I once read that the world is divided between the sick and those who will be sick. I was in my 40s then, thought little of it. Now, I’m 68 and waiting for open heart surgery for a triple bypass. Oh joy.

I’m not writing this to elicit sympathy, although I won’t turn it down. I’m just making an observation on human existence. Others have done so and won Pulitzers and Nobels. I’ll be happy just to go home from the hospital, to rejoin my wife Anat and our dog and eight cats.

Speaking of my wife, none better. She’s a take-charge, take-no-bull, heart-of-gold kind of person. In short, an Israeli. She assesses a situation, determines what is needed, organizes and implements. You can argue, you can disagree, but you better have your answers figured out four replies ahead. Usually, she’s right. Hold that thought. She’s reading this… she’s always right.

Long story short. Eight years ago, I learned a delightful Hebrew phrase: iru’a lev (cardiac event). Until then I always thought an event was a bar mitzvah, a wedding, the Red Sox winning the World Series.

Iru’a lev. It ain’t Hakuna Matata, let me tell you. This lovely formulation came into my relatively new oleh consciousness after fainting at home and awakening with difficulty breathing. An ambulance ride (that was cool), a week at Rambam in Haifa, a battery of tests – not so cool – and voila! I’m a cardiac patient with mildly blocked arteries and higher life insurance premiums.

Life insurance. What a racket. Should’ve gone into that.

What followed were annual visits to cardiologists where I made like a gerbil on a treadmill and everything seemed just hunky dory. I dodged the bullet!

Or so I thought. (Ok, cue the violins.)

Several months ago, I began feeling pressure in my chest, sometimes a stab of pain. Add in some palpitations and I said to myself, “bubbeleh, time to see a doctah.” I set up a cardiological exam, postponed once due to a little something called incoming missiles from our dear friends in Iran. Another series of tests, and BOOM! (ok, wrong choice of words for the Middle East) here I am at Carmel Hospital’s cardiac ward.

Speaking of bar mitzvahs, this week Anat and I were all set to do a grand tour: Paris to meet up with my daughter, her hubby and their two gorgeous kids, another daughter in Holland, off to LA for my niece’s bat mitzvah, visiting other family including another daughter – a musician trying to make it big – cousins, aunt, uncle. Then, off to Phoenix to visit my 91-year-old mom, then to Boston to see my brother and catch a Red Sox game at Boston’s secular cathedral: Fenway Park.

Damn. I mean, really. Damn! Or, as Israelis say, BASSA!

Instead, I have a room with a view at the Carmel Hospital with the verdant Carmel Mountain to the left, the Mediterranean Sea to the right. Although, to be honest, the windows could use a good cleaning.

What makes it tolerable is family and friends. My four daughters (yeah just like Tevye) calling with worry in their faces (gotta love video phones), and friends sending notes of concern (gotta love WhatsApp). And Anat shlepping an hour each way to visit me. Gotta love her.

I also rediscovered something about Israel, something most non-Israelis are unaware of, including our supporters and most certainly our detractors.

At the first hospital the staff was easily fifty-fifty Arabs and Jews. Doctors and nurses alike. The ambulance crew that took me over… let me tell you, I’m lying in an ER bed and suddenly three young women are fussing all over me. That’s it! I died and went to heaven! Well, not quite. This was the ambulance crew. All three were Israeli Arabs (or Palestinian Israelis, I didn’t ask how they see themselves). The driver was Hatem, also an Arab Israeli Palestinian Muslim. Such warmth and care I received!

“What music do you like?” Hatem asked.

“Beethoven.”

“Sorry, no Beethoven.”

I can be such a dweeb. “Beatles?” I asked.

A few seconds later, “Getting Better” started playing. I decided to take it as a good omen. Then, Hatem asked, “Do you like Jon Bon Jovi?”

“Sure!”

There I was in an ambulance livin’ on a prayer hoping for no bad medicine.

Ok, I’ll stop.

At Carmel, I met my cardiac team. Two serious-looking fellas, one Jewish the other Muslim. The nursing staff, completely mixed. Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, all pulling together to save lives. Like mine.

The ward I’m in? Same same. Patients are Jews, Arabs, Druze, Muslims, Christians. My roommate is an Arab.

This is the Israel you don’t see on Tik Tok, CNN, BBC, the New York Times. It is also the Israel you’ll never read about in UN resolutions, NGO reports, or at campus encampments. But every Israeli knows this because we all experience it. And not just at hospitals.

Don’t get me wrong. Israeli society is far from perfect. Discrimination exists, and full equality for Israeli Arabs remains unfinished business. Israel deserves criticism for its shortcomings. But this is also a country where Jews and Arabs argue about those shortcomings loudly and openly, where Arab justices sit on the Supreme Court, Arab parties serve in the Knesset, Arab officers command in the IDF, and Arab students make up roughly 40 percent of the undergraduate population at the University of Haifa, and 25% at other universities.

This being Israel, I am obligated to throw in a bit of politics. It’s practically a mitzvah.

Our current government is shameful, with senior ministers like Itamar Ben Gvir and Betzalel Smotrich whose blatant, vicious anti-Arab racism is a national scandal. And, a prime minister who actually knows better, but does little to nothing to reign them in.

October 27, election day, can’t happen soon enough.

And I plan on being here then. I know how I’ll vote.

Before then, I have a date with the scalpel.

After that, I’d like to finish the trip we never took, spoil my grandchildren, hug my daughters, embrace my wife, cuddle the dog and cats, and someday sit in the Fenway grandstands behind the Red Sox dugout with my brother.

And one more thing: I’d really like to avoid learning any more “delightful” Hebrew medical terminology.

I.

Some months ago, in While Israel Fights Iranian Fanatics, Jewish Fanatics Are Setting the West Bank on Fire, I argued that extremist settler violence was becoming a strategic threat to Israel itself. In Settler Violence Revisited: I Warned..., I warned that the government’s failure to confront Jewish terrorism in the West Bank would have consequences far beyond the victims of those attacks.

Today, those warnings look understated.

On Friday a group of armed Israeli settlers entered the area around the Palestinian village of Tell in Area A, under full Palestinian Authority jurisdiction where Israeli civilians are generally prohibited from entering. They did this without coordinating with the IDF.

Predictably, a confrontation developed between the Israelis and Palestinian villagers. It escalated to violence leaving four Palestinians and two Israelis dead.

Over the weekend, this was followed by waves of settler reprisal attacks against Palestinian communities.

Two weeks ago two Palestinian Authority police officers carried out a combined shooting and stabbing attack at the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, killing an Israeli civilian. Hamas praised the attack.

While I condemn all these attacks, as an Israeli I am responsible for the mess in my own backyard. So I offer the following:

This violence is not simply another episode in an endless conflict. It is evidence of something far more dangerous: a government allowing ideological extremism to push Israel toward another West Bank explosion at precisely the moment we are already fighting Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran across the region.

This is failure of political judgment, negligence and irresponsibility.

Let me be absolutely clear. Hamas is not merely another political actor in this story. It is a genocidal, antisemitic terrorist movement whose founding charter and subsequent statements call for Israel’s destruction and whose October 7 invasion produced one of the worst atrocities in Jewish history since the Holocaust: the systematic murder of civilians, rape and sexual torture, the burning of families alive, and the kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis into Gaza. Israel had—and still has—every right to self-defense. Anyone who denies us that right is a fool.

Yet, we must confront our own demons.

II.

Historians have long studied movements driven by what might be called redemptionist politics. Norman Cohn, J. L. Talmon, and Eric Voegelin described movements that believed history could be redeemed only after the old order was broken. These movements differed enormously, but they shared one dangerous conviction: compromise delays redemption; crisis accelerates it.

Extremists do not flourish in peaceful societies. They need chaos, fear, polarization and violence. That does not make Hamas and the Jewish messianic far right equivalent. Hamas deliberately targets civilians as a matter of strategy. October 7 was an act of barbarism whose scale and cruelty fundamentally changed this war.

The comparison is not about morality or methods. It is about political logic. Both movements are redemptionist. Both believe history advances through violence. Both require perpetual conflict because peace undermines their worldview.

Their goals could not be more different. Hamas seeks Israel’s destruction and embraces a genocidal ideology that has repeatedly called for the murder of Jews and an Islamist Palestinian state. The Jewish redemptionist movement seeks exclusive Jewish sovereignty over the biblical Land of Israel. They are bitter enemies. Yet politically they depend on the same psychological fuel.

Neither prospers when coexistence appears possible. Neither benefits when moderates succeed. Every terrorist attack strengthens those Israelis who argue Palestinians understand only force. Every settler pogrom strengthens those Palestinians who argue Israel was never interested in peace. Every funeral becomes another recruiting poster.

Hamas and the Israeli far right are enemies sustained by the same redemptionist fire. And those of us in both societies – Israeli and Palestinian – are dragged into this whirlpool of fire against our will.

III.

This a national security crisis. Israel’s own security establishment has been saying so for months. Senior IDF commanders have warned repeatedly that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank risks igniting another intifada. The Chief of Staff has described settler violence as causing strategic damage to Israel’s war effort as IDF soldiers are increasingly being diverted from Gaza and fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon in order to separate violent settlers from Palestinians and contain unrest in the West Bank.

Think about that for a moment.

At the very moment Israel faces Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, and regional instability, we are forcing our own army to spend precious manpower dealing with Jewish extremists attacking Palestinians. This is exactly what our enemies want.

It gets worse.

Before October 7, Israel’s intelligence and military leadership repeatedly warned that Hamas was preparing for a major attack. On March 25, 2023, Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant called for a halt in the government’s judicial overhaul. He said “The deepening [social] split is seeping into the military and defense institutions. This is a clear, immediate and tangible danger to the security of the state.”

Those warnings were ignored, with catastrophic consequences.

Today, many of those same institutions are issuing another warning. This time the threat includes Jewish terrorism and the danger of a massive escalation in the West Bank. Once again, the political leadership appears unwilling to listen.

IV.

Especially Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Their project is not simply about security. It is about redemption. It is rooted in an ideology that sees permanent Jewish control over the entire Land of Israel – from the River to the Sea – as a divine mission with territorial compromise a historic and religious betrayal of history. Whether intentionally or not, the result is an atmosphere in which extremist settlers increasingly believe they have political backing.

Benjamin Netanyahu is different. He is not a messianic ideologue. But he chose to govern with them. He created the coalition that included these two extremists and their parties in a “government of the full right.” His political survival depends on them.

But not only them. Netanyahu is also dependent on two Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) parties to stay in power.

That dependence has produced paralysis. Israel’s security professionals warn that extremist settler violence is threatening national security. Coalition politics demands that the government avoid confronting the ministers whose political base includes the very movement creating the problem.

I cannot know Netanyahu’s motives, and I will not pretend otherwise. There is no evidence that he wants violence or seeks another intifada. But politics is shaped by incentives as much as intentions. A government dependent on ideological extremists, approaching an election while security once again dominates public life, has very little incentive to confront those extremists decisively.

The result is a government that is dangerously self-destructive to the State of Israel.

V.

While asking tens of thousands of reservists to leave their families and businesses for repeated tours of duty some lasting up to 400 days or more, this same coalition pushes legislation that entrenches Haredi draft exemptions. While our soldiers fight on multiple fronts, the government tolerates violence that forces the IDF to open yet another front inside the West Bank. While demanding national sacrifice, it deepens national division.

Yes, Israel had to fight Hamas after October 7. Yes, Israel must confront Hezbollah and Iran.

Israel did not choose this war. Hamas chose it on October 7, when it crossed the border to murder, rape, torture, and kidnap civilians on a scale that shocked even a country familiar to decades of terrorism. Hamas must be defeated. Hezbollah remains a strategic threat. Iran continues to arm and direct our enemies across the region.

None of that excuses what this government is doing to Israel itself.

But we do not strengthen Israel by hollowing out the very foundations that make Israel worth defending.

We do not strengthen national security by undermining the rule of law.

We do not strengthen deterrence by allowing Jewish terrorism to flourish.

We do not strengthen Zionism by abandoning the moral constraints that have always distinguished a democratic Jewish state from the fanatics who seek its destruction.

VI.

Israel’s generals and the messianist redemptionists are speaking entirely different languages. The generals speak about stability, deterrence, force readiness, intelligence, and preventing another front from opening. The redemptionists speak about cosmic destiny.

Those are not mere differences in policy, but are different understandings of what the State of Israel exists to achieve. One seeks to preserve the state. The other seeks to redeem history at any cost.

History offers a sobering lesson. Movements that promise redemption through conflict almost always leave behind more graves than glory. Israel was founded so that Jews would never again surrender their future to fanatics. It would be a bitter tragedy if, in our determination to defeat the fanatics outside our borders, we allowed our homegrown fanatics to destroy us from the inside.

Save us, oh God, from our would-be saviors desecrating your Name.

I.

Now that the war with Iran seems to be all over but for the shouting, it is worth asking a question that goes far beyond centrifuges, missiles, air strikes, and ceasefires.

What does the West not understand about Iran?

Before the war began, President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff revealed something remarkable. Speaking about Iran’s refusal to yield in the face of an enormous American military buildup, he said Trump was “curious” why the regime had not simply given in.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why they haven’t capitulated. Why, under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do?’”

The assumption behind the question is that Iran’s rulers use the same calculator we do. That they want what most governments want: prosperity, stability, economic growth, international legitimacy, and above all survival.

That assumption sits at the heart of Western thinking about Iran and political Islam in general. It has shaped Republican and Democratic administrations alike since Jimmy Carter.

II.

There is a fascinating podcast by the brilliant Haviv Rettig Gur exploring the concept of Muqawama, usually translated as “resistance.” It is two hours long, I’ll try to capture its essence.

The translation barely scratches the surface. Muqawama is not merely resistance as understood by the West. It is a strategy informed by a completely different worldview. It includes a theory of history and warfare foreign to the Western mind. It is a doctrine that transforms weakness into strength, suffering into virtue, and martyrdom into a force multiplier.

Within this framework, pain is not necessarily a deterrent. Sacrifice validates the struggle and most importantly, mere survival becomes victory.

For those of us raised on Enlightenment values, liberal democracy, constitutional government, and the belief that human beings ultimately seek life, liberty, prosperity, and happiness, this way of thinking can be impossible to grasp.

Yet Americans have encountered it before.

U.S. troops in the Pacific Theater of World War II were initially stunned by the willingness of Imperial Japanese forces to fight to the death. Japanese soldiers launched mass banzai charges directly into machine gun fire. Kamikaze pilots deliberately crashed their explosive-laden aircraft into American ships. During the Battle of Okinawa, the Japanese military often forced civilians, especially women and children, into leading the banzai charges to confuse American GIs.

American commanders expected an enemy that would eventually calculate costs and benefits the same way they did. Instead, they encountered an ideology that elevated sacrifice above survival and viewed death in service to the nation as a virtue.

The Nazis displayed a similar fanaticism. Even after Germany’s defeat was inevitable, Hitler ordered armies that scarcely existed to continue fighting. Teenagers and elderly men were drafted into the Volkssturm. Entire cities were sacrificed in hopeless battles. As Allied armies closed in, Hitler issued the Nero Decree ordering the destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure rather than allowing it to fall intact into enemy hands.

The comparison is not exact. The Islamic Republic is not Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. But, the lesson is that anti-democratic ideologically driven movements often interpret suffering very differently than liberal democracies do. Before such movements can be defeated, they must first be understood.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Even Israel made this mistake.

III.

For years, Israeli leaders convinced themselves that Hamas had become pragmatic. Our politicians, IDF intelligence, Mossad and Shin Bet, believed economic incentives would moderate its behavior. We believed work permits, infrastructure projects, and improved living standards would create stability. We assumed Hamas would eventually behave like a government because it was governing.

October 7 shattered those assumptions.

What Hamas sought was not prosperity. What it sought was Muqawama, “resistance.” The word is in its Arabic name: Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement).

What Hamas celebrated after October 7 was not a military victory. Thousands of Gazans were dead, entire neighborhoods lay in ruins, and Gaza itself was devastated. Yet Hamas declared victory because victory was defined differently. The organization survived. The struggle continues. Muqawama endured. Viewed through that lens, survival was sufficient.

IV.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: did we learn the lesson?

The focus over the February 28 US-Israeli attack on Iran has largely been on tactical and operational questions. How much damage was inflicted? How much of the nuclear program survived? How many missiles were destroyed? How long was the program set back?

Those are important questions, but there is another one. Did the architects of the war truly understand the ideological system they were trying to break?

Remember one thing. This is the regime that, during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, gave children under the age of twelve plastic keys, told them they were the keys to Paradise, and sent them on suicide missions to clear minefields with their bodies.

The IRGC did not invent the glorification of sacrifice. What it did was institutionalize it and transform it into a governing doctrine.

If Haviv’s analysis is correct, then overwhelming military force does not necessarily produce capitulation. The regime interprets suffering differently than do Western strategists. Damage becomes proof that the struggle matters. Punishment becomes evidence that history is unfolding exactly as expected. Every dead civilian becomes a recruiting poster. Every sacrifice reinforces the narrative.

That does not mean military action is futile. It does mean that measuring success requires a deeper understanding of the jihadist Muqawama worldview.

A more difficult question is whether the war weakened the regime’s narrative of resistance or reinforced it.

V.

There is another group that badly misunderstands Muqawama.

The antizionist Left.

Many antizionist activists view Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis through the binary framework of oppressed versus oppressor. They translate Muqwama into their understanding of resistance. They imagine the French Resistance. Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto. They see anti-colonial struggle and hear the language of liberation.

What they fail to comprehend is what the ideology itself says.

The antizionist Left often sees Muqawama through the lens of anti-colonial resistance. They recognize the influence of Frantz Fanon, anti-imperial liberation struggles, and the language of the oppressed fighting the oppressor.

What many fail to appreciate is that Muqawama did not stop with Fanon.

The Shi’ite architects of the Iranian Revolution, particularly Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini, drew from an astonishing range of intellectual sources. They absorbed Fanon’s theories of revolutionary violence, Mao’s doctrine of a protracted people’s struggle, Leninist concepts of vanguard movements, Sunni Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Said Qutb’s ideas about Islam as a total political and social system, Shiite traditions of martyrdom and sacrifice, and elements of European antisemitic conspiracy theories that migrated to the Middle East since the 1930s

These ideas were fused into something new.

Muqawama is not simply anti-colonialism. It is not simply Islamism. It is not merely revolutionary nationalism. It is a synthesis that combines anti-colonial struggle, religious messianism, martyrdom, permanent resistance, forever war, and a belief that history inevitably favors those willing to sacrifice the most.

Hamas leader Fathi Hammad, stated this clearly in 2008:

“For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry ... This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly and the mujahideen. They desire death like you desire life.”

Many Western Leftist activists recognize one ingredient in that mixture and mistake it for the whole, but the IRGC, Hamas, Hezbollah et al understand the entire recipe.

The irony is striking. Many of the same activists who champion women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, secularism, freedom of expression, and pluralism find themselves cheering movements that reject those values outright.

They are not examining the doctrine as articulated by the IRGC, Hamas, or Hezbollah. They are supporting a story they have written for themselves. In that story, Iran becomes anti-colonial. Hamas and Hezbollah become liberationist. The actual beliefs of these movements are treated as secondary details, inconvenient facts that can be ignored in service of a larger narrative.

Iran’s hanging of gay men from cranes, forcing women to wear hijab or face death, and shooting thousands of pro-democracy protesters in the streets is a distraction from the main narrative: Israel is the worst evil in the world from which flows all other evils.

The result is one of the strangest political alliances of our time: progressive activists defending movements whose leaders would reject nearly every value they claim to champion. Think Queers for Palestine.

VI.

The most important question facing the West today may not be whether Iran’s leaders understand us. They do. They have spent decades studying Western societies, democratic politics, media cycles, economic vulnerabilities, and the limits of public tolerance for prolonged conflict. They have built an entire strategy around those observations.

Rather, the question is whether we understand them.

October 7 exposed a catastrophic Israeli failure to grasp how Hamas viewed the world. Steve Witkoff’s comments show that Washington is still making the same mistake with Iran.

If the leaders of the Islamic Republic predicted that overwhelming military force would eventually give way to international pressure, economic concerns, calls for restraint, and a negotiated halt before the regime itself was threatened, then perhaps the most disturbing possibility is this:

Iran did not miscalculate.

We did.

* * * * * *

Did I just use the ‘A’ word?

I did. Please read on…

I am an American Jewish liberal, a lifelong Democrat, and a lifelong Zionist. I also made Aliyah, which means I now experience Israeli politics as a daily cardiovascular workout better than Zumba.

So when my liberal American Jewish friends back in the “Old Country” tell me they are heartbroken over Israel’s direction, I get it. I share your anguish.

I know what it means to be both in love with and furious at Israel, usually before breakfast. I know what it means to defend Israel against the outrageous rants of antizionists, then open the news and wonder what fresh madness some benighted Israeli minister has decided to contribute to Jewish history.

I believe deeply in the necessity of Jewish sovereignty. I also fear that the current government is leading that sovereignty toward something morally dangerous and politically disastrous.

Are you still with me? If so, I have a suggestion.

Make Aliyah.

Wait! Before you start doom scrolling elsewhere, please hear me out.

I don’t intend any rebuke, or the old obnoxious line that “if you really loved Israel you would live here.” I suggest Aliyah as an invitation, a way of turning liberal Zionist anguish into democratic power, to have a direct impact on Jewish history.

I mean it as a concrete response to the question I hear constantly from you, my American Jewish friends who still love Israel (bless you), still believe in Zionism (bless you all the more), and still feel sick over the country’s direction:

What can we actually do?

Come help change it. But, as a movement.

For years, you’ve been living a dilemma. You care deeply, but from a distance. You donate, visit, advocate, argue, defend, criticize, explain, contextualize, and worry. My God, do you worry! And thank you for that. But, your worrying, while emotionally sincere, does not get counted by the Va‘adat HaBechirot HaMerkazit (Central Elections Commission).

That was your first Hebrew lesson. Free, too!

Israel is not only an idea, a cause, a refuge, a symbol, or an argument at the Shabbat table. Israel is a country, and countries are shaped by citizens. Citizens vote. Citizens join parties. Citizens build institutions. Citizens show up at demonstrations, and, when necessary, very loud WhatsApp groups.

Once you get here, you’ll understand that last line.

Here is the political arithmetic — apologies upfront for inducing narcolepsy...

In Israel’s last national election, roughly 40,000 valid votes equaled one Knesset seat. The number shifts from election to election, but the scale is clear. Forty thousand votes can add one seat to an existing party. One seat can help determine a coalition. One seat can affect ministries, budgets, courts, settlements, religion and state, civil rights, education, the price of cottage cheese, the future of Israeli democracy, and peace.

Forty thousand liberal olim could add a seat to a center-left party. Eighty thousand could add two, and so on. In Israeli politics, two or three seats can be the difference between a government that empowers messianic extremists and a government that has a long-term vision of a Jewish and democratic state of all its citizens.

Imagine that.

This is not a call to create a new boutique American immigrant party with a clever Hebrew name, a bad logo, and a launch event in Ra’anana where everyone speaks English and pretends not to. Israel has enough parties. The more practical path is to strengthen existing democratic, Zionist centrist or leftist parties by joining them, voting for them, volunteering for them, and helping them regain electoral reach.

So, yeah. Why not HaTnu‘a LeAliyah Liberalit. The Movement for Liberal Aliyah. (Second Hebrew lesson, also free!)

The crisis is real. Israel is a democracy under assault from within. Under threat are the judiciary, the media, civil society, the opposition, and the millions of Israelis who refuse to surrender their country to this current clown car we call our government.

Ok, I think I just scared you off. But think of this. Sick of Trump? You are one citizen out of 330 million. Sick of Netanyahu? Me too. And, like me, you’d be one citizen out of 10 million. Where do you have a greater impact? Do the math.

Israel was created so the Jewish people could build a haven against antisemitism while also taking responsibility for our own fate in a sovereign Jewish and democratic homeland. We didn’t do all that so we could rule indefinitely over another people while pretending the demographic and moral consequences will somehow resolve themselves.

Power comes with responsibility. Sovereignty comes with limits.

Of course, not everyone can make Aliyah. People have families, careers, health issues, aging parents, financial constraints, and deep roots. Diaspora Jewish life matters and American Judaism matters, a lot. I am not interested in turning Aliyah into a cudgel with which to beat you. I’m only interested in applying Jewish guilt.

There’s a difference. 😉

Still with me? Thank you.

Far more liberal American Jews could come than do. More retirees, young adults, families.

So I say this with affection, urgency, and a little bit of chutzpah, which after sixteen years in Israel I have definitely acquired: your anguish is real, and your fears are not imaginary. But, anguish alone will not save Israeli democracy. You showing up at the kalpi (polling station) will.

So, nu? Come already. Vote. Add your voice, your values, your stubbornness, your democratic instincts, and your love of the Jewish people. Come for the democracy, stay for a hafuch and bourekas.

Israel’s future will be shaped by those who show up.

See you at the polls?

I.

What happened over the weekend in the Palestinian town of Hawara should provoke anger in anyone who cares about Israel’s future. Once again, masked Jewish extremists descended on a Palestinian community. Once again, an IDF soldier is seen aiding and abetting the vigilantes. Once again, residents were injured and property damaged. Once again, Israeli authorities promised investigations.

This cycle has become so familiar that many Israelis scarcely notice it anymore. The true scandal is the growing normalization of violence that should never have been tolerated in the first place.

How many investigations, condemnations, intelligence assessments, diplomatic protests, and public statements must accumulate before Israel confronts the reality that extremist settler violence is not an isolated problem but a recurring systemic one?

II.

Over the past year, I returned repeatedly to a single theme. In The Moral Challenge of Jewish Power, I argued that Zionism’s greatest achievement was not simply creating a Jewish state. It was restoring Jewish sovereignty after centuries of powerlessness. The return of sovereignty transformed the Jewish condition and Jewish moral responsibilities. The central question was never whether Jews deserved power, but whether we would exercise that power in a manner consistent with the values we claimed to represent.

In While Israel Fights Iranian Fanatics, Our Own Extremists Are Burning the House, I argued that Israel faces two threats simultaneously. One comes from Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the global antizionist movement. The second comes from within: those who believe Jewish victimhood confers moral immunity, who imagine that Palestinian terrorism excuses Jewish lawlessness, and who treat the rule of law as an obstacle rather than a foundation of Jewish sovereignty.

After yet another Jewish vigilante outrage, I revisited this issue.

The weekend’s events in Hawara suggest that these foundational questions are not being taken seriously by the Netanyahu government.

While antizionists will do what antizionists do, the most compelling admonishments are not coming from them, but from the people charged with defending Israel. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir recently condemned extremist settler violence as “morally and ethically wrong” and warned that it causes “extraordinary strategic damage.” During a multi-front war, he argued the military should not be forced to confront “a threatening minority from within” and that these extremists endanger “our values as a people and as a state.”

A democratic state cannot selectively enforce the law without eventually undermining confidence in the law itself. When some groups appear to enjoy political protection, legal principles give way to tribal loyalties. Vigilantism acquires legitimacy. Public institutions lose credibility, opening the door to disorder and lawlessness.

III.

The internal challenge of Jewish power is whether sovereignty would elevate Jewish political culture or gradually degrade it. So, we must look at Israel’s current political environment.

Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich started as fringe far-right activists. For the last four years they have been senior ministers whose allies occupy key positions throughout the governing coalition. Their rhetoric and actions (and inactions) repeatedly inflamed tensions, and their political project seeks to weaken restraints that once limited extremist behavior.

Benjamin Netanyahu did not create settler extremism, but he transformed extremist forces from an outside pressure group into a governing force. After the 2022 elections, in pursuit of coalition stability to maintain his personal political survival, he shamelessly elevated Ben Gvir and Smotrich from the margins to the center of national decision-making.

Over the next four years, again and again, security officials, former generals, diplomats, and allies sounded the alarm. Again and again, Netanyahu chose accommodation over confrontation. The result is an Israeli society riven by deep political and social chasms.

IV.

The damage extends far beyond Israel’s borders.

For decades the cardinal rule of pro-Israel advocacy in the United States was maintaining bipartisan support for Israel. The erosion of this support cannot be blamed entirely on antizionist activism, social media, or generational change. Israeli leaders played a role too, and no leader over the last two decades has had greater influence over the U.S.-Israel relationship than Benjamin Netanyahu.

His 2015 decision to address Congress in opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement, over the objections of the Obama administration and in coordination with Republican leadership, was viewed by many Democrats as an unprecedented intervention in American domestic politics.

Netanyahu’s subsequent embrace of Trump-era hyper-partisanship reinforced the perception that Israel chose to align with one political camp at the expense of maintaining broad support across the American spectrum. His elevation of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, pursuit of a divisive judicial overhaul, and toleration of increasingly illiberal currents within his coalition deepened concerns among many Democrats and American Jews who once regarded support for Israel as fully consistent with liberal democratic values.

Netanyahu did not create the forces driving partisan polarization around Israel, but his political choices have undoubtedly accelerated and deepened them. Every extremist settler act of vigilantism strengthens the narratives of Israel’s adversaries.

V.

As someone who spent much of his professional life in the American Jewish community, I do not believe the Democratic Party is permanently lost to Israel. Those who think we can just willy-nilly write off the Democratic Party are seriously lacking in foresight. Political coalitions evolve, new leaders emerge, and public attitudes change. Trust will not be rebuilt through public relations campaigns. It will be rebuilt through policies, leadership, and strategic political planning by, hopefully, new Israeli leadership.

The lesson of Hawara is not that another investigation is needed, though surely it is. The lesson is that another investigation will change little if the political conditions that produced this self-inflicted crisis remain intact.

Israel needs new leaders willing to defend the rule of law with the same determination that they defend Israel’s borders. It needs leaders prepared to confront extremists rather than depend upon them. It needs leaders who understand that Jewish power carries moral obligations as well as political rights.

The Netanyahu era long ago reached its limits. The bargain he struck with the far right imposed a heavy cost on Israeli society, on Israel’s standing abroad, and on the moral credibility of the Zionist project itself. Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and those who share their vision must no longer shape national policy.

The challenge of Jewish power was never whether Jews would make mistakes. Every nation does. The challenge was whether we would possess the confidence to acknowledge them, the integrity to correct them, and the wisdom to understand that accountability is not a weakness but a source of strength.

Israel's enemies will continue to threaten us. They always have. But, in the face of that external challenge, the question is whether we are willing to confront the internal dangers we created for ourselves.

That is the test of Jewish power and it is a test we dare not fail.

I.

“Jews don’t need a state, we need each other, and we need to fight where we are.”

That is the centerpiece of a recent fundraising appeal from Jewish Voice for Peace Executive Director Stefanie Fox promoting a new history of the Jewish Labor Bund. Invoking the Bund’s doctrine of doikayt (”hereness”) in fighting for social justice, Fox presents the movement as a model for contemporary Jewish antizionism.

Superficially it is a beautiful sentiment. Jews should be able to fight for social justice wherever they are. But that isn’t how history turned out.

Look again at Fox’s statement, its first two clauses: “Jews don’t need a state, we need each other.” See it? The contradiction? “We need each other,” she wrote, while in the same breath tossing 8 million Israeli Jews under the bus.

Of course Jews need each other. But, not like that.

The issue is that Jews did exactly what Fox advocates. They fought where they were. They built communities where they were. They integrated where they were. They contributed to the societies around them.

Fox’s invocation of Eastern Europe in particular as her ancestral homeland overlooks a brutal historical reality: the non-Jewish ethno-national majorities of those very lands emphatically rejected their Jewish neighbors as truly belonging. In Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania… Jews were not regarded as kin but as perpetual outsiders. All too often, the very people with whom the Bund sought to build alliances turned out to be willing collaborators with the Einsatzgruppen death squads.

Calling these places a homeland, in light of that murderous legacy, ignores the deep-seated antisemitism that virtually erased Jewish life from the European landscape.

While the sentiment of rooted, local struggle carries a certain ethical resonance, it is also emblematic of the glaring flaws in the neo-Bundist revival among contemporary Jewish antizionists. These flaws are not merely political but historical, cultural, and even moral.

Neo-Bundism today is a movement of historical amnesia and cultural myopia — one that resuscitates an ideology extinguished not only by the murderous force of Nazism but also by the paranoid calculations of Stalinism. Its selective nostalgia obscures the very real failure of the Bund to protect Jewish life and identity. Worse, it perpetuates a “Ashkenormative” narrative that marginalizes and erases the lived experiences of non-European Jews.

II.

Historical Failure and Dangerous Alliances

Founded in 1897, the Bund represented the Jewish proletariat of Eastern Europe and advocated for cultural autonomy, Yiddish socialism, and resistance to both Zionism and assimilation. But history was not kind to this vision. It was annihilated along with the millions it claimed to represent. The very working-class solidarity the Bund envisioned collapsed under the weight of genocidal antisemitism. Its fatal flaw was believing that Jewish safety could be secured through goodwill and cultural affinity rather than sovereignty.

Since October 7, this pattern has become even more apparent. Many contemporary neo-Bundist organizations, including JVP, have aligned themselves with a broader antizionist movement that celebrated, justified, minimized, or rationalized the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Much like their historical predecessors who mistook ideological proximity for genuine solidarity, today’s neo-Bundists routinely overlook the antisemitism embedded within segments of their political coalition.

In their determination to oppose Zionism, they have found themselves marching alongside people who are dedicated to the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. The historical parallel is difficult to miss. Just as the Bund placed extraordinary faith in political allies who ultimately failed to protect Jewish lives, today’s neo-Bundists continue to place their faith in movements that reject Jewish self-determination altogether.

III.

Ashkenormativity and Cultural Erasure

One of the more telling ironies of the neo-Bundist paean to Yiddish is the glaring demographic disconnect between the language it romanticizes and the lived reality of Jewish life today. Yiddish, while a cultural treasure, is spoken fluently today almost exclusively by enclaves of Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim. The vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews are illiterate in Yiddish.

In stark contrast, modern Hebrew — revived from ancient roots and shaped in the crucible of Jewish sovereignty — is the living language of nearly eight million Jews and serves as the cultural engine of the world’s largest Jewish community. Neo-Bundism’s fixation on Yiddish as the authentic Jewish tongue exemplifies its Ashkenormative tunnel vision: a nostalgic elevation of one narrow thread of Jewish experience at the expense of a vibrant and diverse global Jewish tapestry.

At the time of the original Bund’s prominence, the majority of the world’s Jews lived not only in Eastern Europe but also across the Middle East and North Africa. These Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews had flourishing communities in Baghdad, Aleppo, Fez, Cairo, and beyond. They spoke Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Farsi, Ladino—not Yiddish. Their experiences, languages, and traditions are utterly invisible in the neo-Bundist imagination.

That invisibility is not a neutral oversight—it is a form of cultural racism. To valorize Yiddish as the premier language of Jewish resistance while ignoring the voices, tongues, and histories of Middle Eastern Jews who were uprooted from their homes by the twin forces of pan-Arabism and Islamism is to suggest that their experiences are irrelevant. Most of these Jews found refuge not in Europe but in nearby Israel. To ignore this is to erase a massive portion of global Jewry.

It is worth remembering why.

The destruction of these communities was not caused by settlements, occupation, or any particular Israeli government. It occurred because of antizionism. Arab governments, nationalist movements, and mobs increasingly defined their local Jewish populations as extensions of a collective Jewish enemy. They did not distinguish between Zionists and non-Zionists. Entire Jewish communities, whether they supported it or not, were scapegoated by Arab regimes acting in the name of the Palestinians.

The Jews of Baghdad were fighting where they were. The Jews of Cairo were fighting where they were. The Jews of Damascus, Tripoli, and Sana’a were fighting where they were. They spoke the local language, participated in local society, and often considered themselves loyal citizens of the countries in which they lived.

None of it protected them.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine was minuscule. Today, Israel is home to the world’s largest Jewish population, comprising nearly half the world’s Jews (and growing). In contrast, the once-thriving Eastern European Diaspora communities the Bund championed have all but vanished and the Arab world’s Jewish communities have been emptied. Neo-Bundism, in choosing to romanticize the past, ignores all this.

It is not Zionism that is out of touch with Jewish reality, it is neo-Bundism.

Its politics are those of ghosts and ruins, not of living communities or future generations. Many Israelis (myself included) acknowledge Israel’s flaws, not to delegitimize Israel, but to hold it to the moral standards foundational to its existence. They recognize that no democracy is immune from error, especially one navigating existential threats and deep internal divisions.

But criticism of specific policies must be grounded in a commitment to the Jewish state’s survival and improvement, not its dissolution. This self-critical stance is a hallmark of democracy and of Zionism itself.

IV.

Fox urges Jews to “fight where we are.” That is precisely what Israelis are doing.

Israel is no longer a theoretical proposition in an ideological debate between Zionists and Bundists. It is home to nearly eight million Jews, roughly half the world’s Jewish population. It absorbed Jews expelled from Arab countries, rescued endangered Jewish communities from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, and provided refuge to countless Jews who had nowhere else to go.

Today Israeli Jews are fighting where we are. We are defending our homes, families, communities, and country against forces that openly seek the destruction of the Jewish state and the murder of its inhabitants.

The irony is difficult to miss. While Israelis fight for their survival in the one place on earth where Jews exercise collective self-determination, JVP supports an antizionist movement that seeks to dismantle that very state.

Neo-Bundism presents itself as a moral alternative to Zionism, but in truth it remains a historical fantasy. It asks Jews to place their faith in a formula that failed in Europe and the the Middle East and North Africa.

Zionism, for all its internal debates and contradictions, begins with a simple recognition: Jewish survival cannot rest on the goodwill of others. That proposition was tested in the last century and history’s verdict was utterly, coldly, mercilessly devastating.

This time I turn my saltiness toward antizionism itself and the intellectual dishonesty that drives it.

Not criticism of Israel. Not opposition to settlements. Not outrage over Palestinian suffering, which is real and deserving of serious moral attention. I mean the broader antizionist movement that reduces one of the most complicated national conflicts on earth into a cartoonish morality play while erasing everything that does not fit its narrow ideological narrative.

I even provide you with an extensive bibliography on this subject below.

I.

What shocks me again and again is not simply the hostility toward Israel. It is the staggering ahistoricity of so much antizionist discourse. Vast numbers of people speak with absolute moral certainty about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while knowing almost nothing about the forces that shaped it.

This matters. Because if people do not understand why so many Israeli Jews carry deep fears about annihilation, expulsion, terrorism – long before October 7 – then the conflict inevitably gets flattened into slogans. “Oppressor” versus “oppressed.” “White” versus “brown.” “European colonizer” versus “indigenous native.”

The reality is far messier, far more tragic, and far less emotionally convenient.

Many self-described “progressives” today openly support “armed resistance,” meaning Hamas. Some romanticize “resistance” without ever seriously examining the ideologies of the movements they are cheering. Hamas is not a secular liberation movement. It is an Islamist organization rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood, openly antisemitic in its founding charter, violently authoritarian in practice, misogynistic, homophobic, and eliminationist.

Would learning the full history change all their minds? No. But it may influence some into rethinking their positions. It may force at least some people to confront the possibility that the conflict did not begin in 1967, did not begin with settlements, and did not emerge from nowhere as a simple anti-colonial struggle. It may force some to wrestle with the fact that Jewish fears in Israel were shaped not only by Europe and the Holocaust, but also by the near total destruction of Jewish life across the Middle East and North Africa itself.

II.

On May 16, 1948, the day after Israel declared independence, The New York Times published a remarkable headline:

“JEWS IN GRAVE DANGER IN ALL MOSLEM LANDS”

The article warned that nearly 900,000 Jews living across the Arab and Muslim world faced catastrophe. It described anti-Jewish violence, discriminatory laws, confiscations, internment, and growing fears that Jews throughout the Middle East and North Africa would collectively pay the price for the creation of the State of Israel.

But the violence had already begun years earlier. Have you heard of the “Farhud” massacre in Iraq in June 1941? Iraqi Muslim mobs, encouraged by the pro-Nazi Iraqi regime and fascist incitement, murdered almost 200 Jews in Baghdad and Basra. Rioters raped women, mutilated bodies, looted Jewish homes and businesses, and terrorized one of the oldest Jewish communities on earth.

That was only the beginning as region-wide pogroms followed after World War II:

• From November 5–7, 1945, Arab rioters in Tripoli and across Libya murdered more than 140 Jews, including 36 children. They wounded hundreds, destroyed synagogues, looted and burned over 1,000 Jewish homes and businesses, and left thousands homeless.

• From December 2–4, 1947, after the UN partition vote on Palestine, Arab mobs in Aden attacked the Jewish quarter. Rioters murdered approximately 82 Jews, burned synagogues and schools, destroyed hundreds of Jewish shops, and devastated much of the community.

• That same month in Aleppo, Syria, Arab rioters attacked the city’s Jews. Mobs murdered 75 Jews, burned the ancient Great Synagogue of Aleppo, destroyed schools and orphanages, and looted Jewish property throughout the city.

• On June 7–8, 1948, Muslim rioters in Oujda and Jerada, Morocco, massacred Jews in response to the Arab-Israeli war. They murdered 47 Jews, including women and children, wounded many others, and sacked Jewish homes and shops.

• In Cairo during the summer of 1948, Muslim Brotherhood terrorists bombed Jewish neighborhoods, department stores, and communal institutions after Egypt invaded Israel. Jews were killed and wounded in these coordinated attacks. The Muslim Brotherhood, it should be remembered, is the ideological parent movement of Hamas.

• On June 12, 1948, renewed anti-Jewish violence erupted in Tripoli, Libya. Arab rioters murdered 14 Jews and terrorized the Jewish quarter yet again.

• Then came the Menarsha Synagogue bombing in Damascus on August 5, 1949. Attackers hurled grenades into a synagogue packed with worshippers on Shabbat eve. Twelve Jews were murdered including eight children.

Jewish communities across the Arab world were increasingly trapped between rising Arab nationalism, Islamist incitement, antisemitism imported and adapted from Europe.

“After 1948, since virtually all Arab countries were at war with Israel, many Arab countries began to treat their own Jewish citizens as ‘enemy nationals.’ Many governments began to enact officially legislated discriminatory laws against Jews, denying them most basic human and civil rights, including: expropriating their property; removing them from civil service and other forms of employment; subjecting them to countless arrests, physical attacks, torture, and even public executions.” (Justice for Jews from Arab Countries)

III.

What is especially striking about that 1948 New York Times article is the accompanying cartoon. It references Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement of that era.

Readers in 1948 would have immediately understood why a swastika was drawn on his back. al-Husseini’s record as a committed Nazi ally was widely known.

He met personally with Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941, a meeting featured widely in Nazi propaganda newsreels. According to the official German record of the meeting, Hitler told the Mufti that once German armies pushed through the Caucasus, “Germany’s sole objective then will be the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere.”

The Mufti responded enthusiastically. He described Arabs and Nazis as sharing the same enemies: “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.”

The Mufti was placed under the auspices of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler – architect of the Final Solution. His services to the Third Reich included broadcasting Nazi propaganda into the Arab world, recruiting Muslims into Waffen-SS divisions to fight anti-Nazi resistance fighters in Yugoslavia, and actively opposing efforts to rescue Jewish refugee children from Europe.

After Germany occupied Tunisia in late 1942, the Nazis established forced labor camps for Jews across North Africa. Five thousand of North African Jewish men were sent into these brutal desert concentration camps where they were beaten, starved, tortured, and worked under horrific conditions. Hundreds died directly from abuse, disease, and executions.

The SS also established a death squad called Einsatzkommando Egypt in North Africa under SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff, one of the architects of the mobile gas van program. Had Rommel’s Afrika Korps broken through British defenses in Egypt and reached Mandatory Palestine, historians believe broader extermination operations against Middle Eastern Jewry would likely have followed.

Israeli Jews, especially those whose families experienced this directly, understand implicitly the intentions of Hamas, the ideological heirs of the Grand Mufti.

The modern world – including so many Western Diaspora Jews – jumping from headline to headline, has completely forgotten this, and more.

IV.

Before 1948, roughly 850,000 to 900,000 Jews lived across Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world. These communities were ancient. Some predated Islam itself. Baghdad was once one-third Jewish. Aleppo possessed one of the world’s oldest synagogues. Yemenite Jewish traditions stretched back millennia.

Today, more than 99.8% of those Jews are gone. There are now likely no more than around 10,000 remaining, mostly in Morocco and Tunisia. Iran’s Jews once numbered 90,000. Today there are, at most, 8,000 remaining as a captive community.

This was a Jewish Nakba.

They fled or were expelled. Most came here to Israel penniless as Arab regimes stripped them of citizenship, homes, businesses, bank accounts, and property estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Today, their descendants make up slightly more than half, of Israel’s Jewish population.

This fact alone completely shatters the simplistic mythology that Israel is merely a “white European settler colony.” This is a major reason so many Israelis look at Westerners glorifying “armed resistance” with horror and derision.

None of this erases Palestinian suffering. None of it justifies every Israeli policy or action. Serious moral thinking requires the capacity to hold multiple truths at once. I’ve written about all of that and will continue to do so.

But serious moral thinking also requires history as it was. And right now, far too much of the global conversation about Israel and Palestine operates on selective memory, ideological simplification, and historical illiteracy.

V.

Part of the reason this history remains so poorly understood is because Jews themselves still do not tell it well enough. Many predominantly Ashkenazi legacy Jewish organizations, pro-Israel activists, and North American Jewish schools continue to focus heavily on Europe and the Holocaust while giving far too little attention to the destruction of Jewish life across the Middle East and North Africa. That ongoing educational vacuum allows the grotesque fiction to flourish that Israeli Jews are merely “white Europeans” with no authentic Middle Eastern history of their own.

In 2001, during the Second Intifadah, in my position as Director of the Middle East Project of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, I reached out to the Bay Area’s tiny Mizrahi Jewish community. I’ll never forget the first meeting I had with the late Joseph Abdul-Wahed, an Egyptian Jew evicted from Egypt who found refuge in the United States. From that first encounter would emerge the wonderful group Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), now under the leadership of Gina Bublil Waldman, evicted from Libya in 1967. Other early members included Semha Alwaya, whose family survived the Farhud. Rachel Wahba, whose Egyptian and Iraqi Jewish families were evicted from their homes and were stateless for decades.

That was some 25 years ago! And, tragically, despite JIMENA’s efforts, the history of the deliberate destruction of Middle Eastern Jewish life remains far from the center of pro-Israel advocacy.

This is a strategic blunder by these organizations as antizionism depends on historical amnesia. It requires people to erase nearly a million Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim lands and pretend the destruction of ancient pre-Arab and pre-Islamic Jewish communities from Baghdad to Casablanca never happened. It requires Israelis to be recast as foreign “white colonizers” completely ignoring the descendants of the very Middle Eastern Jews driven out of their homes within living memory.

And that is why so much antizionist rhetoric sounds unhinged to Israelis. We know what happened to the Jews of the Arab world. We know what “armed resistance” became for Jews in Baghdad, Aleppo, Tripoli, Cairo, Aden and elsewhere. We know what too many prefer to ignore.

The bottom line: You cannot spend decades erasing that history, glorifying “resistance,” excusing the October 7 massacre, rape and torture of Israeli Jews, chanting for “global intifada,” and then act shocked when Israelis don’t hear a call for justice, but the baying for our annihilation.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Marina. Last Days in Babylon: The Story of the Jews of Baghdad. New York: Free Press, 2007.

Bensoussan, Georges. Jews in Arab Countries: The Great Uprooting. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.

Dalin, David G., and John F. Rothmann. Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam. New York: Random House, 2008

Elpeleg, Zvi. The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement. London: Frank Cass, 1993.

Elpeleg, Zvi. Through the Eyes of the Mufti: The Essays of Haj Amin al-Husseini. Translated by Rachel Kessel. Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2009.

Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Gensicke, Klaus. The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years. London: Routledge, 2011.

Gilbert, Martin. In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Herf, Jeffrey. Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Julius, Lyn. Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2018.

Laskier, Michael M. North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

Levin, Itamar. Locked Doors: The Seizure of Jewish Property in Arab Countries. Jerusalem: Praeger, 2001.

Mallmann, Klaus-Michael, and Martin Cüppers. Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine. New York: Enigma Books in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010.

Satloff, Robert. Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands. New York: PublicAffairs, 2006.

Simon, Reeva Spector, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer, eds. The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Mufti and the Führer.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Accessed May 26, 2026. USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia

Yad Vashem. “The Holocaust in North Africa.” Accessed May 26, 2026. Yad Vashem Holocaust in North Africa

Yale Law School Avalon Project. “Record of the Conversation Between the Führer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941.” Accessed May 26, 2026. Avalon Project Hitler-Mufti Meeting Memorandum

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Yesterday, Itamar Ben Gvir gave Israel’s enemies exactly what they wanted.

A camera. Bound detainees. Shackled kneeling bodies. Abusing the Israeli flag and Hatikvah. With his aggressive taunting and smirking he gave a full fascist theater of humiliation, performed by a minister of the State of Israel and broadcast to the world.

The flotilla itself was a provocation. Of course it was. It was designed to support Hamas, feed a propaganda machine (not Gazans), and hand antizionists another staged morality play in which Israel is cast as the world’s supreme villain.

But Ben Gvir did not defeat that propaganda. He starred in it.

He amplified it.

He took what was an under-the-radar, controlled and effective law enforcement operation and turned it into an international disgrace. He transformed detained antizionist activists into human props for his own video (still live online as of the time of this writing).

Ben Gvir desecrated the Israeli flag by using it for bullying. He debased our national anthem, HaTikva (The Hope). He handed Israel’s enemies the image they so crave: an Israel drunk on power, contemptuous of human dignity, led by men who confuse cruelty with strength.

And the damage was immediate. Italy, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Spain and others summoned Israeli diplomats or demanded explanations.

The U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, condemned Ben Gvir.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, seeing the extensive damage, accused Ben Gvir of knowingly harming the state. Israel’s own ambassador to Washington said Ben Gvir had taken “a sledgehammer” to Israel’s diplomatic efforts. Even Netanyahu, of all people, felt compelled to issue a rebuke.

Why of all people? Come on, now. Let’s not pretend Netanyahu is shocked.

Netanyahu brought Ben Gvir, a street thug Kahanist fascist, into his coalition in a desperate bid to stay in power to head off his criminal trials for fraud and breach of public trust. Netanyahu normalized Ben Gvir. Netanyahu empowered him. Netanyahu handed him the police, the prisons, and a national platform.

Netanyahu was the rotten tree that grew the poison fruit.

This is the continuation of the moral dilemma I wrote about in my previous piece (Defending Israel, Confronting Israel). We can, and must, defend Israel against antizionism, against Hamas, against the global movement that seeks to demonize, de-ligitimize and dismantle the Jewish state.

But defending Israel absolutely does not mean defending every Israeli minister, every Israeli abuse, every act of degradation committed in our name. Defending Israel can also mean criticizing specific actions taken by the government. Or, in this instance, a powerful minister gleefully abusing his power. Defending Israel must also mean being able to say without hesitation: Ben Gvir is doing catastrophic damage to Israel’s moral and diplomatic standing, and Jewish soul.

A serious country does not let a political arsonist run around with matches during a war.

A moral Zionism can and must say plainly: Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel has the right to stop hostile flotillas. Israel has the right to protect its borders and its citizens.

But Israel humiliating detainees? Turning cruelty into social media content? Allowing Ben Gvir to become the symbol of hard-won Jewish empowerment?

Tragically, horrifically, Ben Gvir is now the face of Israel because Netanyahu made him the face of Israel. That is the disgrace. Not only that Ben Gvir behaves like this, but that the prime minister of Israel gave him power, gave him a ministry, gave him legitimacy.

This is the moral rot now consuming Israel from within.

So many of us are fighting every day to defend Israel against a global antizionist movement built on lies, double standards, dehumanization, and obsessive hatred. We are trying to hold the line against people who want to erase Jewish self-determination altogether.

Then Ben Gvir steps in front of a camera and makes their work a hundred times easier. And Netanyahu, the man who built this coalition of extremists to save himself, stands there pretending bewilderment as the fire spreads.

Defenders of Israel are now trapped between two mobs: one that wants to destroy the Jewish state from the outside, and another willing to degrade it from within. One screams that Israel is uniquely evil. The other behaves as if the moral challenge of Jewish power means never having to care how we wield it.

Both are dragging Israel, and the Jewish people, toward catastrophe.

And if Israel is going to survive this moment morally, diplomatically, and democratically, then any serious “defender of Israel” must start screaming “no” to both of them.

I am an Israeli. I live here. I am a Zionist. I spent decades fighting antizionism because I believe it is not simply criticism of Israel, but a global hate movement dedicated to the delegitimization and ultimately the destruction of the Jewish state.

At the same time, I find myself in stark, deep opposition to my own current government.

This creates a severe moral dilemma. A tragic dilemma.

Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times column accusing Israel of systematic abuse and sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners touched a nerve for many Jews and Israelis. Not because antizionists are right – they are not – but because pieces like this inevitably feed a global hate movement already committed to portraying Israel not as a flawed nation fighting a brutal war, but as a uniquely monstrous society deserving isolation, demonization, and ultimately dismantlement. And yet there are also kernels of truth within some of these accusations, and pretending otherwise is morally and strategically disastrous.

I won’t offer a point-by-point rebuttal here to Kristof’s claims. Others have already done that in detail, challenging both the framing and sourcing of the piece. (The Making of the Kristof Column with Matti Friedman on the Call Me Back podcast; Is Nicholas Kristof right? on the Ask Haviv Anything podcast) are just a few examples.

My concern is different. Even if significant parts of Kristof’s article are flawed, exaggerated, or poorly sourced, there are real abuses and moral failures within Israeli institutions. This is precisely the deeper moral and political dilemma facing Israelis who oppose antizionism while also refusing to deny or excuse genuine wrongdoing within our own society.

The Sde Teiman detention abuse scandal is one example. Israeli media itself reported allegations of severe abuse of Palestinian detainees, including allegations of sexual humiliation and assault. Charges against several soldiers were later dropped after the detainee was returned to Gaza. Some claims remain disputed. Some may ultimately prove exaggerated or false. But enough evidence emerged to shock many Israelis and force a national reckoning.

Israel is currently governed by the most extremist right wing coalition in its history. Ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich openly inflame ethnic hatred and empower some of the ugliest forces within Israeli society. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enabled and normalized them in order to preserve both his coalition and his political survival.

To deny this reality destroys our credibility.

But antizionism exploits this reality in profoundly dishonest ways.

There is a difference between criticizing Israel and denying Israel’s legitimacy altogether. Criticism seeks correction. Antizionism seeks destruction.

Every Israeli abuse, every dead Palestinian child, every racist statement by an Israeli politician is immediately transformed into evidence that Israel itself is uniquely evil. Not flawed. Not traumatized. Not struggling. Evil.

The goal is not reform. The goal is to turn Israel and Israelis into global moral pariahs, the “new Nazis,” a uniquely illegitimate society whose existence cannot be justified.

That is why so many Israelis and Jews – including myself – become defensive. We know there are real enemies who seek our destruction. Hamas seeks our destruction. Hezbollah seeks our destruction. Iran seeks our destruction. Islamist movements seek our destruction. Significant sectors of the global far left seek Israel’s destruction.

And after October 7, no one can claim that these fears are only theoretical.

Israelis are a traumatized people. We have endured decades of terrorism, suicide bombings, rocket fire, wars, intifadas, kidnappings, and now the mass murder, torture, rape, and hostage-taking of October 7. Hamas did not merely attack Israel physically. It shattered the Israeli psyche.

Trauma and fear change societies. Sometimes for the worse.

But trauma cannot become an excuse. If anything, it makes morality more necessary. I wrote about this in The Moral Challenge of Jewish Power where I argued:

“We need a Zionism that is strong enough to defend Jewish life and honest enough to confront the ways in which power can be misused and abused. We require a Zionism that understands that sovereignty is not the end of the Jewish story, but the beginning of a more demanding chapter. We need a Zionism that accepts that we will sometimes fall short, but insists that we remain accountable, self-critical, and committed to doing better.”

A moral society is not without its extremists, racists, criminals, sadists, or corrupt politicians. No such society exists. A moral society, however, refuses to make such people its moral voice. That is why self-criticism matters. But if we abandon self-criticism because we fear giving ammunition to our enemies, we surrender the moral core of Zionism itself.

There was once a belief among many Israelis and Jews that we should not “air dirty laundry” publicly because Israel was under siege. That model no longer works, if it ever did. In this day of instant news and social media our dirty laundry is visible to the entire world in real time, especially under our current government.

Denial cannot be our strategy, it convinces nobody. Yet, at the same time, we must counter the antizionist narrative that Israeli wrongdoing is evidence that Israel is illegitimate.

Israel is not an abstraction. It is not a colonial metaphor discussed in university seminars. Israel is a living society of ten million human beings, including roughly half the world’s Jews. Like all societies, it contains both decency and ugliness, courage and cruelty, democracy and extremism.

For me, the question is not whether Israel has moral flaws. Clearly it does. Rather I ask whether Israelis and its supporters abroad are still willing to confront them.

I believe the answer is yes.

Israeli journalists still expose abuses. Israeli human rights groups still operate freely. Opposition voices are loud and insistent. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against this government’s authoritarianism long before October 7. Families of hostages openly challenged the government’s conduct of the war. To the distress of this government, Israeli courts still function. Israelis still argue loudly and endlessly about morality, democracy, war, and power because argument itself is core to Israel’s culture.

That matters.

Antizionists refuse to see Israelis as we are. They insist Israel is beyond redemption.

Where does that leave me? On a tightrope defending Israel against those who seek its destruction from the outside while also confronting those within Israel who are degrading its democracy, humanity, and moral standing.

Those are not contradictory fights, but many of us have become the very same struggle.

Beneath a missing hyphen lies a profound disagreement about the nature of contemporary anti-Jewish hatred, and perhaps about the future of Jewish survival itself.

Since the horrors of October 7 Diaspora Jews have been murdered, stabbed, firebombed and hunted across the Western world: massacred at Bondi Beach; burned alive in Boulder, Colorado; shot in Washington, D.C.; murdered on Yom Kippur in a synagogue in Manchester, England. Numerous attempts at mass murder of Jews have been narrowly averted as in Michigan, or prevented by law enforcement.

Synagogues now require armed guards. Jewish schools resemble hardened security sites. Jewish students are driven from campuses while mobs openly chant for “global intifada” and the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. For many Jews, this no longer feels like a series of isolated incidents, but has become a civilizational fire alarm.

An urgent debate over what to call this has arisen prompted by an emerging group of thinkers who argue that what we are witnessing is not merely a “new antisemitism,” but something different and just as lethal: antizionism.

No hyphen. Lower case. A distinct ideological formation.

These thinkers, including Adam Louis-Klein, founder of Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ); Naya Lekht in her excellent podcast Don’t Know Much About; and Andrew Pessin, founder of the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism – view anti-Jewish hatred as having gone through three epochs.

The first is religious anti-Judaism of both Christendom and Islam.

The second is 19th and 20th century racial antisemitism that imagined Jews as a race-polluting biological enemy conspiring to destroy the “Aryan” race, which culminated in Auschwitz.

Today’s version is antizionism in which the old imagery of the demonic Jew is translated into the moral language of the contemporary activist world. Through the collective figure of Israel and “the Zionist” Jews are recast as white colonialists, apartheidists, baby killers and genocidaires.

How does this work?

The antizionist does not say, “Jews poison wells.” He says, “Zionists commit genocide.”

The antizionist doesn’t say, “Jews control the banks and governments.” She says, “Zionists control Congress, the media and Western foreign policy.”

And the antizionist does not say, “Jews are alien invaders polluting European civilization.” They say, “Zionists are settler-colonial occupiers who should go back to Europe.”

The content changes but the deeply entrenched core narrative remains hauntingly familiar.

These thinkers point out that before 1948 anti-Zionism was largely an internal Jewish argument. Zionism was still a theoretical idea, not an existing state, and many Jews opposed it on religious, political or ideological grounds. This all changed when the objective material condition of the Jews was utterly transformed after the Holocaust, and Israel’s establishment.

What we are seeing today, however, is something very different: a globalized ideology shaped by an odd synthesis of older Soviet anti-Zionism, racial antisemitism, and radical Islamism. This is what transforms anti-Zionism into antizionism.

It wouldn’t be Jewish if there wasn’t disagreement.

Other thinkers strongly resist treating antizionism as a wholly distinct category. Historian Jarrod Tanny, for example, insists on keeping the hyphen, arguing that anti-Zionism often functions as contemporary antisemitism, but warns against overstating the novelty of the phenomenon. In his view, today’s anti-Israel extremism frequently repackages older antisemitic tropes in progressive or anti-colonial language rather than constituting an entirely separate historical species.

Tanny writes,

“The relationship between racial antisemitism and anti-Zionist antisemitism is complex, but the answer is not that anti-Zionism lay incubating as a seed in the world of Marr, Ford, and the Nazis, waiting to germinate with the birth of Israel.”

Others, like David Hirsh, founder of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, offer something closer to a middle position. Hirsh argues that antizionism can become a worldview that transforms “Zionism” into a mythical source of global evil in much the same way antisemitism historically transformed “the Jew” into a mythical force behind society’s problems. Yet he also approaches the issue cautiously.

This debate may sound academic. It is not. Naming this matters because diagnosis determines response. If Jews misidentify the nature of the threat confronting them, they risk preparing for the wrong danger at precisely the wrong moment.

But if antizionism represents a new mutation, one embedded in the moral prestige language of anti-racism, decolonization and human rights activism, then many legacy Jewish institutions may be radically underestimating the challenge they – and we – face.

Has the no-hyphen camp fully proven its case? Tanny, Hirsh and others are right to warn against flattening history or collapsing every form of anti-Zionism (antizionism?) into antisemitism. Yet the emergence of this debate itself feels significant. Jews are struggling to name a phenomenon that increasingly resembles older forms of anti-Jewish hatred while simultaneously presenting itself in an entirely new vocabulary. Perhaps that uncertainty is precisely why the argument over the hyphen has become so emotionally and intellectually charged.

A missing hyphen may seem trivial. But language matters. This argument over a hyphen is not about semantics. It is existential. Societies preparing to turn on their Jews generally do not wait for us to finish our internal debates.

Tonight, as Israel’s Memorial Day (Yom HaZikaron) begins, I am expanding my circle of remembrance. For years, I remembered my friend David Rosenfeld, murdered by Palestinian terrorists in 1982. This year, I remember all victims of terrorism, including innocent Palestinians.

I will certainly remember the Israeli soldiers who fell in battle defending Israel from attack. But I will not remember terrorists, whether Jewish or Palestinian, who set out on a mission to take innocent lives.

And I know what some will say: there are a whole lot more Palestinians who chose terrorism than Jews. Yes, that is true. But so what? I am remembering the innocent, non-terrorist Palestinians killed in this goddamned conflict. And there are a lot of them.

Because if we cannot hold all of their humanity at once, then we have already lost something essential: our humanity.

So, I remember David Rosenfeld.

David was a friend. An American from Philadelphia who came to Israel and built a life here. He worked at the bank where I deposited my dollars. We began talking and became fast friends.

In March 1981, as I was preparing to leave Israel after an extended stay, David told me he was moving with his wife and two small children to the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, very near the archaeological site of Herodion. I must have looked at him with unbelieving eyes because he quickly said he was not “one of those” settlers, gun-toting, wild-eyed. David told me what drew him to Tekoa was Rabbi Menachem Froman, who believed Jews and Palestinians might yet meet not only across lines of conflict, but across lines of faith and shared humanity. It was that fragile, improbable hope that took him there, and that he chose to live by. He specifically said he would not carry a weapon. I bid him farewell, we hugged. I never saw him again.

On July 2, 1982, during the Lebanon War, David was alone at Herodion (one of King Herod the Great’s palaces and his tomb) where he was the director of tourism. Two Palestinians attacked him, stabbing him over one hundred times. I learned of his death in an article in the Boston Globe. It was a thunderclap. Something shattered inside me. For years, I carried that loss as a monster-sized chip on my shoulder. I nursed the anger, and in the process, blocked off my soul.

Decades later, it still sits with me.

And, this year, I also remember the Dawabsheh family in Duma.

In the early hours of July 31, 2015, Jewish terrorists crept into the village and firebombed the family’s home while they slept. Molotov cocktails were thrown through the windows, engulfing the house in flames within moments. Hebrew graffiti was left on the walls – slogans of revenge, marking the attack as an act of extremist, ideological violence.

Inside that home were a mother, a father, and their two young children. Eighteen-month-old Ali Dawabsheh was burned to death. His parents, Saad and Riham, suffered catastrophic burn injuries and died in the weeks that followed. Their older son, Ahmed, survived, but with severe burns and the trauma of witnessing the destruction of his family. It was not an abstract tragedy. It was intimate, deliberate, and horrifying in its cruelty.

The Jewish terrorist was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

I know Yom HaZikaron is for us Israelis, to remember our losses. I know it is a big ask to extend that grief to Palestinians. I know, because up until now, I also thought that. Felt that.

Yom HaZikaron, I now believe, asks more of us. Maybe even the impossible.

I say this knowing another thing. That in the years after David’s murder, in my own grief I closed my eyes and ears to Palestinian grief. I didn’t want to hear it. I was in my twenties, and I carried this anger into my thirties and forties. That is my confession.

Yet, this anger and hate gave me some insight: we Israelis and Palestinians, in our mutual pain and trauma, fear each other, dehumanize each other, objectify each other, and can’t see beyond our own tribes.

That is indeed a tall order.

Yes, Palestinians in Gaza who were not terrorists, who were caught in a war not of their choosing, should be remembered. Did some or most support Hamas? Yes, but we are not a mob. Israel is a state governed by law. We do not decide who lives or dies based on what we think they might believe.

That is what Hamas does. And I sure as hell don’t want us to be like Hamas.

I firmly believe Hamas bears tremendous responsibility for this state of affairs. It possesses a violent, genocidal and antisemitic ideology that seeks our destruction. Its leadership initiates a major war and then hides while its own civilians remain exposed. It built some 500 kilometers of fortified tunnels and refused to open them to its own people as shelters. Like all totalitarians in history, this is a leadership that treats its own people as expendable.

No. We don’t want to become like that.

So tonight, as the siren sounds, I remember…

David Rosenfeld, my friend.

Ali Dawabsheh. His parents, Saad and Riham. And their older son, Ahmed, who survived, badly burned and alone.

All victims of terror, no matter the perpetrator.

Our soldiers who stood in the breach.

If we cannot hold all of that, if we cannot insist on moral clarity about terrorism while also refusing to surrender our humanity toward innocent life, then we have lost something essential. Our souls.

And yes, many of us have lost that essential something. How else did we get this current government?

This Yom HaZikaron let’s remember our own – and theirs, too. To give all these death a deeper meaning, Yom HaZikaron must also be about who we choose to be in the shadow of our unfathomable losses.

There is something deeply concerning that I keep hearing from American Jews I care about. It’s usually said with concern, often with anguish. It goes like this:

‘What Israel is doing right now, especially under this government, is making Jews around the world less safe, its policies are putting a target on Jewish backs everywhere.’

I understand the instinct behind that. But we need to confront it honestly, because it is wrong. And more than that, it is dangerous. Lethally dangerous.

Let’s start with reality. Antisemitism is rising globally. The latest data, including a Tel Aviv University report released days ago, confirms what Jews already know: this is not a blip, but a surge, and in too many cases it is deadly.

But here is where we go off track.

Too many of us respond by looking inward, asking what we did wrong. Asking whether different Israeli policies, a different government, a different tone might have prevented it. That instinct feels responsible. It is not.

Why? Because antisemites are responsible for antisemitism.

Not Israel. Not its government. Not us.

For decades, those of us who worked for American Jewish organizations were trained into a framework: “anti-Zionism” is not necessarily antisemitism, but it can “cross a line” into antisemitism. Our job was to identify when that happened.

That framework no longer describes reality, if it ever did.

What we are seeing today is a global movement that maps Jews everywhere into the actions of Israel, assigns them collective responsibility, and increasingly justifies hostility and violence.

We are living through a third historical wave of Jew-hatred. The first was theological anti-Judaism. The second was racial antisemitism. The third, unfolding now, is political and ideological, but it follows the same pattern: Jews are cast as uniquely conspiratorial, uniquely illegitimate, uniquely malevolent, uniquely deserving of punishment.

Today, that language is best understand as antizionism. (Yes, the spelling is correct.)

We are told this is about policy. About settlements. About Gaza. About the maddening Netanyahu government. It is not. It is about whether Jews are allowed the same human right as every other people: the right to self-determination. Once that right is framed as a crime, everything else follows.

If Israel is evil, and since most Diaspora Jews support Israel (if not all its policies), then they become legitimate extensions of that evil. And once that happens, anti-Jewish violence is normalized. It is “resistance by any means necessary.” It is “globalizing the intifada.” That is how someone justifies shooting Jews in Sydney because of a war thousands of miles away.

And here is the part we must confront:

When we ourselves respond by asking what Israel did to provoke this, we reinforce the logic that makes those attacks possible. We validate the premise. We tell the world that when Jews are targeted, there is something to explain when in fact there isn’t.

If Chinese Americans were expected to answer for Beijing, what would that be called?

Racism.

If American Muslims were expected to answer for the policies of 57 Muslim states, what would that called?

Islamophobia.

But there is a Jewish exception. Its not new. Its been with us, well, forever. And too often, we mistakenly accept that burden. There is a reason for this, and it runs very deep in our collective memory and cultural DNA.

Many of us were raised with a reflex shaped by generations of vulnerability. My grandfather, born to Yiddish-speaking immigrants fleeing Russian pogroms, once nervously whispered to the 8-year-old me as I counted my allowance in public, “Put that away, everyone will think you’re a kike.”

The Yiddish phrase “Sha, shtil! Es iz a shonda far di goyim” (“Be quiet! Don’t be a disgrace in front of non-Jews”) sums it up.

In the Diaspora, Jews learned that visibility could be dangerous. That the actions of one Jew or a group of Jews could bring consequences for all. So, we internalized it, baked it into our bagels.

That instinct made sense once upon a powerless time. But can we now all agree it failed us completely in the 20th century? I mean, Auschwitz was not a protest of West Bank settlements.

Today, this reflexively defensive instinct leads many of us believing that antisemitism is something we can manage through better behavior. That if we are careful enough, critical enough, we can reduce the danger.

When we understand lethal antisemitism on an Australian beach as a reaction to Israeli actions, we reinforce the oldest lie about us: that Jews are collectively responsible. Can we all just agree that antisemites do not need our help to justify their hatred?

So, what must we stop doing?

We must stop internalizing the accusations, translating hatred into self-critique, and believing that if we just say the right things, the hatred will subside. Why? Because it is not about what we say or do. Or what those Jews over there are doing. It never was. It is and always has been about what Jew-haters imagine who and what Jews are.

This does not mean abandoning criticism of this or any Israeli government. It does not mean silencing debate. But, it does mean drawing the line on our own terms.

So, yes, by all means criticize Israel’s policies! Demand better from us thick-headed Israelis! Support from afar (please!) the many millions of Israelis who are also sick of this current government (yours truly for one).

But never, never, never! accept that antisemitism is a reaction to Jewish behavior.

Never accept that Jews anywhere are legitimate stand-ins for a state.

Never accept that our safety, an inalienable human right, is conditional.

And never accept that when Jews are murdered at a Hannukah celebration (Bondi Beach) or in their synagogues on Yom Kippur (Manchester), the first question we ask is: “what did we do wrong?”

FFS! We did nothing wrong. Nothing.

We Jews must stop with this self-effacing narrative because it gives permission to antisemites to be antisemitic. Whatever our personal positions are on the Israeli government’s policies we must never internalize the narrative that somehow antisemitism becomes a rational and understandable response.

Because Jewish behavior does not cause antisemitism.

Antisemites cause antisemitism.

Full. Stop.

There’s a growing conversation in Washington about conditioning, restricting, or even ending U.S. military aid to Israel. J Street’s April 13 statement is part of that shift. It’s worth taking seriously. It’s also worth pushing back on it.

First, let’s be clear about categories. J Street is not the same as the Democratic Socialists of America, Jewish Voice for Peace, and other antizionist groups that openly call for ending all military aid to Israel, or even ending Israel. That distinction matters. But timing matters too. Those voices, along with efforts in Congress to block weapons transfers, are the backdrop here. So, when J Street steps in with a “conditional” approach, it’s hard not to read it as trying to split the difference. Maybe that’s the strategy. Maybe not. Either way, it raises some real concerns.

Here’s the core of J Street’s argument:

“When Israeli policies do not align with American policies and interests, Israel should not be able to use American weapons for those policies. That is why J Street supports the Ceasefire Compliance Act (CCA), which makes clear that Israel must adhere to the October 2025 ceasefire agreement and 20-point plan for Gaza that it previously agreed to, facilitate the entrance of humanitarian aid into Gaza, prevent de facto and de jure annexation of the West Bank and take material steps to prevent settler violence. If these conditions are not met, the CCA dictates that Israel cannot use U.S. weapons in Gaza or the West Bank.”

Before I get into why I think that’s a problem, let me say something upfront. J Street is correct about Jewish terror in the West Bank. That is real, and I’ve written about it here and here. The slow drift toward annexation is also real. And yes, the Netanyahu government has enabled or tolerated that. If you care about Israel long term, that should bother you. It bothers me. A lot.

But here’s where I part ways with J Street.

No serious person argues that the United States should have no say in how its weapons are used. Of course it should. That’s legitimate. But there’s a difference between setting general rules and turning those rules into real-time political pressure during an active war. In an existential conflict, the battlefield changes faster than Washington can keep up. If access to critical weapons depends on shifting political judgments, you’re not just guiding an ally, you’re introducing uncertainty into its decision-making at exactly the wrong moment.

If the question is how to pressure Israel, the answer is not to do it in real time during an existential war. Pressure is legitimate, but timing matters. When it’s applied only to Israel while Hamas keeps rearming, recruiting, regrouping, and reasserting control, the message to Iran and Hezbollah is simple: keep going, it’s working.

I get it when antizionists seek precisely that outcome, but I expect much more from J Street.

At first, I thought the J Street statement just left things out. On a second read, I found a built-in asymmetry.

Israel gets conditions. Enforceable ones. Hamas gets context. Other U.S. allies that support Hamas and receive billions in American arms… no mention.

Let’s be honest about what we’re dealing with. Hamas started this war on October 7, backed by Iran and Hezbollah, which joined the fighting the day after. What’s happening now is not some new conflict. It’s the same war, just a later phase. Hamas has not disarmed. It has reasserted control over parts of Gaza, with catastrophic consequences for Gaza’s civilians. (See Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib for a Palestinian Gazan’s POV on Hamas’s repression.)

Hamas is testing the ceasefire and rearming at the same time. And none of that triggers anything in J Street’s statement. No mechanism. No consequence. That omission is a built-in imbalance.

And here’s the irony. The actual Ceasefire Compliance Act explicitly says Hamas has to stop attacks, stop rearming, dismantle its military infrastructure, and move toward disarmament. So, the bill itself at least gestures at symmetry. But J Street’s framing mostly leaves that out.

Then there’s the consistency problem. If the principle is that U.S. support should reflect U.S. interests and values, fine. Apply it. But apply it across the board. Qatar and Turkey are major U.S. allies who have played real roles in supporting Hamas politically and materially. Both receive major U.S. arms systems worth billions. Where’s the call to reassess those relationships? Why is the standard only being sharpened in one direction? I would expect a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization to demonstrate awareness of the geopolitical realities Israel faces.

There’s also a disconnect here that’s hard to ignore.

You can’t run a war where access to critical weapons systems depends on shifting political judgments in Washington. Who decides there’s been a violation? How fast? What happens to operations already underway? War doesn’t pause while that gets sorted out. That kind of uncertainty has real consequences on the battlefield.

J Street also leans on the idea that Israel should reduce its dependence on U.S. military aid. That’s actually a serious point, and I agree with it in principle. But again, details matter. A gradual, coordinated ten-year drawdown as proposed by the Israeli Prime Minister is one thing. A near term (2028) major restructuring tied to conditions is something else entirely. One is strategic planning. The other risks looking like pressure, sending a message to Israel’s enemies that their Muqawama Doctrine works and now is the time to double down.

And this is not only about Netanyahu. It applies to any Israeli prime minister, present or future. The question is whether Israel’s ability to conduct a war for its own survival should be subject to evolving political conditions set elsewhere in real time.

Signals matter. If support starts to look conditional or shaky right now, Israel’s enemies notice. The message becomes: keep pushing, the U.S. will eventually pull back. At the same time, regional partners who have aligned themselves with Israel start recalculating. That’s not a message you want to send in the middle of an ongoing war.

For what it’s worth, I actually do support phasing out U.S. military aid to Israel over time. Not because I think the relationship is a problem, but because dependence is. October 7 made that clear. When your war effort depends on external supply that comes with political conditions, your room to maneuver shrinks exactly when you need it most. Long term, Israel should be more self-sufficient. That’s just strategic reality.

But that’s not what J Street is proposing here.

What they’re proposing feels, to me, like introducing a conditional leash in the middle of an ongoing war. That is not the right move.

That said, this is a conversation worth having. I’m open to other approaches. Civil responses are always welcome.

This is a long one, please bear with me.

On Passover, we tell the story that defines us: we were enslaved, powerless, at the mercy of others, strangers in a land not our own. We had no sovereignty, no army, no ability to defend ourselves. Our fate was determined entirely by those who ruled over us.

And we are commanded to remember that experience even today, as we live as a “free people in our land.” This power of a state is new to us. While we have much to be proud of, holding sovereign power comes with built-in moral snares.

Exile (galut) was not just geographic dispersion. It was both a political and spiritual reality. We lived without power, surviving under the authority of others, often under their boot. Over time that condition shaped our identity. We became accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a people acted upon, rather than a people acting in history.

We made powerlessness a virtue.

That changed in 1948 when the State of Israel was established. For the first time in nearly two millennia, we regained sovereign power. We built a state and an army to defend it. We took responsibility for our own fate.

Yet, while Zionism solved one political problem, it created a new moral challenge: what does it mean for a people that was powerless for so long to become empowered?

I first encountered that question in a serious way in 1989 when I read an essay, “Ethics of Jewish Power,” by Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, one of the 20th century’s most influential Jewish thinkers. It made a deep impression on me then, and it feels even more relevant now.

Greenberg understood something that many of us were not yet ready to face. The return of Jewish sovereignty would not simply restore Jewish safety. It would transform the entire moral framework in which we lived.

Powerlessness may be a virtue, but one that is forced on you. For centuries, we had developed what he called an “ethic of powerlessness.” It was shaped by exile, by vulnerability, by the fact that we lacked the ability to impose our will on others. It emphasized restraint, moral aspiration, an “innocence of powerlessness” that was “not simply moral superiority, it is also a result of the lack of capacity to act,” Greenberg argued.

This all changes the moment you take power.

Greenberg’s central claim was stark and uncomfortable: power is morally dangerous; but powerlessness is worse.

The Holocaust made that undeniable. It revealed that in a modern world of states and industrial violence, powerlessness is not just a disadvantage, but it was a death sentence. Zionism’s restoration of Jewish power was therefore not optional. It was necessary.

But necessity does not resolve morality. It complicates it, by creating moral dilemmas Jews didn’t have to face for centuries.

Jews were not the only ones facing this problem. In the 20th century, countless peoples faced a similar reality: life under empire meant vulnerability, not virtue. Greeks, Armenians, and others did not romanticize their powerlessness, they rejected it. They chose sovereignty, understanding that the moral burdens of power are real, but far preferable to the moral illusion of living at the mercy of others.

Palestinians, too, are pursuing state power, and if they achieve sovereignty, they will face the same unavoidable truth: power brings moral dilemmas that cannot be escaped, only managed.

In a follow-up essay, The Ethics of Jewish Power Today, Greenberg sharpened the argument. Once we have power, we no longer live in a world of moral clarity. We live in a world of tragic choices. We are forced, at times, to choose between competing goods, or between a greater and a lesser evil. The question is no longer whether harm can be avoided entirely. It is whether we are using power in a way that maximizes life and minimizes death.

The same state that protects Jewish life makes decisions that affect millions of non-Jews. The same army that defends can also inflict harm. The same sovereignty that secures our future forces us to confront not just our ideals, but the consequences of our actions in a flawed and dangerous world.

Greenberg warned that we would be tempted in two directions.

One would be to cling to the old ethic of powerlessness, to judge ourselves as if we still lacked power, to demand of ourselves a kind of moral purity that no state can sustain. This urge is heard among some Jews for whom the innocence of powerlessness is preferable to the moral ambiguities, dilemmas and challenges of exercising power. The other temptation would be to abandon moral restraint altogether, to justify anything in the name of survival, to give ourselves a moral blank check.

He rejected both.

What we need, he argued, was a new framework: an ethic of power that accepts the necessity of power, but insists on limits, accountability, and moral judgment in how that power is used.

Not perfect outcomes, but responsible ones.

Not moral purity, but moral seriousness.

Not self-justification, but self-criticism.

And crucially, all the while daily confronting the moral ambiguities of defending your citizens against enemies all too willing to murder as many as they can get their hands on. That is what October 7 taught us.

What then when we stumble morally? An ethical society is not one that never errs. It is one that builds into itself the capacity to examine its own actions, to investigate failure, to correct itself over time. Power must never be self-validating. It must always remain under judgment.

And that framework is exactly what is under strain today.

Many of us look at the current Israeli government and feel disillusionment. We see Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and other ministers, and we ask: is this what Jewish empowerment was meant to produce? Is this far-right, ultra-nationalist, messianic government what Jewish statehood could only ever produce? Has something gone fundamentally wrong and power itself corrupted the Zionist project beyond repair?

But such a conclusion misreads the moment.

Greenberg did not argue that Jewish power would make us better. He argued that it would severely test us by exposing tensions we had never had to face before. If we are troubled by what we see today, that does not mean his argument failed. But, it means we are living through the case that proves why he wrote it.

The temptation now, especially for Jews outside Israel, is to step back and disengage. But that response carries its own danger, and given what we saw on October 7, the lives of millions of Israeli Jews — half the world’s Jewish population — would be imperiled.

Jews abandoning Jews to mortal danger — which is what antizionist Jews do when they support (even tacitly) Hamas — is not a return to a more authentic or moral Judaism, but a direct violation of the obligation not to stand idly by the blood of one’s fellow. It also betrays the foundational Jewish principle that all Jews are responsible for one another.

There is a persistent idea, especially among some Diasporist Jews, that Judaism was somehow more authentic, more ethical, even more “pure” when we lacked power. Jewish power, embodied in the State of Israel, thus represents a kind of moral fall.

Greenberg rejects this view outright, and for good reason. The so-called “innocence of powerlessness” is a chimera mistaking constraint for virtue. For centuries, we did not refrain from harming others because we had perfected our ethics. We refrained because we lacked the capacity to act. Powerlessness did not elevate us above moral compromise. It simply removed the possibility of certain kinds of moral failure.

Moreover, powerlessness was not morally neutral. It carried its own moral cost. It meant vulnerability to violence, dependence on the goodwill of others, and, at its most extreme, annihilation. The Holocaust exposed this with brutal clarity. To choose powerlessness in a world that permits, and at times encourages, the destruction of the weak is not a moral position, but a dangerous illusion.

Greenberg’s point is not that power guarantees moral behavior. It clearly does not. It is that moral responsibility only begins once power exists. The task is not to retreat from power in the name of purity, but to confront the far harder challenge: how to exercise power without surrendering our humanity.

To respond to the moral failings of a particular government by turning away from Jewish power altogether is a retreat from responsibility, not a moral stance.

The real question is not whether we should have power, but rather “how should we use it.” And how should we judge ourselves in the process?

Here too, Greenberg’s warning is essential: the moment we begin to generalize, demonize, or collapse individuals into an irredeemable collective enemy, we erode the very moral restraints that an ethic of power requires. And here, our own tradition offers a model that is as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago.

The Torah returns to one mitzvah (command) no fewer than 36 times in different formulations of “Do not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger as you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9) This teaching is a direct confrontation with the reality of power. It assumes that we will one day hold power over others, and it warns us in advance what that power can do if left unchecked.

This is not about being “nice.” It is about memory as a moral constraint. We know what it means to be vulnerable, to be at the mercy of others, to have no recourse. That memory is supposed to shape how we act when the roles are reversed.

And today, those roles have been reversed.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we are no longer the powerless minority. We are the sovereign power. The IDF is the most powerful in the region. We control borders, movement, security, and, in many cases, the daily lives of millions of Palestinians. That reality does not erase the threats we face from Palestinian terrorism. It does not negate the right to defend ourselves. But it does mean that our moral responsibility is no longer theoretical. It is immediate, constant, and unavoidable.

This is where the current Israeli government is failing that test.

A government that fuels division within Israeli society, that undermines democratic institutions, that threatens the freedom of the press, that privileges narrow political interests over the common good, is not strengthening Jewish sovereignty, but is weakening its moral foundation. A leadership culture marked by corruption, political opportunism, and the normalization of extremist rhetoric is not simply a political problem. It is a moral one.

And in its approach to Palestinians, the failure is even more profound. When policy drifts toward permanent control without political horizon, when language dehumanizes, when power becomes an end in itself rather than a means of securing life, we are no longer operating within an ethic of power.

This is precisely the danger Greenberg warned about: not that we would have power, but that we would come to justify its use without sufficient moral restraint. This is what undergirds the government’s inaction over extremist settler violence (Jewish terrorism) while conversely passing a law just yesterday permitting the death penalty for Palestinian terrorists.

Which is why the story of Nathan and King David is not ancient history but remains a timely warning.

In the Book of Samuel (II Samuel 12:1–13), the prophet Nathan confronts King David after David abuses his power, sending Uriah to his death so as to take his wife Batsheva.

Nathan does not begin with accusation. He tells a story. A rich man, with many flocks, takes the one small lamb of a poor man rather than draw from his own abundance. David is outraged and condemns the man to death.

Nathan then turns to him and says: Ata ha’ish! (You are the man!)

In that moment, the king is held accountable. His power does not shield him. It demands judgment. That is the standard our tradition sets for holding power. Not its rejection, but its moral constraint. Not the denial of sovereignty, but accountability within it. Even our greatest leaders are not above moral scrutiny.

If Greenberg was right, then what we are living through now is not the failure of Jewish power, but severe testing of it. The answer to the misuse of power is not to abandon power as that path leads back to a condition that, in a post-Holocaust world where antisemitism is resurging, is unsustainable. But the answer is also not to defend everything done in the name of the state. That is not Zionism; it is the surrender of moral judgment.

What is required is something harder.

We need a Zionism that is strong enough to defend Jewish life and honest enough to confront the ways in which power can be misused and abused. We require a Zionism that understands that sovereignty is not the end of the Jewish story, but the beginning of a more demanding chapter. We need a Zionism that accepts that we will sometimes fall short, but insists that we remain accountable, self-critical, and committed to doing better.

This requires engagement, criticism, and the willingness to say, as Nathan said to David, that power does not place any of us above the law and we all will be judged equally before it.

Zionism succeeded in restoring power to the Jewish people. That was the easy part. Now comes the harder task: ensuring that we are worthy of it.

May your Pesach be thoughtful and self-reflective in these difficult, troubling times.

I wrote recently that while Israel is fighting an existential war against extremists abroad, we are tolerating our homegrown violent extremists. I warned that settler violence in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria was not isolated, not random, and not contained. Since then, the evidence has only become more overwhelming, and the consequences more dangerous.

Even the Israeli security establishment is now saying this openly and bluntly. The IDF chief has called settler violence “unacceptable” and warned that it is causing “extraordinary strategic damage” to Israel.

Think about that for a moment. Not activists. Not critics abroad. Not journalists. The IDF, which is fighting Iran and Hezbollah, taking casualties, facing international criticism. That is how serious this has become.

And it is not just about morality, though the moral failure is obvious and shameful. It is about Israel’s ability to function as a state.

At the same time, the strain on the military is already reaching dangerous levels. The IDF chief has reportedly warned the cabinet that the army risks “collapsing in on itself” due to manpower shortages.

Will this government listen?

Another layer on top of that is the need to divert forces fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon to deal with Jewish terrorism in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. This is not sustainable. This is self-inflicted damage, and it is happening in the middle of a war.

Internationally, the cost is mounting just as quickly. Even Israel’s own ambassador to the United States – himself a settler – has acknowledged that settler violence is a “stain” that is costing Israel friends.

And pro-Israel Democrats in Washington, people who have consistently supported Israel despite internal pressures not to do so, are now calling settler violence a “national security threat.”

Let that sink in. This is not coming from Israel’s enemies. This is coming from our allies. From our friends.

For months, many in the pro-Israel community stayed silent. Out of loyalty. Out of fear of giving ammunition to Israel’s ideological enemies. Out of a belief that criticism during wartime should be restrained. That silence is backfiring.

Finally, more than 1,000 Diaspora Jewish leaders have now publicly called for action against what they explicitly described as “Jewish extremist terror” in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. That’s a good start. But why not 10,000? Or 100,000?

That matters. It is overdue. And it is still not enough.

Where are you pro-Israel advocacy organizations including those for which I was a senior staff member? I know you are having internal discussions about this.

Not good enough.

Speak out if you wish to remain credible supporters of the bigger picture, which is Israel writ large. Otherwise, your silence becomes consent. You cannot fight antizionism while remaining silent about this.

And, you are not doing Israel any favors.

The problem is not just the violence itself. It is the political system that enables it. Our government includes, empowers, and depends on messianic religious fanatics who see this violence not as a problem, but as a means to their vision: turning Israel into a theocracy and annexation of the West Bank/Judea and Samaria.

The result is a growing perception, inside and outside Israel, that the state is either unwilling or unable to control its own extremists. That perception is corrosive. It erodes Israel’s legitimacy abroad. It undermines the IDF’s effectiveness. It fuels Palestinian rage and radicalization. And it stains the very idea of Zionism.

I do not use that word lightly. Zionism was founded to be the answer to Jewish powerlessness, to antisemitic lawlessness, to the vulnerability of living at the mercy of mobs. Now we are watching mobs act in our name.

That is a moral failure. It is also a strategic disaster.

There are signs, finally, that people are beginning to wake up. That voices within Israel, within the security establishment, and within the Diaspora are willing to say clearly that this cannot continue. But awareness is not action. Statements are not policy. Condemnations are not enforcement.

What is needed now is something far more basic: a government that is willing to govern. A government that enforces the law, restrains extremists, and understands that power carries responsibility.

Israel has elections coming. That matters.

Because what is at stake is not just a coalition, not just a policy debate, not even just the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. What is at stake is the character of the state.

Whether Israel remains a democratic, law-governed state rooted in Jewish values, or whether it allows itself to be dragged, slowly but steadily, into something else.

As I wrote before, and I will say again now with even greater urgency:

This is not Zionism.

And if we do not stop it, it will continue eroding Israel from within and leave us totally isolated from the world, including our best friends.

To my dear liberal American family and friends:

I see you. Please read and try to see me.

Right now, millions of Americans, especially liberals, centrists, and traditional conservatives, look at the Trump presidency and see something deeply dangerous: a threat to the rule of law, to democratic norms, to civil and civic rights. For them, this is not just another political cycle. It is an existential struggle over the future of the 250-year-old American democratic experiment.

I understand that instinct because, as an American ex-pat, I share it.

But living in Israel, especially after October 7, forced me to shift priorities. My existential reality is now very different.

Because here, the threat is immediate and physical. For me it is measured in sirens and running to shelters, in loud explosions nearby, in funerals for soldiers and civilians. It is the knowledge that those who seek our destruction spent decades and billions of dollars building the means to carry it out.

In the US, the fear is of failing democratic guardrails, weakening institutions, the undermining of the rule of law. ICE in Minneapolis is emblematic of that.

Both fears are real. Both are grounded in lived experience. But they are not the same. And that difference shapes how the war in Iran is seen, understood, and judged by us and by you.

You know the saying “where you sit determines where you stand”?

I once thought of that as a pithy abstraction. Its not. It’s literal.

Fifteen Years, and Then Suddenly…

We made Aliyah fifteen years ago. We built a life and raised a family here.

But in an important sense, I was still very American. My mental map of the world ran through U.S. politics and media. I lived here physically while experiencing American political reality as though I was still in the Bay Area.

Then came October 7, which collapsed all that instantly.

We watched in horror as the massacre unfolded on live TV. That same day, our youngest daughter was called up to the IDF reserves in a combat role. A friend’s grandson was seriously wounded fighting in Gaza. We attended funerals. We stood in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv among thousands, waiting, hoping, grieving.

Something shifted, fast and irreversibly.

I became Israelized.

Not as a matter of ideology, but of proximity. And necessity.

I stopped watching American cable news. It suddenly felt distant, underinformed, irrelevant to the reality unfolding around me. Instead, I turned fully to Israeli media, constantly and intensely, trying to understand what was happening, what might come next, how people here were processing it.

And that had an unexpected consequence. My Hebrew improved dramatically.

Because it had to.

When the stakes are this immediate and your brain is filled with cortisol, you do not wait for translation. You do not rely on summaries. You listen. You absorb. You struggle through the language because understanding is not optional.

Becoming Israelized, for me, was not just about adopting a different perspective. It was about living inside the reality. It became a matter of survival.

No more monsters on our borders

From this vantage point, the war in Iran looks different. It isn’t a separate or new war. The Iranian regime spent decades building a network of proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others – organized around a single objective: our destruction.

They were monsters on our border.

The mass murder, rape, kidnappings of October 7 demonstrated exactly what that destruction would look like: genocide.

So, when Israelis talk about this war, they (we) are not talking about something they (we) chose. They (we) are talking about something that was brought to them (us), and now, finally, as a counter-offensive brought back to its source.

Tehran.

Supporting the War, Despite Netanyahu

Anyone who knows me knows my deep contempt for Netanyahu. He is corrupt. He’s been in power for too long. He’s enabled the worst instincts of Israeli society by bringing into his government messianic fanatics. I fervently hope that this year’s election will finally put him out of power.

And yet, paradoxically, I support this war. As do over 90 percent of Israelis, including many who were in the streets (including yours truly) protesting this very government. From the outside, that may look contradictory. From here, it is not.

Or, as the classic Israeli song goes: d’varim she’ro’im misham lo ro’im mikan (things you see from there you can’t see from here).

When the threat is existential, political divisions do not disappear, but they reorder themselves. The question becomes less about who leads and more about whether the threat itself can be neutralized.

There is also a hope, cautious, maybe even unrealistic, that this moment could reshape the region. That weakening or even toppling the Islamic Republic could undermine the engine driving so much regional violence. That a Lebanon free of Hezbollah, and a Gaza free from Hamas may open new pathways to regional stability, and dare I even whisper it, peace.

Maybe that’s too optimistic. Maybe there will be blowback. History suggests there often is. But it is hard to imagine a worse outcome than allowing Iran to continue rebuilding its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and tightening the “ring of fire” the ayatollahs spent decades constructing around us.

Two Realities, One Conversation

This, my dear liberal American family and friends, is the disconnect between us.

Americans, especially you, look at this war through the lens of your own existential fears of the Trump presidency. Israelis look at it through ours. Both are shaped by real experiences. Both feel urgent. Both feel morally clear from the inside.

But they are not the same.

And if we are going to have an honest conversation about this war, about Iran, about Israel, about what comes next, we must begin by acknowledging that difference. Not dismissing it. Not flattening it. Not turning it into slogans.

Just understanding it and being accepting of the differences in our experiences that brought us to the positions we hold.

Because where you sit shapes what you fear most.

And what you fear most shapes everything else.

While Israel is fighting a dangerous war against the Islamic Republic regime in Iran (and its proxies) with Iranian and Hezbollah missiles striking us day and night, something deeply troubling is happening. In the hills of the West Bank, extremist settlers have escalated attacks against Palestinian civilians — shootings, arson, intimidation, and assaults — that are driving families from their homes and land.

If I am to be a “salty Zionist” I need to say this plainly: this violence is intolerable, unacceptable, immoral, profoundly un-Zionist and decidedly un-Jewish.

The violence is not random. For key figures in Israel’s government, particularly Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, the long-term goal is annexation of the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. Their agenda is to prevent a Palestinian state while reducing the Palestinian presence on the land.

This violence serves that warped agenda.

Smotrich recently called to cancel the Oslo Accords, annex the West Bank and “encourage” emigration. Ben-Gvir, a disciple of Meir Kahane — the far-right American-Israeli rabbi who founded the extremist Kach movement and advocated expelling all Arabs — built his political career on racist anti-Arab provocation and confrontation. For years he displayed in his living room a portrait of Baruch Goldstein who in 1994 murdered 29 Muslim worshipers in Hebron.

Both Smotrich and Ben Gvir have openly called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

There is also a blunt political reality. Netanyahu’s coalition depends on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Both have threatened to bring down the government if their agenda is challenged. Reining in extremist settlers would mean confronting the very ministers who keep Netanyahu in power. For a prime minister on trial for multiple corruption charges, staying in power is everything.

Since the Hamas invasion and massacre of October 7 Israeli security data shows attacks by extremist settlers against Palestinians surged dramatically. Palestinian communities in parts of the West Bank have abandoned their villages after repeated harassment and violence.

Just last week, with attention on the war with Iran, there was a wave of settler attacks on Palestinians, killing five. These incidents include shootings, arson attacks, destruction of farmland, and intimidation of shepherds and farmers trying simply to make a living.

Israeli security officials acknowledge and condemn the attacks and that enforcement is weak. At times the army does intervene, arresting suspects, dispersing riots, or declaring closed military zones after attacks, but these actions are inconsistent and often come only after violence has already occurred.

At the same time, while Netanyahu has promised “forceful action” against the violent settlers, prosecutions of extremist settlers remain rare and many suspects are quickly released, reinforcing the perception that the phenomenon is not being effectively stopped.

The result is a disturbing reality: even while Israel fights Iran in a major war, the state has often failed to stop extremist settler violence in the West Bank.

And that failure carries consequences far beyond the immediate violence.

I believe Palestinian nationalism, in its current form, is not ready for a viable two-state solution. The Palestinian political system is fractured, corrupt, and too often captive to extremist forces of its own.

But settler violence ensures that the possibility of any future political solution with the Palestinian national movement disappears entirely.

Even if peace is impossible today, destroying the possibility of peace tomorrow is strategic madness. If Palestinian communities are pushed off their land through intimidation and violence, diplomacy becomes impossible, coexistence becomes unimaginable and radicalization becomes inevitable.

There is also a deeper moral dimension that we, of all people, should understand.

Jewish history is filled with memories of pogroms, massacres, expulsions, and mob violence tolerated or encouraged by governments. Zionism emerged as a specific Jewish liberatory response to that history, as a movement to ensure that Jews would never again live as a powerless minority at the mercy of lawless mobs.

A people whose history is shaped by pogroms cannot tolerate pogrom-like violence carried out in its own name.

Burning fields, terrorizing shepherds, and attacking civilians is not Zionism. It is the betrayal of Zionism.

And this brings me to my friends and colleagues in the organized American Jewish community.

For decades, organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, and StandWithUs — institutions over the decades I proudly worked for in senior positions — have done yeoman’s work defending Israel against unfair accusations and hostile propaganda.

That work remains vital. But defending Israel also requires moral clarity. Silence in the face of extremist settler violence is assent.

Even during wartime, and I would say especially during wartime, the pro-Israel community must insist on something fundamental: that Israel be a state governed by the rule of law and Jewish moral values.

Extremist settler violence does not protect Israel. It endangers its future and it endangers the broader Jewish future. The pro-Israel community must urgently find its voice on this.

Why? Because Zionists, salty or not, have an ethical Zionist responsibility to say so, loudly and clearly.

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Donald Trump is a convicted felon whose behavior has damaged American democratic norms.

Benjamin Netanyahu is on trial for multiple corruption charges, is passing the buck over the greatest security failure in Israel’s history on October 7, and governs with a coalition that includes ultra-nationalist extremists.

If these were the only facts that mattered, the conclusion would be simple. But reality rarely cooperates with the human desire for easy moral clarity. Because another truth also exists at the same time: confronting Iran is strategically justified.

This is where much of our public conversation breaks down. Too many assume that if the messenger is flawed, the message must also be false. If Trump is involved, the policy must be reckless. If Netanyahu is involved, the war must be cynical. It makes the world easier to understand. It is also intellectually lazy.

Start with Iran. The Iranian regime is authoritarian, massively repressive, anti-American, openly antisemitic and fully dedicated to Israel’s destruction. For years Iran built its Axis of Resistance strategy, a “Ring of Fire” of governments and proxies around Israel: Hamas and PIJ in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthies in Yemen, the now defunct Asad regime in Syria.

The idea was simple and deadly. Arm and position proxy forces all around Israel’s borders so that, when the moment comes, they can attack simultaneously from multiple directions.

Each group is a piece of a larger design. Taken together they formed a regional network designed to overwhelm Israel’s defenses.

October 7 did not appear out of nowhere. Hamas did not suddenly wake up that morning and carry out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The attack was part of a strategy that Iran had spent years cultivating through training, funding, and weapons.

Which means something important.

The war we are watching now did not suddenly begin last Saturday. It began on a different Saturday (October 7, 2023) when Iran’s proxy network ignited the first phase of a broader confrontation.

There is another layer to this story too often ignored. Iran is not operating in isolation. Tehran sits inside a growing geopolitical alignment that includes Russia and China.

Iranian drones have been used extensively by Russia in Ukraine. Iran and China have deepened their economic and military cooperation. This axis of repression among authoritarian states shares a common interest in weakening and defeating Western-style liberal democracy.

Seen from that angle, the confrontation with Iran is not simply another Middle Eastern war. It is one theater in a much larger global strategic contest.

Let’s go back to the two men whose names (correctly IMHO) trigger so much political reaction.

No beating around the bush. Donald Trump is a convicted felon who has shown repeated contempt for democratic norms and institutions. His political style is built on grievance, intimidation, and personal loyalty rather than constitutional restraint. It is hardly surprising that so many Americans see him as a destabilizing force.

Trump is also staring at midterm elections this November. The political stakes for him and for the Republican Party are enormous. A war that goes badly could damage him and his party for years. Even within his own MAGA movement there are visible splits between isolationists who want the United States out of foreign conflicts and those who believe Iran must be confronted.

This escalation is a massive political gamble. But a political gamble can still intersect with a real strategic threat.

The same uncomfortable duality applies in Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s record is hardly cleaner. The catastrophic failures that led to October 7 occurred on his watch after years of policies that empowered Hamas and neglected Israel’s broader strategic reality. He remains on trial for corruption. His attempt to ram through a judicial overhaul fractured Israeli society, and his coalition includes some of the most extreme figures ever to sit in an Israeli government.

And yet none of those facts erase the reality that Iran represents a long-term existential threat to Israel. On that, there is wall-to-wall consensus among Israelis.

Just like the US, Israel is also approaching elections this year. Netanyahu’s political survival will always shape his calculations.

But elections alone do not explain the war.

The Iranian threat does not disappear if Netanyahu leaves office. It does not go away if Democrats win back Congress in the midterms. It does not fade if Donald Trump fades from the political stage altogether.

The deeper problem in today’s politics is the demand for moral (read binary) simplicity. People want a world where good leaders do good things and bad leaders do bad things. Reality has never worked that way.

Flawed leaders sometimes confront real threats. Cynical political calculations sometimes sit beside genuine strategic danger. And sometimes several truths exist at the same time.

That is the uncomfortable reality.

You can believe that Donald Trump is dangerous to American democracy.

You can believe that Benjamin Netanyahu is corrupt, bears responsibility for the failures that led to October 7.

Yet, you can still recognize that confronting Iran is a strategic necessity.

And you can hold all these contradictory truths to be self-evident because that is what this moment demands.

I do not support Donald Trump. I never have. I never will. He has damaged American democracy, debased political discourse, and yes, he is a convicted felon.

And yet, from inside my home bomb shelter in northern Israel, listening to sirens and feeling the concussions of intercepted missiles just a few hundred meters overhead, I am stunned by what I keep seeing online from my American friends: this war is just a distraction, a “wag the dog” maneuver, a cheap political ploy to change the subject from legal troubles or the Epstein files.

You can distrust Trump, but let’s try harder to understand the world.

The war is not a press release. It is a strategic campaign aimed at reshaping the balance of power in the Middle East (and beyond), including potentially collapsing the Islamic Republic itself.

Operations of this scale do not materialize because of a bad news cycle. So, let’s zoom out to get a better understanding.

For years, Iran survived sanctions because the regime had economic lifelines. Most importantly, it had China. Beijing remained the primary buyer of Iranian oil despite crippling American sanctions. Discounted Iranian crude flowed east through shadow fleets and opaque shipping networks.

That money funded the IRGC, the regime’s Praetorian Guard. It also funded Hezbollah, Hamas, and the missile and drone capabilities that send my family and millions of Israelis dashing into reinforced concrete rooms, and also kills Israeli civilians.

But Iran is not just a Chinese partner. It is also a Russian arsenal having sent $2.7 billion worth of missiles to Moscow.

The drones raining down on Ukraine over the past two years were largely Iranian. The Shahed suicide drones (renamed Geran by the Russians) became a central tool in Putin’s war. Iran supplied Russia not only with drones but with ballistic missile components and military technology.

A sanctioned regime in Tehran became a wartime supplier to another sanctioned regime in Moscow.

Yes, read that again.

China buys the oil that keeps Iran solvent. Iran builds the drones that help Russia prosecute its war. Russia and Iran coordinate militarily. North Korea has sent thousands of troops to support Russia in the war. Tehran and Pyongyang have cooperated on missile technology and weapons design over decades. Venezuela under Maduro helped Iran and Russia evade sanctions through shared shipping networks. This is a loose but very real axis built around resisting American leverage.

Historian Niall Ferguson calls this Cold War II, a new systemic confrontation between a U.S.-led order built on sanctions, finance, alliances, and technological dominance, and a China-centered network that enables authoritarian states to survive Western pressure.

Iran became a proof of concept.

If Tehran could withstand sanctions, fund proxies, arm Russia, repress its population, and still function because China kept buying oil, that would signal something dangerous: that American coercive power can be neutralized.

That is this war’s backdrop.

If the Iranian regime collapses, China loses more than a cheap oil supplier. It loses proof that its parallel system works. Russia loses a military supplier. The entire sanctions-resilience model takes a severe blow.

If the regime survives and rebuilds with continued backing from Beijing and coordination with Moscow, the message is equally clear. Defy the West. Endure. Wait it out.

You can be sure Taiwan is anxiously watching all this unfold.

So, yes, oppose Trump – as I do – and still recognize that this war sits inside something much larger than him.

Great power struggles do not erupt because of a news cycle scandal. The China–Iran–Russia–Venezuela alignment existed long before this war.

You can despise the man and still misread the moment. Trump is not trying to change the subject, though that may be a temporary side-effect. This is a system testing another system. China underwriting Iran. Iran arming Russia. Russia reshaping Europe. Venezuela playing the middleman. All this existed long before this war and it will outlast it. Reducing it to a tail-wagging-the-dog theory may be self-soothing but it is not terribly clever.

Sorry, my American friends, but from inside a reinforced concrete room with Iranian missiles arcing overhead, this is not a dog-wagging distraction. It is a truth-telling moment in today’s great power struggle.

For his family, this is closure. Painful, incomplete, but real. For Israelis we need it to be something else: A moment of reckoning, a din v’heshbon. One moral account has been settled, but another remains dangerously open.

There is relief in knowing that Ran Gvily is home. His return allows his family to mourn properly and to reclaim the dignity stolen by Hamas.

That matters. It matters deeply.

But it does not absolve the Netanyahu government for its failures to prevent October 7.

October 7 was not a force of nature. It was not an unforeseeable surprise. It was the product of long-term policy choices. Chief among them was a deliberate strategy to freeze the Palestinian issue in place. No negotiations. No political horizon. No effort to reduce friction or desperation. Instead, there was the fantasy that the conflict could be indefinitely managed while Israel expanded settlements and empowered the most radical elements in the settler movement.

Hamas was tolerated, even indirectly strengthened, because it was seen as useful and mistakenly believed to only want to govern Gaza. This divided Palestinians, weakened the Palestinian Authority, and provided a convenient excuse to do nothing. October 7 was the bill coming due.

This failure was compounded by another act of reckless irresponsibility. From January 2023 until October 7, the Netanyahu government deliberately tore Israeli society apart with its so-called judicial reform.

So alarmed were millions of Israelis that the largest sustained civil protest movement in Israel’s history was launched. Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government chose to ignore warnings from economists and dismiss counsel from allies. Most unforgivably, warnings from senior IDF and intelligence officials were treated as political sabotage.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned publicly that the damage to military readiness was real and dangerous. Senior reservists said plainly that cohesion was cracking. Netanyahu chose to press on anyway, prioritizing coalition and personal political survival over national security.

Thus did Israel enter the most dangerous period in its history distracted, divided, and weakened from within.

All on Netanyahu’s watch. He owns it.

Yet his response since October 7 has been to evade responsibility at every turn. To blame the IDF. To blame intelligence. To blame political opponents. To blame anyone other than himself. Accountability, to him, is a threat rather than an obligation.

That is not leadership. It is moral cowardice.

Israel is a state governed by law, and is not a personal shield for one man. The Commissions of Inquiry Law, 1968, is clear. Events involving massive loss of life, systemic state failure, or collapse of public trust fall squarely within its purpose.

By any legal or historical standard, October 7 meets and exceeds the threshold contemplated by the law. What we are getting instead is a coalition friendly committee, headed by Netanyahu himself, to determine who will sit on the political commission of inquiry.

Israelis are not fryarim (suckers). We have paid too high a price to be fooled by this evasion of civic and legal accountability.

The hostages and their families deserve the truth. The families of those murdered on October 7 deserve the truth. The families of fallen soldiers deserve the truth. We the citizens of Israel who collectively experienced the war, watched our children drafted into the reserves and spent uncounted hours hunkering down in our safe rooms, deserve the truth.

Without it, there can be no healing.

This is not politics. This is an existential matter. Societies that refuse to confront their failures repeat them. Leaders who evade judgment guarantee the next disaster.

The return of Ran Gvily closes one chapter with dignity. It also leaves no excuse for avoiding the reckoning that must follow.

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