On August 24, 1929, an Arab mob attacked the Jewish community of Hebron. Sixty-seven Jews were murdered in a day. There was no State of Israel. No Israeli army. No Israeli ‘occupation’ of the West Bank. No post-1967 settlement movement.

There were Jews: members of an old Sephardi community, long-established Ashkenazi families, and newer arrivals, including students at the Slobodka yeshiva established there several years earlier. In Hebron, Jews and Arabs largely lived as neighbors and traded with one another. Four days before the massacre, Haganah representatives came to Hebron and offered the Jewish community armed protection or evacuation to Jerusalem. Eliezer Dan Slonim, one of the community’s leaders, declined. He trusted Hebron’s Arab notables and feared that armed Jewish defenders would provoke the very violence they hoped to prevent.

Then, amid escalating tensions across Mandatory Palestine, Jews were attacked in their homes and in the yeshiva. Afterward, British authorities evacuated the surviving Jewish community.

Hebron matters because it interrupts a story we have become accustomed to telling. Much of the contemporary conversation about Israelis and Palestinians implicitly begins much later. Begin in 1967 and the organizing fact is occupation: Israel controls territory populated by Palestinians, settlements expand, Palestinians resist. Move the starting point back to 1948 and the story changes. Now the organizing facts are the creation of Israel, war, Palestinian displacement, and the absence of the Arab state the partition plan had envisioned.

Both starting points illuminate something real.

But neither can explain Hebron in 1929.

Where You Begin

Where a history begins shapes what it appears to explain. If your story foregrounds centuries of Jewish persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, Zionism appears as refuge and liberation. If it starts with the ‘Nakba,’ hostility to Israel is seen as a response to dispossession. If your story starts with ‘occupation,’ Palestinian violence becomes intelligible primarily as resistance to occupation.

Hebron forces one particularly important correction. Anti-Jewish violence in Mandatory Palestine did not begin as a response to Israeli sovereignty or military occupation. The Jews murdered there had no Jewish state exercising power over Palestinians and no Jewish army protecting them. Indeed, 1929 did not merely predate Jewish power: the failure of British protection strengthened the case for Jewish self-defense and pushed some previously indifferent or anti-Zionist Jews toward Zionism.

Any account in which Jewish power explains the conflict in its entirety therefore has a chronological problem.

So add more history. The violence did not emerge from nowhere. Palestinian Arabs feared growing Jewish immigration, land purchases, loss of livelihood, and eventual Jewish political domination. Those fears were real political forces, and the British Shaw Commission later identified them as fundamental causes of the wider unrest. That context makes the explanation fuller without making the massacre any more defensible.

Then complicate it again. This is not the whole story either. On Tisha B’Av, some 300 Jewish demonstrators, many of them Betar members, marched to the Western Wall, raised the flag, and sang Hatikvah. The demonstration was peaceful, but false reports soon circulated that Jews had attacked Muslims and threatened Muslim holy places. Religion raised the stakes: territorial claims became sacred claims, political defeat became desecration, and violence acquired the force of religious duty. Hamas’s name for its October 7 assault, “Al-Aqsa Flood,” drew on a similar religious frame and again invoked a threatened Muslim sanctuary to justify mass violence. Any serious history of this conflict has to treat religion as a central force, not a footnote.

And even inside Hebron, the categories refuse to behave. Arab rioters murdered Jews. Other Arab families hid Jews in their homes and saved their lives. Neighbors became murderers. Other neighbors refused and saved lives.

The Morality Play

The appeal of binaries like oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and indigenous, aggressor and victim is not historical. It is moral. They sort the protagonists before the history has been told and offer the satisfaction of knowing who belongs on which side. They also compress a century of changing circumstances into a few moral labels, obscuring more than they explain.

The problem is compounded when those labels harden into permanent identities. Jews and Palestinians become characters in a morality tale, rather than people whose circumstances, vulnerabilities, aspirations, and actions change across time.

Hebron makes that difficult. Jews were living there for centuries before Israel, before so-called occupation, and before the contemporary conditions these categories are meant to describe. They included families rooted there for generations. They were attacked while defenseless and then evacuated by the British who had failed to protect them. None of that erases Palestinian rootedness or suffering. It simply makes fixed, simplistic moral roles impossible to sustain.

That is what historical thinking is supposed to do: test the framework against the facts, not trim the facts to fit the framework. Once inconvenient evidence has to be removed to preserve the casting, we are no longer studying history. We are sorting it.

What History Is For

Historical complexity does not mean suspending judgment. It means making judgment answer to the full record. Understanding the grievances that preceded a massacre does not excuse the massacre. Recognizing Jewish historical belonging does not settle Palestinian political rights. Recognizing disparities of power does not turn every act against Israelis or Jews into legitimate “resistance.” Complexity is not a demand for symmetry. Responsibility can be unequal and the history still complicated.

That should be the point of teaching this history. Education should make students’ thinking harder to manipulate and their judgments easier to defend, not prescribe a political position or make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fit neatly inside the political vocabulary they already possess.

That discipline is difficult because simple frameworks offer something history rarely does: immediate moral clarity. Students should instead learn to ask:

• What does my starting point make invisible?

• What facts would complicate my explanation?

• What does a different chronology contain that mine leaves out?

The answers may still lead them to different political conclusions. That is not a failure of historical education. History should discipline political judgment, not dictate it.

History Is Not a Blueprint

Discovering that Jews lived in Hebron long before 1967 does not tell us what Israeli policy in Hebron should be today. Historical presence establishes belonging, but it does not automatically settle sovereignty, borders, military rule, settlements, or Palestinian political rights.

History matters enormously to this conflict, but the future cannot simply be derived from the past. There is no historical ledger that, once properly balanced, will tell us where a border should run or how two peoples should live alongside one another now. Competing claims of historical justice can explain what each side believes it is owed, but they cannot by themselves produce a workable future.

Any serious political solution must therefore be pragmatic and forward-looking, asking what can actually work, what guarantees security, and what allows both peoples to build a future. The point is not to forget history, but to refuse to become captive to it.

August 24, 1929 does not tell us how the conflict should end. It shows how much our explanations depend on where we begin. A conflict with this much history becomes simple only when enough of it is removed. Hebron puts some of it back.

The Siegels

A few weeks ago I had the privilege to sit with Keith and Aviva Siegel. Keith was held hostage in Gaza for four hundred and eighty-four days. Starved, moved from place to place, kept alive by people who would have been just as content to let him die. When I met them, I expected many things. Anger. Exhaustion. A hardness earned the most honest of ways, through suffering. What I didn’t expect was that they would say, plainly and without performance, that they still believe the Palestinians should have a state of their own.

I’ve kept thinking about their optimism. It would be easy to call it naive, but it’s most certainly not. Naivete is a failure to understand the stakes. The Siegels understand the stakes better than anyone. What they were expressing was not innocence either. It was a refusal to let what was done to them decide who they would become. That’s a different thing entirely, and it’s much harder.

Now this isn’t the sort of essay where the writer meets someone who suffered and chose grace, and the whole piece tilts toward hope. Peace is possible. Both sides want the same thing underneath. If only the leaders would sit down. Blah blah blah. I don’t believe that, and I won’t pretend.

Two States?

Here’s what I actually think. There’s no two-state solution available right now. Not delayed, not blocked by a stubborn government, not one election away. Unavailable. And the reason is not complicated: there is no trust. There is no reason for there to be trust. Israel does not trust that a Palestinian state next door would not become Gaza 2.0, and after October 7 that fear is hardly irrational.

Consider what trust would actually require. It would require Israel to take a wide piece of land - the West Bank - that presses directly against its narrow middle, hand governance of it to a leadership that cannot credibly guarantee that the territory will not become a base for another October 7 attack, and hope. Hope that this time the withdrawal does not become a launching pad. We have already run a version of that experiment. In 2005 Israel uprooted every settlement and withdrew its permanent forces from inside Gaza. What grew there wasn’t a peaceful state but a garrison pointed inward, and on the seventh of October it fired.

And the danger is not only a hostile Palestinian state. It is a failed one. In the Middle East, political vacuums rarely remain empty. Where the state cannot control territory and monopolize force, militias and terrorist groups fill the space. Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria have supplied enough examples. Israel cannot afford another one nine miles from the Mediterranean.

So when someone tells me that Israel should leave the West Bank entirely, I do not disagree with them in principle. It probably should, at some point. But ‘at some point’ carries almost everything in that sentence. The West Bank is, more than anything, territory abutting Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion airport, the coastal spine where most Israelis live. At the country’s narrowest point along the pre-1967 lines, only about nine miles (15 kilometers) separate the West Bank from the Mediterranean. A miscalculation there does not look like Gaza. It looks worse. Given where the world sits at this moment, given October 7 and everything that has come after it, Israel cannot make that move. Not will not. Cannot, and should not be asked to.

This is the part of my own thinking I find hardest to hold, because it doesn’t resolve. I believe both of these things at the same time. I believe - as most Jews do - that Palestinians deserve dignity, self-determination, a future that is theirs. And I believe Israel would be reckless, close to suicidal, to trade its security for that outcome under current conditions. Those two beliefs do not cancel each other out. They just sit there, side by side, refusing to be reconciled.

Tragic Patience

I call this tragic patience. Tragic patience is accepting that an outcome can be both necessary in the long run and dangerously premature now. But patience is tragic only if the destination remains visible. Otherwise it is just permanence. . The tragedy is not that peace is running late. The tragedy is that realism forbids the very gesture the idealists keep demanding, and both of those facts are true.

There is a temptation, when you understand this, to let patience curdle into comfort. And this is where some personal perspective is beneficial. When I’m there, I walk the streets in Israel and see people living. Really living. Sending their kids to university, filling cafes, arguing about everything, building companies that cure diseases and move water and rewrite what a small country can do in the world. There is something magnificent in that refusal to be defined by the conflict. But there is also a quiet danger in it. When one side is thriving and the other is not, patience is a great deal easier for the side doing the thriving. The status quo that feels like endurance from Tel Aviv feels like something else from Ramallah.

What patience requires

I don’t have a resolution for that, and I am suspicious of anyone who offers one quickly. What I have instead is the memory of Keith Siegel, who by every right should be the last man on earth to hold space for Palestinian statehood, holding it anyway. I can’t match his generosity, and am not sure I should try. But I can’t dismiss it either, and I have stopped wanting to.

The Palestinian people and question will not disappear. That is the other half of my realism, the half that is uncomfortable from my side of the line. Whatever share of the blame belongs to their leadership, and I think it is most of it, the millions of people are still there, and they will still be there in fifty years. A realist has to reckon with that too. Managing it, indefinitely, is not a solution. It is simply a status quo that has proved tolerable enough to persist.

Israel’s election this October offers a slim measure of hope. No, a new government won’t manufacture a Palestinian partner. But Israel still controls its side of the equation. It can restore order in the West Bank. It can stop making eventual separation harder. That would not produce peace but at least preserve the possibility of one.

So I wait, and I know what I’m waiting for. Not a peace conference. I am waiting for a Palestinian leadership, after more than twenty-one years under Abbas (now 90), willing to accept that Israel is permanent and make building a future beside it the central Palestinian goal. And I am waiting for Israel to stop confusing the absence of such a partner with permission to make that future impossible. Until the first arrives, Israel cannot safely make the territorial gamble. Until the second happens, “patience” risks becoming an excuse. The tragedy is having to hold all these truths at once.

“The speech in question is protected under the First Amendment.”

Some version of that sentence has become a familiar response to reports of antisemitic speech in American schools and universities. It has an unusual property: it is often legally correct and institutionally incomplete.

Used as a complete answer, it treats protected speech and antisemitic speech as though they were mutually exclusive categories. Once speech is deemed protected, the questions of what was said and what an institution should do about it quietly disappear. The legal finding becomes the institutional response. But legal protection answers whether speech may be restricted, not what it means or how an institution should respond.

The Distinction

Three questions keep collapsing into one:

Should someone be allowed to say this? That is about permission.

What does it mean? That is about content.

What should be done? That is about responsibility.

Answer the first and you have answered exactly one of them.

A statement can be protected and antisemitic at the same time. This would be unremarkable with any other prejudice. Racist and misogynistic arguments can be constitutionally protected. Protection from punishment does not launder the content. Strangely, this distinction becomes unstable when Jews identify antisemitism: The discussion moves from what was said to whether the speaker was allowed to say it.

Calling an argument antisemitic is not prohibiting it, it is answering it. The First Amendment limits the government’s power to suppress speech. It doesn’t shield an argument from scrutiny. There is an enormous space between the government may punish you for saying this and there is nothing here worth responding to. Almost everything that matters lives in that space.

K-12

The distinction should be easiest in elementary and secondary schools. A middle-school classroom is not a street corner. Public-school students retain constitutional rights, but schools regulate speech as part of maintaining a functioning learning environment.

Even under an expansive view of K–12 speech rights, a school still owes a targeted student a response. It can document an incident so a pattern can be recognized, inform the family, increase supervision, and address the speech directly. An educator can explain why a remark such as “Hitler should have finished the job” is antisemitic and why it matters. None of that restricts anyone’s speech. It’s simply education.

A recent confidential case brought to a Jewish Federation shows the problem clearly. In the account, one student told a fifth-grade Jewish student, “I hate Jewish people and I hope they all die.” When the Jewish student raised the incident, the teacher reportedly responded that the other student “has freedom of speech.” Even if the statement was protected, that would answer only whether the school could punish it, not what it meant or what the school owed the targeted student. “Free speech” becomes an alibi for refusing to respond.

Title VI may also require federally funded schools to respond when harassment based on Jewish ancestry or ethnic characteristics creates a hostile environment. But the argument does not depend on Title VI. Even if the statute vanished tomorrow, a school would still have a responsibility to teach children what words mean.

The University

Universities require a different presumption. Their students are adults, and their purpose includes exposure to offensive and unsettling ideas. Political speech should receive wide latitude, especially at public universities. A university worthy of the name should be reluctant to punish arguments merely because they are morally repellent.

But reluctance to punish is not an obligation to become intellectually mute. A university can protect an argument and still criticize it. A professor can allow or even assign an ugly claim and interrogate its assumptions. An administration can decline to discipline protected speech while explaining that it relies on an antisemitic trope.

The confusion became a national spectacle in December 2023, when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified before Congress. When asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their harassment policies, the presidents answered largely in the language of context and disciplinary thresholds. Strictly speaking, that was responsive to the question asked, but it exposed the underlying confusion: speech can fall short of a disciplinary threshold and still be antisemitic and morally grotesque. The presidents had become fluent in explaining when speech could be disciplined and hesitant to say plainly what the speech was.

Where It Gets Harder

Israel is where the distinction becomes more complex, and the free-speech objection deserves more weight. Israel is a state whose government and policies are proper subjects of criticism, defense, debate, and protest. There is a real danger in treating every harsh criticism of Israel as antisemitism. A word that means everything protects no one.

But political speech and prejudice can share a sentence. Saying that Jews control Washington on Israel’s behalf invokes an antisemitic conspiracy. Screaming “baby killers” at strangers wearing Stars of David is collective blame. Excluding Jewish students from a non-political campus club unless they publicly renounce their Zionism is a discriminatory condition imposed on Jews.

Those are the easier cases because they involve conspiracy, collective blame, and discriminatory exclusion. Anti-Zionism is harder because it sits at the boundary between political argument and a judgment about the legitimacy of Jewish collective rights.

Is opposing Zionism antisemitic? Let’s begin with a definition: At its minimum, Zionism is the claim that Jews are a people entitled to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

Now, it is one thing to sit in a seminar and argue about Zionism’s history, competing currents, consequences, or nationalism itself. Claims that particular Zionists, Israeli governments, policies, or historical actions have been racist, violent, or unjust should be examined on their merits. Those are not questions for a disciplinary office to settle. The response is to answer the argument, not remove it.

It is another to declare Jewish national self-determination itself inherently racist or genocidal, or otherwise uniquely illegitimate. The claim is no longer about a government, war, or policy, but that Jewish collective self-determination is itself morally suspect. “Anti-Zionism” makes this sound like an argument about politics, where in fact this is a demand to end the State of Israel: to eliminate an existing country and revoke a right to self-determination Jews have already secured. That such a demand is routinely treated as merely a critique of “Zionism” is part of the confusion. As we have made that case elsewhere (here and here), that crosses from political criticism into antisemitism.

Nor do I think anti-Zionist Jews settle the question. Members of a group can endorse ideas about their own group that others reasonably regard as prejudicial. The identity of the speaker does not determine the content of the claim.

Some will dispute that judgment. Fine. The argument here does not depend on everyone agreeing with me about where that line is. The point is narrower: as the clearer cases already establish, antisemitic speech can still be protected speech. Calling a claim antisemitic is not an attempt to silence it. It is an argument about what the claim means. That is the distinction institutions keep losing: protection from punishment is not protection from judgment.

The Job

The fifth-grade teacher’s ‘freedom of speech’ response captures the error in miniature: it answered whether the speaker could speak as though that settled what had been said and what the school should do.

An institution that responds to an antisemitic statement only by invoking free expression has confused protecting speech with discharging its responsibility. It has protected itself from the work of judgment and from whoever might be annoyed by it.

Protect the protest and enforce rules against assault, threats, intimidation, exclusion, and disruption. Let the ugly argument be made, then take it apart. Decline to discipline protected speech and still call a trope a trope. Defend the speaker’s rights and support the students the speaker targeted. An institution that does those things has censored no one. It has simply refused to pretend that it doesn’t understand English.

Here is what happened:

Thirteen Soviet Jews were shot in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. Five were among the Soviet Union’s leading Yiddish writers. The others included an actor, a physician, editors, translators, officials, and communal leaders. A secret military court, sitting without prosecutor or defense counsel, had convicted them of espionage, treason, and nationalist activity.

Much of the evidence against them was work the Soviet government had asked them to do.

Borrowed

Ten years earlier, German forces were advancing across Soviet territory, murdering entire Jewish communities, and Moscow needed money and support from abroad. Soviet Jews could reach Jewish audiences in America in a way the Kremlin could not. So the government created the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and placed Solomon Mikhoels, the country’s most celebrated Yiddish actor and director, at its head.

In 1943, Mikhoels and the poet Itzik Fefer toured the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Britain, speaking to enormous Jewish crowds and raising money for the Soviet war effort.

They succeeded because they appealed not only to antifascists or fellow citizens, but specifically to fellow Jews. The solidarity was real. Jews who had never met understood themselves as bound by history, memory, and obligation. The Soviet state did not create those bonds. It borrowed them. Jewish solidarity was welcome because it brought money and political support to Moscow.

Then the committee became more than an instrument. Soviet Jews began writing to it about missing relatives, ruined communities, discrimination, and the struggle to rebuild. An office built to speak to Jews abroad had become an address for Jews at home.

The committee also gathered testimony about the Nazi murder of Soviet Jews and helped compile the Black Book. Soviet censors refused publication. They demanded that the editors play down the Jewish character of the killings and the role of local collaborators. All Soviet peoples had suffered together, the official story insisted. The book was suppressed and its typeset pages destroyed. Jews were permitted to be dead, but they were not permitted to be distinctly dead.

Confiscated

After the war, the committee had become intolerable to the Soviet regime. The Soviets confiscated what they had borrowed, and the same conduct acquired a new meaning: Contact with foreign Jews became espionage. Advocacy for ruined Jewish communities became nationalism. Documenting murdered Jews as Jews became disloyalty.

In January 1948, Mikhoels was killed and his death staged as a traffic accident. The committee was dissolved and its members arrested. Their letters, speeches, and poems were read back to them as evidence.

The state had not discovered disloyalty. It had reclassified their Jewish solidarity as disloyalty. These men had not chosen Jews over country. Many were Communists who had served Soviet institutions all their lives. But the state required that being Soviet be all they were. And yet something was left over — an attachment to Jewish history, to Jewish dead, to living Jews elsewhere — and the remainder was the crime. The state had used them to speak to the Jewish world. It killed them for proving that such a world existed.

The case was later annulled: after Stalin’s death, the Soviet Military Collegium found no substance to the charges, and the testimony on which they rested was shown to have been extracted through torture and coercion.

This is how the charge of dual loyalty works. It asks for no evidence of betrayal, because the attachment is itself the betrayal. And nothing answers it: no record of service, no war fought, no Party card. The defendants had all of that. None of it counted, because the question was never really about their conduct.

Across Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaigns, Jews were called rootless cosmopolitans, attached to nowhere, and bourgeois nationalists, attached too fiercely to their own. Having no home, and loving another one too much. The contradiction was not a flaw in the accusation. It was the accusation. Antisemitism has rarely needed a coherent theory of the Jews. It needs only to make Jewish difference incriminating in whatever form it appears. The accusation changes, but the target remains Jewish collective existence.

Now

American Jews are not facing secret military trials or executions in prison basements, and comparing the punishments would be obscene. What carries over is not the penalty but the shape of the demand.

Look at which forms of Jewishness move most easily through Western societies: a personal faith, a cuisine, a family story, a remembered persecution, a set of universal ethics. Jewishness is easiest to welcome when it stays personal and as long as one doesn’t need to concede that Jews are a people with real interests and claims of their own.

The demand has rarely been that Jews stop being Jewish. It has more often been that they reduce Jewishness to a private faith, or to a set of universal moral values, and give up the rest: national memory, collective solidarity, political agency, the right to organize as a people. Everything collective gets renamed: Solidarity becomes tribalism. Peoplehood becomes nationalism. Attachment to Israel becomes dual loyalty. Jewish advocacy becomes foreign influence.

Zionism attracts most of this, because it gives peoplehood a political form. It can be argued with, and often should be. But asking Jews to disown Jewish self-determination as the price of admission is not asking them to oppose a policy. It is asking them to agree that collective agency is ordinary for other peoples and disqualifying for their own.

None of this is abstract. Since October 7, the publishing industry has found room for Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Molly Crabapple’s history of the anti-Zionist Bund, and Benjamin Moser’s forthcoming Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History. That these books were published is not the problem. The narrowing in the other direction is.

Zionist Jewish writers describe proposals that stall, events that disappear, and online lists classifying authors as “Zionists,” sometimes on the basis of little more than a passing connection to Israel or Jewish communal life.

Eli Sharabi, released after 491 days in Hamas captivity, reportedly struggled to secure a British publisher for Hostage. Once published, it reached bestseller lists in Britain and the United States.

Novelists whose work has nothing to do with Israel have been swept onto the same lists by association alone. In late July, a Nashville bookstore canceled Alyssa Rosenheck’s launch for White. Blonde. Jew. after an online campaign accused the store of promoting Zionism. The owner said the resulting security burden was more than the store could bear. Debbie Lechtman describes a book proposal that spent years on submission and received overwhelmingly positive feedback. One publisher finally suggested the edit: leave October 7 out. Everything else worked. The Soviet censors told the editors of the Black Book to play down the Jewish character of the Nazi killings. Different stakes. The same edit.

So the bargain is conditional belonging: Jews may remain Jewish so long as they give up their stubborn insistence that they are a people: the solidarity that crosses borders, the history that keeps running back to Israel, and the right to act together as Jews, for Jews.

We already know what the bargain is worth. The men in the Lubyanka basement had lived inside every limit their state imposed. They wrote in the permitted language, in official institutions, for a committee the government itself had invented.

It did not save them, because the limits were never the point. What the state reached for was the thing underneath: the ability of Jews to remember, to organize, to speak, and to act as a people. That was the crime.

The same capacity is once again described as dangerous, and it is usually this part of Jewish life that is being asked to step aside.

The thirteen murdered on August 12, 1952:

Dovid Bergelson, novelist
Itsik Fefer, poet
Dovid Hofshteyn, poet
Leyb Kvitko, poet
Perets Markish, poet
Benjamin Zuskin, actor
Boris Shimeliovich, hospital director
Solomon Lozovsky, diplomat
Joseph Yuzefovich, historian
Leon Talmy, journalist and translator
Ilya Vatenberg, lawyer and editor
Khayke Vatenberg-Ostrovskaya, translator
Emilia Teumin, editor

Something in us loves a ruin.

Not the ruin itself per se, but what it does to a story. Destruction has a shape, a date, a cause, a villain, a before, and an after. You can build a commemoration around it or teach it to a ten-year-old in one lesson. Our calendars are organized around catastrophe and rescue. Our news cycles turn on the moment a thing breaks, and our politics on the warning that it is about to.

Maintenance has none of this. Maintenance resists narrative. It’s the work of converting moments of mobilization into durability. It’s an engineer replacing a part that hasn’t yet failed, on a road no one thinks about, with money that could have gone to something with a ribbon to cut. It’s the third year of a policy that won’t show results for some time, or the governance review that no one cares to read about.

There’s nothing dramatic about maintenance. Its success is strangely self-erasing. When maintenance works, the bridge doesn’t collapse, the institution doesn’t fail, and the emergency never arrives. Nothing happened, which makes the work that prevented it look unnecessary.

I’ve been thinking about this asymmetry because it describes one of the central Jewish temptations of the moment, on both sides of the Atlantic: mistaking survival of the emergency for resolution of the problem. Emergency produces clarity, mobilization, and sometimes heroism. But survival becomes durable only through the slower work of converting emergency achievements into institutions, habits, and capacity.

Israel after the emergency

By any historical measure, Israel has just come through an extraordinary run of military achievement. Hezbollah, the “crown jewel” of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” which spent two decades accumulating an arsenal designed to make northern Israel unlivable, has been degraded to a fraction of what it was. The Iranian regime itself absorbed strikes that would have been unthinkable in 2021, and lost its Supreme Leader (and most of its other leaders) in the process. Hostages came home. Israel survived other attacks, and still, its people party on the beach.

Every one of these is a precondition. None of them is a policy.

Military success isn’t self-executing. It creates an opening. Politics decides whether that opening becomes an arrangement or closes again.

Weakening Hezbollah isn’t the same as building a stable northern border. A stable northern border requires a Lebanese army able and willing to actually hold ground it’s been handed, a political settlement that survives the next Lebanese government, and Israeli communities willing to move their children back into their homes. The pilot zones in the south are a test of institutions, not of firepower, and institutions are slower and less satisfying than airstrikes.

A ceasefire in Gaza is not the same as determining Gaza’s future. The hostages are home and large-scale fighting has subsided, but nearly every structural question remains open. A new roadmap now envisages phased Hamas disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, technocratic administration, and international security supervision. But a roadmap isn’t implementation. Hamas disputes what it has agreed to surrender. The sequencing remains contested. The technocratic committee exists, but it has not yet established effective authority inside Gaza. Reconstruction and legitimate governance can’t just be announced into existence.

Surviving an Iranian attack also isn’t the same as a regional strategy. The memorandum of understanding signed in June was supposed to end the confrontation within sixty days. In July it frayed over shipping lanes. A country can’t organize its national life around the expectation of a decisive blow that finally settles things, because the blow never settles things. It buys an interval, and what you do during that interval is the hard work.

Which brings us to October 2026. Israel will hold an election on the 27th, the first since October 7, 2023, and the first in almost forty years to follow a Knesset that completed its four-year term. The temptation will be to fight it entirely on the question of blame, because blame is the most narratively satisfying material available. Blame asks whom to punish, whereas accountability asks what must be repaired. A serious commission of inquiry wouldn’t be a distraction from maintenance; it would be maintenance. The questions that will determine whether the next decade is survivable are all maintenance questions:

• who serves in the army and who doesn’t,

• whether courts, governments, and parliaments can constrain one another without making effective government impossible,

• whether an honest accounting of October 7 is ever produced,

• whether the North and the Gaza Envelope are genuinely rebuilt rather than announced.

None of these deliver a single triumphant headline, but all of them compound.

The Diaspora’s version of the same mistake

We make the identical error in the rest of the Jewish world, in a different key.

Emergency is something American Jewish institutions know how to do. It concentrates attention, loosens wallets, clarifies loyalties, and makes participation feel urgent. The harder question is what remains when urgency recedes.

Since October 7, enormous Jewish energy has gone into condemning antisemitism, documenting it, litigating it, and demanding that institutions name it. This is necessary and I frankly don’t have patience for people who suggest otherwise. But it’s such a defensive posture which is just not a way to live our lives. We can’t raise our children on a threat. If the only reason we give them to stay is that someone out there hates them, Jewishness becomes a liability to manage rather than an inheritance to deepen, and we can’t be surprised when they conclude that the easiest solution is to become less visible or to leave.

Durable Jewish life in North America requires institutions capable of reproducing commitment after the rally ends. It needs day schools that families can afford and qualified teachers who are paid and valued enough to build careers rather than pass briefly through Jewish work. It requires synagogues and camps and campus organizations with functioning boards, credible leadership pipelines, real succession plans, vibrant social service agencies, and budgets that survive the departure of one philanthropic family. It requires coalitions with people who won’t agree with us about everything, built patiently in years when we don’t need them, because coalitions assembled during an emergency are just not coalitions, but appeals. And it requires an affirmative account of why any of this is worth continuing, one that would still be compelling if antisemitism vanished tomorrow. As Bari Weiss often says, our role is to be Jewish, not just fight antisemitism.

A Jewish community is a system of mutual obligation. It teaches, feeds, houses, employs, visits, buries, welcomes, and cares. A community that can issue a perfect statement on antisemitism but can’t care for its members has defended its name while neglecting its substance. It’s doing something wrong.

I’ve sat in enough board meetings to know that the future of Jewish life gets decided in rooms where nothing memorable is said.

A Durable Zionism

Zionism has always been better at this than its critics or its loudest defenders admit. Its revolutionary achievement was not only that it inspired Jews to declare sovereignty. It converted aspiration into administration.

The Declaration of Independence was read, briefly, on a Friday afternoon. What made it stick was schools and clinics, municipalities and courts, Hebrew classrooms and tax systems, housing and immigration agencies, public institutions capable of receiving over a million Jews from the Arab world and then another million from the former Soviet Union decades later, absorbed badly and unevenly and at enormous cost, but absorbed nonetheless. That’s the version that worked, and we don’t need to blanket it with epic language. The results speak for themselves. Zionism worked because it became boring.

A durable Zionism is one that survives its own success. Governments made serious errors. But the state didn’t endure because its institutions were flawless. It endured because failures could be absorbed, contested, and, if need be, corrected. Durable Zionism treats the state as an ongoing administrative project rather than a slogan to be defended in comment sections, and it accepts that a project you actually own is one you’re obliged to repair. Ownership without repair is just fandom. Criticism without the willingness to do the hard work of repair is moral performance.

The un-sexy thing about maintenance is that it offers no ending and little recognition. You’ll never know if you succeeded, only that nothing collapsed on your watch, and then you do it again. The bridge did not fall. The teacher did not leave. The institution survived the donor’s departure. The border community returned and stayed. The next crisis arrived and found functioning systems waiting for it.

Nobody writes songs about this because, when it succeeds, there’s no single night on which the people were saved. There are only people who kept showing up after the emergency stopped making showing up feel heroic. We’re always looking for some great headline, but civilizations are rarely saved by grand gestures, despite what The Odyssey may show, in theaters now.

Whether we can be those people isn’t something we get to decide in the next crisis. It’s being decided in the years between them, which is to say: right now.

But we don’t. The fact that Tisha B’Av folds two destructions of two Temples, centuries apart, into a single date should have been our first clue that catastrophe is never just one thing.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about the Jewish arguments of the moment we’re in: we aren’t primarily divided over policy. What divides us is something prior to policy and harder to negotiate. We disagree over what would count as a true Jewish catastrophe. We disagree about which temple is burning.

Five mourners

Consider who shows up to the argument.

The first mourner fears the erosion of Israel’s physical security. For this Jew, October 7 wasn’t an aberration but a revelation. Every concession, every restraint imposed from outside, is a crack in the closely guarded perimeter, and behind that perimeter are children sleeping in their beds. This mourner reads Jewish history as a single lesson: powerlessness kills. The temple that mustn’t fall is the state’s capacity to defend Jewish life.

The second mourner fears the erosion of Israel’s democracy. For this Jew, the 2023 judicial overhaul wasn’t a technical dispute about court appointments but a preview of a different country, one where power answers only to itself. This mourner knows Jewish sovereignty has been lost before, and not always to foreign armies. The temple that must not fall is the character of the state, the thing that made it worth building and defending.

The third mourner fears the erosion of Israel’s moral character. For this Jew, the question isn’t only whether Israel survives but what kind of state survives. This mourner watches the war’s toll and worries less about world opinion than about the mirror, suspecting that a state can defeat its enemies and still damage something essential in itself. The temple that must not fall is the moral purpose of Jewish sovereignty: the conviction that Jewish power exists to protect Jewish life without becoming indifferent to the lives and dignity of others.

The fourth mourner fears the collapse of American support. The ‘special relationship’ was never sentimental but a critical strategy. This mourner reads the polling of Americans under 35 the way an engineer reads stress fractures; a consensus becoming a partisan possession is now becoming temporary. The temple that must not fall is the covenant between America and Israel, because without it every other temple is exposed.

The fifth mourner fears the rupture between Israel and American Jewish life. For this Jew, the danger isn’t simply that the liberal Zionist center is thinning. It’s that two communities that once understood themselves as parts of one people are beginning to experience each other as moral strangers. Israeli Jews increasingly hear American Jewish concern as naïveté, disloyalty, or interference. American Jews increasingly experience Israel as something they are expected either to defend without qualification or to disavow. The temple that must not fall is the relationship itself: the possibility that Jews separated by geography, politics, and radically different experiences of power can still recognize obligations to one another and imagine a shared future.

Each mourner has identified something real and necessary. Therefore, none has proved that his diagnosis is complete or that his remedy is safe. The danger then isn’t caring too much about one wall, but imagining that your wall can remain standing after you’ve demolished the rest of the building.

The tragedy is not that their fears are imaginary. The tragedy is that each mourner experiences the others’ remedies as the catastrophe itself.

Your repair, my ruin

Watch how this works:

• The security mourner looks at mass protests during wartime and sees deterrence bleeding out on live television.

• The democracy mourner looks at emergency powers and sees the permanent ratchet, the crisis that never quite ends and never quite returns what it borrowed.

• The moral legitimacy mourner looks at the necessary war and sees the corrosion of everything it supposedly protects, and is told that his ethics are a luxury purchased on credit against other people’s children.

• The alliance mourner pleads for course corrections that would preserve American support, and is heard as demanding that Jewish survival be outsourced to the mood swings of a foreign electorate, the very condition Zionism existed to end.

• The American Jew asks for a relationship with Israel that can survive moral disagreement, and is told from one direction that Diaspora concern is irrelevant to a country at war, and from the other that maintaining the relationship at all is a moral failure.

One person’s necessary course correction is another’s destruction of the Jewish future. That sentence, I think, is the actual text of our communal argument.

And because each camp believes the stakes are existential, each treats the others not as wrong but as dangerous. After all, you don’t compromise with someone setting fire to the Temple! You stop him. This is how a family argument acquires the emotional grammar of a war.

Yavneh was an act of triage

The tradition has been here before. When Jerusalem was under siege by the Romans, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of the city in a coffin. Standing before Vespasian, he didn’t ask for the Temple or the city. He asked for Yavneh and its sages, an institutional remnant from which Jewish life might continue.

We tell the story as though he saw the next nineteen centuries laid out before him. He didn’t. The Talmud itself preserves the criticism that he should have asked for Jerusalem, alongside his fear that asking for everything might leave him with nothing. The establishment and success of Yavney wasn’t a certainty. It was pragmatic triage: when he couldn’t preserve the whole Jewish world, he preserved something - a small part - capable of carrying that world forward.

The story points us toward a different kind of responsibility. We don’t have the luxury of refusing to choose until the smoke clears. Israel must fight wars, govern power, protect democratic institutions, make moral judgments, maintain alliances, and remain connected to Jews beyond its borders in real time. It can’t pick and choose when, but it must walk and chew gum at the same time. The question isn’t whether Israel can avoid choosing among competing danger, and it can’t. The question is whether, in protecting one part of the Jewish future, we preserve enough of the rest to make repair possible. Jewish prudence is not the refusal to choose but the discipline of choosing without destroying the conditions under which tomorrow’s Jews can correct us.

The zealots failed that test. In their zeal to save the Temple, they mistook their strategy for the Temple itself. They burned the stores on which Jerusalem’s survival depended, destroying in the name of preservation the very capacity that might have preserved it.

One Temple, many walls

The Talmud’s verdict on the Second Temple is sinat chinam, wanton or baseless hatred. We often reduce that teaching to a plea for greater civility, as though Jerusalem might have been saved by a gentler tone. But the warning is more than that. Sinat chinam begins when loyalty to one faction overrides responsibility for the whole, when another Jew’s defeat becomes more urgent than preserving the structure both inhabit.

That’s the danger facing the five mourners. Each has identified something real. A Jewish state that can’t protect Jewish life has failed its first responsibility. A Jewish state that abandons democratic constraint may preserve power while hollowing out its purpose. A Jewish state can defeat its enemies and still lose part of the moral purpose that made its survival worth defending. A country that squanders its most important alliance becomes more exposed. An Israel that loses the attachment of American Jewry fractures the Jewish people itself.

These are not five competing Temples. They are load-bearing walls of the same one.

They will not always bear equal weight. There will be moments when security must come first, moments when democratic constraints must limit what an elected government can do, moments when moral restraint carries strategic cost, moments when an ally’s demands should be refused, and moments when Diaspora discomfort cannot decide Israeli policy. Prudence means refusing to pretend that the value most visible from where you stand is the only one holding up the building.

Tisha B’Av itself offers the model. The day gathers catastrophes separated by centuries into one act of mourning. It doesn’t say that every loss was identical. It teaches that Jewish destruction is cumulative, that one ruined chamber leaves the entire house diminished.

On Tisha B’Av we lower ourselves to the ground and mourn before we argue. The ritual doesn’t erase our disagreements or make every diagnosis equally sound. It asks us to remember that, whatever we believe must be saved first. When we stand again, that shared grief should discipline what we are willing to damage in order to prevail.

The fast ended several days ago. We’ve returned to our full height and to decisions that just can’t wait for history’s verdict. We will choose, and some of our choices will be wrong. The duty is not to achieve certainty unavailable to human beings. It’s to act without burning the stores, to defend one wall without casually weakening the others, and to preserve enough of the Jewish future that those who come after us will still possess the power to repair what we could not.

The question is not which Temple is burning. It is whether we can remember, while fighting over the flames, that the building is one.

Political homelessness does not mean having nowhere to sit. It means being offered a seat only if you leave part of yourself outside. That is where many American Jews now find themselves. The right claims to defend Israel, but asks them to ignore the conspiracists and white nationalists gathering inside its own house. The left will defend minorities, but increasingly asks Jews to renounce Zionism, Israel, and even Jewish peoplehood. Each side still keeps a chair open, but each charges admission: the fee is a piece of yourself, cut off and left at the door.

On the right

Start with the right. Many conservatives support Israel forcefully. They speak clearly about Hamas, condemn campus antisemitism, recognize antizionist Jew-hatred, and reject the fantasy that Israel alone is responsible for the violence committed against it. In the recent Boundless survey, sixty percent of MAGA voters affirmed the Jewish people’s right to a homeland. That support is real and it matters, but support for the Jewish state is not the same as regard for Jews.

The danger on the right is not only the open antisemites (of whom there are plenty), it is the general politics of exclusion. The right can admire Israeli toughness while indulging conspiracies. It can denounce antisemitism on campus while tolerating Christian supremacism, replacement theory, and authoritarian nationalism. And so the right can praise Israel while still promoting the worldview that has always endangered Jews: the nation is being stolen, the people replaced, globalist elites (aka the Jews) using immigrants, universities, the press, and finance to hollow out the “real America.” Jews need not be named every time for the pattern to be recognizable. Eventually the story finds them.

American Jewish life was built and flourished on the opposite premise. Jews thrived here because America, at its best, refused to define the nation by blood, creed, or ancestry. Jews thrived because citizenship could be civic rather than ethnic, because religious liberty protected difference, because minority rights mattered, and because pluralism made it possible to be fully Jewish and fully American at the same time.

That is the amputation the right demands: cut away the part of your inheritance that knows Jewish safety depends on pluralism, treat other minorities’ vulnerability as separate from your own, and trust that Jewish security can be bought through alliance with forces suspicious of difference itself.

You are welcome among Israel’s defenders, provided you look past the Jew-hatred the coalition keeps elevating and surrender the open society that made you safe. That is not a home. It is a transaction.

On the left

For the same reasons, the left’s failure stings more. For generations it was the political home of most American Jews, who marched for civil rights, fought the quotas, built unions and universities, and took the side of the immigrant and the refugee. Most American Jews still recognize themselves in the left’s moral language of minority protection, church-state separation, the defense of the vulnerable. That language is not foreign to Jews. It is their political, cultural, and religious inheritance.

Increasingly, however, the machinery built to recognize vulnerability struggles to recognize Jewish vulnerability when Israel is involved. Jewish grief is read as propaganda, Jewish fear as manipulation. Jewish individuals and institutions are held answerable for a government they did not choose. “Zionist” comes to mean any Jew who refuses the required disavowal. None of this is mere criticism of Israeli policy. Something else is happening when Zionism itself becomes a contamination: not a state behaving badly but a state that should not exist, not a government to oppose but a national idea to excommunicate, not an argument but a verdict handed down in advance.

Among progressives, eighty percent say Israel has committed genocide. Among Americans under thirty-five, a majority agrees. For the great majority of Jews, who keep some bond to Israel however critical, this is not another foreign-policy dispute. It is a demand that they redescribe part of their own identity as a crime.

That is the amputation the left asks of Jews. It asks them to cut away the part of Jewish peoplehood that understands Israel as more than a policy question. Only after separating themselves from other Jews loudly enough can American Jews be trusted and become the approved kind of Jew: an ally, a critic of Jewish power, a witness to other people’s suffering, a Jew whose identity is reduced to private faith and stripped of any claim to peoplehood or national belonging.

You are welcome in the movement for justice, provided you concede that the Jewish national project is uniquely monstrous and do not ask why Jewish self-determination alone is treated as illegitimate. That is not a home. It is a probation.

The erasure

The two bargains are not identical. The right’s most visible failure is its comfort with nationalist grievance, conspiracy, and a politics of exclusion that has always endangered Jews. The left’s is its hostility to Israel and its growing inability to tell criticism of a government apart from the delegitimization and demonization of a people. But the two failures combine to close the exits.

“Politically homeless” is not self-pity. Jews are not short of power, allies, or choices. The point is that the choices increasingly require Jews to become smaller to fit. They are welcome as voters, donors, allies, victims, useful symbols, but the whole Jew is hard to place. That is the erasure.

Jews do not fit neatly into the moral categories American politics now prefers. They are a tiny minority with a long history of persecution, but also a community often associated with success, education, and influence. They are vulnerable, but not always visibly so. Many pass as white, though Jewish history predates modern race and is full of expulsion and slaughter at the hands of people who did not think Jews white at all. Jews are a religious group, but also a people, a civilization, a family, and, for many, a nation. Israel is a refuge, a state, a democracy, a military power, a traumatized society, and the object of both legitimate criticism and obsessive demonization.

The current age of slogans cannot handle this much complexity, so it flattens Jews. The right turns Jews into symbols of Judeo-Christian civilization when useful and agents of decay when not. The left turns them into avatars of white power when they defend their peoplehood and grants them standing only when they renounce it. Each denies the Jews the right to be a living people rather than an ideological instrument.

The temptation, given how exhausting this is, is to accept one of the bargains. And Jews are hardly immune to it. American Jews have spent generations seeking acceptance into elite institutions, political movements, universities, professions, and cultural life. We want to be liked. This is not a bad thing in and of itself. We want to be seen as decent, enlightened, and trustworthy. We want access to the room and we don’t want to be the person making everyone uncomfortable. But this generates a powerful urge to overlook what is being demanded, to convince ourselves that the price of belonging is not really so high. After all, who wants to discover that the people applauding you are applauding only the parts of you they approve of?

So some Jews choose the right and tell themselves the conspiracists are fringe, the nationalists are manageable, the Christian supremacists do not really mean it, and the important thing is that they stand with Israel. Some choose the left and tell themselves antizionism is only criticism of Netanyahu, the slogans are just slogans, the exclusions are isolated, and the important thing is that they stand with the oppressed. Each bargain buys a kind of peace, but each is paid for with a piece of the self.

Homeless, not helpless

The alternative is not withdrawal. A community without a permanent home can still vote, organize, build coalitions, and exercise power. It just has to do so without illusions. That means refusing to treat any camp as a safe house, refusing to excuse antisemitism on both sides, refusing to reward those who praise Jews only when Jews are useful. And it means refusing the demand both sides keep making: that Jews amputate part of themselves to be let in.

Political homelessness may even be clarifying. A people that no longer owes its vote to anyone can ask what it actually believes — about schools, crime, immigration, religious liberty, free speech, democracy, the economy — instead of swallowing a pre-packaged slate because that is what one’s side is supposed to think.

American Jews can also benefit from looking for allies in unexpected places, not because any community is pure or waiting with open arms, but because habit is no longer a strategy. There are Americans between the activist left and the nationalist right who share parts of the Jewish experience. They understand what it means to carry a homeland, to cross a border, to build a life around family and faith, to be penalized for success, to inherit a sacred story, to recognize prejudice without needing to be trained on it. Latino Americans, Asian Americans, Black churchgoers, Hindu Americans, and others may not share every Jewish concern. They may not agree with Jews, or with one another, on every question. But many know something about peoplehood, memory, vulnerability, aspiration, and belonging. A politically homeless Jew can at least go and knock.

No people should have to choose between its safety and its values, between fighting racism and fighting antisemitism, between caring about Palestinians and caring about Israelis, between being fully Jewish and being fully American. No coalition yet offers all of it. So American Jews are politically homeless. They are engaged, serious, wide awake, and homeless. Not because they have run out of convictions, but because they refuse to give them up.

For the last several years, Qatar’s reach into American life was a feeling more than a figure. One could sense it in the encampments. On the think-tank panels. In the odd softness of certain newsrooms toward a state that has for years hosted Hamas leaders while presenting that relationship as necessary for mediation. In the strange fact that American universities could become so morally fluent about every distant injustice and so paralyzed before the murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture of Jews.

The problem was that saying so often felt dangerous. Not physically dangerous, but intellectually dangerous. The moment Jews begin talking about money, foreign influence, elite institutions, and anti-Israel ideology, the air changes. Everyone knows the old antisemitic tropes. Everyone knows how easily a serious argument about power can be made to sound like a fantasy about hidden hands. And so many Jews learned to do the responsible thing: lower the voice, add caveats, avoid the subject, pretend the pattern was only a mood.

That caution is understandable. It is also becoming a problem. A conspiracy theory begins when evidence disappears and imagination takes over. This is the opposite. The money is documented. The contracts exist. The reports are public.

In early June, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies turned the feeling into a number. The memo, by analyst Natalie Ecanow, runs on more than a year of collecting receipts, and the number is $400 billion since 2000. The authors say they erred low. Depending on how one counts broader commitments and economic exchange, the White House and Doha have floated figures far higher. This was recently discussed on the Boundless Insights podcast with Jonathan Schanzer.

Begin with scale. Qatar has about 330,000 citizens. That is fewer people than live in Washington, on a peninsula roughly the size of Connecticut. Spread $400 billion across that citizenry and you get something like $1.2 million a head. This is not a small country quietly parking gas money abroad. It is a very small country using state wealth to buy proximity to nearly every sector of the largest economy on earth.

The report walks the sectors. Aviation and infrastructure is the giant, much of it Qatar Airways buying Boeing. Defense runs near $85 billion; Qatar hosts Al Udeid, the largest American military base in the region, and sits among the top foreign buyers of American arms. Energy, real estate, lobbying, public relations, think tanks, gifts, and paid trips all follow.

Universities

But the most important number in the report is not the largest one. Aviation buys jobs. Real estate buys addresses. Lobbying buys access. Education buys the American future leaders who will one day decide what all of it means.

That is where the story becomes harder to dismiss as ordinary foreign investment. Qatar is now the largest foreign funder of American universities, ahead of China by roughly $2 billion. The schools that take the most are not random. They are the schools with campuses in Doha: Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M, and Virginia Commonwealth. Together they map neatly onto the formation of an elite: medicine, technology, diplomacy, journalism, engineering, energy. Qatar did not buy a random sample of American higher education. It attached itself to the disciplines that shape how a ruling class thinks, reports, builds, negotiates, and governs.

The campus is only the visible architecture. The quieter architecture is made of centers, endowments, research grants, conferences, curricular partnerships, teacher trainings, visiting scholars, fellowships, and study trips. Influence does not need to dictate a syllabus line by line. It can shape what gets institutionalized, which topics are discussed and which are avoided, who directs a center, what becomes a field, which speakers are invited, and which assumptions feel sophisticated. Influence on this scale does not need to control the room. It only needs to arrange it before the students walk in.

Behind the investment

Here’s where a fair reader pushes back. Is this not just foreign investment, the ordinary kind, the way Japan or Canada sink billions into America chasing a return?

No. Qatar’s major investment arms are controlled by the state or tied to the ruling family. That does not make every deal sinister or every recipient corrupt. It does mean each transaction plants a constituency inside America with a reason to care about Qatari interests. And this is what separates Qatar from other foreign investors: It is a monarchy that served as a financial and diplomatic patron of Hamas, gave the Taliban a political office, has long cultivated Muslim Brotherhood figures, networks, and movements, and funds Al Jazeera, one of the most influential media networks in the Arab world and far beyond it, whose coverage has for years helped make anti-Israel framing feel like ordinary political common sense.

This is not to say that every Qatari-funded professor, program, student, or campus is Islamist. That would be ridiculous. The problem is that the state writing the checks is not ideologically neutral. It has repeatedly aligned itself with movements and media ecosystems hostile to Israel, hostile to liberal pluralism, and, in Hamas’s case, openly committed to the destruction of the Jewish state and the killing of Jews.

FDD is not writing on a blank slate. ISGAP’s Follow the Money project has been warning for years about foreign funding, especially from Qatar, flowing into American higher education with insufficient transparency and possible effects on antisemitic discourse, anti-Israel radicalism, and illiberal campus norms. NCRI’s reports add a different layer, using social-science and network-contagion methods to examine foreign funding, campus speech, antisemitism, anti-democratic attitudes, and the spread of radical narratives. Qatar did not invent campus anti-Zionism, and no serious person should pretend every protest chant was purchased in Doha. But the convergence is hard to dismiss.

Lobbying

Another anticipated reply is AIPAC. Isn’t this just the other side complaining when someone else plays the influence game?

No. The comparison is useful precisely because it clarifies the difference. AIPAC is an American advocacy organization, funded by Americans, operating in the open American political system: lobbying Congress, endorsing candidates, raising money, and fighting elections under American campaign-finance rules. One can like that, hate it, regulate it, or criticize its power. But it is domestic political advocacy by American citizens.

Qatari influence is different in kind. It is state money from a foreign monarchy, moving not only through registered lobbying firms but through universities, branch campuses, contracts, gifts, research centers, educational programs, think tanks, corporations, and cultural institutions. AIPAC is trying to persuade American politics. Qatar is trying to shape the institutions that produce American elites before they enter politics. None of this means domestic lobbying is pure. None of it means AIPAC should be immune from criticism. It means the comparison is sloppy. American citizens organizing politically inside their own democracy is not the same thing as a foreign autocracy embedding itself inside the educational machinery that forms that democracy’s ruling class.

Asking questions

So no, we should not speak recklessly. Jews, of all people, should know what reckless accusations about money and power can do. But fear of sounding like a conspiracy theorist cannot become an alibi for refusing to describe power and influence when it is real, documented, and consequential. The answer to conspiracy thinking is not silence. It is evidence. It is precision. It is the discipline to say exactly what is known, exactly what is alleged, exactly what is disputed, and exactly why it matters.

FDD’s report is strongest because it does not say every transaction is illegal. It does not say every recipient is bought. It does not say Qatar is useless to Washington. But usefulness is not innocence. Qatar’s genius has been to make itself indispensable in the room while funding the conditions that distort that very room in the first place.

One date, two answers to the same question: what is freedom worth if it cannot protect the people who depend on it?

This summer the numbers both turn: two hundred and fifty for the United States, fifty for Entebbe. For American Jews, the coincidence is not only historical. It is personal. America and Israel are the two great modern answers to Jewish vulnerability: the republic that promised Jews they could live as equal citizens, and the Jewish state that promised Jews they would never again be beyond reach.

Entebbe

The Entebbe story is short. On June 27, terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and a West German revolutionary cell hijacked an Air France flight out of Tel Aviv and turned it, by way of Athens and Libya, to Entebbe, in Idi Amin’s Uganda. At the airport they released the non-Jewish/Israel passengers, and held onto the rest. A selection was made in the airport. Jews sorted from everyone else, three decades after a similar such selection was made in Europe. Nobody in that terminal needed it explained. The hostages were told they would die if a list of imprisoned militants went unreleased, and Israel was being asked a question older than the state: could a Jewish power reach a Jew held captive two thousand miles away, or could it only grieve? The Air France crew was offered release and refused to leave. There was decency in the terminal too. But decency was not a rescue plan. Israel still had to decide whether Jewish power could reach the people left behind.

It could. The force flew those two thousand miles undetected and landed in the dark. In roughly ninety minutes the commandos of Sayeret Matkal stormed the terminal, killed the hijackers, and loaded more than a hundred hostages onto the planes home. One soldier died, the unit commander, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu. They renamed the operation for him.

Revolution

Set the rescue beside the American Revolution with which it shares a birthday, and the same kind of power shows up in both. Not the power of mass or inheritance. Not the heavy, settled power of empires. The American Revolution was a thin colonial force taking on the finest military power of its age and refusing the odds. Entebbe was a small state throwing force into the middle of a hostile continent to reach its own people. In both, the decisive ingredient was the same: nerve of the kind the strong assume the weak will never find - veritable chutzpah - backed by enough cold preparation to bring the nerve off.

The ingenuity took different shapes, and the difference is the point. America’s was constitutional. The marvel was never the war but the framework built afterward to outlast the men who won it, drawn up on the blunt assumption that the founders would die and that bad men would sometimes hold the highest office, and that the structure had to survive both.

Entebbe’s ingenuity was operational: disciplined improvisation under impossible time pressure. A mock terminal quickly built in the Negev to drill against a building they had only photographs of. A black Mercedes flown in to pass for Amin’s motorcade. A plan rehearsed to the minute and rewritten on the fly.

Framework

The real link between them is a phrase that should hang over both anniversaries. Laying the framework for success. A rescue is an event. A constitution is a framework. The harder thing, the thing both stories are actually about, is whether a people can take one night of audacity and turn it into a standing capacity, something that keeps protecting them long after the night is over. America bet that a framework could carry the founders’ nerve forward for centuries without them in the room. Israel’s bet at Entebbe was narrower and just as wild: that there would now always be a state able to reach any Jew, anywhere, that two thousand years of being unrescuable were finished. The raid was the proof. The state was the framework.

The American story and the Israeli story are the two great Diaspora wagers of the modern age, that the powerless can build durable power and not be wrecked by the building of it. A Jew watching from the Diaspora has a stake in both bets paying off, because both are arguments that history does not have to end the way it usually ends for people like us.

Neither bet has been clean or obvious. The credit for Entebbe has been fought over for fifty years by the men who were in the room, which is its own quiet lesson about glory. Not every hostage came home. Dora Bloch, taken to a hospital before the raid, was murdered there on Amin’s orders after it. And the American framework has spent two and a half centuries holding, buckling, and holding again, never more visibly than now. Power laid down as a framework can guard a people or rot it, and over a long enough run it tends to do both.

The fireworks in Washington and the floodlit runway in Kampala end the same way: in darkness, with the hard part still ahead. The American question was whether liberty could become a constitutional order strong enough to survive the founders, the factions, the failures, and those who would abuse it. The Israeli question was whether Jewish sovereignty could become a standing capacity, so that a Jew in danger would no longer be left to the pity or indifference of others.

For American Jews, both questions are still open. We live inside the republic that promised us equal citizenship and beside the state that promised Jewish rescue. Neither promise is self-executing. Neither is clean. Neither is safe from rot. But both are answers to the same old Jewish fear: that history will again leave us dependent on someone else’s courage.

Fifty years and two hundred and fifty years are long enough to prove that the audacity was real. They are not long enough to prove that the frameworks are secure. Entebbe was not only the night Israel reached its people - as recent history shows, Israel sadly can't always reach its people either. something along the lines that Israel doesn't always succeThe Fourth was not only the day America declared itself free. Both were beginnings of obligations. A founding is what happens once. A framework is what has to be kept.

America and Israel are the two great modern frameworks in which Jews have placed their safety: liberal citizenship and Jewish sovereignty. July 4, 1976 placed them briefly on the same calendar. July 4, 2026 asks whether both frameworks can still hold.

Most Jewish children on this continent go to secular public schools. They belong to no synagogue in any real sense. They don’t regularly pass through the doors of Jewish institutions throughout the week. For far too many Jewish kids there is no daily Jewish anything, and the day-school families and the shul families get to argue over whose model is better while being the exception. The calendar for everyone else runs secular from September to June. Jewishness sadly becomes a surname. A holiday or two. A grandparent.

Then there is camp.

Jewish camp is the single most effective institution North American Jewry has ever built for transmitting peoplehood. Not belief or literacy, but belonging; not a substitute for literacy or practice, but what makes a child care enough to seek them later. The bodily, unargued sense that you are one limb of something enormous that runs across oceans and centuries, and that the enormous thing is yours.

Synagogue can teach practice. Day school can teach text. Camp produces the thing neither reliably nor consistently produces, and it does it almost without seeming to try: a child who assumes that there is a Jewish people and that s/he is inside it.

The mechanism isn’t a curriculum but a totality. For a few weeks the child lives inside a small, sealed Jewish world where the ordinary furniture of life has been quietly relabelled. The dining hall is the chadar ochel. The staff are the tzevet. Hebrew stops being a subject and becomes the noise of getting to lunch. Shabbat doesn’t arrive as a lesson but rather as a change in the air, white shirts, a slower clock, the same songs every week until they lodge in the body and refuse to leave. Israel is not first encountered as a position paper. It is encountered as people: the shaliach with bad sandals and too much confidence, the counselor just back from a gap year, the Hebrew song everyone knows before anyone translates it, the flag that appears so naturally it almost disappears. Later, they can argue. First, they have to feel that of course there’s a country woven through all of this. Peoplehood is caught, not taught. Camp is the net.

The real miracle is not that adults arrange a Jewish environment. It is that, after a few days, the children begin enforcing it for one another. The songs, jokes, crushes, rivalries, nicknames, cabin rituals, color war teams, and Friday-night habits become theirs. Jewishness stops arriving vertically, from parent or rabbi or teacher, and starts moving horizontally, from friend to friend.

Numbers

The research has said so for years, and it is more lopsided than communal data ever gets. The Foundation for Jewish Camp’s landmark study found that adults who went to Jewish overnight camp are roughly 30% more likely to give to a federation, 37% more likely to light Shabbat candles, 45% more likely to attend synagogue monthly, and 55% more likely to feel deeply attached to Israel. Incredible. Half a lifetime later, a few summers in a bunk move the needle on attachment to a country thousands of miles away further than almost anything else the community has tried. The broader Jewish camp field now includes more than three hundred Jewish camps across every stream and temperament, and the effect shows up in all of them.

Peoplehood

Why peoplehood in particular, and not observance, and not knowledge? Because peoplehood is the one thing a teacher can’t hand to a student. It has to be lived among peers, in a body, as a daily fact. You can learn the laws of Shabbat sitting at a desk, but you can’t learn belonging alone at that same table. Belonging needs other people who belong with you, and a place where being Jewish is not a position you defend but the water you are literally swimming in. For most Jewish kids on this continent, camp is the only stretch of their whole childhood spent living inside the Jewish people instead of beside it.

Camp also does something most Jewish institutions struggle to do: it turns teenagers and college students into Jewish leaders before they know enough to be intimidated by the word. A nineteen-year-old counselor becomes the most important Jew in a ten-year-old’s life for three weeks. That is not incidental to the model. It is the model.

Now more than ever

That was always true. Since October 2023 it has become urgent. A generation of Jewish kids is being asked, earlier than any of us were, to defend or hide who they are in front of classmates who have opinions about it. Camp is the one place where the identity is neither a burden nor a debate, where a child can set it down and just stand inside it for a while. What comes out of those weeks is not just nostalgia or unwashed clothes. It’s ballast. We look at how so much of our community is centered around institutions, boards and schools and committees that strain to manufacture exactly this and mostly can’t. Camp does it on a Tuesday by the lake without appearing to work at all.

So let’s call camp what it is: the crown jewel of North American Jewry. The most efficient model the Diaspora has for making Jews who stay Jewish. Which means the community’s failure to make it widely accessible is not a logistical problem but a strategic failure. If camp is where peoplehood is most reliably produced, then funding it through scholarships, transportation, and outreach to families on the edge of Jewish life is not extra. It is the most important work that can be done.

Separate

The thing that makes camp work is its separateness. The totality is possible only because it is bounded, sealed, a whole world that runs for a fixed number of weeks and then stops. The bus pulls out and the kids go home to ten months of dispersion, to the secular year, to being the only Jews in the class, to a calendar that relabels nothing. Camp doesn’t solve the Diaspora condition, and it doesn’t claim to. It does reveal what the Diaspora condition lacks.

That is why camp matters so much. Not because Judaism belongs in summer, but because summer is where North American Judaism has managed, almost despite itself, to build a temporary country for its children. A place with its own language, songs, rituals, heroes, arguments, romances, loyalties, and laws. A place where Jewishness is not defended but inhabited.

We should not romanticize that. We should learn from it. If camp is the crown jewel of North American Jewry, then the question is not only how to send more children there, but also what the rest of Jewish life can borrow from camp: density, joy, peer belonging, Hebrew in the air, Shabbat in the body, Israel as relationship before argument.

The bus always comes back. But if camp has done its work, the child who returns is not exactly the child who left. For a few weeks, they were not a Jewish child in America. They were one limb of a people. The question is whether we can build enough Jewish life in the winter to help them remember.

Altalena

In June of 1948 a former American landing ship sat low in the water off a country that was barely five weeks old. She carried roughly nine hundred volunteers, recruits, immigrants, and Holocaust survivors, along with rifles, machine guns, mortars, explosives, and armored vehicles, enough to turn a war Israel was not yet sure it would win.

Her name was Altalena.

The name was borrowed. It had been Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s literary pseudonym, and in Italian it means seesaw.

Here’s what happened. The Irgun loaded the ship in France. The Irgun was the Revisionist paramilitary force rooted in Jabotinsky’s movement, commanded by 1948 by Menachem Begin, and in those exact weeks it was supposed to be dissolving into the newly formed Israel Defense Forces (IDF). A UN ceasefire was in effect, and it forbade either side from landing fresh weapons. When Begin learned the ship had sailed, he told the new prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and tried to negotiate its landing, partly because openly breaking the ceasefire would look like defiance of the state itself.

Ben-Gurion was a party man, a movement man, and a bitter enemy of Begin, which makes the episode more frightening, not less. The fight was not really about the arms but about who could assign them. Begin wanted weapons to reach men who had been Irgun yesterday and IDF soldiers today. Ben-Gurion’s answer was simpler: once there was a state, guns could not have a party address. His position was not a negotiating line but a sentence: there would not be two armies, and there would not be two states.

The ship reached Kfar Vitkin on June 20, and the trouble began there, before Tel Aviv ever entered the story. Irgun men were bringing arms and fighters ashore when the army arrived and demanded the cargo. The Irgun refused. The beach turned into a firefight, and to this day no one is certain who fired first. Men died at Kfar Vitkin, on both sides. A shaky truce held just long enough for the ship to slip south to Tel Aviv, where the Irgun was strong and where Begin seems to have gambled that the government would never dare open fire in the streets.

It dared. Even there the sequence is disputed: Irgun men were unloading weapons onto the beach, and the shooting had started again, before Ben-Gurion gave the order to bombard her. She soon lay grounded off the Tel Aviv shore, burning, because that order came and a shell found her hull. Sixteen Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers died across the two confrontations. Begin was almost hit while on the ship himself. Who fired first, and whether it had to end this way, still depends on whose memoir you open.

Miracle

Zionism’s first revolution was that Jews stopped waiting for others to secure Jewish life and began building institutions of their own. The Altalena exposed the second, the one that comes after agency: the power Jews built had to be placed under law.

We tell the miracle of 1948 as the winning of a state, the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty after two thousand years. The deeper miracle is the one the Altalena dragged into daylight: that a five-week-old country was already strong enough to insist on one authority and to make it stick against a faction of its own. Many movements win their war and then spend a generation shooting each other over the spoils. Israel had that catastrophe over in seventy-two hours, and walked off with one army that could limit even the faction that built it.

Now, the name pays off. A seesaw without a fulcrum isn’t a seesaw. It’s a plank, two ends taking turns hitting the dirt. The fulcrum is the fixed point that turns collision into motion, that lets two opposed weights hold each other in tension instead of smashing each other to pieces, their opposition organized around a point that neither end owns. Sovereignty is that point. Take it away and you don’t get balance, but rather the plank and the ground.

None of this was clean. The Altalena was a near civil war, Jews killing Jews in the shallows. The cannon was only half the story. Begin’s refusal to answer it was the other half. Ben-Gurion supplied the principle that there is one authority; Begin supplied the restraint that kept it from curdling into a massacre. That two men who loathed each other each did his half on the same day, and made their peace years before Begin won power in 1977, is the part I find almost impossible to believe. Begin later said he wished to be remembered as the man who prevented a civil war, that it mattered more than anything he did as prime minister.

Seesaw or Plank

The Jewish world is, again, a seesaw. Inside Israel the plank pitches between the coalition and the street, the courts and the ballot, religion and democracy, between visions of the state that increasingly doubt one another’s legitimacy. These are not trivial arguments. They are the arguments of a people that has power, and therefore responsibility, and a country without them is not alive. But a country whose arguments destroy the legitimacy of the country itself is not a country for long.

For Israelis the fulcrum still has a hard institutional form: one state, one army, one lawful authority over the weapons. Governments can be wrong, majorities can abuse power, courts can overreach, generals can fail. Once a camp decides the state is legitimate only when it holds the controls, sovereignty collapses back into movement politics, and the seesaw becomes a plank.

In the Diaspora the fulcrum is weaker, because it is voluntary. We have no single government or army, only shared peoplehood, inherited obligation, communal institutions, and the recognition that Israel is not an “issue” but the living center of Jewish collective agency. Our doors should stay open to the confused, the alienated, the grieving, the Jews who no longer know how to carry Israel after everything they have seen. A serious community can argue about Israeli governments, occupation, war, religion, and the moral costs of sovereignty. What it cannot do is treat the argument over how sovereignty should be carried as the same as the argument that sovereignty is itself the crime. The first is weight on the seesaw. The second removes the fulcrum.

That is the lesson the burning ship still offers, and it goes down hard. The country you love may be governed by people you fear. The army that keeps you safe may be commanded by people you distrust. The institutions you build may make room for Jews whose words enrage you. The test is whether you still believe in the fulcrum when it does not belong to you.

We are never told in advance which one the hour wants. The cannon, or the restraint. Ben-Gurion has been called ruthless for choosing the first; Begin has been called a coward by his own for choosing the second; and both charges miss that the country needed both choices made on one morning by two men who could not stand each other. The cannon and the restraint were opposites, but they served the same fixed point: Jewish power could not be allowed to become factional power.

The fulcrum lives in no founding document but is remade every morning a faction loses and stays, a leader who could inflame refuses, and a community chooses argument over rupture, which is the work 1948 did not finish but only began.

The American Jewish community is rightly concerned about anti-Zionism in its ranks. We debate how widespread it is, whether young Jews are moving toward it, and where Jewish institutions should draw their lines.

But there is a prior question we do not ask often enough: when someone says they are anti-Zionist, do we actually know what they mean? Recent surveys show how slippery the terms have become: Many Jews support Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state but do not call themselves Zionists; a substantial portion of self-identified anti-Zionists still agree that Israel should be the nation-state of the Jewish people.

The word sounds clearer than it is

On paper, anti-Zionism sounds like a clear position. Zionism, at its most basic, is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Anti-Zionism would therefore seem to mean opposition to that idea.

Sometimes, that is exactly what it means. There are people who oppose Jewish sovereignty on principle. Some oppose all nationalism. Some believe Jews should exist only as a religious or diasporic community. Some believe a Jewish state is inherently illegitimate. That is anti-Zionism in the strict ideological sense.

Not all anti-Zionisms are the same

However, In real life the label is often used much more loosely. “I’m anti-Zionist” can mean many different things, and those meanings matter.

For one person, it means: I hate what the Israeli government is doing. That person may be furious about the war in Gaza, settlement expansion, settler-violence, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, or the treatment of Palestinians. But they may not actually oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. They may be using “anti-Zionist” to say “I want to distance myself from this Israel,” not “I want Israel dismantled.”

For another, it means: I think Zionism means Jewish supremacy. If someone has been taught that Zionism inherently means racism, denial of Palestinian rights, permanent domination and occupation, or unconditional support for every Israeli government action, then rejecting “Zionism” may be a rejection of that distorted definition, and not necessarily a rejection of Jewish self-determination itself.

For another, it means: I’m acting in solidarity with Palestinians. In many activist circles, anti-Zionism has become a solidarity norm, a way of signaling that one takes Palestinian suffering seriously and belongs inside a coalition organized around progressive values. That solidarity may be sincere, but it does not necessarily tell us what the person thinks should happen to Israeli Jews, Palestinian governance, Jewish sovereignty, refugee claims, or security. The label may be doing coalitional work before it has become a worked-out political view.

For another, it means: I feel morally overwhelmed by Israel. Some Jews arrive at anti-Zionism through rupture: a trip, a war, a campus experience, a family argument, an encounter with Palestinian suffering, or a sense that Jewish institutions did not make room for their moral questions. For them, anti-Zionism may be less a worked-out ideology than an expression of alienation.

And for some, frankly, it means: I have not really sorted this out. They know the word “Zionist” feels radioactive. They know they do not want to be associated with Israeli power. They know their friends use the term anti-Zionist approvingly. But they have not formed a clear view of Zionist history, Israeli politics, Palestinian nationalism, Jewish peoplehood, or the consequences of ending Jewish sovereignty.

These are not the same position. And yet we often treat them as if they are. Of course, these categories do not always appear neatly in real life. A single person might be morally overwhelmed by Gaza, repelled by a distorted definition of Zionism, shaped by progressive solidarity norms, and also drawn to a serious post-national critique. The point is not to sort every Jewish anti-Zionist into one permanent box. It is to notice that the same word can carry different combinations of belief, emotion, social belonging, and political imagination.

There are deeper questions inside those combinations. Is the person rejecting Jewish nationalism because they reject nationalism altogether? Or do they affirm other national movements while treating Jewish nationalism as uniquely illegitimate? Is the objection to Israel specifically, or to the moral compromises of state power — borders, armies, coercion, and sovereignty — altogether? And if someone says they believe in Jewish peoplehood but reject Jewish statehood, the next question is what that peoplehood is supposed to do. Is it mainly culture, memory, ritual, and belonging? Or does it also carry obligations of refuge, protection, and collective security?

That confusion is a problem for everyone: Jewish institutions deciding who belongs, educators trying to teach Israel honestly, families talking across generational divides, and young Jews caught between inherited communal language and activist vocabulary. Most importantly, it is a problem because the stakes are real.

What do you want instead?

If someone says, “I’m anti-Zionist,” the next question should not only be, “How did you get there?” It should also be, “What do you want instead?”

Do you want two states? A binational state? A single Palestinian-majority state with minority status for Jews? A confederation? A diaspora-only Jewish future? The end of Israel as a Jewish state? The end of Jewish sovereignty altogether? Those questions are not gotchas. They are the difference between a moral posture and a political program.

Opposition to Israel’s existence is not only a theoretical claim. It implicates the political arrangement under which Israeli Jews live. It is one thing to object to a Jewish nation-state in abstract terms. It is another to advocate dismantling or replacing a sovereign state in ways that would transform the basic conditions of existence for millions.

Take all the talk about a “binational state,” for example. The phrase can sound humane and democratic, especially from far away. One state, equal rights, no occupation, no separation. But when people endorse it, do they mean a worked-out constitutional order, a protest against the current Israeli government, a rejection of occupation, or simply the most morally attractive option available in a survey?

A binational state is not just a feeling. It is a proposed political order. As such, it raises unavoidable questions: Who controls the army? What happens to Jewish immigration and Palestinian refugee claims? How are Jewish and Palestinian national rights protected? What happens if one group fears domination by the other? What security guarantees exist? How would anyone get from here to there without catastrophe?

Without those follow-up questions, “binationalism” can function less as a worked-out political proposal than as a moral placeholder. You do not have to oppose binationalism to ask those questions. You just have to take it seriously.

The same is true of anti-Zionism. If anti-Zionism is a serious political position, then it deserves serious political questions. If it is not a serious political position — if it is a mood, a protest, a social signal, or a rejection of a distorted definition — then we should know that too.

Why consequences matter

American Jews have every right to criticize Israel, oppose its government, advocate for Palestinians, and argue for different political futures. But most American Jews do not live under the arrangements they imagine or propose. Israelis and Palestinians would. They are the ones who would inherit the security dilemmas, constitutional uncertainties, demographic conflicts, and risks of violence if those alternatives fail.

A diaspora Jew can endorse binationalism, post-nationalism, or the end of Jewish sovereignty from within an American civic order protected by citizenship, distance, and power. Israelis and Palestinians cannot opt out of the consequences in the same way.

That is also why Israeli Jewish anxiety about such futures should not be dismissed as self-explanatory moral failure. It is worth asking why many Israeli Jews experience proposals to end Jewish sovereignty not as democratic ideals but as threats to security, sovereignty, and collective survival. None of this means diaspora Jews should be silent. It means our words should be more precise.

What better conversations require

The question is not whether every Jew who says “I’m anti-Zionist” is evil, antisemitic, naive, or brave. The question is simpler: what are they actually saying?

Are they rejecting Jewish peoplehood? Jewish sovereignty? The occupation? Netanyahu? nationalism? racism? war? communal pressure? their Hebrew school education? their parents’ politics? a distorted understanding of Zionism? Until we know that, we do not know what we are arguing about.

The Jewish community does not need less argument about Israel. It needs a better argument that begins by asking people what they mean, and then taking their answers seriously enough to ask the next question.

June 7 is the day to say so, because June 7 is the day the longing came home.

When the longing came home

On June 7, 1967, Israeli paratroopers fought their way through the Old City and reached the Western Wall, the surviving wall of the Temple Mount, the closest a Jew could stand to the site of the Temple. Previously under Jordanian military control, no Jew had been allowed to stand there for almost 20 years. The IDF’s chief chaplain, Rabbi Goren, raised a shofar and sounded it against the stones. The brigade commander, Motta Gur, had already radioed the words that an entire generation of Israelis can still recite from memory: “Har habayit beyadeinu! The Temple Mount is in our hands!” Hardened men who had never thought of themselves as religious put their faces against the limestone and wept.

It was, of course, a military victory. But for the Jews who reached the Wall, it was not experienced only, or even mainly, as victory. It was homecoming. The weeping wasn’t the weeping of victors but the weeping of people who had arrived somewhere their grandparents had only been able to face from a distance and pray toward.

The Hebrew calendar marks the anniversary of the unification of Jerusalem as Yom Yerushalayim, which passed this spring. I am choosing to mark the secular date because for most of us in the Diaspora the memory attaches to June 1967 and the feats of the Six Day War.

A pride that was earned

The challenge is not to choose between pride and honesty. The challenge is to hold Jerusalem the way Jews have always held it: with longing, reverence, grief, and responsibility at once.

Here is what makes the pride legitimate: we didn’t stumble into a feeling about Jerusalem in 1948 and dress it up after the fact. We kept faith with this city for 2,000 years before we ever held it again.

For twenty centuries, Jews scattered across every continent prayed facing Jerusalem. Not toward a capital they were building but to a city they’d lost. The central prayer of Jewish liturgy, said three times a day, names Zion and Jerusalem five times and is recited while turned east (at least, in North America and Europe). The blessing after a meal asks for the city’s rebuilding. The Torah service proclaims that instruction goes forth from Zion. A Jew at prayer in Vilna or Marrakesh or Buenos Aires was, with his whole body, addressing one specific place on earth, and had been doing so since long before there was a political Zionist movement or a flag to raise over anything.

The longing was woven into the architecture of an entire life. At every Jewish wedding, at the height of joy, a glass is shattered under the canopy so that even our happiness carries the memory of a broken city. The exiles in Psalm 137 swore that if they forgot Jerusalem, their right hand should lose its skill, and Jews kept that vow operational for fifty generations because they understood that a people can be parted from a place and still refuse to let it go. On Tisha B’Av, Jews mourned the city’s destruction as though it were not ancient history but a wound in the present tense. Yehuda HaLevi, comfortable and celebrated in Spain, wrote that his heart was in the east while the rest of him stayed in the west, and then he stopped writing about it and set out for Jerusalem and is said to have died on the way.

This is the part worth standing tall over. It is hard to think of another people that has loved a city so liturgically, so bodily, and for so long in its absence. . We held it in memory when we could not hold it in fact, every single day, for two thousand years, with nothing to enforce the loyalty but the loyalty itself. And then, on a June morning in 1967, we held it again. Having and holding aren’t two separate things. They’re one act, interrupted for two millennia and rejoined at the Wall. The holding began long before sovereignty. Jews held Jerusalem in prayer, law, mourning, poetry, and direction. In 1967, that metaphysical holding became physical again. That is not an attachment anyone needs to double-think. It is one of the greatest acts of fidelity in human history.

Pride and honesty in the same hand

None of this requires pretending that holding Jerusalem is simple. The earthly city is real. It is crowded and contested, holy to others as well as to us. The same homecoming we are right to celebrate also remade the lives of the Palestinians who live there, and their lives, their claims, and their grievances are real. They cannot be wished away by Jewish memory, however ancient and legitimate that memory is. The city is governed, too, by fallible people who make hard decisions and sometimes the wrong ones, and a Jew can argue with any of those decisions, loudly, and should when conscience demands it. That is what it means to actually possess a thing rather than only to dream about it from afar. A people can hold a country in the moral imagination, but a real one needs garbage trucks and zoning fights and coalition compromises, the unglamorous business of actually existing. The dream answers to no one. A government answers to its citizens and to history both.

But the line holds, and that’s the point: a Jew does not have to endorse every decision of an Israeli government to understand why Jerusalem matters. Disagreeing with a coalition, for example, is not the same as conceding that your grandfather’s prayers were a fiction. You can criticize a minister with everything you have and still stand at that Wall with your whole chest, because the minister is a fact about this year and Jerusalem is a fact about three thousand of them. Jerusalem has outlasted kings, caliphs, crusaders, emperors, high commissioners, prime ministers, and more bad municipal planning than any holy city should have to endure. Memory is not policy and pride is not a blank check. The two have never needed each other’s permission.

So mark the day

Mark June 7, and mark it proudly. Not quietly, not with the cautious hedge that has crept into so much Jewish speech about Israel, as though every sentence of attachment now owes a sentence of apology or explanation. It doesn’t. Jerusalem matters a great deal, and we are the astonishing generation that gets to say “next year in Jerusalem” and mean a real city we can board a plane and reach by morning.

There is a story that in Jerusalem itself they add a word to the old phrase. Not next year in Jerusalem, but next year in the rebuilt Jerusalem, because there is always more to build, more to deserve, more to become worthy of. That is the correct posture for a proud people, and it is the opposite of complacency. You can be deeply, unembarrassedly proud of having and holding this city and still understand that holding it well is the work of every generation that gets the privilege.

We kept the city for 2,000 years, and the city kept us. On June 7 we reached it again. Be proud of that. Not apologetically, not defensively, not as a permission slip for every policy made in its name. Be proud. And then go be worthy of it.

Plot

In her new memoir, Rachel Goldberg-Polin describes the burial plot she and her husband Jon chose for their son Hersh. They placed him in the middle. The two graves on either side, she writes, will eventually be theirs. Their daughters, with luck and time, will marry, build their own lives, and be buried with their own families. Hersh will not. So his parents will lie next to him, taking the place of the wife and children he would have had.

It’s one of the most piercing parts of When We See You Again. It is also one of the most controlled. There is no soaring rhetoric around it, no scaffolding to bear the immense weight. Just a cemetery plan that, tragically, makes sense, even when it absolutely shouldn’t.

That register is the book’s argument, whether or not Goldberg-Polin would describe it that way. She hasn’t produced a book about resilience. She hasn’t produced a book that ends with hope, although hope is there in glimpses. Compared to Eli Sharabi’s Hostage, the other major October 7 memoir in English, hers refuses the usual closing gesture. Her book doesn’t attempt to balance emotional devastation with a message of resilience. She just poured the pain onto the page, insisting that the reader absorb it.

Parceling the pain

In a recent interview with Aviva Klompas on Boundless Insights, Goldberg-Polin makes this explicit. She says the book isn’t a memoir, not a tell-all, and not the story of someone rising from ashes into resilience. It began, she says, as a way of putting pain into packages, of parceling out the weights that were corroding her from the inside. That clarification matters as the book is not asking to be admired as recovery. It is asking to be received as testimony.

One of the most important things Goldberg-Polin refuses is the demand to “get better.” In the interview, she speaks about the hunger, especially in Israel now, for signs of healing, resilience, and recovery. But for families who have buried their loved ones, “better” is a cruel word. They may get different or learn to live differently, but the loss is never repaired. That’s why the phrase Goldberg-Polin reaches for in the interview - Viktor Frankl’s “tragic optimism” - is so clarifying. It is not hope as consolation or even positivity. It’s the insistence that even inside unhealed tragedy, one remains bound to love, truth, memory, and action.

Obligation

The decision to write this kind of book is a heroic act of extraordinary exposure. There were easier paths. Goldberg-Polin could have retreated into private grief. She could have written a recovery narrative that flattered the audience and asked nothing of it. She could have stayed off camera. Instead, through 330 days of captivity, she stood in front of every microphone she could find, with a piece of masking tape stuck to her chest counting the days, and she has continued, albeit in a different register since Hersh was buried, to remain visible.

In Jewish terms, that public campaign belonged to the world of pidyon shvuyim, the redemption of captives, one of the tradition’s most urgent obligations. That matters because her visibility wasn’t merely therapeutic or political. It was a mother’s campaign, yes, but also a recognizably Jewish act: refusing to let a captive become an abstraction. Hersh had a name, a face, a family, a story, a people. The tape on her chest forbade the world to look away from that.

There is a particular Jewish temptation that her example refuses. It’s the reflex to lower the voice when challenged, to slip back into the crowd, to make oneself smaller until the moment passes. The reflex is ancient and, in many of its historical applications, sensible. It kept families alive across centuries of pogroms and expulsions. It survives in Diaspora bones whether or not it is still adaptive in 2026. Goldberg-Polin’s life since October 7 is a refusal of that reflex. She lost so much, but keeps speaking.

Grief

What she models is not the absence of pain. The book makes clear that there will never be such an absence. It’s something more difficult, which is the choice to remain standing while broken. To get dressed in the morning. To meet with presidents and popes. To give the eulogy at one’s own child’s funeral. To then sit down and write 272 pages and let strangers read them. None of this is stoicism in the Greek sense, the suppression of emotion in the service of dignity. It is closer to the Jewish discipline of mourning: it doesn’t ask the mourner to master grief, but rather gives grief form. You tear the garment. You sit. You say the words. You mark time differently. And then, before you are healed, before you are ready, before the world makes sense again, you are asked to shoulder it and keep walking. The grief isn’t displaced or resolved. It is given language, ritual, and obligation, so that the mourner can carry what can’t be put down.

This, I think, is one of the lessons the Jewish world most needs and is least equipped to absorb. Since October 7, many North American Jews have felt the temptation either to explain themselves into acceptability or to withdraw from public Jewishness altogether. One response tries to become the kind of “good Jew” no one will punish. The other decides that being visibly Jewish has become too costly. They are very different postures that share one assumption: that Jewish visibility is a problem to be managed.

Rachel and her husband Jon offer a third posture. She has been visible from the start as Hersh’s mother, as a Jew, as an Israeli, as an American-born woman speaking to multiple worlds at once, and as someone who refused to adjust the moral frame of her son’s captivity and murder to satisfy any audience. She has stood in front of progressives who would have preferred her son had been a different kind of victim, and in front of conservatives who would have preferred she had a different kind of politics, and she has not done either group the favour of becoming more “usable” or making them comfortable. She has refused to be useful to anyone except her son and the other hostages. That refusal is itself a form of teaching.

Dosage of bravery

There’s a temptation, in writing about her, to extract a programme and turn her into a slogan. She would resist this, and so should anyone trying to learn from her example. The point is not that everyone must become Rachel Goldberg-Polin. Thankfully, almost no one will be asked to. The point is that her bravery is available in smaller doses to everyone who reads her book. The choice to say the unfashionable thing at the dinner table. The choice to wear a Star of David in public. The choice to keep sending one’s kids to the Jewish school after the windows have been broken. The choice not to disappear.

The Jewish grammar for this is Rabbi Tarfon’s: It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it. Goldberg-Polin says something close to this in her interview. The existence of mystery, destiny, or divine plan does not give anyone a pass. We still have to do what is right, to pursue justice and truth, even when truth feels less and less recognizable. That is what the book leaves us with: not healing, not resolution, but obligation.

Hersh’s burial plot is its own kind of teaching. She is planning her own death next to her son’s. She is doing this clearly, in print, while still alive. There’s a model here for how to carry an unbearable knowledge. Name it. Set it down. Keep going. She doesn’t pretend the plot is anything other than what it is. She doesn’t pretend that her daughters’ eventual families will fill the space Hersh was supposed to fill. She just lays out the cemetery and lets the reader see it.

The book ends without resolution because, as we know all too well, the situation does not resolve. Hersh is gone. His parents remain alive. The plots are bought. The grief remains grief. The work of standing in the open as a Jew, in a moment that asks Jews to explain themselves or disappear, continues. Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s example is not that the work becomes easier, or that pain becomes wisdom, or that tragedy eventually reveals itself as blessing. It is that love remains after death, obligation remains after devastation, and the work must be shouldered anyway.

At this year’s University of Michigan commencement ceremony, the historian Derek Peterson — a MacArthur fellow, among the most decorated scholars of his generation — used his faculty address to tell the stadium what their education had been for. The greatness of the university, Peterson concluded, rests on the courage and conviction of student activists who have pushed it down the path toward justice. He mentioned the suffragettes who fought for women’s admission, the first Jewish professor who opened the school’s doors to Jews fleeing antisemitism, and the Black Action Movement which demanded a curriculum reflecting Black experience. And then, at the climax of the speech, he mentioned the pro-Palestinian student activists “who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Let’s put aside that some of the actions these student activists have taken “to open hearts” included harassment and intimidation, vandalism, classroom disruption, and targeting regents’ homes. All that aside, the intellectual claim itself does not hold up. Much of the activism Peterson celebrated is not moral seriousness but its imitation: a politics of slogans and self-display that consumes the moral weight of real suffering, asks little of those performing it, and offers even less to the future of the people in whose name it speaks.

Moral consumption

The problem with much of the so-called “pro-Palestine” activism is not that it responds to imaginary suffering. Palestinian suffering is real. Gaza’s civilians have endured devastation. The reality in the West Bank involves serious injustices. None of this should be minimized. The problem is that this performative activism trades on that suffering without doing the serious work required or proposing any viable future the two peoples can share.

What we are seeing instead is confident ignorance: students chanting slogans whose implications they cannot explain, institutions and city councils issuing statements on a conflict they barely understand, influencers reducing more than a century of war, displacement, failed diplomacy, nationalism, religion, and trauma into five repeatable lines.

This activism has become a premier site of moral consumption: a way to feel morally serious, politically brave, and historically awake without submitting to the discipline that genuine moral engagement demands. It offers certainty, belonging, villains and victims in clean categories.

It asks remarkably little in return. No language or history needs to be learned. No reckoning is required with failed peace efforts, corrupt Palestinian politics, Israeli security fears, Hamas, Iran, or the fact that good intentions can produce disastrous outcomes.

One can simply declare: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, liberation and resistance. The simple binary is the point.

Why this conflict?

Their activism is not “pro-Palestine” but rather “anti-Israel.” It is defined less by a serious engagement with Palestinian needs than by opposition to Israel’s policies, legitimacy, and existence.

There are many conflicts and injustices in the world. None generates the same ritualized attention in Western progressive institutions: the same resolutions, boycotts, encampments, and social penalties. The standard explanations — American backing, democratic status, settler-colonial framing — apply to many other cases. None produces anything close to the response Israel produces.

A more uncomfortable explanation is that this conflict has become uniquely useful as a moral symbol. It allows Western activists to stage a drama about colonialism, racism, capitalism, and militarism through one small strip of land controlled by Jews. Israel becomes the symbolic carrier of every Western sin; Palestine becomes a vessel of redemption — or, as the Cornell Graduate Student Union put it, we free Palestine, and Palestine frees us. To them, Palestine is less a place than an idea. “Free Palestine” becomes less a political program than a creed. A tragic national struggle between two peoples is reduced to a cosmic morality tale.

The performance of certainty

Reality resists morality tales.

Anyone who has spent serious time with this conflict knows that genuine engagement produces humility. Israeli power is real, and so is Israeli vulnerability. Palestinian suffering is real, and so is Palestinian political agency. The more one learns, the clearer it becomes that two peoples, with histories and aspirations that cannot be wished away, will continue to live between the river and the sea. Any serious politics must start from that.

The current activism does the opposite. It treats doubt as apostasy and complexity as cowardice. In The Certainty Trap, Ilana Redstone describes the way political certainty leads people to assume that those who disagree with them are not merely wrong, but morally or intellectually defective. That is exactly the posture this activism rewards. Any attempt to distinguish between criticism of Israeli policy and hostility toward Jews is dismissed as propaganda. Any effort to ask what a slogan means in practice is treated as bad faith. Certainty is not the result of careful analysis. It is the entry requirement for belonging.

No accountability

A deeper feature of this performance is that activists pay no price if their slogans harden rejectionism, empower extremists, or worsen the lives of the people they claim to defend.

This is by design. When politics becomes self-expression, consequences become secondary. What matters is that one took a stand, used the right words, and appeared on “the right side of history.” Whether the action helps or harms is not asked at all. This is where moral performance becomes not merely shallow but destructive.

Who pays the price

The performance harms Palestinians by turning them into symbols rather than political actors with competing views, interests, failures, and responsibilities. Palestinians who criticize Hamas, support coexistence, or reject maximalist fantasies are ignored because they interfere with the script. The movement needs them as pure victims or revolutionary icons.

It harms Israelis by confirming the Israeli right’s most paranoid claim: that the world objects not to particular policies but to Jewish sovereignty itself. When activists chant eliminationist slogans, justify “resistance” without limits, or treat Israeli civilians and Jews as extensions of the state, they strengthen the forces least likely to pursue peace.

And it harms Jews far from the conflict. Synagogues, Jewish institutions, and ordinary Jews become proxy targets for people unwilling to distinguish between Jews abroad and the actions of Israel. The movement has little patience for such distinctions. When Jews name the antisemitism that follows, they are told they are trying to silence legitimate criticism.

Cheap righteousness

Feeling righteous is not the same as being useful. Performing solidarity is not the same as reducing suffering. When the performance of justice matters more than its achievement, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes a theater for other people’s moral consumption, Palestinians become props in Western dramas of redemption, Jews become symbols onto which rage can be projected, and the future of two peoples is sacrificed to the catharsis of slogans.

This is what the imitation of moral seriousness produces, and what Peterson mistook for the climax of a university education. What he held up at Michigan Stadium was not moral clarity or courage, but a flattering mirror. Many in the audience saw themselves as heirs to suffragettes and civil rights activists, and applauded. The activism was the vehicle. The self-image was the point.

The alternative is not silence in the face of suffering. It is intellectual humility: the discipline of learning before declaring, listening to actual Palestinians and Israelis rather than turning them into symbols, distinguishing evidence from interpretation, recognizing uncertainty and complexity where they exist, and identifying the values beneath disagreement instead of reducing opponents to caricatures. That is the harder moral discipline. It offers less catharsis than cheap righteousness, but it is the only kind of moral seriousness worthy of the name.

This idea is what Shavuot commemorates. It’s not merely the giving of the Torah but the accepting of it. That may be why the Book of Ruth is read on Shavuot. Ruth doesn’t first take a course about Judaism and then decide whether the tradition suits her. She says to Naomi, “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” The order is telling. Peoplehood comes before full comprehension. Ruth enters a covenantal life not because it has been made comfortable, but because she has accepted a bond.

Comfort vs. obligation

The distinction is between identity as comfort and identity as obligation. Identity as comfort asks whether belonging to the Jewish people speaks to me, nourishes me, inspires me, or fits my life. Identity as obligation asks what I owe because I am bound to a people, a history, and a covenant that precede my preferences.

For most of the postwar American Jewish century, especially outside the most observant communities, the formula ran the other way. Nishma first. We will hear, study, consider, find what speaks to us, and then, having located the parts that resonated, maybe we’ll do. This wasn’t a failure but a strategy. American Jewish life was built around personal meaning because personal meaning was what could be transmitted in a voluntary, pluralistic, comfortable society. Synagogue when it inspired us. Tradition when it spoke to our existing moral and political sensibilities. Israel when it moved us. Community when it felt right. Identity as something we opted into based on what we got out of it. For two or three generations the strategy worked, more or less, producing a Jewish life whose public vocabulary often avoided sacrifice and rarely knew how to demand discomfort. It is not that sacrifice never existed. It is that American Jewish institutions struggled to speak in the language of commandedness, duty, or peoplehood.

New rules

Then came October 7, and the formula broke. Not because American Jews suddenly stopped finding meaning in belonging to the Jewish people, but because personal meaning was no longer enough. Inspiration could not answer the question of what one owes to murdered Jews, kidnapped Jews, frightened Jews, isolated Jews, Israeli Jews, visibly Jewish Jews, or Jews who suddenly discovered how conditional their acceptance had been.

The reason it broke isn’t complicated. A Jewish life built on personal meaning can’t tell you what to do when meaning runs out and when the news is all bad. It can’t tell you what to do when the community is under attack, when your friends won’t say what you need them to say, and when the question is not what inspires you but what you owe.

Crisis doesn’t ask “What do I believe?” It asks “Who am I responsible for?” Those aren’t the same question, as the first can be answered privately, whereas the second is answered by showing up. What October 7 surfaced for many American Jews was that they had been formed for the first question and not the second. They had been taught - through their history, heritage, and community - to hear before doing, and when the moment demanded action, many found that the Jewish vocabulary they had inherited did not always give them the language, habits, or obligations they needed.

This doesn’t mean American Jews must agree on Israel (they don’t, and they never will). It doesn’t mean abandoning the right to criticize Israeli policy or Israeli government. In fact, covenantal responsibility may make criticism more serious, not less. To criticize from outside is one thing. To argue from within a bond is another. The question is whether criticism becomes an exit from responsibility or an expression of it. It means something simpler and perhaps harder. Jewish responsibility isn’t contingent on Jewish comfort. It binds even when it is inconvenient and when the politics are uncomfortable. It binds even when your social environment makes the binding costly. That’s what makes it responsibility instead of mere preference.

The American Jewish formula of nishma first worked when the cost was low. When the cost rose, the formula couldn’t hold the weight. Many of us who had built Jewish lives around what moved us found ourselves needing a Jewish life that could hold us even when nothing moved.

The sentence is uncomfortable in the way all real commitments are uncomfortable. It doesn’t promise that the doing will feel meaningful or that the hearing will produce agreement. It promises only that you have entered into something that does not run on your feelings about it. It signifies that you’re a part of something bigger.

Today

That’s the question being asked of American Jews today, not by anyone in particular but by the moment. Whether the binding holds when the comfort runs out. Whether you can say na’aseh - we will do - before you have finished arguing about every term. Whether the covenant is something you opt into for what it gives you, or something you stand inside even when it asks for something back.

In practice, this does not have to mean grand gestures. It may mean joining a synagogue even when services do not always move you. It may mean showing up for a community event because presence itself is a form of solidarity. It may mean giving to Jewish institutions, checking in on Israeli friends and relatives, learning enough Hebrew or Jewish history to stop outsourcing your own inheritance, making Shabbat dinner even when the week has been exhausting, or defending Jews in rooms where doing so will cost you social ease. The point is not that every Jew must do the same thing. The point is that covenant does not become real all at once. It becomes real through repeated acts that say “your people are my people” even when the politics are hard, the news is painful, or the belonging feels costly.

Ruth’s sentence and Sinai’s sentence belong together. “Your people shall be my people” and “we will do and we will hear” are both declarations made before the future is clear. Neither is a statement of comfort. Both are statements of attachment.

Both Ruth and the Israelites at Sinai had no clear idea of what they were committing to. They said yes anyway. Some might think this was foolish. It might be the most honest thing any of us has ever said: we do not yet understand everything we owe, but we know that we’re bound.

Nicholas Kristof’s column this week in The New York Times alleges widespread sexual abuse of Palestinians by Israeli guards, soldiers, and settlers. The allegations as Kristof presents them are not proven, and the column reporting them is unreliable. But the broader rot they gesture at is real: settler violence, ministers who dehumanize detainees from the floor of the cabinet, the assault on Israel’s institutions of accountability. A serious society handles both at once. It demands transparent investigation of every credible allegation, regardless of who is accused. And it refuses to abandon the moral standards that distinguish a Jewish and democratic state from its enemies, however hated those enemies may be. On both counts, Israel should be the loudest voice in the room. Anything less concedes the ground to bad reporting and bad actors alike.

The reporting

Kristof’s piece does not meet the bar these allegations demand. It rests on anonymous testimony with no independent corroboration. It treats advocacy NGOs with documented anti-Israel records as if they were neutral observers. It includes claims — dogs trained to rape prisoners, among others — that don’t pass basic sense checks and have no corroboration from anyone else. This is not how a serious paper builds a case for crimes of this gravity. It is how propaganda gets laundered into print. And allegations published this way do precisely what they claim to expose: they demonize Israelis and feed the antisemitic tropes a serious paper should be undoing.

None of this means nothing happened. The problem is real, just far smaller than the column makes it look. There are bad actors in Israel, and they are abusing power. They are not all of Israeli society, and conflating them with it is exactly the slip this framing invites. Worse still is the symmetry Kristof draws between Israeli bad actors and Hamas. October 7 was rape as a weapon — planned, ordered, filmed, celebrated by an organization that calls it resistance. What Kristof describes is rape as institutional rot. Both are wrong. They are not the same wrong. The category collapse is itself a moral failure worth naming.

The rot

But the broader phenomenon is not a matter of one columnist’s sources. Settler mobs assault Palestinian villagers. Citizens and politicians stormed a military facility to defend soldiers accused of grievous abuse. A national security minister calls detainees “scum” and “Nazis” and brags about making their conditions harsher. The night-shift guard doesn’t invent that script. He picks it up from the top. Behind all of this, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General’s office, the State Prosecutor, the oversight bodies — the entire architecture meant to hold a state to its own laws — have been under sustained assault from the same coalition that now defends accused abusers. The result is vigilantism: citizens, settlers, even politicians taking enforcement into their own hands. A democracy cannot survive the breakdown of its contract with its citizens. You cannot dismantle the brakes and then act surprised when the car will not stop.

The line we don’t cross

This should be said clearly: Hamas’s terrorists — the men who burned, raped, mutilated, and broadcast their atrocities on October 7 — deserve no empathy. None. We can hate them with the full force of our hearts. We still don’t get to rape them in our custody. That isn’t weakness. It is the line between us and them. A Jewish and democratic state that puts its detainees through courts — charges, tries, holds them under law — is doing something fundamentally different from what Hamas did on October 7. A guard who rapes a prisoner hasn’t avenged anything. He has erased the difference that gives Israel a moral case at all.

Two wrong answers

For Jews outside Israel, all of this poses a hard question. How do you speak honestly and responsibly about Israeli wrongdoing? Two responses dominate the Jewish conversation right now, and both fail.

The first treats every accusation against Israel as a blood libel and every Jewish critic as a useful idiot or antisemite. This is the defensive crouch: bad faith dressed up as loyalty. It makes the rot worse by ensuring nothing has to change.

The second says the project itself is the problem. Zionism is racism. Israel was born in sin. Rejection of both is the honest move. This is what a growing number of young liberal Americans, and American Jews, are being offered as their only alternative to the first.

The connected critic

But there is a third position. Professor Michael Walzer called it the connected critic: someone who criticizes from within, shares the community’s fate, and is sharper precisely because they refuse to leave.

“Not in our name” is the line of someone who wants the moral credit of objection without the burden of belonging. The connected critic says the opposite: yes, in our name. With our taxes, our flag, our soldiers, and therefore on our hands to fix.

This is the Zionism young Jews most need — not the ethnonationalism of Israel’s fanatics, not the antizionists’ resignation letter, but a Jewish nationalism proud to hold itself to higher standards than its enemies do.

The responsibility

In practice, this means Israel should be the loudest voice calling for transparent inquiry into every credible allegation, regardless of who is accused. Bad reporting and reflexive denial are not opposites. They are co-conspirators. Each makes the other easier. The connected critic refuses both.

I know how this essay will be misused. Honest writing about Israeli wrongdoing becomes fuel for those who would burn the project of Jewish self-determination to the ground. That is not a reason to stay silent. It is the reason to be precise. Israel’s enemies aren’t made stronger by Jews who clean their own house. They are made stronger by Jews who refuse to.

And here is the asymmetry that should weigh on Jews outside Israel. We can walk away. Israelis can’t. They live there, vote there, raise their kids there. They don’t get an exit. When we declare “not in our name” from across an ocean, we don’t escape the problem. We leave Israelis alone with their fanatics.

A demanding Zionism is more exacting than uncritical Zionism, because it insists on standards. It is much more responsible than antizionism, because it insists on staying. Israel is worth criticizing because Israel is worth saving. That is the entire argument.

Arguments about antisemitism in America have settled into a familiar shape. One side locates the problem mostly on the right: the militias, the replacement theorists, the politicians who flirt with both, the pundits, influencers, and Youtubers. The other side locates it mostly on the left: the post-October 7 protest culture, the activist vocabularies of decolonization, the campus chants that have moved off campus. Each side has its evidence. Each side mostly believes the other is exaggerating, or inventing it for political advantage.

Boundless recently commissioned a major national study of media consumption and online antisemitism, in which 1,000 American adults were surveyed, nationally representative with oversample of young adults (aged 18-35). The results, published here, suggest that both stories are partly true. They also suggest that both stories miss what is actually happening, and that what is actually happening is worse than either: antisemitism is not simply migration from one political camp to another, but has become a prejudice that travels comfortably through both. In other words, Antisemitism does not sort the way other prejudices do.

Where other prejudices sort

The study turned up something strange. On almost every kind of prejudice it measured, conservative and liberal Americans live in different worlds. Ask whether discrimination against white people is as serious as discrimination against Black people, and conservative TV viewers say yes by a wide margin while liberal TV viewers say no. Ask whether all illegal immigrants should be deported, and the two camps split three to one. Ask whether women are better off at home with the kids. Same divide.

Now run it the other direction. Ask whether they’ve seen racist content online lately, and far more liberal viewers say yes than conservative viewers. Ask about anti-Muslim content, or anti-women content, and the gap is just as wide. On topic after topic, the partisan filter does exactly what it is supposed to do. It splits Americans into two countries that barely overlap, each one alert to the bigotry the other shrugs at.

Then we asked about Jews. The sorting stopped.

Three claims to keep separate

What we found takes three forms, and they’re worth keeping separate. The first is a claim about what people see online. The second is a claim about what they believe. The third is an interpretive conclusion the first two together force us toward. A caveat before any of them: self-reporting media exposure is imperfect, and reporting that you have seen anti-Jewish content online is not the same as endorsing it. But the strength of the finding does not rest on any single number. It rests on the fact that the same survey instrument that shows sharp partisan sorting on every other prejudice it measured shows almost none on Jews. The instrument is the constant, and the variable is the prejudice.

Start with exposure. Conservative and liberal TV viewers report encountering anti-Jewish content online at almost the same rate, around six in ten on either side; anti-Israel content, around seven in ten. That much could be the algorithms doing their work, pushing Jew-related material into every feed regardless of politics.

But exposure is not endorsement. When you ask people what they believe, the parity holds. Twenty-seven percent of conservative podcast listeners agree Jews use shady practices to get what they want; among liberal podcast listeners, 21%. On whether Jews have too much control and influence in the United States, conservative podcast listeners come in at 32%, liberal podcast listeners at 28%. Among television viewers the pattern actually inverts: 22% of conservative TV viewers agree Jews have too much control, against 31% of liberal TV viewers. The partisan filter that explains almost every other disagreement in American life does not explain how Americans feel about Jews.

This is the interpretive claim, and it matters because the way most of us have been arguing about antisemitism assumes the partisan filter works on this question the way it works on every other. It assumes a fight over which side has more, with each side accusing the other and defending its own. The Boundless data doesn’t settle that fight, but rather dissolves it. Antisemitism is the prejudice that does not sort. It moves through every silo and is the one hatred that crosses every line.

Why it travels

Why this should be true is not really a mystery. Antisemitism has always adapted to whatever ideological project is at hand. Put differently: whatever the antisemite needs the Jew to be is how the antisemite will portray the Jew. The right uses it as a story about subversion from above: Jews engineering the Great Replacement. The left uses it as a story about oppression from above, dressed up as decolonization: Jews as settler colonizers in Palestine. Both stories require different protagonists, but both end up finding the Jew.

Some of it is structural in a newer way. The strongest media predictor of anti-Jewish views in the Boundless data is not conservative or liberal television. It is non-traditional (and largely non-regulated) media: podcasts, YouTube, online newsletters, social media, news aggregators. People who get most of their information through these channels are markedly more likely to hold anti-Jewish views, regardless of their politics. Heavy social media users show elevated anti-Jewish views across the board, with agreement that Jews use shady practices jumping from 16% to 24%. Whatever the new media environment is doing to the American mind - be it algorithmic repetition, creating a conspiracy ecosystem, influencer incentives, distrust of institutions, or the fact that what “outrages engages” - it is doing something specific to how that mind thinks about Jews.

The wider survey

The rest of the survey fills in this picture in ways that should disturb anyone reading it. One in three Americans now holds at least one openly anti-Jewish view. One in six holds two or more. A third say they have seen content online claiming Zionists secretly control politics, media, or global finance. About a quarter of those who saw it consider the claim either true or a fair political opinion. Twenty-seven percent of Americans believe Israel directed the United States to recently attack Iran. These are not fringe positions but are mainstream enough that, applied to almost any other group, they would prompt emergency convenings.

The October 7 numbers are worse, and that is taking into account that not every harsh view of Israel is antisemitic. But conspiratorial claims about Zionist control, denial or minimization of Jewish victimization, and classic allegations of Jewish manipulation are. Two and a half years after the most heavily documented massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with the attackers’ own footage in public circulation (what I’ve taken to calling the GoProGrom), only 49% of Americans believe Hamas committed acts of sexual violence that day. Among progressives, the figure is 39%; among Americans under thirty-five, the same. Forty-one percent of Americans believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Among progressives, that figure is 80%. Among younger Americans, 53%. Half the country is no longer sure whether to believe what was documented in real time.

The recognition gap

There is a thread that runs through all of this, and it is the one that makes the parity finding hurt the most. On every other category of bigotry, liberal viewers are far more likely than conservative viewers to recognize what they see as hate. They notice and name it. They take it seriously. Then you reach Jews, and the antiracist apparatus that runs so reliably elsewhere shuts down. The antiracist reflex suddenly becomes selective or uncertain or conditional. The recognition gap that exists for women, for Black people, for Muslims, for immigrants, just doesn’t exist for us. The machinery built to spot prejudice does not spot this one.

Politically homeless

We must recognize what this means for our community. Roughly one third of the surrounding population already holds at least one of the views that has historically preceded our worst centuries: claims of conspiracy, excessive Jewish power, manipulation, dual loyalty. The sorting mechanism that protects other minorities from sliding into majority hostility is not protecting us. There is no partisan vote that solves this. There is no media diet that fixes it. Whichever direction the country moves politically over the next decade, the data suggests Jews lose either way, because the prejudice doesn’t track the politics.

That is not the conclusion anyone wanted but it is what the numbers show. The comfort of believing antisemitism was a problem of one side or the other, and that one’s own side was the safer house, is no longer available. Both houses are leaking and the leak is in the foundation, not the roof. Until the leak is fixed, the Jews find themselves politically homeless.

What to do about it is a longer conversation. The first step is to stop having the wrong fight and start having the right fight: build cross-partisan monitoring, treat and expose antisemitism on traditional social media, teach robust media literacy, stop excusing in-group antisemitism, and teach others to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from conspiratorial antizionism. The fight over whose antisemitism is worse is the fight that produced this data. Whatever comes next has to start from the recognition that the old map of where the danger lives no longer matches the territory.

The danger lives everywhere.

To whom it may concern,

You will not have heard of me. Few do, even now. I was not a victim of genocide. The Nazis did not kill me - though they killed forty-nine members of my family. What killed me was the fight that came after: the years of lobbying and pleading and starving in furnished rooms to give the crime a name and to make the world ratify it. I collapsed at a bus stop on Forty-Second Street in August of 1959, at fifty-nine years old, with no money, no family, and a briefcase full of papers no one wanted. Seven people attended my funeral. The doctors said heart failure. I would have said something else.

I write to you about a word. My word.

I coined it in 1944, while the people I loved were being murdered in a country I fled. My mother. My father. Cousins, aunts, uncles, the whole family tree, taken to Treblinka and turned to smoke. I had begged my parents to leave, to come with me. They wouldn’t. They were wrong, and I couldn’t save them. I’ve carried that knowledge, that guilt, every day since.

The word I coined was not an academic exercise. It was an attempt to give a name to what was done to my family and to the families of every people whose existence has been targeted because of what they were.

The word is genocide.

Genocide

From the Greek genos, a tribe or a people, and the Latin cide, to kill. I joined the two because what was being done required a word that did not yet exist. It wasn’t war, it wasn’t massacre, and it wasn’t persecution, however severe. It was the attempt to erase a people as a people - to end their language, their faith, their continuity, their existence. To make it as if they had never been.

The word was meant to be precise; that was the point. The world already had words for cruelty, for slaughter, for atrocity, for war. What it did not have, before 1944, was a word for the particular crime of trying to destroy a people for the sole reason that they were that people. As such, the Convention I helped to draft would later say. Targeted because of who they are, not because of what they do, not because of where they live, not because of which side they fight on in some war. Because of who they are. That, and only that, is what my word was made to mean.

Today

I have been told what is happening in 2026. My word has been taken up to describe the actions of the Jewish State - the state established by the survivors of the very crime my word was made to name. It’s chanted in university quadrangles, written into scholarship, repeated from political podiums, and hurled at Jewish children walking to school as if it were a stone. I made the word. I know what it was made for. And I can tell you with the authority of its author that what is being described in Gaza is not what my word names.

The word requires intent. Not consequence, however terrible. Not destruction, however vast. Intent. The destruction of the group must be the goal, not the byproduct of a war fought against an army that has embedded itself in the group. The reasoning now offered in defense of the modern accusation runs like this: many civilians have died, therefore the destruction of a people must be the aim. This is just not how my word works. The test isn’t whether civilians died on a terrible scale. The test is whether their death was the purpose of the campaign, or the tragic and culpable consequence of a campaign whose purpose was something else. The two are not the same thing, and a word that can’t tell them apart is a word that can’t do its job.

A nation that warns civilians before it strikes, that opens corridors for their escape, that sends its own children into ground combat to spare the children of the enemy from the air, that negotiates for the return of hostages and the pause of fighting - that nation may be doing many things, some of them terrible. Recklessness is not genocide. Miscalculation is not genocide. Operational failure is not genocide. Even a humanitarian catastrophe, full of real suffering that no one of conscience can look away from, is not genocide. To say so is not to dismiss the suffering. It’s to insist that the suffering be named correctly, because it is only when things are named correctly that they can be addressed.

The war didn’t begin as a random campaign against a population. It began with an enemy that crossed a border on a Saturday morning and entered homes to murder and kidnap whole families. Apparently this is still happening against my people after I first saw it take place over 80 years ago. A country fighting to prevent the repetition of that kind of attack should be judged by the laws of war, by prudence, by morality, and by the consequences of its choices. But that’s not the same thing as intending the destruction of a people as a people. The accusation collapses the difference between targeting a people because they are Palestinian, and fighting an armed group that has chosen to operate from within Palestinian society - beneath its hospitals, inside its schools, behind its civilians. To call this genocide is not to use my word. It is to break it.

In fact, it’s something worse than that. You must understand what it is to take the word forged from the ashes of my family and turn it against the survivors of those same ashes. Yes, my word emerged from Jewish catastrophe, but it was never meant to belong to Jews alone. I made it for the Armenians, for the Roma, for the Hereros, for every people whose existence might be targeted as my own had been. The misuse isn’t offensive because Jews own the word. It’s offensive because precision is what allows the word to protect anyone at all! Every time it is spent on what it was not made to describe, it has less to give the next people who need it.

Why?

The question that must be asked then is why the accusation persists. I think I know. It is not only believed. It is wanted. If Jews are committing genocide, the world can finally stop dwelling on what was done to them. Eight decades of guilt can be put down. Israel - the state that for the first time in two thousand years gave Jews the means to defend themselves - can be condemned without shame. The old suspicions about Jews, the ones polite society has held back for eighty years, can return to ordinary speech, vindicated at last. Opposing Jews stops being bigotry and becomes a duty. By the same logic, the killings of October 7th become resistance, and the families dragged from their beds that morning become the cause of the war their murderers started. It is a clean story. It is also a lie. But what makes it dangerous is not the lie. It is the moral comfort it offers.

This is the inversion of memory. It is the conversion of suffering into guilt. It is a form of forgetting that pretends to be a form of remembering.

Someone once wrote that genocide is a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics: one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. I meant it as a warning against the tyrants of my century. I didn’t imagine that my word, my own word, would one day be enlisted in the service of the very temptation I described.

So I ask you, whoever you are, reading this letter I can’t truly send: be careful with the word. It was paid for. Forty-nine members of my family paid for it, and millions of others in Poland and Germany and Rwanda and Cambodia and Sudan. Use it when it applies. Don’t use it when it doesn’t. The integrity of the word is the difference between recognizing the next genocide when it comes and missing it because the word had already been spent.

That is all I have to say. The bus is coming.

Yours,

Raphael Lemkin
Wołkowysk, Poland 1900 - New York, USA 1959

For an extended treatment of the history, meaning, and contemporary misuse of the term genocide, read Boundless’s new report, The Charge of Genocide: History, Meaning, and Consequences (April 2026).

Ezra Klein had a now infamous column recently in the New York Times about why there’s no liberal Joe Rogan, and quietly made a more consequential case: that antizionism has gone mainstream not because of bigotry but because of Israel’s conduct. Hasan Piker, Klein says, isn’t a Jew-hater. He’s an antizionist. And antizionism, in this telling, is now a reasonable response to a state that has apparently made itself unreasonable.

There have been many good rebuttals to Klein from people like Haviv Rettig Gur and Brendan O’Neill so far. I want to do something different: take Klein’s framing seriously, grant him every generous premise, and show that the argument still doesn’t land. The debate about whether antizionism is antisemitism maybe made sense 78 years ago. It makes no sense now. The reason has little to do with bigotry and everything to do with what Israel has become.

The argument that used to make sense

Once upon a time, Zionism was a theory. It was a proposition, developed in European cafés and Russian yeshivas, that the Jewish people should have a state. There were brilliant Jews who thought so and brilliant Jews who did not. The Bund (a secular Jewish socialist movement from Eastern Europe) thought Jews should remain Diaspora socialists. Early Reform thinkers thought Jews were a religion, not a nation. Orthodox anti-Zionists thought the return to Zion should be left to the Messiah. You could argue about Zionism the way you could argue about any political theory.

In that world, it was possible to be an intellectually honest antizionist. You could say, “I don’t think a Jewish state is the right answer to the Jewish question,” and mean it. You were engaging with a proposition that had not yet been lived. Many prominent Jews in Europe and America felt the same way.

That world ended in 1948.

Zionism is not a theory anymore. It is a country called Israel.

It is over seven million Jews who live there. It is a language spoken by children in schoolyards. It is a passport, an army, a grandparents’ generation already buried in the ground. You cannot be antizionist toward a country the way you were toward an idea. The category error is too big.

What are you actually asking them to do?

Here is the question that’s basically never answered: Take an Israeli seventeen-year-old in Haifa. She did not pick Zionism. She was born in 2009. Her grandfather came from Baghdad in 1951, because Iraq was expelling its Jews 10 years after the Farhud tried to murder them. She speaks Hebrew because her mother spoke Hebrew to her. She has an Israeli passport because that is the country her birth certificate was issued in.

What exactly does the antizionist want her to do?

“I’m not asking her to do anything. I’m just opposed to the state she lives in.” That isn’t an answer. Every country is made of people. To be opposed to the existence of her state is to be opposed to the arrangement that is her life. Does the antizionist want her to emigrate? To renounce her citizenship and live as a non-citizen in a Palestinian-majority state? To stop speaking Hebrew to her children? Every specific version of the answer is either monstrous or incoherent. “From the river to the sea” is a slogan only because no one has to spell out what it means for the actual Jewish human beings living between the river and the sea.

The sophisticated antizionist will say he is making a political argument about the character of the state. A binational arrangement. Consider what that actually means. Seven million Hebrew-speaking Jews give up majority status, give up the political sovereignty their grandparents built, give up the only country on Earth where Jewish life has demographic and military weight, and trust that a binational entity including Hamas voters and West Bank militants will treat them fairly. They are to return, voluntarily, to the Diaspora condition they left, with its known downside of periodic mass murder, the desire for which is enshrined in founding documents.

This is where the distinction between antizionism and antisemitism becomes, in practice, an academic curiosity. Bari Weiss wrote in How to Fight Anti-Semitism that it’s one thing to consider whether to have children before you get pregnant, but it’s another thing entirely to consider parenthood after your kid is born. Maybe the distinction between antizionism and antisemitism matters in a Jewish Studies seminar. For the Israeli seventeen-year-old in Haifa however, it’s meaningless. What the antizionists are demanding of her is that she dissolve the basic conditions of her existence. Whether your motive is classical Jew-hatred or high-minded political theory is immaterial to the demand itself.

It is also not racism, at least not in the Nazi sense. Nazi racial antisemitism offered Jews no escape: you are what you are biologically, and no renunciation could save you. Antizionism does offer an escape: Renounce your people’s sovereignty, disavow Zionism, adopt the vocabulary of your accusers, and you will be welcomed. This is the sophisticated antizionist’s position. In that structural sense, antizionism resembles not racial antisemitism but the old Christian antisemitism, which promised to receive Jews warmly if only they would convert.

That is why the honest word for it is not racism. A movement that seeks to erase a national and ethnic identity through propaganda, persecution, and sometimes violence is not a legitimate political position. It is a hate group. That broad political circles in the West now grant this hate group intellectual respectability is a problem of its own, and not different in kind from the fact that racial doctrines once enjoyed wide acceptance, or that Christian Jew-hatred was once the bedrock assumption of educated European life. Popularity has never been evidence of legitimacy.

What Israelis are

Israelis don’t owe anyone an argument for their existence. They don’t need to win the debate about whether Zionism was the right idea in 1897. They don’t need to persuade Ezra Klein or Hasan Piker or the student encampments that their country’s creation in 1948 was just. The debate is over, not because one side won, but because the thing itself came into being. They are a people. They speak a language. They live on a piece of land and have mortgages. That is what peoples do. The Greeks do it. The Poles do it. The Québécois do it. The arguments about whether they should are, at this point, a leisure activity for people who live elsewhere.

The core goal of Zionism, the one all its strands shared, was to make the Jewish people a nation like other nations: speaking its own language, exercising sovereignty in its own homeland. Different Zionisms added different ingredients. Some are incomplete. Some never will be. But the core was achieved. To be a Hebrew-speaking Jew in the Land of Israel is now as unremarkable as being a Frenchman in France. Zionism as an ideology has produced something that no longer needs ideology: a national, ethnic, and cultural identity with a life of its own.

For a long time, Jews have been expected to justify their existence to every new generation of critics, in every new language, using the vocabulary the critics themselves handed us. Zionism and the Israeli project, at its deepest level, is the project of not having to. Of simply being. Of the dignity of waking up somewhere, ordering a latte (“cafe-hafuch”) and croissant in Hebrew (OK, the Hebrew for croissant is croissant, a French word, but still), and speaking a language and raising a family and going to work. Antizionism is a demand that Jews return to the mode of being in which they have to justify all of that. Israelis, for the most part, are not interested. And they shouldn’t be.