leaders and rank‑and‑file viewed the difficulties faced by Jews between the 1890s and 1940s, Crabapple’s book can be useful. She generously portrays the idealism, managerial skill, and creative initiative that frequently characterized its leaders and its work. The movement had real achievements, if fleeting. Its members pioneered political organizing among persecuted ethnic minorities in authoritarian Eastern European states. They developed methods for organizing labor, providing social services, and educating impoverished Jewish youth. They helped create a vibrant, secular, modern Yiddish culture.

But the Bund’s story evolved in what historian Timothy Snyder later called the “Bloodlands,” the region between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union that became the slaughterhouse of about 14 million civilians between 1933 and 1945 [Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010)]. Jewish victims of the Shoah, including about ninety percent of the Jews of Poland and the Baltic states, made up a plurality of those deaths. In the interwar period, newly independent Poland, the country where the Bund enjoyed its greatest success, had 3.3 million Jews before the war. After the war, the return of refugees from the USSR, and the subsequent exit of Jews in response to post-War antisemitism, only about 45,000 remained by 1950. Perhaps 15,000-20,000 Jews live in Poland today.

The Bund urged Jews to stay where they were, work for socialism, national‑cultural autonomy, and local self‑defense. It asked people to make existential decisions about where to live, and for many, those decisions proved fatal. Any serious historian of the Bund must face the questions that arise from that awful fact. It is not a subject that is clarified by noting how dreadful the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and their collaborators in surrounding societies were toward their Jews. Assuming that Jews have agency, it is also profoundly about why the Bund’s leaders failed to recognize the depth of the danger and to rethink their program in time.

Crabapple’s book suffers from a kind of unearned triumphalism, oddly reminiscent of the long‑outgrown “Israel can do no wrong” genre that produced Leon Uris’s “Exodus” [Leon Uris, Exodus (New York: Doubleday, 1958)] in the generation after Israel’s independence. As with that genre, the problem is not only moral but analytical. A history of the Bund that refuses to grapple with Zionism is like a history of democratic socialism that refuses to address its relationship with its greatest left-wing rival, the Communists of the Soviet Union. The Bund’s most serious adversary in the Jewish political imagination of its time was not the tsar, the Polish right, the liberal or conservative Democratic Jewish parties of Eastern Europe, or even the Bolshevik movement that shared its Marxism, but the Zionist movement. Zionism presented a rival analysis of Jewish history, a rival strategy for safety, and eventually a state that is home today to about half of the world’s Jews.

Modern political Zionism was, among other things, a diagnosis of why mechanisms like those the Bund trusted, doykayt, socialism, working class solidarity, minority rights, and local self‑defense were unlikely to keep Jews safe in Europe.

Evaluated by outcomes, Zionism’s record is simply on a different scale from the Bund’s. Yet Crabapple provides no evidence that she understands this basic aspect of the challenge she faced when she set out to write about the Bund.

At its height around 1905–1906, the Bund may have had 35,000 members [Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972) 239] among a Yiddish‑speaking Jewish population of roughly seven million in Eastern Europe. It played an important role in organizing Jewish self‑defense against pogroms and did reasonably well in municipal elections in interwar Poland, drawing tens of thousands of votes.[Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (New York: Mouton Publishers, 1983), 468.] Yet it never managed to elect a representative to the Sejm (Poland’s parliament), unlike other Jewish parties. Even at its high points, it remained a very small mass movement. Crabapple never asks why.

Zionism and Israel’s successes were not just quantitatively, but also qualitatively different. Before independence, Zionist institutions in the Mandate territory created what was later called a “state on the way”: quasi‑governmental structures capable of assuming sovereignty in 1948. After the Shoah and the near‑total exit of Jews from the Muslim world, the new state absorbed hundreds of thousands of survivors and refugees. Today, a majority of Israel’s Jews likely trace at least some of their personal origins back to Jewish communities in the Muslim world, Africa, and Asia, a population the Bund barely considered, even though its ideology claimed to speak for the “Jewish people” (Yiddishe Folk) as a whole.

The Russian Empire, in which the Bund arose, also included non‑Ashkenazi Jewish minorities such as Bukharan and Georgian Jews. Yet there was no serious Bundist reckoning with the fact that large numbers of Jews did not fit their Yiddish‑centered model of cultural autonomy. Zionism, by contrast, was not fixated on its Ashkenazi origins. One reason the Zionists were right to press so hard for Hebrew as the common language in the yishuv (the pre-State Jewish community under the Mandate) was that it could unite diverse Jewish populations, not just Yiddish speakers.

These are some of the reasons you cannot begin to understand the Bund’s failure if you ignore the success of its main rival. That success suggests that, whatever the criticisms leveled against it, Zionists got a few things right. Crabapple seems incapable of examining the evidence she herself presents to ask where Bundists might have gone wrong in the corresponding components of their analysis.

These general problems with the book, its author’s susceptibility to allowing her prejudices too much power in creating her text, her romanticizing the Bund, her caricaturing Zionism, and her treating catastrophe as fate, thus depriving those whose lives she chronicles of their human agency, become clearest when we look at how Crabapple handles some individual lives. Two examples will suffice: her treatment of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commander Mordecai Anielewicz and his mother, and her description of the Shoah survivor founders of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot.

Anielewicz, his mother, and what history owes the dead

Crabapple has this to say about the 24‑year‑old commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Mordecai Anielewicz, and his mother, Tzirel Zaldman:

“For the mostly ceremonial role of commander in chief, the ZOB elected a tough, grandiose boy named Mordechai (sic) Anielewicz, a member of the left‑wing Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair whose mother once sold rotten fish down by the river. They picked him because he wanted it so much.”[Crabapple, 326]

Crabapple supplies no footnote. How should we respond when a historian, rather than explaining who these people were and how they functioned, resorts to abusive language, provides no sources, and adds libelous, unsubstantiated details that are not probative to the situation?

While Crabapple does not say where this comes from, a likely source is a remarkable 1986 interview with Marek Edelman, one of the few surviving ghetto commanders, conducted by the journalist Hanna Krall. Edelman, a Bundist who stayed in Poland and became a prominent cardiologist, told Krall that Anielewicz “very much wanted to be a commander,” that he was “childlike in this ambition,” and that his mother sold fish and sometimes had him paint the gills red when they were left over.

Reading Krall’s interview with him, I found Edelman’s testimony deeply moving. It deserves a close reading. It is also the testimony of a man who tells us that he helped lead an impossible revolt and worked surreptitiously at the Umschlagplatz, selecting a few people to be rescued for a few months of life doing service to the underground Jewish resistance. In contrast, countless others went to their deaths.

Edelman somehow survived. It is no insult to him to suggest that some of his statements may reflect his subjective emotional sense of what is true, shaped perhaps by survivor’s guilt, rather than literal fact. A responsible historian might quote him, but would weigh his words carefully, look for corroboration, and avoid turning a single remark made forty or more years after the alleged fact, into an unqualified biographical judgment about Anielewicz’s mother.

As far as we can tell from available sources, there is no independent record that Tzirel Zaldman sold “rotten fish.” There are no court cases, health inspection reports, or even reliable gossip that arose in the four decades after her presumed death in the Warsaw Ghetto and Krall’s interview with Edelman. What we do know is that she and Mordecai’s father were impoverished Jews trying to survive by running a tiny grocery in a poverty‑stricken Warsaw neighborhood, and that Tzirel supplemented the family income by selling fish. To repeat Edelman’s remark as “fact” and turn it into a sneer at a destitute woman who likely died in the ghetto is, at best, reckless.

The same carelessness appears in Crabapple’s portrayal of Anielewicz himself as a “tough, grandiose boy” holding a “mostly ceremonial” command. We know that he grew up in poverty, did well in school, spoke three languages, and learned Hebrew well enough to teach it. Before the war, he worked with poor youth. During the war, he repeatedly escaped the ghetto to carry out missions for his socialist‑Zionist movement on the “Aryan side,” even getting out of Nazi‑occupied territory at one point early in the war, and each time he went back in. He had the maturity to sustain a relationship with his partner, Mira Fuchrer, who died with him in the ŽOB bunker at Mila 18. None of this fits easily under “grandiose boy.”

More importantly, archival work by historian Havi Dreifuss, [Havi Dreifuss, “The Leadership of the Jewish Combat Organization during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: A Reassessment,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 31, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 24–53.], shows that the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) was a committee-run coalition with representatives from several underground movements. Anielewicz became “commander” because the Polish Home Army, upon which ŻOB depended for weapons, refused to deal with a committee and demanded a single interlocutor. He was, in Dreifuss’s analysis, a kind of first among equals, especially in communications with the outside resistance.

Tuvia Borzykowski, a comrade in the bunker, later described how Anielewicz moved constantly among people, listened to fighters from different factions, and helped maintain relations among them—“the primary artery” whose presence strengthened everyone. Dreifuss concludes that ŻOB was not a neat military hierarchy and that Anielewicz’s role was complex: central but not absolute. His reputation post-mortem drew on his personality and on how others remembered him.

Dreifuss’ article is what serious history looks like. She wrestles with evidence to understand the thinking and the actions of stressed individuals acting under unimaginable pressure. Crabapple, on the other hand, by sneering at a “grandiose boy” and repeating an unsubstantiated insult of his impoverished mother, flattens the moral landscape and hinders our understanding of the historical events.

Lohamei Hagetaot, “ethnic cleansing,” and anachronism

A second example shows that this is not a one‑off slip. Crabapple describes ghetto fighters Antek Zuckerman and his wife, Tzvia Lubetkin, and the kibbutz they helped found:

“Antek’s wife, Celina, had already left for Palestine, where she gave birth to their child. He joined her there in 1948. The two heroes of the uprising spent the rest of their lives on a kibbutz for ghetto fighters like them, built on the ruins of a Palestinian village, ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias that became the IDF.”[Crabapple, 364.]

In just three sentences, a surprising number of things go wrong. We can pass quickly over the minor but telling detail that Crabapple uses Lubetkin’s wartime alias, “Celina,” rather than the Hebrew name she used for the rest of her life in Israel, Tzvia. That choice of name is surely strange for an author like “Molly Crabapple,” who asks us to respect her choice to write under a pseudonym. More important is the picture painted: two Jewish heroes living out their days on the ruins of a village allegedly “ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias.”

Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot was founded in April 1949 by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and other resistance movements. Although Lohamei Hagetaot is often described in pro-Palestinian sources as having been built “on the site” of the depopulated village of al‑Sumayriyya, in fact, the kibbutz was established on a deserted British Army camp roughly two kilometers to the south of the village’s ruins on the main coastal highway north of Acre, on land the British had previously expropriated for their own use. The Palestinian village of al‑Sumayriyya lay on the outskirts of the present-day Israeli moshav of Regba.

According to the pro‑Palestinian Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest), al‑Sumayriyya’s residents left before or during the Haganah’s Carmeli Brigade attack on the village on 14 May 1948, an action aimed at securing Acre and the coastal road north toward the besieged Jewish town of Nahariyya and the Lebanese border.

Significantly, contemporary reports mentioned in the PalQuest source described the village as a base for sniping on the highway. Israeli units mortared it and entered from the west, leaving the eastern side open to allow civilians to flee. Demolition squads then destroyed most of the houses. The key point is that there was a clear military justification for capturing and destroying buildings that had become a military outpost.

That battle, like many in the 1948–49 war, was brutal and resulted in the depopulation of the village. In general, it is reasonable to criticize some aspects of Israeli conduct in the war and to argue that more could have been done to allow return. But it is misleading to suggest that Lohamei Hagetaot itself sits literally on the ruins of al‑Sumayriyya, and it is historically careless to describe the battle in purely moral language, “ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias” without mentioning the strategic context, along with the way the attack was carried out that saved civilian lives.

The term “Zionist militias” in the plural is also an error. Only the Hagannah took part in the battle, and it was already organized as an army and no longer conducted itself as a militia. Israel was declared on the day after the battle, and the IDF was created twelve days later, formally incorporating the Haganah units that took part in the battle.

The term “ethnic cleansing” is also a problem. Currently, it is widely used but poorly defined. There is no internationally recognized crime of “ethnic cleansing.” When people have been prosecuted for actions popularly labeled that way, it has been under particular charges like deportation, persecution, or murder.

Moreover, the 1948–49 war took place in a world where large‑scale population transfers, however awful, were frequently regarded as a legitimate, if tragic, means of resolving conflicts. For example, the internationally approved Greek‑Turkish population exchange after World War I, the vast movements and expulsions of Hindus and Muslims during the creation of India and Pakistan at almost the same time as the 1948-1949 Arab Israel War, and the forced expulsion of some 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945 which took place with international approval within the lives of the generation that fought the war.

None of this means that what happened to Palestinians was just. But it does mean that casually importing a modern, rhetorically loaded term like “ethnic cleansing” into a very different legal and political context, to cast aspersions on the reputations of “the two heroes of the [Warsaw Ghetto] Uprising,” demands argument and evidence, not a single citation to a partisan website.

Here, as elsewhere, the Israeli historian Benny Morris is more careful. In his magisterial book “1948,” [Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)], he documents expulsions and atrocities committed by Jewish forces.

Yet he concludes that “transfer or expulsion was never adopted by the Zionist movement or its main political groups as official policy at any stage… not even in the 1948 War.”[Morris, Kindle Ed. Loc. 5720.] While noting that, for a few months, there seemed to prevail a pro-transfer sentiment, he points out that by war’s end, significant Arab populations remained in places like Galilee, Haifa, and Jaffa—about 20% of Israel’s citizenry today. By contrast, areas conquered by Arab forces were completely emptied of Jews, and expulsionist thinking “characterized the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement since its inception.”[Morris, Kindle Ed. Loc 5727]

That the village of al‑Sumayriyya no longer exists is a tragic fact. But the suggestion that Lubetkin, Zuckerman, and their co-survivors are somehow tainted by “ethnic cleansing” simply by living on a kibbutz in a former British base is hard to square with the evidence.

If we want to discuss whether Crabapple’s misuse of the term reflects a debatable opinion or expresses an unacceptable prejudice, we need to note that it tellingly sits beside her account of living in Manhattan,[Crabapple, xix], a place from which the indigenous population is long gone, and her tender reflections about Ukrainian friends who assembled after a motorcycle trip at the park that currently occupies the site of the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in the Shoah, Babi Yar. She describes it as a site that cannot remain frozen in horror forever: “All land is watered with blood, she writes [Crabapple, Kindle Ed. p. 302.].

The problem is not that Crabapple criticizes Zionists or Israelis. Criticism of Israel is common, and sometimes deserved, in the international media and in scholarship about the region. Indeed, excellent Israeli historians and social scientists have written searing accounts of aspects of their own society. The problem is the double standard: harsh moral judgment and sloppy sourcing when Zionists are involved, coupled with understanding and forgiveness when others inhabit blood‑soaked ground.

Ironically, as with the “rotten fish” remark, the whole detour into 1948 was unnecessary for telling the Bund’s story, which had effectively ended with the Shoah. It appears, much like a proverbial Freudian slip, to manifest Crabapple’s professionally debilitating underlying prejudices.

Doykayt, anti‑Judaism, and the limits of progressive solidarity

Beyond its specific missteps, Crabapple’s book carries a warning for those attracted to the confusing set of positions now called “progressive,” especially within the Jewish community. At the heart of the Bund’s tragedy lies a failure to grasp two things: the role of anti‑Judaism in the societies around them, and the way modern political movements could turn brutally against Jews even when Jews fought on their side.

In the decades before the Shoah, Bundists argued that Jews should stay where they were, build Yiddish culture, demand national‑cultural autonomy, and ally with socialist movements. Along the way, they put up every obstacle they could to Zionism, which they saw as an escapist and reactionary fantasy. However, Zionism was not just a rival in the Jewish public square; it was, in retrospect, a possible way out of the brewing catastrophe. At certain moments, in the early 1920s, for example, had more Eastern European Jews chosen emigration to Palestine, many lives might have been saved.

From a strategic point of view, during the interwar years, the estimated 200,000 victims of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Civil War already posed a challenge to doykayt, a full generation before the Shoah. Jews were massacred by forces on all sides, revolutionary and counter‑revolutionary. As early as 1919, the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow wrote in his History of Zionism 1600-1918, anticipating Timothy Snyder by nine decades, that “it is impossible to allow the Jews to remain a prey to revolution and counter‑revolution, between which they are crushed just as the corn is ground between the upper and nether millstones.” That was a diagnosis contemporary with events, not hindsight. The Bund never really answered the challenge to their ideology implicit in Sokolow’s analysis.

Bundists were not blind to antisemitism. They organized self‑defense, strikes, Yiddish schools, and a separate Jewish socialist party precisely because they knew Jewish workers faced specific dangers. What seems absent from their internal organizational culture is a fundamental ability to reappraise their core diasporist assumptions in light of events. After the Russian Civil War pogroms and later in the midst of rising fascism and the mounting crisis of interwar Poland, the Bund continued to place enormous weight on socialist solidarity, the local struggle for minority rights, and the local struggle in societies where anti‑Jewish hostility was firmly established. It was a strategy that should not have been expected to succeed, and it did not.

In our era, the weakness of doykayt becomes clearer when studied alongside David Nirenberg’s account of anti‑Judaism. In “Anti‑Judaism: The Western Tradition,”[David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).] Nirenberg shows how, across Christian and Islamic societies, intellectuals repeatedly invented largely fictional constructs of “the Jew”—as symbol of legalism, greed, rootlessness, racial impurity, capitalism, communism, colonialism—and used those constructs to make sense of their own crises, often in places with few or no actual Jews. This continued long after these societies had secularized to one degree or another, and continues in Islam-based and Christianity-based societies to this day.

Anti‑Judaism, in this sense, is not only prejudice but a chronically recurring way of thinking, a pathological intellectual tool that can be adapted to very different circumstances.

The Bund failed to grasp how deeply such patterns were embedded in the political cultures around them. They believed that they could gain real solidarity. They underestimated how quickly and irrevocably Jews would again find themselves between the millstones when crisis came.

Contemporary Western Jews may recognize this pattern in reactions they encountered among too many erstwhile allies after October 7, 2023. Many who had invested in left‑wing alliances found that their erstwhile comrades reached instinctively for anti‑Jewish narratives about colonialism and “resistance,” rather than for solidarity with the victims.

Of course, the Bundists did not have Nirenberg’s analysis. They did, however, have the evidence of pogroms, revolution, and counter‑revolution, and the arguments of Zionist contemporaries who warned that Jews were uniquely exposed. They chose to double down on doykayt. Crabapple, a century later, chooses to double down on a romanticized version of their choice.

Because she ignores the need to examine the Bund’s political failure critically, Crabapple’s book has serious weaknesses. Coupled with careless use of sources and their deployment to demonize ideological rivals, her method makes the book difficult to rely on to comprehend the Bund’s role in Jewish history. Using “Here Where We Live Is Our Country” to understand the Bund is roughly as useful as reading Uris’s “Exodus” to understand Israel’s history, except that Uris published his musings as fiction.

Honest history should help us see the world as it is, even when it is dangerous, complicated, and hostile, and not as we would like it to be. The Bund’s tragedy was that it failed to keep Jews safe when catastrophe came, but while much of that result was a product of forces beyond their control, an important factor was the fact that it did not rethink its program after earlier disasters. It clung to a consoling vision of “hereness” in societies marked by deep anti‑Judaism. By refusing to confront that failure head‑on, Crabapple’s book repeats the Bund’s own evasion in historiographical form. In an era when Jews are again discovering the limits of their alliances, we cannot afford such soothing myths, whether Bundist, anti‑Zionist, or, for that matter, Zionist. We need unsparing, honest, self‑critical work of the sort that some Israeli historians, like Benny Morris, have produced, not sentimental triumphalism masquerading as history.

Author’s Note: My thanks to Prof. David Chinitz who read a (much lengthier) early version of this this article and offered his comments, my friend Ron Yavin who discussed the Bund at length with me and helped me to clarify some of my thinking, particuarly about the Anielewicz and Lohamei Hagetaot components of the essay, and to my wife Martha whose editing of all of my essays is invaluable. Note that I also made use of AI in part of my editing process (Grammarly) and in conducting my research (Perplexity AI). Of course_, all responsibility for any errors lies with me. This essay is a departure from my usual 800 to 1600-word format. I welcome input from readers if this longer form works for you.

This essay is a political endorsement (not that my endorsement will make or break a candidate) and an explanation. I have previously quoted the wise aphorism of F. Scott Fitzgerald in an essay describing what the Israeli right calls “BDS - Bibi Derangement Syndrome,” where they allege that an obsession with Netanyahu’s dysfunctions prevents clear thinking about our situation. There is some truth in that accusation. Netanyahu is profoundly dysfunctional. Note his latest caper: corrupting the vote on the State Comptroller’s position to elect his personal attorney. Yet, overfocusing on Netanyahu’s corruption and influence can steer us away from analyzing his appeal to so many Israelis and from correcting the systemic problems that make him politically possible.

Keeping Fitzgerald’s insight in mind is critical to thinking productively about Israel in this era and the opposition’s failure so far to halt Netanyahu’s operationally failed but politically successful career. Our polls show a consistent pattern of a society stuck in the ruts of government and opposition. The opposition enjoys a small but steady majority, yet cannot persuade more Netanyahu supporters to switch sides.

In this era of algorithm-guided public relations and a focus on fulfilling the polarizing desires of the base, we in Israel are largely led by people who have difficulty keeping “two opposed ideas in the mind” while continuing to “retain the ability to function.” Oddly, this is not just about how our leaders handle big questions, such as the future of our relationship with the Palestinians or the future of the Israeli Jewish society if the Haredim do not serve in the IDF. It goes to the root of what politicians are supposed to do. They need to keep in mind that Netanyahu is a catastrophe, but that his supporters need to be brought over and not driven away.

In an 1842 address to the Washingtonian Temperance Society in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln told his listeners that “when the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and true maxim that ‘a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’”

True, persuasion over bullying doesn’t always work, especially against forces like those Lincoln faced. Indeed, Lincoln’s election triggered Southern secession and the bloody Civil War that followed. Still, the productive, results-based politics he practiced held the North together during the War and achieved victory. That political methodology is about the art of persuasion.

Here is a secret our current public square largely ignores. People can change their minds. I speak from personal experience, having backed every territorial withdrawal and government-led peace initiative in my lifetime. But today, after October 7, I see no practical possibility of advancing on that path. I can offer personal testimony that opinions can change. What cannot change them is bullying, harassing, and insulting—the language of choice for today’s political leaders.

The key question in determining whom to support as our next prime minister is: Who among our current crop of political leaders engages in persuasion rather than the hyperactive distribution of gall? Who can pick up the reins after the next election and proceed to govern in ways that make a necessary change in the way our politicians do business, beyond simply reversing the roles of our currently dysfunctional government and opposition?​

A candidate who can persuade, rather than bully, is Gadi Eisenkot. In his three decades and more in the public eye, first as a renowned military officer who rose to Chief of the General Staff, and then in his political activity, he has shown the character we so desperately need to fill the position at the helm. He has integrity. In all his years in the public eye, there has been no allegation of corruption that cannot be said, lamentably, about too many of his colleagues. He has no left-wing delusions to discard about the possibility of achieving a messianic peace accord with the Palestinians. He has a record of supporting social solidarity, as reflected in his economic policy. These characteristics would have made him a primary candidate for a senior position in Menachem Begin’s Likud. They probably disqualify him from Netanyahu’s party.​

Eisenkot is a unifying figure. His Jewish ethnic origins are Moroccan; his parents were born there. He was born and raised in Tiberias on the Lake of Galilee, in what is often described as Israel’s underdeveloped “periphery.” Most impressive was the dignity and compassion toward others in the same situation with which he handles the fact that his son and his nephew were killed in combat in the course of the current war. He speaks as a bereaved father in Israel, a role that carries considerable moral authority. If he becomes the prime minister, he will be in a position to persuade rather than bully. Since we can expect the Likud to pursue the polarizing political methodologies that Netanyahu has injected into it, Eisenkot will need all the persuasive skills he can muster.

Eisenkot can do the job in the way that it needs to be done, which I do not feel I can say about any of the other candidates for the position.

Future historians may well turn to the recent NY Times essay by Senator Christopher Van Hollen as an example of the futility of reasoning with those whose antisemitic views rest on accepting stories that cannot be true. While I do not know his personal attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, and I avoid generalizing labels, I find that Van Hollen’s op-ed shows the Orwellian irrationality at the core of contemporary antisemitism.

In his opening paragraph, he claims: “Democrats need to face a hard truth. While Republicans’ approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has failed, so has ours. The Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” Van Hollen critiques his party for what he sees as uncritical backing of Israel, setting the tone for his wider argument.

However, for those of us in Israel during the Biden years, Democratic support often looked inconsistent, sometimes strong and supportive, sometimes hostile or confused, as during the Rafah episode (fiasco?). Thus, Van Hollen’s “hard truth” is more of a story than a fact.

To analyze such arguments further, it is useful to apply what I have called Henry’s Principle. Taught to me by the late Rev. Dr. Henry Marksberry during my hospital chaplaincy training, this principle holds that paying attention to what people do not say can be as important as listening to what they do say.

One of these is Van Hollen’s erasure of the Clinton Administration’s efforts to achieve a Palestinian-Israeli peace accord that ended with Arafat’s inability to say yes at Camp David. Having erased the event, Van Hollen will not ask why Arafat had so much trouble with the concept of compromise with Jews. And he does not have to trouble himself with explaining why we can expect a different result from essentially recapitulating the Clinton Administration’s policies.

Van Hollen also ignores the military reality that Hamas used its civilian population as a shield. Condemning Israel’s response without noting that Gaza’s infrastructure was used as a massive Hamas military facility reduces his argument to a story that could not possibly be true.

Most importantly, and consistent with Henry’s Principle, Senator Van Hollen omits from his 1200-word essay how the Democratic Party should confront Islamism. The past generation has revealed the considerable influence Islamism has over the majority of Palestinians. Yet, among the “hard truths” Van Hollen claims to deliver to his party, this aspect seems to have eluded his attention. Without creating a context in which Islamists can be brought to understand the need to make peace with Israel, Van Hollen’s “hard truths” are neither true nor hard. They come to little more than a proposal to resurrect already-failed policies and hope for the best.

Which is why Van Hollen’s suggested steps for the Democratic Party, such as “The next Democratic president should recognize a State of Palestine that is subject to clear benchmarks, including free and fair elections,” risk generating disastrous results in the region if a new Administration chooses to implement them.

Van Hollen’s suggestion overlooks two key factors that long characterize Palestinian political life: the religious impulses behind much Palestinian militancy and widespread Palestinian dissatisfaction with their leadership.

Who will govern this State of Palestine, subject to “clear benchmarks?” The Palestinians have not used the past three decades since Arafat returned from exile, as the Jews used the decades of the British Mandate, building a viable proto-state with competent professional and administrative leadership ready to undertake state functions. Following this objective failure to perform, Palestinians lack confidence in their purported leaders’ ability to fulfill their responsibilities.

As the French (pro-Palestinian) researcher Francois Ceccaldi noted in a melancholy interview about a year ago: “ … polls show a general loss of confidence in all Palestinian political forces. The Palestinian Authority is perceived as corrupt and ineffective. Its authoritarian governance and diplomatic isolation limit its room for maneuver. As for Hamas, although it embodies resistance in the eyes of some Palestinians, it is unable to offer a credible alternative. “

Van Hollen seems to have a problem noticing that the heart of the problem is not just the occupation or violence from settlers, but the inability of the Palestinian side to compromise. He neglects or refuses to wrestle with the fact that this inability is largely anchored in a religious worldview about the non-sovereign and fundamentally unequal place that important Islamic traditions allocate to non-Muslims in a Muslim polity and the belief that Israel and neighboring areas are inseparable from the Muslim Levant. Even an Israeli return to pre-1967 ceasefire lines would not overcome this barrier, as we saw in the case of the total military withdrawal from Gaza.

Added to the proven inability of Palestinians to create a coherent state-on-the-way, we can see that Israeli objections, drawn not from the far-right but from probably about 80% of Israeli voters, to creating the State of Palestine at this time are not the caprice of a neighborhood bully, as Van Hollen seems to imagine it, but a sane, reasoned response to a harsh reality.

By omitting these basic issues, Van Hollen’s essay becomes more of a story that cannot be true than a genuine analysis, recalling Orwell and highlighting a lack of rigor in his moral critique.

​Generally, politicians are not known for moral insights; their desire for power often overshadows ethical reservations, which makes them especially susceptible to being conduits for antisemitic anti-Judaism. What Van Hollen can do to somewhat rectify his misdeed in publishing this op-ed, if he has the public courage, is to write a follow-up outlining the Palestinians’ responsibilities in creating conditions for statehood and perhaps addressing the potential consequences if the benchmarks he proposes for the State of Palestine are not met. That op-ed, if written with integrity, would immediately alienate him from the progressive wing of his Democratic Party, so we ought not expect him to write anything like it soon.

About a year and a half ago, I published a response to the obituaries of former President Jimmy Carter entitled: “It Matters That Carter’s Antisemitism Doesn’t Matter.” The bizarre silence of most obits about Carter’s frequent hostility toward Judaism, Israel, and Jews attracted my attention. Similar silences remain a focus because they speak to hostile assumptions, prejudices, and judgments.

This time, my thoughts are provoked by the voter attraction of the losing candidate in the May Democratic Party’s 35th Congressional District primary elections, the antisemite Maureen Galindo. Though she lost the primary, she still gained over a third of the vote and attracted a higher percentage of voters in the runoff than in the first round!!

Most explanations stressed that her antisemitic comments only appeared after she won 29% of the votes in the first stage of the primary in March, placing first. Another excuse was that many votes in support of her were submitted early. Both suggestions miss the deeper cause of Galindo’s significant voter support. Her antisemitism was not an obstacle.

Ms. Galindo is one of those paranoid conspiracy advocates that American society produces regularly. They appear so often that both major parties have vetting processes to prevent the kind of embarrassment (mostly among coastal elite Democrats) that Ms. Galindo has evidently caused. However, in her case, vetting didn’t work.

It was not just the party apparat that failed to identify the problem in time. After the first stage of the primary in March, the San Antonio Current described her merely as a “colorful candidate,” also calling her “a San Antonio activist known for spinning dubious left-wing conspiracy theories on TikTok.” The article did not note her antisemitism.

It was not until late in the Democratic Party primary elections process, on May 11, 2026, that a New York Times report published in the Opinion Section, entitled “Democrats Can’t Let This Antisemitic Sex Therapist Win Her Runoff,” referred to “a Facebook video released last Fall” (i.e. Fall 2025, 4-5 months before the March 3rd first stage of the Democratic primary), where Galindo expressed her concern about “Jewish individuals collaborating with Christian Zionists in efforts to instigate the Rapture;” Referred to the film “Left Behind” and said: “All of the Jews who own Holywood, they utilize literature and films to shape realities; and urged her audience to embrace “the genuine, radical Jesus, who was opposing church leadership of 2000 years ago that still persists.”

Between the first and second stages of the primary, Galindo really went to town. On May 13th, she shared her opinion on Instagram (writing in the third person): “She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking. (It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists).”

In that same Instagram post, she wrote: “When Maureen gets into Congress, she’ll write legislation so that all Zionism and support of Zionism is undoubtedly Anti-Semitic (sic), since it’s Zionists harming the Semites.”

On the same day, she went on Texas Public Radio to say “anybody who is supported by Israel should be tried for treason.” On social media, CBS News reports she suggested that “Zionist associated candidates and politicians” deserve “treason trials.”

The Democratic Party rushed to condemn her. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene issued a joint statement declaring Galindo’s language “disqualifying” and said such talk “has no place in American politics, and certainly not in the Democratic Party.”

AOC called her comments “absolutely disgusting.”

Democratic Party leaders suspected that Galindo was indirectly backed by Republicans. Axios reports that the Lead Left PAC, a somewhat mysterious organization whose website metadata includes a link to the GOP fundraising site WinRed, spent $600,000 supporting Galindo.

Awakening late to the threat that it might have an explosive problem on its hands, the Democratic Party leadership launched a last-minute fundraising effort for Galindo’s rival and succeeded in bringing about her defeat.

Everyone in the Democratic Party camp breathed a sigh of relief. But that relief is misplaced. Note that in the first stage of the election primary, Galindo won 29% of the vote. In the runoff, she won 36%. A flagrant antisemite actually increased her share of the vote after her antisemitism was exposed, denounced, and widely publicized.

Why? The NY Times, which seems capable of understatement so long as it is not talking about allegations of canine rape of Palestinians by Israeli dogs, suggested that despite “fervent discourse in Washington and among political commentators online, the primary runoff seemed to attract notably less interest within Texas’s 35th congressional district.” I find it rare that I agree with the NY Times, but they are correct here. The numbers speak eloquently.

I have been unable to locate any research indicating that voters for Galindo’s rival, Jonny Garcia, voted against her because of her vicious antisemitism. Even Garcia, in explaining his victory, only spoke of Galindo trying “to divide our communities” without specifically noting her antisemitism. It would be an interesting topic for social research, because the indications from this primary election are that there will be very few, if any. Out there on the ground, in a Texas electoral district with few Jews, antisemitism did not matter.

If we can draw lessons from the history of human bigotries, one of them is that only the most deeply embedded achieve that status. For many Texans, antisemitism is so deeply embedded that it either does not affect their vote or they see it as a feature, not a bug. For American Jews, this is yet another in a lengthening list of negative indicators regarding the future of America and of its Jews.