— Gideon Sa’ar, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, November 21, 2024

In 2015, Israeli Knesset member Moti Yogev, furious over a Supreme Court ruling concerning the demolition of Palestinian homes, suggested sending a D-9 bulldozer to flatten the court. It was a crude remark, but it captured a powerful political instinct: when law becomes an obstacle, do not argue with it. Bulldoze the obstacle. That instinct has now gone international, operating through coercive state leverage rather than legal petition.

America and Israel are not merely challenging international law. They are helping establish a more dangerous principle: international law applies to everyone except those powerful enough to punish the people who enforce it.

The immediate battleground is the International Criminal Court (ICC), which issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Faced with the court’s challenge to its key ally, the United States moved to punish the court itself.

Washington has long been hostile to the ICC, fearing that American soldiers, diplomats, and political leaders could face prosecution before an international tribunal. But the immediate trigger for the latest American offensive was the court’s pursuit of Israel’s leaders. In protecting itself from international scrutiny, the United States is also protecting its closest Middle Eastern ally.

To understand the depth of this unraveling, look back to 1945. The modern framework of international criminal justice was not an alien concept forced upon Washington; it was largely an American invention. At Nuremberg, U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson spearheaded a revolutionary legal paradigm: codifying crimes against humanity, redefining war crimes, and establishing personal accountability for heads of state. In moving against international courts today, the United States is seeking to undermine the legal architecture it helped forge after World War II.

The paradox deepens when considering why those innovations were created. Nuremberg and the 1948 Genocide Convention were responses to Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust, helping establish a legal framework intended to ensure that humanity would never again ignore the systematic destruction of a people. That Israel, a state whose existential and moral foundations are bound to the memory of the Holocaust, now faces a genocide case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) while its senior leadership faces ICC arrest warrants represents an agonizing collapse of the postwar legal regime.

Governments have every right to challenge a court’s jurisdiction, contest its evidence, or reject its conclusions. But something fundamentally different happens when a state responds to an international legal institution through coercive statecraft designed to intimidate it into submission.

According to a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call, Israel’s Mossad waged a covert campaign against the ICC for nearly a decade. Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen personally pressured and threatened former ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, including by showing her covert photographs of herself and her family.

Where Israel used covert coercion, the United States has deployed open lawfare. Under executive orders targeting the Hague, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has imposed sweeping financial sanctions on ICC officials, including ICC President Tomoko Akane. The administration has explicitly declared its intent to “systematically dismantle” the ICC. Washington has moved beyond disputing particular warrants to targeting the institution itself.

The effort to evade legal accountability also operates through control of information. In the past, regimes from Kosovo to Myanmar have restricted access for journalists and investigators in order to hinder the collection of evidence. Today, as Israel bars the international media from entering Gaza, it invokes safety considerations. Yet, as in other war zones, an agreed mechanism could have been established to allow independent reporting.

This strategy of information suppression operates on two fronts: on the one hand, blocking the international media from outside; on the other, the unprecedented killing of over 200 Palestinian journalists reporting from within, coupled with complete impunity and no one being held accountable. The combination of closing the gates to foreign media while silencing local documentation serves a clear purpose: the active concealment and obscuring of suspected war crimes and genocide, while systematically preventing the creation of an evidentiary foundation for the courts in The Hague.

What happens when international law still exists on paper but becomes optional in practice? Imagine such a world. The United Nations still meets. Treaties are signed. International courts issue judgments. Diplomats invoke international law. The institutions remain, and lawyers continue writing carefully reasoned opinions.

But every sovereign actor understands the real rule: law applies until a sufficiently powerful country decides that it does not. If an international institution tries to enforce the law against that country, the institution itself can be sanctioned, spied upon, intimidated, or dismantled. That is not the formal abolition of international law. It is something more insidious: a two-tiered international system in which law restrains the weak but yields to the strong.

The consequences reach far beyond The Hague. Borders remain secure only until a stronger neighbor decides otherwise. Treaties governing trade, arms control, maritime navigation, and diplomacy remain binding only as long as they serve powerful signatories. Rules protecting civilians, prisoners of war, and human rights decay into matters of political calculation rather than legal obligation.

This is why the attack on the ICC matters even to those who dispute its rulings. Once powerful states establish that they can penalize judges and intimidate prosecutors for politically inconvenient investigations, they create a precedent that adversarial powers will eagerly exploit.

But when the United States, a principal architect of the postwar order, demonstrates that international legal institutions may be attacked when they threaten strategic interests, it gives competing powers a ready-made justification.

Why should Moscow accept legal constraints regarding Ukraine when Washington calls an international court an illegitimate threat for investigating its ally? Why should Beijing respect maritime rulings when Washington demonstrates that legal institutions can be crushed for issuing inconvenient warrants?

International law rests on precedent, reciprocity, and states’ willingness to accept rules even when inconvenient. The postwar order rested on a simple, realism-grounded proposition: power could not be eliminated, but it could be constrained. Borders could not always be made inviolable, but their violation could be recognized as illegal. Even powerful states could, at least in principle, be judged by standards beyond their own borders.

That principle matters most to states that cannot protect themselves through raw military power. Their security depends disproportionately on recognized borders, binding treaties, and the expectation that stronger countries will pay a political and legal price for violating established norms.

Remove those protections, and smaller states face a brutal calculation: surrender part of their sovereignty to a powerful patron, divert resources toward permanent militarization, or pursue the ultimate guarantee of survival through nuclear proliferation. Weakening international law does not produce a stable multipolar balance. It produces an endlessly rearming, unpredictable global arena.

Ironically, this should concern Israel as much as anyone. Israel is a formidable regional power, but it is fundamentally a small country whose long-term strategic posture depends on international legitimacy. It routinely invokes international law when defending its borders, demanding the release of hostages, or condemning state-sponsored terrorism. A world in which international law becomes a weapon used selectively by the powerful may offer short-term immunity, but ultimately leaves every state exposed to a world where raw power determines whose interests prevail.

The same applies to the United States. For decades, Washington has invoked international law to condemn aggression, territorial conquest, attacks on civilians, and human rights violations. It cannot indefinitely insist that international institutions are essential when judging rivals but illegitimate “national security threats” when they investigate the United States or its allies.

That is not merely hypocrisy. The greater danger is the collapse of the distinction between law and power. Once that distinction vanishes, every major power is free to declare that rules apply only to others.

The danger is not that the United States and Israel will literally succeed in destroying the institutions of international law. The United Nations will continue to exist, the court in The Hague will continue to operate, judges will continue to write rulings, and treaties will continue to be signed. The problem is deeper: the institutions will remain in place, but powerful states will learn that they can ignore them whenever their decisions become inconvenient. That is the most dangerous outcome: not the destruction of international law, but its transformation into a hollow system.

In this sense, there is a profound historical irony. Israel emerged within the new international order built after World War II, and the UN Partition Resolution of 1947 was part of that order. That resolution is one of the foundations of the Jewish state’s international legal legitimacy. Today, Israel is helping to dismantle the very legal system that helped establish the state itself. In such a world, the bulldozer always wins. And the wheel keeps turning.

בימים אלה מתברר כי מספר לא ידוע של אזרחים ישראלים המתגוררים מחוץ לישראל אינם מופיעים בפנקס הבוחרים לקראת הבחירות לכנסת ה-26. חלקם גילו זאת רק כאשר ניסו לבדוק את זכאותם להצביע. הסיבה, לפחות בחלק מהמקרים, קשורה למה שמכונה במערכות המדינה “קוד 51”, סימון שמשמעותו כי האזרח אינו רשום עוד כתושב ישראל במרשם האוכלוסין. מאחר שפנקס הבוחרים מבוסס על מרשם האוכלוסין, שינוי המעמד מתושב ישראל למי שאינו תושב עלול להביא בפועל להסרתו של האזרח מפנקס הבוחרים ולשלילת יכולתו להשתתף בבחירות לכנסת.

עצם קיומו של מנגנון הקובע את תושבותו של אדם אינו בהכרח בעייתי. מדינות דמוקרטיות רשאיות לקבוע כללים באשר לזכאות להצביע, ובישראל קיימת זה שנים הבחנה משפטית בין אזרחות לבין תושבות בכל הנוגע למימוש זכות הבחירה. אולם הבעיה המתעוררת כעת אינה מסתכמת בשאלה אם ישראלי המתגורר בחו”ל שנים רבות רשאי להצביע. השאלה העקרונית יותר היא כיצד מתקבלת ההחלטה שאדם חדל להיות תושב ישראל, כיצד הוא מיודע על כך, כיצד הוא יכול לערער עליה, והאם אותם קריטריונים מיושמים באופן שוויוני ועקבי.

השאלות האלה מקבלות משנה חשיבות משום שהזכות לבחור לכנסת מעוגנת בחוק יסוד: הכנסת. סעיף 5 לחוק היסוד קובע כי כל אזרח ישראלי בן שמונה עשרה ומעלה זכאי לבחור לכנסת. במקביל, חוק הבחירות לכנסת מתנה את האפשרות המעשית להצביע ברישום כתושב ישראל במרשם האוכלוסין. כך נוצרה מערכת שבה הזכות החוקתית לבחור תלויה במידה רבה בנתון מנהלי, שאלת תושבותו של האזרח כפי שהיא רשומה במרשם האוכלוסין.

דווקא כאן טמונה אחת הבעיות המרכזיות. ניתוח שפרסם לאחרונה המכון הישראלי לדמוקרטיה עמד על כך שהחקיקה אינה מגדירה באופן חד-משמעי מיהו “תושב” לצורך הזכות לבחור, וכי לאופן שבו מנוהל מרשם האוכלוסין יש משמעות חוקתית משום שהרישום בו הוא תנאי למימוש זכות ההצבעה. כאשר נתון מנהלי הופך למחסום שדרכו חייב האזרח לעבור כדי לממש זכות יסוד, האופן שבו המדינה קובעת, משנה ומתקנת את הנתון הזה אינו יכול להיות עניין טכני ]פרוצדוראלי] שנעשה בידי פקידים מקומיים באופן שונה בקונסוליות ברחבי העולם.

המציאות שהתגלתה בפני קבוצת “זכותנו להצביע” מעוררת אפוא שאלות מטרידות. הקבוצה כוללת כ100 ישראלים המתגוררים בארצות הברית, באירופה, באוסטרליה ובדרום אפריקה, והיא טוענת כי היא מייצגת תופעה רחבה בהרבה. לפי ההערכות שהגיעו לידי הקבוצה, ייתכן שמדובר בעשרות אלפי ישראלים שנפגעו מהשינוי במעמדם. בשלב זה אין, ככל הידוע, נתון ציבורי המאפשר לקבוע כמה ישראלים הוסרו מפנקס הבוחרים בנסיבות אלה. דווקא היעדר הנתון הוא חלק מן הבעיה: כאשר זכות הבחירה של אזרחים נפגעת, הציבור צריך להיות מסוגל לדעת כמה אנשים הושפעו מן המדיניות, לפי אילו קריטריונים ומי קיבל את ההחלטות.

הטענה כי מדובר באזרחים החיים בחו”ל אינה מספקת תשובה לשאלות הללו. ישראלים המתגוררים מחוץ למדינה אינם קבוצה הומוגנית. יש מי שעזבו את ישראל לפני עשרות שנים ואינם מקיימים עמה כמעט כל קשר, ויש מי שמבלים חלק ניכר מזמנם בישראל, מחזיקים בה נכסים ועסקים, משלמים מיסים, מבקרים בה באופן קבוע וממשיכים לנהל קשרים משפחתיים, מקצועיים וחברתיים עמוקים. חלק מחברי הקבוצה שירתו בצה”ל, חלקם נקראו לשירות מילואים בעקבות 7 באוקטובר, ואחרים תרמו במשך שנים להתפתחות הכלכלית והטכנולוגית של ישראל. עצם העובדה שהם מתגוררים כיום מחוץ לישראל אינה יכולה, כשלעצמה, לספק תשובה לשאלה אם הם זכאים להצביע; היא רק מצביעה על הצורך לבחון את הקריטריונים שעל פיהם נקבעת תושבותם.

יתרה מכך, אם אזרח חדל להיות תושב ישראל מבחינת מרשם האוכלוסין, אך אינו יודע על כך, הוא עלול לגלות את ההשלכות רק כאשר הוא מבקש להצביע. בכך נוצר פער בעייתי בין החלטה מנהלית לבין יכולתו של האזרח להגן על זכויותיו. אם המדינה משנה את מעמדו של אדם באופן שמשפיע ישירות על זכותו להשתתף בבחירות, מן הראוי שהאזרח יקבל הודעה ברורה, הסבר באשר לבסיס ההחלטה ומידע נגיש על הדרך שבה ניתן להשיג עליה. אחרת, זכות יסוד עלולה להיפגע כתוצאה מהליך שהאזרח כלל לא ידע שהתקיים.

חוסר גילוי נאות על שלילת זכות ההצבעה, אי מסירת הודעה ברורה לגבי אפשרות הערעור והכשלת הליך הערעור למפרע בדרישה המקדמית להעברת צילום של ת״ז תקפה.

יש להדגיש כי אין כאן טענה שכל ישראלי המתגורר בחו”ל חייב להיות זכאי להצביע בבחירות לכנסת. זו שאלה ציבורית ומשפטית לגיטימית, ואפשר בהחלט לקיים עליה ויכוח. השאלה היא אחרת: האם המדינה רשאית (דרך פקידי קונסוליות ברחבי העולם) להכריע בשאלת זכאותו של אזרח באמצעות מנגנון מנהלי שאינו שקוף דיו, כאשר קיימת אי-בהירות באשר להגדרת התושבות, וכאשר האזרח אינו מקבל בהכרח הזדמנות ממשית לברר את מעמדו ולערער עליו לפני שפנקס הבוחרים נסגר או שאפשרות הערעור נמנעת ממנו בשל הדרישה המקדמית להציג צילום של תעודת זהות תקפה – תעודות שהקונסוליות דרשו את החזרתן בתמורה לשירותים קונסולריים כמו הארכת דרכון.

העיתוי הופך את הסוגיה לדחופה במיוחד. פנקס הבוחרים לקראת הבחירות לכנסת ה-26 צפוי להיסגר ב-3 בספטמבר. קבוצת “זכותנו להצביע” כבר החלה לפעול במישור המשפטי, בין היתר באמצעות עורך הדין גלעד שר, שכיהן בעבר כראש לשכתו וכרכז המדיניות של ראש הממשלה ושר הביטחון אהוד ברק. במקביל פועלת הקבוצה לקבלת מידע מן הרשויות ולנקיטת צעדים משפטיים שמטרתם לאפשר בירור מהיר של המקרים והשבת זכויותיהם של מי שנפגעו, ככל שאכן נעשתה טעות או התקבלה החלטה בלתי מוצדקת.

אולם המחלוקת הנוכחית צריכה לחרוג מעבר למאבק של קבוצה מסוימת של ישראלים. הממשלה ורשות האוכלוסין צריכות לספק לציבור תשובות בסיסיות: כמה אזרחים ישראלים שונו מרשומים כתושבי ישראל למעמד שאינו תושב בתקופה הרלוונטית? כמה מהם הוסרו בעקבות כך מפנקס הבוחרים? מהם הקריטריונים שעל פיהם התקבלה ההחלטה? האם הקריטריונים זהים בכל המקרים? וכמה מהאזרחים קיבלו הודעה על שינוי המעמד ועל האפשרות לערער עליו?

אלה אינן שאלות טכניות. הדרך שבה מדינה מנהלת את פנקס הבוחרים היא חלק מהתשתית של המשטר הדמוקרטי. בחירות חופשיות והוגנות אינן מתחילות ברגע פתיחת הקלפיות; הן מתחילות בקביעה ברורה עקבית ושקופה מי זכאי להיכלל ברשימת בעלי זכות הבחירה. כאשר הרשימה הזאת נקבעת באמצעות נתונים שמקורם במרשם מנהלי, חובת המדינה להבטיח שהנתונים מדויקים, שהקריטריונים ברורים ושכל אזרח יודע כיצד להגן על זכויותיו.

אם אכן מדובר בתופעה רחבה המשפיעה על אלפי אזרחים, כפי שחוששים חברי הקבוצה, אין להסתפק בתשובות בירוקרטיות פרטניות. יש צורך בבדיקה ציבורית רחבה של האופן שבו נקבעה התושבות, של השפעתה על פנקס הבוחרים ושל ההגנות הניתנות לאזרח שמעמדו השתנה.

“קוד 51” הוא אולי מונח טכני במערכת המנהלית. עבור האזרח שמגלה כי בגללו אינו יכול להצביע, המשמעות אינה טכנית כלל. המשמעות היא שהמדינה קבעה, בדרך שאינה בהכרח גלויה לו, כי הוא אינו רשאי להשתתף בבחירות.

במדינה דמוקרטית, החלטה כזאת מחייבת יותר מאשר קוד במחשב. היא מחייבת הסבר, שקיפות, קריטריונים ברורים והליך הוגן של ביקורת וערעור. ובעיקר, היא מחייבת את המדינה לדעת ולהיות מוכנה לומר לציבור כמה אזרחים נפגעו ממנה.

בארצות הברית Area 51, בנבדה, הוא בסיס צבאי סודי ביותר, שהפך לסמל של חשאיות ושל מידע המוסתר מעיני הציבור. בישראל, “קוד 51” אולי אינו סודי באותה מידה, אבל עבור האזרחים שנפגעו ממנו, הוא עלול להיות לא פחות מסתורי: קוד שמופיע במערכת, משנה את מעמדם כתושבי ישראל, ועלול להוביל לכך ששמם ייעלם מפנקס הבוחרים, בלי שהם יודעים מדוע ומתי זה קרה. במדינה דמוקרטית, זכות ההצבעה אינה יכולה להפוך ל־Area 51 מנהלי, מערכת שבה החלטות הנוגעות לזכויות האזרח מתקבלות הרחק מעיני הציבור, בעוד האזרח עצמו מגלה את התוצאה רק כשהוא מנסה להצביע. קוד 51 חייב לצאת מהחיסיון אל האור.

עד ה־3 בספטמבר, מי שנפגעו מקוד 51 חייבים לקבל תשובה ברורה אם יוכלו להגיע לישראל ולהצביע בבחירות. רבים מהם כבר רכשו כרטיסי טיסה כדי לממש את זכותם הדמוקרטית. למדינה

אין זכות להשאיר אותם באי-ודאות עד הרגע האחרון.

יהודה לוקץ׳ הוא פרופסור-חבר אמריטוס ליחסים בינלאומיים באוניברסיטת ג׳ורג׳ מייסון, וירג׳יניה. פרסם חמישה ספרים. הוא מחבר הספר שיצא לאור לאחרונה:

Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond"

What is unfolding in Qusra, Huwara, Turmus Ayya, and the pastoral hamlets of Masafer Yatta is a synchronized, present-day war of attrition. Entire Bedouin communities like Ein Samiya and Zanuta have been permanently erased from the map in recent months, their residents forced to pack up their homes after relentless campaigns of nocturnal harassment, poisoned water wells, and destroyed infrastructure. What the world witnesses on one social media feed after another is not random frontier chaos. It is the active execution of a strategy, a dual engine of state land seizures and civilian coercion operating with total impunity.

To make sense of why an armed siege can happen in broad daylight while soldiers stand by and cabinet ministers offer vocal support, one must discard the myth that Jewish terrorism is an unexpected bug in the system. It is, and always has been, the ideological engine of the settlement enterprise’s radical wing. Today’s crisis is simply the moment the underground finally inherited the state.

1. The Jewish Underground: Mayor Car Bombs and the Temple Mount Plot (1980–1984)

The lineage of this present violence traces directly back to the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War and the birth of Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful), which viewed the capture of the West Bank as a divine mandate. When the Israeli government signed the 1978 Camp David Accords, hardliners panicked that any concession of Palestinian autonomy would derail their messianic project. Out of that panic emerged HaMakhteret HaYehudit, the Jewish Underground, a clandestine terrorist cell composed not of outcasts, but of decorated military officers, scholars, and respected settlement leaders.

In the early 1980s, the Jewish Underground launched a campaign of political terror designed to shatter Palestinian leadership and force an irreversible reality on the ground. They planted car bombs that severed the legs of Bassam Shakaa, Mayor of Nablus, and Karim Khalaf, Mayor of Ramallah. They sprayed Hebron’s Islamic College with automatic gunfire, killing three students and wounding dozens.

Most dangerously, they spent months plotting an apocalyptic conspiracy to detonate explosives beneath the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount-Haram al-Sharif, calculating that destroying the Islamic sanctuary would ignite a global religious war, clear the ground for the Third Temple, and forcibly prevent any future Israeli government from surrendering an inch of Biblical land.

When the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, dismantled the group in 1984 as they wired explosive charges beneath Palestinian commuter buses, the state’s response revealed an early blueprint for impunity. Though convicted of grave acts of terror, the conspirators benefited from aggressive political lobbying by religious-nationalist Knesset members. Sentences were rapidly commuted, and within a few years, nearly every member walked free, returning to influential public roles across the settlement enterprise.

That institutional culture of impunity was further cemented by the Bus 300 affair (Kav 300) in April 1984. After IDF troops stormed a hijacked civilian bus, senior Shin Bet officers executed two captured Palestinian hijackers extrajudicially, framed a senior IDF general for the beatings, and spent two years committing perjury to cover up the crime. When Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir insisted on opening a criminal investigation into the security establishment, he was forced to resign. In 1986, President Chaim Herzog granted unprecedented, pre-trial presidential pardons to Shin Bet Chief Avraham Shalom and his operatives. By granting pre-conviction immunity to state officials who committed extrajudicial killings and lied under oath, coinciding directly with Herzog’s reduction of sentences for convicted members of the Jewish Underground, the Israeli state established a devastating precedent: extrajudicial violence carried out in the name of Jewish national security would ultimately be shielded by the highest levers of government.

2. Mass Murder in Hebron and the Kahanist Legacy (1990s)

By the 1990s, as the Oslo Accords raised the prospect of a Palestinian state, the ideological mantle passed to the explicit, militant racism of Rabbi Meir Kahane. On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an American-born physician and dedicated Kahanist, walked into Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs during Ramadan prayers. Dressed in his army reserve uniform and armed with an assault rifle, he opened fire into the backs of hundreds of prostrate Muslim worshippers, murdering 29 Palestinian men and boys.

While Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin stood before the Knesset to denounce Goldstein’s movement as an “errant weed,” the operational fallout established a devastating precedent: instead of removing the radical Jewish enclave in central Hebron, the military imposed severe curfews and permanent movement restrictions on the Palestinian population. The victim was punished, the city was formally segregated, and Goldstein’s tomb in Kiryat Arba became a shrine for extremist youth. Less than two years later, that same toxic ecosystem produced Yigal Amir, who assassinated Rabin in Tel Aviv to halt the peace process.

3. “Price Tag” Tactics and the Dawabsheh Family Firebombing (2000s–2010s)

In the 2000s and 2010s, as formal peace talks collapsed, terrorism transformed again. A decentralized network of radicalized youth, the “Hilltop Youth,” established wildcat outposts across West Bank ridgelines and pioneered the doctrine of “Price Tag” (Tag Mehir). The logic was simple: exact an immediate, violent price against neighboring Palestinian civilians whenever the state attempted to enforce law or dismantle illegal structures.

This campaign reached its horrific nadir on July 31, 2015, in the village of Duma, where masked arsonists firebombed the home of the Dawabsheh family while they slept. Eighteen-month-old Ali Dawabsheh was burned alive; his mother and father died of severe burns weeks later, leaving four-year-old Ahmad as the sole survivor. Spray-painted beside the charred ruins were the words “Revenge!” and “Long Live the Messiah.”

4. A Dual Legal System: The Engine of Impunity

Crucial to understanding why this terror has reached an all-time high today is the institutional architecture governing the occupied territory: a legal system split strictly along national lines. For nearly six decades, Palestinians in the West Bank have lived under martial law, tried in military courts with a conviction rate exceeding 99 percent. Israeli settlers living on the exact same land are governed by civilian penal law.

According to data from the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, over 92 percent of police investigations into Israeli settler violence against Palestinians between 2005 and 2023 were closed without an indictment. This structural breakdown has normalized “standing idly by,” where soldiers witnessing attacks on villages like Qusra lack the mandate or political backing to detain Israeli perpetrators, often acting instead to disperse the Palestinian victims.

5. The Netanyahu Coalition: Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and the Triumph of the Underground

What makes the current siege of Qusra fundamentally distinct from the terror cells of forty years ago is that the perpetrators no longer operate in opposition to the state. In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, the boundary between far-right vigilantes and government power has completely collapsed. To secure his own political survival and build a parliamentary majority, Netanyahu handed the keys to the West Bank to the political heirs of Meir Kahane and the settlement movement’s most radical fringe.

The consequences are personified in two key ministers:

• Bezalel Smotrich: Serving as Finance Minister while holding a custom-built ministerial portfolio inside the Defense Ministry, Smotrich was granted sweeping, unprecedented civilian authority over Area C of the West Bank. Smotrich, who himself was arrested in 2005 by the Shin Bet on suspicion of organizing violent opposition during the Gaza disengagement, has used his post to declare record amounts of “state land,” retroactively legalize dozens of illegal wildcat outposts, and starve Palestinian villages of civil development. Smotrich has openly declared his goal: to eradicate any possibility of a Palestinian state by cementing permanent, irreversible Israeli control.

• Itamar Ben-Gvir: Appointed by Netanyahu as National Security Minister, Ben-Gvir directly oversees the Israel Police, the very body responsible for investigating settler violence in the West Bank. Ben-Gvir spent his youth as an activist in the banned terrorist movement Kach, was convicted of incitement to racism and supporting a terror organization, and for years famously hung a portrait of mosque mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein in his living room. Today, Ben-Gvir uses state resources to distribute assault weapons to settler defense teams and publicly defends extremists accused of violence against Palestinians.

When masked men ride into Qusra to burn homes or open fire on funeral processions, they do so knowing that the police force tasked with investigating them answers to Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the civil infrastructure backing their hilltop outposts is funded and authorized by Bezalel Smotrich.

The fires in Qusra, the destruction of olive groves, and the forced expulsion of herding villages are not signs that law and order have broken down in the West Bank. They are signs that a specific ideology is working exactly as intended. The Jewish Underground of the 1980s did not fail; Benjamin Netanyahu gave them the government, and they simply made their terror official state policy.

These are the opening lines of a popular Israeli song written by Yoram Taharlev in 1969 and performed by the Dizengoff Band. The song reached No. 1 on Israel’s Kol Yisrael popular-music chart that October. At the time, its defiant message reflected a widespread Israeli sense of isolation: if the world was against us, Israelis would simply have to manage on their own. In recent years, however, that attitude has become something closer to a worldview in Israel’s relationship with the United States.

In the Israeli media, political system, and among segments of the public, a convenient but dangerous assumption has taken hold: growing criticism of Israel in America is viewed almost exclusively through the lens of antisemitism. This leaves little room for the possibility that something deeper is happening, that America’s relationship with Israel itself is changing. It allows Israel to avoid the harder question: Why are growing segments of the American public changing their views of Israel, and what does that mean for the relationship between the two countries?

The erosion of support for Israel is not primarily the result of hatred of Jews. It reflects deeper changes in American society: a generational shift, growing skepticism about U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and the revolution in social media.

None of this means that antisemitism does not exist or does not affect attitudes toward Israel. It does, and at times it is an important factor. But it is not the only explanation for the shift. Insisting that antisemitism is the principal explanation obscures deeper processes taking place in American society.

To understand the growing anger surrounding AIPAC, consider the Senate primary in Michigan. AIPAC and affiliated organizations spent nearly $30 million supporting Representative Haley Stevens and trying to block the candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive candidate and outspoken critic of Israeli policy. El-Sayed ultimately won. The case was not isolated. In 2022, AIPAC waged an aggressive campaign against Andy Levin, a progressive Jewish congressman who supported a two-state solution and criticized Israel’s settlement policy.

For AIPAC’s critics, these cases illustrate a broader phenomenon: the organization is not merely promoting support for Israel; it has become a powerful political actor whose use of money to influence elections has generated public opposition and raised broader questions about the role of money in American politics. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election likewise demonstrated the depth of the change—precisely in the city that is home to the largest Jewish community in the United States.

But the war in Gaza, and now the war with Iran, have opened a much larger Pandora’s box. The American debate is no longer limited to whether Israel is an important ally. Americans are beginning to examine the relationship as a whole: What does the United States get from the alliance? What does it give in return? And what is the American cost of the relationship?

The war with Iran has made these questions concrete rather than abstract. Many Americans are asking whether Israel pushed Washington into a war that is not America’s, and whether the United States should bear the economic and strategic costs of another Middle Eastern conflict. There is a historical precedent as well. In 1973, U.S. military support for Israel preceded the Arab oil embargo, which contributed to an energy crisis and severe economic turmoil in the United States.

Within the United States, support for Israel is also increasingly colliding with basic American conceptions of free speech. Anti-BDS laws enacted in 38 states have drawn opposition from civil-rights organizations and constitutional lawyers, who argue that they infringe on the First Amendment right to engage in political boycotts. For many Americans, the very possibility that a citizen could be required to give up a political position concerning a foreign government in order to contract with a public authority is seen as inconsistent with fundamental principles of American democracy.

Criticism of Israel did not begin on October 7 or with the war in Gaza. It also draws on an historical memory of episodes in which Israel was perceived as acting against American interests or entangling the United States in Middle Eastern conflicts, from the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, through the Jonathan Pollard affair, to the controversy over Israeli involvement and the role of American officials in promoting the 2003 Iraq War. One need not accept every interpretation of these events to recognize that they form part of the American political memory.

That memory is now compounded by a deep generational divide and the erosion of the consensus around Israel among younger Americans. Campus protests and social media have made Palestine a central moral issue for an entire generation. Even large numbers of young American Jews no longer see Israel as the weaker party in a struggle for survival. Social media bypasses traditional intermediaries and brings direct images from Gaza onto their phone screens. Faced with the devastation there, it is difficult to expect such images not to change the way young Americans view Israel.

Against this backdrop, efforts by Jewish communal organizations to blur the distinction between criticism of Israeli government policy and antisemitism are generating a backlash. When American Jews who criticize the war or government policy are themselves portrayed as “self-hating Jews” or “antisemites,” the public debate becomes a struggle over the very right to criticize Israel. When every criticism is labeled antisemitic, the fight against antisemitism itself may be weakened, because the term loses its precision and with it, its moral force.

And the shift is not confined to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. One hundred and three House Democrats voted to halt military aid to Israel, including senior members of the party. At the same time, opposition to American involvement in Middle Eastern wars is growing on the Republican right as well. The America First movement reflects a growing aversion to the idea that American soldiers should fight or die for allies. Support for Israel, which for decades was one of the few issues to enjoy broad bipartisan backing, is therefore eroding from both ends of the political spectrum.

Israelis rightly demand that Netanyahu take responsibility for the October 7 failure. He refuses to do so. But where is the comparable demand that Israel itself take responsibility for the consequences of its actions and policies? Too often, the instinct is the opposite. For instance, a farmer in Iowa who sees images of Israeli atrocities on television and concludes that the IDF is committing war crimes can be dismissed as an antisemite, while Israel itself refuses to investigate its own conduct. The answer is once again the familiar refrain: “The whole world is against us.” The world is antisemitic. The media is hostile. AIPAC is losing its ability to defend Israel. All of these explanations may contain elements of truth. But together they can become a convenient way of avoiding the more difficult question: What has Israel itself done to erode its support?

The U.S.-Israel alliance is not inevitable. It rests on interests, shared values, and above all on public support. If Israel wants to preserve it, it cannot demand that America understand Israel while refusing to examine its own conduct. “The whole world is against us” may have been a defiant popular song in 1969. But when that refrain becomes a strategy for avoiding responsibility, it becomes strategic blindness and feeds the perception that Israel believes it is entitled to immunity for whatever it does.

Upon its completion, French state television refused to broadcast the documentary, a blanket censorship ban that was maintained across successive administrations for twelve years, until 1981. Authorities suppressed the film because it brutally shattered the comforting post-war myth carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle: the national illusion of la France résistante, which claimed that the French public had almost universally resisted fascism save for a handful of marginal traitors. Instead, Ophüls turned his camera on ordinary shopkeepers, teachers, aristocrats, and municipal officials, exposing how readily the vast majority had welcomed Pétain’s authoritarian “National Revolution,” normalized anti-Semitic legislation, and accommodated themselves to autocratic rule in exchange for order and personal preservation.

To watch Ophüls’ masterpiece today, particularly through the prism of modern American politics, is to experience a disquieting sense of historical recognition. The fundamental subject of The Sorrow and the Pity was never merely foreign invaders in military uniform; it was the psychological architecture of a domestic, right-wing ultranationalist regime that capitalized on national crisis to overturn republican norms from within.

Viewed through this lens, the film offers a powerful, illuminating framework for understanding the Trump presidency and its lasting imprint on the American body politic. To live through this era, particularly from the vantage point of Washington, D.C., and its surrounding administrative ecosystem, is to experience a strikingly similar shift in the civic atmosphere, a persistent, suffocating realization that the national executive turns with open hostility against constitutional guardrails, treating civil servants, independent oversight, and political opponents not as democratic participants, but as internal enemies to be disciplined or destroyed.

The enduring brilliance of Ophüls’ documentary lies in its unsparing examination of elite capitulation and institutional compliance. In Clermont-Ferrand, judges, educators, business leaders, and local politicians did not require a German soldier on every street corner to fall into line. They accommodated the Vichy government out of ideological affinity, professional careerism, or simply an overwhelming desire to protect their personal comfort and social status. They rationalized small moral compromises day after day, convincing themselves that remaining silent during the purging of democratic institutions and marginalized groups was merely the pragmatic cost of keeping the machinery of daily life running smoothly.

This dynamic finds its literary twin in Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 absurdist masterpiece, Rhinoceros. In Ionesco’s play, ordinary citizens inexplicably transform into thick-skinned, roaring beasts. One by one, neighbors and friends normalize this bizarre metamorphosis, embracing brute power and abandoning their humanity. Today, across the American political landscape under the Trump movement, we observe this exact form of rhinoceritis.

We are witnessing a striking, mirror-image display of elite accommodation in real time. Establishment political leaders, corporate executives, university boards, media managers, and senior agency officials repeatedly alter their rhetoric. They abandon long-standing institutional norms and validate unprecedented assaults on democratic governance. Figures who understand the gravity of the threat rationalize their acquiescence under the guise of tactical self-preservation. They convince themselves that by remaining in place as the “adults in the room,” they are protecting their organizations from worse outcomes.

Yet, as both Ionesco and Ophüls illustrate with devastating clarity, when leadership across every major sector opts for preemptive obedience, the guardrails of a constitutional republic do not collapse under frontal assault—they erode through quiet, cumulative surrender.

Another vital thread connecting Ophüls’ portrait of Vichy France to the Trump era is the systematic reliance on grievance, artificial nostalgia, and targeted scapegoating. Pétain’s regime sustained its legitimacy by manufacturing internal threats, blaming immigrants, communists, intellectuals, and minority groups for the nation’s defeat and alleged moral decay.

Trump’s MAGA movement operates on a strikingly similar playbook, building its political momentum on the rhetoric of American carnage, systemic grievance, and retribution. It consistently demonizes marginalized communities, independent journalists, non-partisan jurists, and civil servants, painting them as corrupt elements actively sabotaging the nation from within. Under such leadership, the psychological climate becomes intensely polarized and ambiently anxious. While everyday life appears superficially normal, businesses open, public transportation runs, and entertainment flourishes, the public square becomes fraught with unspoken danger. Citizens find themselves forced into constant moral calculations about when to speak out, when to censor themselves, and how much democratic decay they are willing to normalize to protect their livelihoods.

This environment inevitably produces a profound civic alienation, dividing the citizenry into distinct psychological camps. On one end are those who enthusiastically embrace the regime’s authoritarian posture, deriving meaning and power from its grievance-driven politics. On the other end are those who engage in active resistance, often at severe personal, financial, or professional cost. But the vast majority of the population drifts into what mid-twentieth-century historians termed “internal emigration,” a quiet withdrawal from public engagement, a retreat into private life and local routine, and the adoption of a protective, cynical fatalism that accepts democratic erosion as an unalterable reality.

In Clermont-Ferrand, this passive posture allowed an entire city to attend cinema screenings, host sporting events, and conduct routine business while democratic ideals were systematically dismantled. In contemporary America, it manifests as a quiet, professional weariness, a widespread assumption that the erosion of institutions is inevitable and that the safest personal strategy is to lay low and avoid drawing notice.

The ultimate lesson of The Sorrow and the Pity and the precise reason French state television locked it in a vault for over a decade is that the decay of democracy depends far less on raw coercion than on the willingness of ordinary people to accept the abnormal as the new baseline. A regime that demands personal loyalty over objective truth and compliance over constitutional principle can only succeed if the public quietly consents to play along.

Diagnosing this issue isn’t about surrender; it’s a simple reality check. Reclaiming a healthy democracy requires admitting that keeping the peace by keeping quiet is an easy trap to fall into, and a tough one to escape. Resisting that slow slide means speaking up, holding institutions accountable, and finding everyday courage. Because if a free country fades out not with a fight, but with a collective shrug, well, that’s where the true sorrow and the pity lie.

Netanyahu’s political legacy cannot be reduced to a list of failures or achievements. It includes a clearly defined vision of Israel’s future and its place in the world. Netanyahu himself has given that vision a name: “Super-Sparta.” It is not merely a response to circumstances imposed on Israel, but an active doctrine that translates ancient Sparta into the twenty-first century: a vision of a fortress state built on technological superiority, strategic independence, permanent military strength, and a willingness to endure prolonged diplomatic isolation.

Alongside this security vision operates a complementary political logic: what might be called “Ozempic for democracy,” a gradual weakening of the institutions of liberal democracy, including the separation of powers, judicial oversight, and other checks on executive authority. The goal is not to abolish democracy itself. Rather, the “Super-Sparta” vision sits uneasily with liberal democracy in its fullest sense. When security and national cohesion become the overriding values, institutions designed to restrain majority power can increasingly be portrayed as obstacles rather than safeguards.

One can view this vision as an existential threat to Israel’s character as a democratic state and argue that it condemns the country to a future defined by a permanent siege mentality. But one thing cannot be taken away from it: it is clear, consistent, and offers many Israelis a coherent answer to the question of how to survive in a dangerous region. This is precisely where the opposition’s deeper problem begins.

If the coming election were determined solely by public anger and accumulated frustration, Benjamin Netanyahu would have left office long ago. After nearly two decades at the center of Israeli politics, after the October 7 disaster, the country’s deep social divisions, and the erosion of public trust in state institutions, Netanyahu enters this election carrying more political responsibility than ever before. Many Israelis hold him responsible for the failures that led to the greatest catastrophe in the country’s history. Others accuse him of placing political survival above national leadership, deepening social divisions, and allowing extremist partners to shape the national agenda.

But elections are not merely referendums on the incumbent government. They are choices between competing futures. A public dissatisfied with its government does not automatically embrace an alternative; it wants to know not only who failed, but who can lead it somewhere else. The question that decides elections is not only “Who is responsible?” but also “What do you offer instead?”

This is the central weakness of Israel’s Jewish-Zionist opposition. For years, it has successfully explained why Netanyahu should leave office, pointing to the erosion of democracy, weakened institutions, and social polarization. But it has made a crucial mistake: separating democratic restoration from national security. Rebuilding democracy, strengthening the rule of law, and restoring civic resilience are not merely institutional repair projects. They are essential components of national security itself. A strong democracy is the foundation upon which Israel’s qualitative advantage and national resilience depend. By presenting democratic repair as a separate agenda rather than as part of a broader national security vision, the opposition has allowed Netanyahu to retain a monopoly on the security narrative.

When the average Israeli voter is asked what Israel will look like after Netanyahu, the answers often become unclear. What will be the next government’s security doctrine? How will it prevent another October 7, and what will be its strategy toward Gaza and the Palestinians? How will the state address growing religious coercion and the continuing erosion of the status quo that concerns large parts of the public? What will the relationship look like between secular Israelis, religious Israelis, and the ultra-Orthodox?

Even The Democrats, led by Yair Golan and presenting itself as the clear alternative on the Israeli left, has avoided a definitive position on the central unresolved issue: the occupation and the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even under the most optimistic scenario in which it joins a future coalition, it remains unclear whether it would have the political muscle to push a new government toward a diplomatic resolution of the Palestinian question.

This ambiguity is not accidental. Israel’s Jewish-Zionist opposition is composed of parties ranging from the Zionist left to security-oriented centrists and the right. Any attempt to take a clear position on controversial issues risks exposing internal divisions.

The public support enjoyed by Gadi Eisenkot, who has emerged as Netanyahu’s leading challenger in current polls, reflects more than his record as chief of staff. It comes from the combination he represents: security experience alongside a sense of responsibility, credibility, criticism of the failures that led to October 7, and a commitment to rebuilding public trust in state institutions.

His credibility is also shaped by personal loss. During the Gaza war, his son and two nephews were killed in action. For many Israelis, Eisenkot represents not merely opposition to Netanyahu, but a different model of leadership, one that combines security, national responsibility, credibility, and institutional renewal. Yet at this stage, Eisenkot has not translated the public trust he inspires into a detailed platform or comprehensive plan of action.

Successful political leaders offer a broad interpretation of reality and a vision of the nation’s future. Menachem Begin did not win the 1977 election merely because he opposed the old establishment; he succeeded because he gave a sense of belonging to a broad public that had felt excluded for years. Yitzhak Rabin did not offer only a diplomatic agreement; he offered a worldview in which changing Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians was part of securing the country’s future.

Netanyahu understands this historical lesson well. For years, he has presented a consistent worldview: Israel lives in a dangerous region and must rely above all on military strength, strategic independence, and resistance to external pressure. In his view, peace with the Palestinians is an illusion. Many Israelis share his skepticism about the prospects for a near-term agreement, even if they disagree with the broader conclusions he draws from it. Critics argue that his approach offers no long-term strategy and risks perpetuating conflict at the expense of democratic values. But it is difficult to argue that it does not provide a clear vision.

After October 7, Israel’s public priorities changed. Questions of deterrence, military power, and defensive capability returned to the center of the national conversation, pushing other issues aside. Precisely because of this shift, the opposition needed to offer a broader concept of national security, one that connects military strength with civic resilience, social cohesion, and strong state institutions. Instead, it has remained primarily in the role of criticizing the current government.

The absence of an alternative national vision is also evident in the relationship between Jewish and Arab citizens and their political representatives. The parliamentary reality is clear: almost any government not led by Netanyahu will likely have to confront the question of cooperation with Arab political parties. Yet most opposition leaders have repeatedly and emphatically stated that no Arab party will be accepted as a partner in a future coalition government.

This creates a deep contradiction: an opposition that presents itself as the defender of democracy refuses to recognize one-fifth of Israel’s citizens as legitimate political partners in shaping the country’s future. Civic partnership is not merely a mathematical necessity for forming a coalition; it is a statement about the kind of society Israel aspires to be.

A new government may succeed in restoring some of the weight democracy has lost in recent years because of “Ozempic for democracy,” the forced diet imposed on democratic institutions. Yet today, with the exception of the Arab parties and The Democrats, most opposition parties remain somewhere between the center-right and the right. As a result, no coherent alternative vision has emerged to challenge the “Super-Sparta” model, a vision that sees equality, the rule of law, and the pursuit of a resolution to the conflict with the Palestinians as essential pillars of national security rather than expressions of weakness.

Until such an alternative vision is presented to the Israeli public, even if Netanyahu loses power, the narrative he created may continue to shape Israel’s future.

Although both grew out of the same cultural space, they represented two conflicting concepts of Jewish survival in the modern era.

While the conventional narrative presents the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as a defining moment of national unity, a deep spiritual struggle was raging beneath the surface. The most organized and fierce opposition to Zionism did not come from secular political rivals, but from Orthodox communities whose roots were deeply planted in the geographical and cultural landscape of nineteenth-century Hungary, decades before the state was founded.

The uncompromising anti-Zionism of the Szatmár Hasidic movement was not a spontaneous reaction to modern politics, but a direct product of a deep religious rift that occurred in Hungary decades before the birth of Zionism. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Jews integrated into general society and received legal emancipation, a massive internal fracture opened. The urban, progressive Neolog movement pushed for the modernization of religious life and cultural integration into the Hungarian nation.

In response, traditionalists rallied around the philosophy of the Chatam Sofer, whose famous motto—“New is forbidden by the Torah”— served as a call for an absolute refusal of any aesthetic or structural compromise with the eroding forces of modernity.

The climax of this friction came during the General Jewish Congress of Hungary in 1868 and 1869. The failure to establish a unified communal structure led to an institutional split into three distinct factions: the progressive Neologs, the traditionalist Orthodox, and the centrist “Status Quo Ante.” The Neologs defined themselves as Hungarians of the Jewish faith seeking integration into the nation, while Hungarian Orthodoxy saw this integration as an existential threat to continuity and chose complete institutional separation. This sharp communal division institutionalized competing answers to the question of Jewish existence long before the appearance of political Zionism.

This defensive worldview found its most intense expression in the northeastern border regions, an area known as the Unterland. This rural, mountainous region, which included areas such as Subcarpathian Rus and Transylvania, as well as the cities of Munkacs and Szatmár (now Satu Mare, Romania), was culturally worlds apart from cosmopolitan Budapest. In the Unterland, a massive influx of Galician Hasidim merged with the strict halachic stringency of the Chatam Sofer’s disciples, together forging an exceptionally militant and protective regional rabbinic leadership. When secular Zionism arrived at the end of the century, the region’s rabbis immediately identified it as the most extreme manifestation of modernity, one that sought to replace a religious covenant based on the Torah with a secular, territorial nationalism.

Unlike the Jewry of Poland and Lithuania, who established Agudath Yisrael as a political force willing to engage in parliamentary negotiations and create a religious counterweight, the radical Hungarian rabbis rejected this path entirely. They viewed any partisan compromise or partnership in a modern political system as a spiritual surrender and a source of erosion, preferring absolute isolation.

What is often omitted from theological history is the material reality that allowed the Unterland to become an impenetrable fortress. The city of Szatmár sat in close proximity to the historic Tokaj region, world-famous for producing high-quality wine. The mountainous terrain and geographical isolation provided a physical and cultural shield for rural Jewish life. Unlike the impoverished, urban Jewish masses that crowded Poland or Lithuania, many Jews in northeastern Hungary were involved in agriculture, the timber trade on the slopes of the Carpathians, and the highly prosperous production and export of kosher wine. This wealth generated relative prosperity and granted the Orthodox community unusual institutional autonomy. This economic independence funded and sustained independent schools and yeshivas through which an uncompromising worldview could be passed down from generation to generation, protected and insulated from the ideological currents transforming the rest of Europe.

It was on this rich soil that Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum grew. Born in 1887 into a rabbinic dynasty from Siget, he established the center of his Hasidic movement in Szatmár. After maneuvering against internal rivals, such as the competing Munkacs dynasty, he consolidated the local opposition into a structured, universal theological doctrine in his foundational book, Vayoel Moshe. His argument was based on a strict, literal interpretation of the “Three Oaths” mentioned in the Talmud, which state that God adjured Israel not to ascend to the Land of Israel en masse and by force, and not to rebel against the nations of the world during exile.

While Religious Zionist thinkers argued that the Holocaust invalidated these oaths, the Szatmár Rabbi insisted that exile is a divine decree for spiritual refinement that can only end with a miraculous, messianic redemption from Heaven. Therefore, the Zionist effort to build a state through military and diplomatic means was viewed by him as a sin of profound theological gravity, an attempt to “force the end” of exile. He argued that even if the state were run perfectly in accordance with the Torah, its very establishment before the arrival of the Messiah constituted a rebellion against God.

From this perspective, the Rabbi even raised the shattering and highly controversial argument that the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust was a direct divine punishment for the sin of Zionism and the violation of those very oaths.

The destruction of the Holocaust systematically wiped out the flourishing Hasidic communities of northeastern Hungary. Following the catastrophe, most of the mainstream Orthodox world felt there was no choice but to make pragmatic political compromises, such as the 1947 Status Quo agreement in Israel, to secure a haven for traumatized survivors.

But the Szatmár Rabbi refused to bend. Having survived the war, he immigrated to the United States and transplanted the 1869 model of absolute communal separation directly into the New York diaspora, while the rest of the Jewish world celebrated the establishment of the State of Israel. This found its distinct physical expression in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn and the establishment of the autonomous town of Kiryas Joel in upstate New York, which allowed the geographical and cultural isolation of the European Unterland to be recreated in America.

Just as his predecessors in Hungary used financial autonomy to block modern influences, the Szatmár Rebbe built a massive, self-sustaining, independent community in exile, complete with its own educational systems, businesses, and social safety nets. To this day, in accordance with his rulings, Szatmár institutions refuse to accept even a single shekel of government funding from the State of Israel, viewing dependency on the state as a form of spiritual contamination.

However, a distinction must be made between the Szatmár Hasidic movement and groups like Neturei Karta. While both advocate for religious anti-Zionism and separation from the state, Szatmár emphasizes the internal construction of an autonomous community, whereas Neturei Karta is defined by public, provocative anti-Zionist political activism, a methodology from which Szatmár leaders have consistently distanced themselves.

Ultimately, the history of radical anti-Zionism is a fundamentally Hungarian story. It demonstrates how the fiercest opposition to the state was not born in the chaos of 1948, but was a direct continuation of an ideological culture war that began in rural Hungary nearly a century earlier. Szatmár’s uncompromising stance was built on a historical tradition of drawing absolute institutional boundaries. Faced with the sweeping currents of the modern era, they chose to retreat into an unyielding fortress of tradition, treating the sovereign Zionist project not as a fulfillment of historical Jewish destiny, but as a complete betrayal of it.

In retrospect, Szatmár's anti-Zionism presents a complex mirror to Jewish nationalism. It highlights that Judaism has many faces and that, alongside the Szatmár worldview, a wide range of approaches to Zionism have existed and continue to exist. At its core, fundamental questions about the competing identities of the Jewish people and their future remain open and deeply contested.

If you found this essay thought-provoking, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps me continue writing independent historical and geopolitical analysis on Israel, the Middle East, and Central Europe. Paid subscriptions make this work possible.

Please check out my book: Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.

That temptation has long lured political leaders into believing they can shape athletic outcomes as readily as political ones. The longer leaders remain in power, the more likely they are to assume that ordinary rules no longer apply to them, that influence, pressure, and political authority can solve any problem. Political scientists have long observed that prolonged incumbency often breeds a sense of exceptionalism. Leaders who spend years bending bureaucracies, intimidating rivals, and dominating public institutions can begin to confuse political authority with the power to control reality itself. Sporting competition offers a harsh corrective because, once the whistle blows, performance, not political influence, determines the outcome.

The most famous example remains the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Adolf Hitler transformed the Games into a grand showcase for Nazi Germany, intending to demonstrate the efficiency of his regime and the supposed superiority of the Aryan race. The Olympics were carefully choreographed as a propaganda triumph, designed to legitimize the regime before a global audience. Instead, the defining image of the Games became Jesse Owens, the Black American sprinter who won four gold medals. Owens did not set out to challenge Nazi ideology; he simply ran faster than everyone else. In doing so, he exposed the limits of political propaganda. Hitler controlled the spectacle, but he could not control the finish line.

Nearly ninety years later, the 2026 FIFA World Cup offered a modern version of the same lesson.

After U.S. striker Folarin Balogun received a straight red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina, FIFA rules required him to miss the Americans’ Round of 16 match against Belgium. Rather than allowing the disciplinary process to run its course, President Donald Trump personally appealed to FIFA President Gianni Infantino to reverse the suspension. Senior administration officials joined the effort, and FIFA ultimately suspended the one-match ban, allowing Balogun to take the field.

The controversy was never simply about one player. It was about the appearance that political power had penetrated an institution whose legitimacy depends on the equal application of its rules. FIFA has long insisted that governments must remain outside sporting decisions. Once political intervention appears capable of altering disciplinary outcomes, the credibility of every future decision comes into question. Whether FIFA’s ruling could be defended on technical grounds mattered less than the perception that the world’s most powerful political office had secured exceptional treatment.

Yet politics has limits that become painfully visible in sports.

The United States entered the match with Belgium in the lineup, precisely as the White House had sought. It made no difference. Belgium dominated the game from start to finish, defeating the Americans 4–1. The player whose eligibility had become the subject of international controversy proved unable to alter the result. Political influence succeeded in changing the pregame narrative but failed to change the score.

The parallel with Berlin is striking. Hitler believed he could choreograph athletic competition into political validation. Trump appeared to believe that presidential influence could overcome the ordinary rules of international sport. Both encountered the same stubborn reality: governments may influence institutions, pressure decision-makers, and dominate headlines, but they cannot legislate victory.

Modern politics increasingly rewards leaders who project confidence, strength, and the ability to overcome every obstacle. That confidence can gradually evolve into something more dangerous—the belief that institutional rules, like political opponents, exist to be bent whenever they become inconvenient. Major sporting events expose the limits of that illusion because they remain among the few global arenas where outcomes are determined by performance rather than power.

That is why the scoreboard retains a unique democratic quality. It recognizes neither ideology nor political office. The referee’s whistle, the stopwatch, and the final score remain indifferent to influence, wealth, or presidential phone calls. From Berlin in 1936 to the World Cup in 2026, history has delivered the same enduring lesson: political power may shape the spectacle, but it cannot determine the outcome.

This failure was not an anomaly. It was the culmination of a recurring pattern of “mirror-imaging”: the tendency to assume that adversaries operate according to the same utilitarian cost-benefit logic that has long shaped Israeli strategic thinking. For decades, Israel’s security establishment has built one of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence systems, from the technological capabilities of Unit 8200 to the global reach of the Mossad. Yet this extraordinary intelligence apparatus has repeatedly struggled with strategic misrecognition. The problem has not been a lack of information, but the difficulty of interpreting information through frameworks that account for the ideological, historical, and cultural logic of those confronting Israel.

This pattern of misreading is not new. Before the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli planners misinterpreted the political constraints and motivations shaping Egyptian President Nasser’s escalation, reading military movements through assumptions of restraint rather than intent. That analytical framework hardened into the catastrophic intelligence paradigm of the “Conceptzia” before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which held that Egypt and Syria would not go to war without air superiority. Israeli intelligence failed to anticipate that President Sadat was pursuing a limited-war strategy aimed not at battlefield victory but at breaking the diplomatic stalemate and reshaping regional calculations. Even after that trauma, the pattern persisted: Sadat’s 1977 visit to Jerusalem was initially met with deep skepticism and suspicion, reflecting Israel’s difficulty in recognizing a genuine strategic transformation on the part of the Egyptian president.

The same cognitive pattern resurfaced during the First and Second Intifadas (1987 and 2000), when the security establishment initially interpreted mass uprisings as localized security disturbances, consistently underestimating their political depth and accumulated psychological weight.

The current Israeli strategy toward Tehran echoes earlier intelligence failures rooted in the belief that direct military action could precipitate the collapse of the Islamic Republic. By persuading Washington that war would produce rapid regime change, Israel misjudged both Iran’s internal resilience and its threshold for escalation. It also overestimated the likelihood that leadership decapitation would trigger a mass anti-regime uprising. In retrospect, both assumptions proved wrong.

The state-run Jewish education system plays a central role in producing and reproducing this cultural ignorance. Although Arabic is the mother tongue of more than one-fifth of Israel’s citizens, the Jewish education system largely treats it as a foreign language rather than a shared civic and regional medium. The consequences are stark: according to data from the Van Leer Institute, only 2.6% of Israeli Jews report being able to read a newspaper in Arabic, and just 1% can read a book in the language.

Even more significant is the generational erosion of Arabic among descendants of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. Mizrahi Jews now comprise nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population. Although many first-generation immigrants arrived fluent in Arabic or Judeo-Arabic dialects, Hebrew’s dominance in schools and state institutions rapidly displaced it. Within two generations, Arabic ceased to function as a living language for most Jewish Israelis, surviving primarily in music, religious practice, and fragmented expressions of memory.

Compounding this linguistic decline is a profound ideological shift within Israel’s political culture. The rise of religious nationalism and right-wing fundamentalism has introduced a theological hostility into public discourse, rendering Arabic and Islam objects of suspicion and disdain. Within this framework, Arabic is no longer merely neglected; it is symbolically associated with existential enmity. This ideological transformation has removed any practical or human incentive for the Jewish majority to engage with Arabic or the societies it represents. By recasting Judaism and Islam as locked in an existential civilizational conflict, Israel’s fundamentalist currents have transformed ignorance of Arabic from a deficiency into a political virtue.

A stark manifestation of this racist barrier, which treats national identity as an automatic ground for disqualification, is seen in the Jewish opposition parties. Except for The Democrats, these parties have sweepingly refused to include Mansour Abbas, the most moderate Arab member of the Knesset, in any future government. This disqualification stems not from political or ideological considerations, but solely from the fact that he is an Arab.

Even academic institutions, whose mission is to deepen understanding across cultures, often reproduce the same structural limitations. Middle Eastern Studies programs at Israel’s leading universities have largely developed as disciplines that study the region from a distance rather than through sustained intellectual and human engagement with Israel’s neighbors. This is not simply the result of individual scholarly choices. It reflects a regional reality in which even states that maintain diplomatic relations with Israel rarely permit Israeli scholars to conduct extended field research or sabbaticals.

The problem is compounded by the underrepresentation of Israel’s Arab citizens in senior academic positions, despite their linguistic fluency, cultural familiarity, and lived experience. At the same time, many faculty members serve in the military reserves, particularly in intelligence units, reinforcing an institutional environment in which expertise on the Arab world is often shaped as much by security imperatives as by scholarly inquiry.

This broader structural marginalization was codified in law by the 2018 Nation-State Law. By downgrading Arabic’s status after nearly a century as an official language under the British Mandate and Israeli statehood, the Knesset conveyed the implicit message that Arabic is now an ‘enemy of the Hebrew state.’

The consequences extend beyond education and academia into the interpretation of daily news and public discourse. In a society where the vast majority of Jewish citizens do not speak Arabic, interpretation of regional news is monopolized by a narrow elite of official spokespersons, military analysts, and media commentators. This dependency limits direct engagement with primary sources and filters public understanding through highly mediated narratives that often reproduce state frameworks. Language thus functions as an invisible barrier shaping what can be seen, questioned, and understood in the public sphere.

This epistemic distance is not simply the result of the absence of contact, but of its structure. Even where formal peace exists with Egypt and Jordan, relations remain largely confined to diplomatic, military, and bureaucratic channels, without the dense social, touristic, and cultural interweaving that produces everyday mutual understanding. Newer forms of regional normalization have not fundamentally altered this logic; Israeli engagement with the Gulf, including travel to the United Arab Emirates, often takes the form of short-term commercial and tourist mobility, with cities such as Dubai functioning more as fancy shopping malls than as spaces of sustained social encounter. Morocco represents a partial exception: for many Israelis, particularly those of Moroccan Jewish descent, visits involve a form of heritage tourism—cultural immersion through ancestral sites, synagogues, cuisine, and local traditions. Relations with Palestinians present a different but related dynamic: here, contact is extensive, but it is shaped by the political realities of the occupation, security, labor, and territorial control rather than through ordinary reciprocal social exchange.

The key to untangling this Gordian knot is a profound rethinking of the Palestinian issue. It must be understood not merely as a security challenge to be managed, but as a central political and historical reality shaping Israel’s place in the region.

A fundamental paradigm shift is necessary: a genuine recognition that Israel is part of the Middle East rather than an external actor operating within it. This is easy to say but extraordinarily difficult to achieve. The State of Israel continues to pay a heavy price, often in blood, for its chronic failure to fully understand its neighborhood. As long as strategic analysis relies primarily on technological superiority and a security doctrine built around interception and control rather than cultural fluency and grounded regional knowledge, Israel will continue to misread its environment in ways that technology alone cannot compensate for. Until Israel moves beyond the “villa in the jungle” mindset and learns the region’s linguistic, historical, and political codes, it will remain a technologically brilliant but culturally blind power in the Middle East.

Please check out my recently published book: Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.

As the war with Iran unfolded, many Americans reached a familiar conclusion: Israel was once again pulling Washington toward a conflict it did not want. Yet many Israelis were arriving at the exact opposite conclusion as they watched U.S. President Donald Trump publicly constrain Israeli options, dictate red lines, negotiate agreements, and insist that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu follow Washington’s lead.

The paradox of this moment is that the very same events have persuaded many Americans that Israel exercises extraordinary influence over Washington while simultaneously convincing many Israelis that their country’s freedom of action increasingly hinges on Washington’s consent.

For decades, the partnership rested on an unwritten, bipartisan understanding: Despite Israel’s deep reliance on American military and economic aid, Israelis maintained that final strategic decisions were theirs alone. Washington could pressure or criticize, but Jerusalem ultimately retained final authority.

Today, however, that traditional consensus is facing a profound test. The signs of this shift grew increasingly visible during the Gaza war. When Trump exerted pressure to secure a cease-fire and hostage releases, much of the Israeli public welcomed the immediate respite. Yet few paused to reflect on the underlying balance of power, namely, that a monumental strategic development had been orchestrated not in Jerusalem, but by the American president.

The subsequent military escalation between Israel and Iran only solidified this shift, as Trump made it clear that Washington, not Jerusalem, would define the region’s future. His rhetoric was unmistakable. In a remarkable statement to the Financial Times, he declared of Netanyahu: “He won’t have any choice. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.” True to

that assertion, the U.S.-Iran framework agreement that aimed at ending the war was negotiated without Israel at the table. Trump presented its final terms to Netanyahu as a fait accompli. In their preliminary reactions, many Israelis, especially Netanyahu’s supporters, characterized the deal as “capitulation.”

Notwithstanding Trump’s characteristic bravado, American presidents have pressured Israeli leaders before. What makes this moment unusual is the degree of public candor. Pressure that was once exercised behind closed doors is now being proclaimed openly. Trump is not merely influencing Israeli decisions; he is publicly asserting his authority to define their limits.

Nor has this pattern been confined to war and diplomacy. Trump’s public intervention in Netanyahu’s corruption trial, including calls for a pardon, represented a striking intrusion into an issue that Israelis traditionally regard as a strictly internal matter.

How did Israel arrive at this point?
The answer lies in a profound miscalculation and a massive gamble by the prime minister. For years, Netanyahu’s strategic goal was to draw the United States into a direct confrontation with Iran. When Trump returned to office, Netanyahu saw a golden opportunity to achieve that objective and persuaded him that a joint U.S.-Israeli military action could trigger regime change in Iran and permanently guarantee the security of the region. But by selling Trump on the illusion of an easy collapse in Tehran, Netanyahu opened up a geopolitical Pandora’s box that he completely lost control of.

Instead of a swift regime change, the push triggered a massive regional war. The moment the United States became a direct participant, managing missile defenses, securing global shipping lanes, and absorbing the economic shock waves, the war was no longer Israel’s. It became America’s war.

Ultimately, Netanyahu’s policy has devolved into a succession of risky wagers, operating on the assumption that Washington would always underwrite Israel’s security and absorb the fallout. But when a superpower takes on the primary burden of fighting, it assumes the unilateral right to dictate the terms of peace. Netanyahu succeeded in drawing Trump into the center of the conflict, only to discover that once Washington assumed the burden of war, it also assumed the right to dictate the terms of its conclusion over Netanyahu's head.

This is a radical departure from the past. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir openly defied the George H.W. Bush administration over settlement policy, Washington retaliated by freezing $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. Israel paid a devastating economic and diplomatic price for its intransigence, but no one doubted its power to stand its ground against American pressure. Even during the 1991 Gulf War, when Bush persuaded Israel not to retaliate for the Scud missiles that Iraq fired into the country, the decision aligned with Israel’s own national interests. Israelis viewed that restraint as a sovereign, calculated decision to let the U.S.-led coalition handle Saddam Hussein, rather than a concession forced upon them by Washington.

The atmosphere today feels different. Trump is admired by many Israelis and is often described as one of the most pro-Israel presidents in American history. Dependency imposed by an adversary provokes immediate resistance; dependency on a close friend is much harder to recognize. Precisely because Trump is viewed as an ally, his interventions have exposed a reality that many Israelis find uncomfortable: The boundaries of Israeli action increasingly appear to be subject to American approval.

Nearly three years after October 7, many Israelis sense a strategic failure. Hamas still controls Gaza, Hezbollah continues to threaten the north, and Iran remains emboldened and self-confident. As dependence on the United States deepens, Israel’s freedom of action appears to have narrowed while its ability to influence outcomes continues to erode.

Many Israelis troubled by America’s growing influence are not necessarily advocating further military escalation. Quite the opposite. They believe that the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran should have ended already and been replaced by a serious diplomatic effort. From this perspective, American pressure has acted as a restraining force and may have prevented a broader regional conflagration. Indeed, many Israelis would argue that Washington’s intervention served both Israeli and regional interests.

The central question is what these events reveal about the balance of power between Washington and Jerusalem and how much freedom of action Israel still retains. For the first time, questions about Israeli agency are moving from the margins of political debate toward the center.

Sovereign nations care deeply about dignity, agency, and control over their own destiny. Israel’s fundamental challenge today is not a lack of military strength, but rather the sobering realization of what happens when a prime minister sacrifices long-term strategic autonomy for short-term political survival. By cajoling Washington into a war, Netanyahu set in motion a dynamic he could no longer manage. Even a powerful nation can find itself sidelined when its leader substitutes tactical rolls of the dice for coherent strategy, proactive diplomacy, and difficult political decisions.

Yehuda Lukacs is an associate professor emeritus of global affairs at George Mason University in Virginia. His most recent book is Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.

The danger does not stop there. The truly ominous scenario is the possibility that radical Haredi violence will converge, even if not formally or structurally, with the operational methods of the radical messianic right. This is particularly plausible if the next government is perceived as center-left and attempts to pass a meaningful Haredi military conscription law. In such a scenario, Haredi extremists on one side and nationalist-messianic extremists on the other could find themselves on the same side of the barricades, facing off against the state.

For decades, the concept of “Jewish terrorism” was primarily associated with radical groups within the religious-nationalist camp, specifically elements operating out of the occupied West Bank settlements. There, land, messianism, and extreme nationalism fused into a worldview that views the state as a legitimate tool only as long as it serves their goals. When the state restricts, evacuates, arrests, or prosecutes, it becomes, in the eyes of these elements, the enemy.

Yet alongside this phenomenon, another equally disturbing arena is developing within the margins of Haredi society. For years, many tended to dismiss radical Haredi violence as localized religious zealotry, unruly protests, or isolated disturbances. But when violence is directed at judges, law enforcement, public institutions, and symbols of governance, it becomes far harder to brush aside as a marginal outburst.

A significant portion of Haredi society views the secular state as a hostile entity lacking true legitimacy. To them, the courts, the police, planning authorities, the education system, and the IDF are not public institutions, but rather arms of a world that threatens the Haredi way of life. The conscription issue is perceived as an existential threat to Haredi society in its current form. Therefore, a meaningful draft law is viewed not as a government reform, but as a declaration of war.

There are precedents for this. Groups like the Jerusalem Faction (HaPeleg HaYerushalmi) or the Sikrikim crossed the boundaries of legitimate protest long ago. They have targeted women they deemed immodest, business owners, public institutions, other Haredi Jews suspected of cooperating with mainstream Israeli society, and even participants in state ceremonies. Their method has been clear: not just to convince, but to intimidate; not just to protest, but to punish.

For a long time, these incidents could be viewed as localized, even bizarre phenomena. But that would be a mistake. When an organized group uses threats, pressure, and violence to enforce a religious worldview and undermine state authority, it is, by definition, political-religious violence.

This phenomenon feeds on a deep-seated siege mentality. In the eyes of extremist Haredi factions, issues like conscription, core curriculum education, or government oversight are not civil disputes, but rather decrees (gzerot) threatening the Torah world. When a political dispute is framed as a battle for religious survival, justifying radical measures becomes all too easy.

This is where the most explosive scenario comes into play: an opposition victory in the upcoming elections and the formation of a government that attempts to legislate a serious Haredi draft law. To broad sectors of the Haredi public, and certainly to its more radical factions, such a law could be perceived as a catastrophic historical decree.

The danger lies not in another wave of demonstrations or road blockages. A strict draft law could spark violent reactions against state institutions and their representatives. What begins as a protest could devolve into campaigns of intimidation, targeted assaults, and attempts to deter judges, police officers, and decision-makers from fulfilling their duties. In such a scenario, Israel could face, for the first time, a phenomenon of Jewish terrorism originating from the radical fringes of Haredi society.

Despite the fundamental ideological divide between the messianic-nationalist right, which views the state as “the first flowering of our redemption, “and the Haredim, who largely view it as a hostile secular entity to be lived apart from, their tactical common ground strengthens in moments of crisis. Both share a willingness to challenge the state’s authority when it fails to align with their religious or messianic worldview.

This is particularly evident in their attitude toward the judicial system. While Haredi extremists view the courts as a secular institution seeking to impose alien values upon them, the messianic right views them as an obstacle to settlement expansion and the realization of the Greater Israel vision. In both cases, the legitimacy of state institutions is rejected whenever they fail to serve a supreme religious or ideological vision.

If a future government is perceived as both anti-Haredi and anti-settlement, the convergence of these two camps could become exceptionally dangerous. There would be no need for a formal alliance or a joint headquarters. It would be enough for both sides to identify the same institutions as the enemy and employ similar tactics of disruption, intimidation, and civil disobedience.

The radical right brings with it cumulative experience in confronting the state: resisting evacuations, assaults, “price tag” actions, and clashes with security forces. If a future government is perceived as jeopardizing the settlement enterprise, there is no guarantee the struggle will remain confined to the West Bank. Those who have grown accustomed to viewing the state as a temporary enemy may well direct that same perception toward its institutions inside Israel proper.

Here lies the dangerous alignment. Haredi extremists will oppose the state in the name of defending the Torah world. Nationalist extremists will oppose the state in the name of defending the Land of Israel. The slogans will differ, the rabbis will differ, and the objectives will differ, but the enemy will be one and the same: the institutions of the democratic state.

The problem is not only that the state has failed to curb the violence of extremist settlers in the West Bank. Under the current government, this violence often receives direct or indirect political backing, while law enforcement and the IDF frequently demonstrate a limited willingness to confront it. The result is that certain extremist groups operate with a growing sense of impunity, fueled by the belief that they serve a higher cause and are therefore exempt from the rules that apply to everyone else.

For years, a reality has developed in the West Bank where violence directed against Palestinians rarely carries a significant price tag. In doing so, the state has, directly or indirectly, contributed to the rise of a radical force that is steadily gaining confidence, experience, and autonomous operational capabilities. History teaches that such forces do not necessarily remain focused on their original targets. Israel may discover that it has helped birth a political “Frankenstein’s monster,” a force accustomed to operating outside the boundaries of the law, which may one day turn those very same methods against the state itself.

Israel has never before had to grapple with a situation in which two such hubs of resistance operate simultaneously against state authority.

If the shattered windows at the home of a senior Supreme Court judge are a sign of things to come, they must not be dismissed as an isolated incident. They may well be a warning of a far broader process: the shift of political-religious violence from the fringes into the center of the battle over the character of the state.

The danger is that two distinct forms of extremism, born out of opposing ideological universes, will discover they share a common enemy: the institutions of the democratic state. On the day that radical Haredim and radical messianists turn their fury against the state itself, the fight will no longer be over conscription, settlements, or the judiciary. It will be over the state’s very monopoly on authority and force, a stage from which many societies have deteriorated into violent internal conflict.

Is this Netanyahu’s contingency plan if he loses the upcoming elections?

Please check out my book, Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and beyond.

When Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to Washington and a prominent leader of the settlement movement, labeled the liberal lobby J Street a “cancer within the American Jewish community,” it was no mere slip of the tongue. It was the export of a political blueprint refined over decades by Benjamin Netanyahu: divide society into loyalists and domestic enemies, frame criticism as treason, and rule over the wreckage. In Israel, this strategy enabled him to survive scandals and win elections by systematically dismantling civic trust. Now, he is turning that same weapon across the ocean toward American Jewry, with the same intent and at the exact same cost.

Netanyahu did not just fracture Israeli society; he also helped push Washington toward a destructive military confrontation with Iran. The result was regional escalation, the empowerment of hardliners in Tehran, and a growing backlash within the United States. Today, the very same playbook is being deployed against American Jews: demand absolute conformity, brand any dissent as betrayal, and thereby deepen the alienation within the American Jewish community, fracturing it from within.

J Street is not a radical organization. It is liberal, pro-Israel, and supportive of a two-state solution. It represents a broad mainstream of American Jewry, one that seeks to support Israel without automatically rubber-stamping every policy of the Netanyahu government. Yet even these moderate stances are now cast as treason by figures aligned with Netanyahu and the settlement movement.

This toxic rhetoric is already translating into action. A striking example is the planned appointment of Caroline Glick, one of the most prominent figures of the populist right and a fierce Netanyahu loyalist, as Israel’s Consul General in New York.

The New York consulate is no routine diplomatic post; it is the most sensitive bridge between the State of Israel and the largest, most influential Jewish community in the diaspora. Choosing Glick for this role signals the weaponization of Israeli diplomacy in the culture war waged by the Netanyahu government. Glick, an outspoken champion of Donald Trump and the American conservative movement, has a long history of attacking Reform and Conservative Judaism. This represents a direct collision with the demographic reality of American Jewry: Pew Research Center data consistently shows that the vast majority of religiously affiliated Jews in the U.S. belong to liberal streams, while the Orthodox sector, to which the Israeli government’s rhetoric appeals, remains a relatively small minority.

Historically, relations between Israel and American Jewry were built, at least ostensibly, on a concept of mutual partnership. But under Netanyahu, a profound shift is underway: American Jewry is no longer viewed as an independent community with its own voice, sensitivities, and interests. Instead, it is being reduced to a pawn in Israeli political power struggles. In place of dialogue, there is an attempt to enforce political discipline from across the sea.

When an official representative of Israel accuses liberal American denominations of anti-Zionist progressivism, they are not merely attacking their views. They are drawing the boundaries of legitimacy within the American Jewish community. The message is unmistakable: American Jews must fall in line with the Netanyahu government’s policies or face political and public excommunication.

This process is accelerating the polarization surrounding Israel within American politics. By aligning Israeli diplomacy entirely with one side of the U.S. political map, the government is eroding Israel’s ability to sustain broad, long-term bipartisan support. It is transforming Israel from a consensus issue into a deeply partisan and polarizing wedge.

The reason American support for Israel remained so robust over the years was never just the power of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. It was because many Americans viewed Israel as a Western democracy that shared core values and strategic interests with the United States. Even those who opposed the occupation or settlement policies did not necessarily question Israel’s fundamental legitimacy or its strategic alliance with America.

But that reality is shifting. As Israel becomes increasingly identified with destruction, oppression, and unrestrained military might, its moral standing is eroding in the eyes of many Americans. For a growing segment of the American public, Israel is no longer seen as a liberal state defending itself, but as a power acting in direct opposition to the values America claims to champion. This sentiment is only magnified when Israel, or entities aligned with it, brazenly attempt to interfere in American politics and public life.

No organization, including J Street, is immune to criticism. But to brand it a “cancer,” or to dispatch a Consul General who ideologically delegitimizes it, is not an act of moral clarity; it is a deliberate provocation designed to ignite a culture war within American Jewry. What is being attempted here is all too familiar to Israelis: transforming pluralism into a loyalty test and then blaming the excluded for the division. This is the exact political playbook Netanyahu has perfected in Israel for years, bifurcating the world into “loyalists” versus “traitors,” those who belong to the camp and those who must be denounced.

Even David Makovsky, a stalwart pro-Israel establishment analyst from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, recently warned that another Israeli government reliant on extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich could severely undermine relations with American Jewry and shatter bipartisan support. But this is no longer a warning about the future; the process is underway. Netanyahu is not merely dependent on these extremists; he is actively adopting and exporting their politics of forced loyalty and denunciation directly into the public life of American Jewry.

American Jewish institutions cannot afford to remain silent in the face of this rhetoric and political strategy. They must draw a clear red line against the delegitimization of liberal Jews and oppose any attempt to turn support for Israel into a political loyalty test. They must cultivate spaces where people can vigorously debate the occupation, borders, security, and the future of Israel without every disagreement being branded as treason. A younger generation of American Jews will not distance themselves from Israel solely because of a specific policy; they will walk away if they feel they have no moral or political right to speak their minds honestly.

The ambassador’s words and the government’s high-profile appointments are intended to project strength. In reality, they project fear, fear of an open debate regarding the moral and political price of an endless occupation of other people, and fear of the reality that American Jews are no longer willing to automatically fall in line. Calling J Street a “cancer” or sending a Consul General to New York who is overtly hostile to liberal streams will not strengthen the American Jewish community. It will only deepen the fracture within it, replicating the same politics of division that have already inflicted profound damage on Israeli society.

For decades, Israel relied on a pluralistic, liberal, and self-assured American Jewish community. The bitter irony is that the Israeli government is now actively targeting the very political culture that helped build the depth of its support in the United States. If this trend continues, the damage will not just be diplomatic or political. Israel may discover, too late, that it has dismantled one of its most critical strategic and historic assets with its own hands.

Please check out my recently published book, Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.

The article brought back an old memory from 2009, when I almost met the Iranian president myself.

At the time, I was serving as Associate Provost for International Programs at George Mason University and was involved in discussions with members of the Iranian delegation at the United Nations about the possibility of creating a summer Persian-language program in Iran for GMU students. The idea was academic and cultural, not political. I believed then, as I still do now, that students should study languages and societies directly, especially countries that Americans mostly encounter through the language of conflict, sanctions, and war.

After several meetings, the delegation invited me to attend a smaller gathering with Ahmadinejad himself during his New York visit for the United Nations General Assembly.

I hesitated.

By then, Ahmadinejad had already become one of the most controversial foreign leaders in the world. He was a Holocaust denier and made inflammatory statements about Israel that even I found deeply disturbing. I was fully aware of his reputation. Still, part of me was curious. As someone interested in politics and international affairs, I thought it might be fascinating to observe him in person and perhaps even engage him in conversation.

So I boarded the Acela train from Washington to New York.

Somewhere along the route, I called a friend who lived in McLean, Virginia. Her former husband was a very senior CIA official. During our conversation, I casually mentioned that I was on my way to New York and might attend a meeting with Ahmadinejad.

Her reaction was immediate.

“Don’t go,” she said.

There was no hesitation in her voice. She warned me that simply entering the room with Ahmadinejad could place me on an American watch list. She even suggested that years later, I might discover I had problems boarding flights or passing through airport security.

At first, I laughed nervously. But after we hung up, I sat silently staring out the train window as the industrial landscape of the Northeast passed by. The entire trip suddenly felt different. What had seemed like an unusual academic and political encounter now felt dangerous in a way I had not fully considered.

Today, in an age of social media outrage and debates over constant surveillance, the story may sound exaggerated. But in 2009, America’s political atmosphere surrounding Iran was extraordinarily tense. This was still the height of the post-9/11 era. Iran was not merely viewed as a hostile state; it occupied an almost mythical place in the American imagination as part of the “Axis of Evil.” The boundaries between intellectual curiosity, diplomacy, and suspicion had become blurred.

By the time the train arrived in New York, I had made my decision.

I skipped the meeting and visited friends instead.

And that is how I almost met Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

For decades, support for Israel in America rested on several overlapping foundations: Holocaust memory, Cold War alliances, evangelical Christianity, the image of Israel as a vulnerable democracy surrounded by hostile enemies, and a broader cultural identification between the two societies. Criticism of Israeli policy certainly existed, particularly regarding settlements and the occupation, but it remained largely confined to activists, academics, and segments of the political left.

That political landscape is now changing rapidly.

The recent confrontation with Iran intensified these perceptions. For many Americans, particularly after years of exhaustion from Iraq and Afghanistan, the fear of being drawn into another Middle Eastern war revived longstanding suspicions about the role Israeli leadership plays in shaping U.S. foreign policy. Benjamin Netanyahu’s highly public campaign for confrontation with Iran, combined with his longstanding influence within Republican political circles and especially around Donald Trump, reinforced a growing public perception that America’s strategic decisions in the region are not always driven solely by clearly defined American interests. The image of a foreign ally exerting extraordinary pressure to escalate militarily carries enormous political consequences in a society increasingly weary of foreign wars. Each new crisis risks deepening the belief that the U.S.-Israel relationship no longer concerns merely alliance management abroad, but the extent to which external interests shape America’s own political and military decisions at home.

The genocide and destruction in Gaza, the scale of civilian suffering, and increasingly open discussions of annexation, permanent occupation, and ethnic cleansing have already weakened Israel’s standing among younger Americans. Images emerging from the Gaza war shattered the older liberal narrative of Israel primarily acting in self-defense while seeking peace. For millions of Americans, especially younger voters, the conflict with the Palestinians is no longer viewed through the lens of Israeli vulnerability but through the language of human rights, military domination, racial inequality, and collective punishment.

Yet the humanitarian dimension may not ultimately become the decisive factor driving long-term American backlash against Israel.

A second and potentially more powerful dynamic is emerging: growing resentment toward the perception that Israel and its allied lobbying networks are intervening directly inside American political life itself.

Massie’s defeat crystallizes this transformation. Whether one agrees with him or not is almost beside the point. What matters politically is symbolism. Increasing numbers of Americans are beginning to ask a question that was once considered untouchable: why does criticism of one foreign state trigger levels of political punishment unmatched in almost any other area of American foreign policy?

This question is becoming particularly explosive because it intersects with broader anxieties already reshaping American society: distrust of elites, resentment of billionaire influence, anger over lobbying power, frustration with establishment politics, and fears that democratic institutions are increasingly responding to donors and organized pressure rather than ordinary citizens.

The apartheid South Africa analogy, often invoked by critics of Israel, explains only part of what is unfolding. International opposition to apartheid South Africa was driven primarily by moral revulsion toward institutionalized racism and racial domination. The anti-apartheid movement succeeded because it transformed South Africa into a universal human rights issue.

Israel’s legitimacy crisis increasingly operates on two parallel levels. The first concerns Palestinian suffering, occupation, military violence, and inequality before the law. The second concerns the growing perception that Israel has become deeply entangled in America’s own domestic political system.

That distinction matters enormously.

Historically, most Americans have tolerated foreign allies attempting to influence U.S. policy. Every major ally engages in lobbying. But Americans become deeply uncomfortable when influence appears coercive, when dissent seems professionally dangerous, or when domestic political debate itself seems constrained by the interests of a foreign government and its aligned political networks.

This is especially true in a political culture built around ideas of national sovereignty and democratic self-government.

The issue is no longer confined to Congress. University campuses have become battlegrounds over speech, protest, donor pressure, and accusations of extremism. Journalists, professors, and public intellectuals increasingly face campaigns aimed at delegitimizing or professionally punishing criticism of Israeli policy. Social media amplifies every controversy, transforming local disputes into national debates over censorship, intimidation, and political conformity.

For many Americans, particularly younger generations with little emotional attachment to the post-1967 mythology surrounding Israel, these developments are producing an unintended political effect. Attempts to suppress criticism often generate more backlash than the criticism itself.

Ironically, some of Israel’s most aggressive defenders may be accelerating the erosion of American support.

Every multimillion-dollar campaign against a dissenting politician, every attempt to pressure universities, every effort to define criticism of Israeli state policy as inherently illegitimate, reinforces a growing perception that open debate itself is being constrained. In democratic societies, perceived overreach frequently produces a counterreaction.

American political history offers repeated examples of this pattern. Americans have long tolerated influence and lobbying, but they react strongly when they believe outside interests are exercising excessive power over domestic political life. Backlashes emerged against British imperial influence before the American Revolution, against fears of Vatican influence during the rise of Catholic politicians, and, more recently, against concerns about Russian and Chinese influence operations. Across ideological divides, Americans possess a deep-rooted suspicion of the idea that external actors might shape internal democratic processes.

Israel is increasingly at risk of being absorbed into that historical tradition of suspicion.

This does not mean the United States will suddenly abandon Israel, nor does it imply the collapse of the alliance in the near future. The institutional relationship between the two countries remains deep, spanning military cooperation, intelligence coordination, technology, and decades of bipartisan political support. But public legitimacy can erode gradually even while institutional structures remain intact.

That erosion may already be underway.

The generational divide is striking. Older Americans often continue to interpret Israel through the framework of Holocaust memory, existential survival, and democratic solidarity. Younger Americans increasingly interpret it through the frameworks of colonialism, occupation, racial hierarchy, militarized nationalism, and elite political influence. The gap between these perceptions continues to widen.

Massie’s defeat may ultimately become less important for what it changes legislatively than for what it symbolizes psychologically. It reinforces a growing belief that criticism of Israel occupies a uniquely protected position in American politics, insulated from normal democratic contestation through concentrated wealth, organized lobbying, and institutional pressure.

Once a foreign policy issue becomes reframed as a question of domestic democratic sovereignty, political dynamics change dramatically.

At that point, the debate no longer concerns only the Middle East. It becomes a debate about America itself: who governs it, whose interests shape public policy, and whether citizens remain genuinely free to challenge entrenched orthodoxies without fear of political or professional destruction.

That transformation may ultimately prove more consequential than any single protest movement or campus demonstration.

For years, defenders of Israel assumed that American support was permanent, rooted in unshakable strategic and cultural foundations. But political legitimacy is never static. Alliances endure only so long as populations perceive them as compatible with their own moral values and national interests.

Increasing numbers of Americans no longer see the relationship exclusively through the language of alliance. They are beginning to see it through the language of power.

And once that shift occurs, political backlash can accelerate far faster than established institutions expect.

Please check out my new book: Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.

The appeal is obvious. It offers a clean narrative: unify the opposition, find the right leader, and ride a wave of public exhaustion to victory. But this reading is not only simplistic but also analytically flawed.

Hungary does not offer a model for Israel. It offers a case study with very specific preconditions. To understand why the analogy fails, one must begin with a more basic question: what actually made Orbán’s defeat possible? Strip away the rhetoric, and two necessary conditions stand out.

First, the erosion of elite cohesion within the ruling party. Second, the emergence of a charismatic challenger capable of drawing support from within that camp.

Both conditions were present in Hungary. Neither exists in Israel.

Orbán’s system did not collapse solely because of external opposition pressure. It weakened from within. Over time, fractures emerged among political insiders, business elites, and figures previously aligned with the governing structure. Péter Magyar himself embodied this dynamic: a figure with insider credibility who broke ranks and signaled that defection was both possible and legitimate. His candidacy did not merely mobilize the opposition; it destabilized the governing coalition’s aura of invincibility.

No parallel process is visible in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu has maintained a remarkable degree of loyalty within his political camp. Despite legal challenges, public protests, and security crises, there are no meaningful signs of elite defection from within Likud or the broader coalition. The governing bloc remains cohesive, disciplined, and electorally resilient.

Without elite fragmentation, there is no Hungarian-style opening.

The second condition is even more elusive. Magyar’s rise was not just about charisma; it was about cross-camp legitimacy. As a former insider whose ex-wife served as Minister of Justice under Orbán, he could appeal to disillusioned government supporters without being dismissed as a representative of the traditional opposition. He did not simply unite anti-Orbán voters; he actively peeled away segments of Orbán’s base.

This is precisely what the Israeli opposition has failed to achieve so far.

Israel’s anti-Netanyahu bloc is not a latent majority waiting to be activated. It is a coalition of fundamentally different political communities: secular centrists, fragments of the traditional left, elements of the right, and Arab parties with distinct priorities and narratives. These groups are not temporarily divided by leadership; they are separated by deep ideological disagreements over the state’s identity, borders, and future.

Recent political realignments illustrate both the ambition and the limits of attempted unity. The alliance between Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid under the “Beyachad” banner reflects a renewed effort to consolidate leadership. It may improve electoral arithmetic. But it does not resolve the core problem: the absence of a unifying political vision capable of attracting voters from across the existing coalition divide.

Even this limited alignment does not amount to a true “big tent.” Crucially, it continues to exclude Arab parties, which represent roughly one-fifth of Israel’s population. The result is not a broad governing coalition but a deliberately narrowed bloc, one that avoids, rather than resolves, the deepest political cleavages in Israeli society. Instead of bridging Israel’s central divide, the opposition is effectively conceding it.

This is precisely where the Hungarian analogy breaks down at the level of leadership. Naftali Bennett is very much a product of Israel’s broader right-wing elite, but he is not a defector from the current governing nexus surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu. Unlike Péter Magyar, he does not embody an insider rupture that signals to voters within the ruling camp that defection is legitimate. Nor has he demonstrated the ability to draw meaningful support from Netanyahu’s base.

Systems rarely collapse from pressure alone; they fracture when insiders defect. Without that internal rupture, the Hungarian dynamic has no Israeli equivalent.

Magyar did not simply unite the opposition; he reconfigured the political map. The Israeli opposition, by contrast, continues to operate within the same fragmented terrain.

Institutional differences deepen the gap. Hungary, despite years of democratic backsliding under Viktor Orbán, retained a constitutional structure that could be reclaimed through electoral victory. Once Fidesz lost its majority, the incoming government gained the legal authority to begin restoring institutional checks and balances.

Israel offers no comparable mechanism. It has no written constitution, no second legislative chamber, and no federal division of power. The Israeli Supreme Court functions as the primary institutional constraint on government authority, and even that role is politically contested. In such a system, electoral victory does not “reset” democratic norms; it merely shifts control within a structurally fragile framework.

Foreign policy further underscores the limits of comparison. Orbán’s Hungary occupied a semi-detached position within the European Union, and his defeat signals a return to the European mainstream. Netanyahu’s diplomatic strategy has indeed included relationships with leaders like Orbán, but Israel’s strategic reality is fundamentally different. Its security challenges are regional, immediate, and existential, and its most critical alliance remains with the United States.

Replacing Orbán repositions Hungary within Europe. Replacing Netanyahu does not resolve Israel’s core strategic dilemmas. Crucially, the focus on electoral mechanics overlooks the ultimate ‘elephant in the room’: the structural reality of the military occupation of the Palestinians. In the Hungarian context, a change in government allows for a restoration of domestic democratic norms.

In Israel, however, the occupation has become a bipartisan administrative reality that exists independently of who occupies the Prime Minister’s office. Even a ‘change’ government, bound by a diverse coalition that includes pro-settlement elements, is likely to prioritize maintaining the security status quo over a fundamental resolution of the conflict. Thus, a Netanyahu defeat might signal a change in style, but it does not inherently signal an end to the deep-seated policies of military control, ethnic cleansing, settler brutality, and civilian inequality that define the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.

Finally, the social fabric of the two countries diverges in ways that make the notion of a transferable “model” untenable. Hungary is a relatively homogeneous nation-state. Israel is a deeply pluralistic society composed of secular and religious Jews, multiple strands of Orthodoxy, national-religious communities, and a significant Arab minority. These divisions are not marginal; they are foundational.

In such a society, majoritarian political breakthroughs are inherently unstable. Governance depends not on sweeping electoral victories but on complex, often fragile, power-sharing, coalitionary arrangements. The expectation that a single electoral wave can decisively reorder the system reflects a misunderstanding of the system itself.

Orbán’s defeat is a significant moment for Europe. But for Israel, it is not a roadmap.

If the Israeli opposition hopes to present a credible alternative, it must abandon the search for foreign analogies and confront a more difficult reality. Without cracks in the governing elite and without a leader capable of drawing support from within that elite, no “Hungarian moment” is on the horizon.

The real question is not whether Israel can reproduce Hungary, but whether it can articulate a coherent Israeli-Palestinian political vision at all within a highly fragmented society that offers no institutional shortcuts.

Until then, Budapest will remain what it is now: an instructive case, but a misleading model.

Please check out my recently published book: Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.

In 1968, exposure still had consequences. When violence was observed, investigations were conducted. When abuses were revealed, there were hearings, rulings, and officials forced to answer for their actions. None of this worked perfectly, but it worked often enough to sustain a simple expectation: that wrongdoing, once made visible, would not simply pass. What feels different today is that the sequence breaks down. The same exposures occur, the same facts come out, but they no longer compel action. Investigations stall or fade, rulings are delayed or narrowed, and officials outlast the moment. The system continues to process events, but it no longer forces resolution.

The present moment is defined less by a single break than by a pattern that has intensified during Donald Trump’s second term. Pressure is no longer occasional; it is constant. It shows up in public attacks on judges and prosecutors, in threats directed at agencies, and in signals about who will be protected and who will not. Institutions are not dismantled; they adjust. They narrow their exposure, avoid confrontation, and begin to anticipate retaliation. The shift is gradual but cumulative. Over time, it changes what can be challenged and how far power can be pushed without consequence.

Fear here is anticipatory. The professor who revises a sentence not because it is wrong, but because it could be read the wrong way months from now. The editor who asks how a piece will play if the political winds shift. The civil servant who hesitates to put a concern in writing, unsure who might read it later. The student who thinks twice before speaking, aware that a stray comment can be recorded and resurface.

Nothing here looks like overt repression. No order is given; no boundary is clearly marked. The uncertainty does the work. People begin to calculate not only the present cost of speaking, but the possible future consequences of having spoken at all. As that habit takes hold, the range of what can be said narrows quietly, not by force, but by anticipation.

This dynamic is visible across institutions. The media continues to report and investigate, but with growing awareness that exposure can trigger retaliation, legal, political, or economic. The opposition, particularly within the Democratic Party, speaks, but without the confidence of a force capable of imposing real limits or a credible challenge. It reacts, recalibrates, and tests boundaries that themselves appear unstable. Within the Republican Party, dissent has largely disappeared from view. It has not been argued out of existence; it has been priced out of existence. The cost of open resistance, loss of position, isolation, or direct reprisal, has become clear enough that most choose silence.

It is here that the parallel with The Trial of the Chicago 7 becomes most revealing. In the film, the distortion of justice is unmistakable. The courtroom becomes a stage on which power asserts itself in ways that are crude, sometimes absurd, but always visible. The imbalance is not hidden; it is on display. By contrast, the contemporary dynamic is harder to isolate. The line between law and power does not break cleanly; it bends. It shifts in small steps, without a single moment that can be named as decisive. Because it bends rather than snaps, it invites adjustment. Over time, that adjustment becomes routine.

This internal shift is visible in foreign policy as well. The war with Iran unfolds in bursts—strikes, warnings, pauses—without a clear, consistent explanation of purpose. Actions accumulate, but the reasons given for them keep changing. The issue is not only whether these steps are justified, but whether they are clearly explained, debated, or meaningfully constrained. Congress no longer acts as a check.

The result is a convergence that is difficult to ignore. Institutions adjust internally under pressure, while external actions proceed with limited scrutiny. Each reinforces the other. A system less certain of its internal limits becomes less capable of sustaining open debate about its external conduct.

The chant—the whole world is watching—no longer carries the assurance it once did. Visibility remains, but its effect has changed. To be watched is no longer to be restrained; it is to be absorbed into a cycle in which exposure does not lead to consequence. What unfolds in plain sight no longer disrupts the system. It is processed and moves on.

The question is no longer simply whether particular actions are justified or whether individual decisions can be defended within existing norms. It is whether the enforcement chain of American democracy still functions in practice: congressional oversight that constrains, courts whose rulings are carried out, and an executive branch that treats exposure as something that requires correction rather than management. The issue is not whether wrongdoing is seen, but whether seeing it still changes anything.

If that expectation erodes, nothing will mark the moment. There will be no single turning point. Instead, the relationship between action and consequence shifts. Investigations end without resolution. Rulings are delayed or narrowed. Disclosures generate attention but no correction. From a distance, the system still looks the same: hearings, reports, press cycles, but it stops producing outcomes that matter. And when that happens, democracy does not collapse. It continues, but it becomes merely a word in the dictionary.

If Donald Trump still harbors ambitions for a Nobel Peace Prize, he may be looking in the wrong direction. Even significant normalization agreements between Israel and Lebanon—or a historic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia—would fall short. The truly transformative, and politically unthinkable, breakthrough would lie elsewhere: an Israeli-Iranian peace agreement in exchange for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

At first glance, the idea borders on fantasy. Iran is not merely another adversary; it is widely perceived in Israel as an existential threat. Yet precisely because of that, peace with Iran would carry a strategic weight unlike any prior diplomatic initiative. And if such an offer came with a condition, Israeli agreement to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, it would force Israel into a decision it has long managed to avoid. For Iran, the implications would be equally profound: a redefinition of a revolutionary identity in which opposition to Israel has long been central.

What is envisioned here is therefore not a conventional diplomatic breakthrough, but a dual ideological rupture, one that would challenge the foundational narratives of both states. Such transformations are rare in international politics. They tend to occur not through gradual diplomacy, but under the pressure of strategic exhaustion or systemic shock.

To see how such a shift might occur, it is worth recalling an earlier moment when Israeli public opinion seemed immovable, until it wasn’t. Before Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, the idea that Israel would relinquish the Sinai Peninsula was deeply unpopular. Sinai was not just territory; it was a strategic buffer, a symbol of victory after the Six-Day War, and home to Israeli settlements and military infrastructure. By the time of the Camp David Accords, a majority of Israelis supported full withdrawal from the Sinai.

Today, however, those conditions appear absent. Since the October 7 attacks, and amidst the direct war with Iran, Israeli society has been traumatized. The effects are visible: heightened threat perception, a collapse of trust in adversaries, and deep skepticism toward diplomatic solutions that involve territorial compromise. Polling consistently shows that only a small minority of Israelis believe that a Palestinian state could coexist peacefully alongside Israel.

Under such circumstances, a proposal linking peace with Iran to Palestinian statehood would likely be met, at least initially, with outright rejection. Many Israelis would view it as a trap, as was the case before Sadat arrived in Israel. Further, it would be viewed as an attempt by Iran to achieve through diplomacy what it has failed to achieve through confrontation. The idea that Tehran could abruptly transform from a principal adversary into a peace partner would be completely unbelievable.

The Israeli right’s reaction would be predictable: a sweeping rejection, framed through the lens of Oslo and the Gaza disengagement as cautionary precedents against “surrender.” The real question, however, is whether the broader public might still be willing to engage with the idea on its merits.

Wartime psychology does not simply harden positions; it can also create the ripe conditions for dramatic shifts. The same trauma that deepens distrust can, under the right circumstances, generate openness to sweeping change, if that change promises a decisive end to insecurity. This was, in part, the dynamic that followed the Yom Kippur War.

For Israel, the primary benefit of such a deal would be the potential neutralization of the “Ring of Fire”—the network of proxies from Hezbollah to the Houthis that currently stretches its defense resources to a breaking point. By addressing the Iranian threat at its source, Israel would trade an exhausting, existential shadow war for a historic “peace dividend” of regional stability.

Crucially, this would offer Israelis an opportunity for the first time to look beyond the immediate horizon of the next war. It would present the chance to see not another cycle of mobilization, but the “normal existence” that David Ben-Gurion envisioned for the nation at its founding.

From Iran’s perspective, such an initiative would not be an act of goodwill but of strategic calculation. A peace agreement with Israel, especially one tied to Palestinian statehood, would allow Tehran to recast itself from a regional disruptor into a central diplomatic actor, even a broker of historic change.

The potential economic benefits would be significant. Years of sanctions have weakened growth, reduced oil exports, and fueled inflation, while isolating Iran from global markets. Moreover, the current war has caused significant damage to its infrastructure. A diplomatic breakthrough could open pathways to investment, trade, and reconstruction. In that sense, peace would function not only as a political achievement but as an economic strategy.

On the other hand, the current regime might look at peace with Israel as a threat to its own existence. The “Zionist enemy” has long served as the central external threat used to justify domestic repression and the prioritization of the security apparatus. Trading a state of permanent war for a diplomatic settlement would require the regime to reinvent itself, a shift that many hardliners may fear is a prelude to their own demise.

For decades, the dominant assumption in diplomacy has been that resolving the Palestinian issue would unlock broader regional peace. But what if the reverse were true? What if a comprehensive regional breakthrough, even one involving Israel’s most formidable adversary, were the key to forcing a resolution of the Palestinian question?

Such a possible breakthrough, however, sits beyond the reach of the United States acting alone. While Washington remains the indispensable guarantor for Jerusalem, it lacks the necessary leverage in Tehran to secure a similar leap of faith. In the shadow of the current war, a durable agreement could require a multipolar mediation team in which China and Russia, Iran’s principal allies, would serve as reciprocal guarantors for the Islamic Republic.

Ultimately, any such grand realignment remains a distant vision until a more durable ceasefire is signed. The current ceasefire talks have nonetheless opened a channel of communication between Tehran and Washington, albeit indirectly through mediators. This could, over time, create space to revisit the long-standing hostility that has defined the relationship.

Whether a disruptor in Washington or a visionary regional leader has the audacity to pursue such a “Grand Bargain” remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the old paradigms of incremental diplomacy have reached their limit. A durable peace will not be found in small gestures, but in the reluctant realization that security for one can no longer be bought through the permanent insecurity of the other. If a Nobel-worthy breakthrough exists, it lies in this dual ideological rupture, a painful, necessary disentangling of a century of ghosts that finally allows the living to inhabit the “normal existence” that has eluded the region for generations.

Check out my recently published Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.

But behind this display lies a reality that cuts against the image Israel projects. Roughly 100,000 Holocaust survivors still live in the country today, most in their late eighties and nineties. And according to Israeli government data and reporting across the Israeli press, about one in three lives in poverty or near-poverty. More than half struggle to cover basic monthly expenses, and over 30 percent require assistance simply to buy food.

This is not a peripheral issue. It is a defining moral failure. In a state that has made the Holocaust central to its identity and global narrative, the neglect of those who survived it is not an anomaly; it is a contradiction at the heart of the system.

Understandably, Israel has built the most extensive culture of Holocaust remembrance in the world. Institutions such as Yad Vashem stand at the center of national and global memory. The Holocaust is not simply a historical event in Israel; it is a foundational element of identity, education, and political consciousness. It is invoked in speeches, embedded in school curricula, and woven into the country’s understanding of its place in the world. Memory, in Israel, is not passive. It is active, institutionalized, and ever-present.

But memory, no matter how solemn, is not the same as responsibility. The contradiction is stark: in a state where the Holocaust occupies such a central moral and political role, a substantial portion of its surviving witnesses live in material insecurity. The issue is not that Israel has ignored them entirely. Survivors receive stipends, benefits, and services through various government agencies; roughly 30 percent rely on income supplements because their earnings are too low, and nearly three-quarters require long-term care assistance. But these systems are often bureaucratically fragmented, unevenly distributed, and insufficient to meet the realities of aging populations with complex medical and social needs.

The result is a gap, persistent, measurable, and morally significant, between what Israel says about the Holocaust and what it does for those who lived through it. That gap is rarely the focus of national attention.

It is, however, a reflection of political priorities. Under the Netanyahu government, hundreds of millions of shekels have been directed toward coalition commitments, including subsidies and institutional support for ultra-Orthodox parties whose political backing is essential to maintaining the governing majority. These allocations are not incidental; they reflect deliberate choices about where state resources are directed. The question they raise is unavoidable: why does a state capable of mobilizing vast funds for political stability struggle to ensure basic dignity for the last generation of Holocaust survivors?

The dissonance becomes even more acute in wartime. During the recent war with Iran, elderly Israelis, including Holocaust survivors, were among those killed when missile strikes hit residential areas where access to protected shelters was inadequate or unreachable. In several cases, victims were unable to reach safety in time or lacked effective protection in their homes. They were not lost because the state had forgotten them, but because its systems of protection failed when they were most urgently needed.

On commemorative days, the emphasis is on collective memory, national unity, and historical continuity. The image projected, both domestically and internationally, is one of a society deeply committed to honoring its past. And in many ways, that image is real. The rituals are sincere. The institutions are formidable. The educational infrastructure is extensive. But it is also incomplete.

Because what is being honored is not only the memory of the dead, but the presence of the living, and it is precisely here that the dissonance becomes difficult to ignore.

Holocaust survivors in Israel are not symbols. They are individuals. They require not only remembrance, but sustained material support: adequate pensions, accessible healthcare, stable housing, and social services that reflect their age and vulnerability. Yet many continue to navigate a system that does not fully meet these needs. Israeli studies have shown that Holocaust survivors, as a group, often experience higher rates of poverty and hardship than other elderly populations in the country, a fact that underscores the depth of the failure.

This is not simply a bureaucratic oversight. It reflects deeper political and structural priorities.

In Israel, the Holocaust functions not only as a site of memory but as a framework for political meaning. It is invoked in discussions of security, existential threat, and national survival. It shapes how the state presents itself to the world and how it understands its own vulnerabilities. In diplomatic contexts, it carries moral weight. In domestic politics, it serves as a unifying narrative across an otherwise highly divided society.

But while the Holocaust is frequently mobilized to define the nation’s fears, it is less consistently mobilized to define its social obligations. Holocaust remembrance cannot be reduced to an exercise in public relations. Symbolic politics is powerful and comparatively inexpensive. Welfare policy is not.

Addressing the material needs of an aging population requires sustained investment, administrative coordination, political will—and above all, empathy. It requires prioritization. Here, the contrast becomes unavoidable: the state that has mastered the language of remembrance has been less effective in translating that language into comprehensive care for its survivors.

The question, then, is not whether Israel remembers. It clearly does. The question is what that remembrance obligates. If the Holocaust is, as Israeli leaders often insist, a defining moral reference point, then its meaning cannot be confined to ceremonies and rhetoric. It must address the conditions under which survivors live their final years and whether they can do so with dignity and protection.

Because in the end, the measure of remembrance is not only how a nation mourns its dead. It is whether those who survived are allowed to live and die with dignity in the state that claims to honor them.

I am the son of Holocaust survivors. Both of my parents are gone. And it is precisely for that reason that it is so painful to witness how those who are still alive are being treated.

Memory, if it is to mean anything, must extend beyond ceremony. It must shape how the living are cared for, especially those who endured what the state itself calls its defining moral catastrophe.

Please check out my recently published book, Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.

In the end, Viktor Orbán did not simply lose an election. He lost the story he had told Hungarians about themselves for nearly two decades. For years, Orbán cast Brussels as the primary threat to Hungarian sovereignty. Yet many Hungarians draw a distinction between voluntary integration within the European Union and the far more unsettling political alignment with Russia, which they see as a threat to their sovereignty.

Alongside figures like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, Orbán positioned himself within a political camp that many Hungarians came to see as detached from their daily realities. This alignment was not merely ideological; it became a material burden. As Orbán’s project of “strategic autonomy” deepened, Hungary faced mounting economic strain, including persistent inflation, eroding purchasing power, and uncertainty about European Union funding.

Over time, this economic discontent was reinforced by another, more corrosive perception: entrenched corruption and state capture. The accumulation of wealth among politically connected elites came to be seen not as an unintended side effect of governance, but as a structural feature of the system. Together, these developments undermined the government’s central promise. Sovereignty, once framed as protection from external pressure, began to feel indistinguishable from domestic entrenchment and economic vulnerability.

For many, the election felt like something deeper than a routine democratic turnover. It carried the resonance of a country reclaiming its autonomy. Hungary did not relive the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; there were no tanks in the streets, but its moral clarity hovered over the political moment.

This time, the outcome was different. The people won, galvanized by Péter Magyar's rise. As a former Orbán insider who had lived within the machinery of the state, Magyar was able to do what previous opposition figures could not: he spoke the language of the Hungarian heartland. By invoking national dignity and the spirit of 1956 from a position of deep familiarity with the regime, he acted as a mirror, reflecting the gap between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his rule. His defection from the inner circle provided the insider’s credibility that allowed ordinary voters to finally imagine a Hungary beyond Fidesz, the ruling party.

Orbán’s long rule was built on a paradox. He rose to power as a critic of foreign control, invoking Hungary’s history of subjugation under empires and, most painfully, under Soviet domination. He understood how deeply the language of sovereignty resonates in Hungarian political culture. Yet over time, his government cultivated ever closer ties with Vladimir Putin, a leader who, for many Hungarians, embodies precisely the kind of external power their history has taught them to distrust. The man who claimed to defend Hungarian sovereignty appeared, in the eyes of many ordinary voters, to be abandoning it.

That perception was sharpened in the final days of the campaign. JD Vance’s visit to Budapest was meant to signal international support and ideological solidarity. Instead, it underscored the extent to which Hungary had become embedded in a network of global political forces. While Orbán marketed his ties to Trump as proof of Hungary being a “major global player, the electorate increasingly saw their country as a backdrop for imported American culture wars.

Hungary is not a deeply militaristic society. Its modern history is marked less by expansion than by the loss of territory, autonomy, and control over its own fate. This has produced a political culture acutely sensitive to the dangers of alignment with larger powers. Hungarians know how quickly alliances can become dependencies. They understand how easily sovereignty can be compromised in the name of security or ideological affinity.

In this context, the war in Ukraine, a country that borders Hungary, stripped away any pretense of pragmatism, casting Viktor Orbán’s relationship with Vladimir Putin in stark moral terms. The danger was not immediate entanglement in war, but a steady drift into a geopolitical posture that contradicted Hungary’s historical instincts and national interests.

What ultimately doomed Orbán was the gradual erosion of trust in the narrative that had sustained him. The more he insisted that he alone could protect Hungary from external forces, the more his own alliances appeared to contradict that claim. Voters began to see a gap between rhetoric and reality that could no longer be ignored.

This is where the echo of 1956 becomes most meaningful. The revolution was a statement about dignity and the right of a people to determine their own path. In rejecting Orbán, Hungarian voters drew from the same well of collective memory. They were asserting that sovereignty cannot be reduced to slogans; it must be meaningful.

Orbán’s defeat represents a reassertion of a deeply rooted Hungarian instinct: the refusal to accept any form of domination, whether imposed by force or obscured by rhetoric. History leaves behind moral reference points that shape how societies understand their present. In this election, Hungary did not relive 1956. But it remembered it. And in that act of remembrance, it chose democracy.

Please check out my new book, Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.

Under U.S. constitutional law, the standard for “aid and comfort” is very narrow. It requires intentional support for an enemy in a clearly defined legal sense. By that standard, economic policy decisions, even those with serious geopolitical consequences, do not qualify.

But stopping at the legal definition risks missing the harder issue.

The issue is not theoretical. Donald Trump has moved to ease enforcement of sanctions on Iranian oil exports, including allowing certain shipments already in transit to proceed in order to avoid disrupting global energy markets. These decisions are being made while the United States is in direct military confrontation with Iran.

The result is a sharp tension: steps taken to stabilize global energy markets may also increase revenue for a wartime adversary.

This reflects a broader shift in modern conflict. The relationship between the United States and Iran has long existed in a gray zone, with sanctions, proxy warfare, cyber operations, and periodic military escalation. But when direct confrontation occurs, that ambiguity shrinks. Even without a formal declaration of war, policy choices begin to take on a different meaning.

The argument for easing sanctions enforcement is not trivial. Global oil markets are fragile. Sudden disruptions can lead to price spikes, supply problems, and wider economic instability. Policymakers often have to balance competing pressures, and market stability is a legitimate concern.

At the same time, oil revenue is central to Iran’s ability to function as a state. It funds domestic governance and supports its regional activities. Even limited flexibility, such as allowing shipments already in transit to proceed, can have real financial effects.

This is where intent and effect come apart.

The intent behind sanctions flexibility is usually limited: to avoid market disruption, prevent escalation, or reduce unintended harm. These are short-term economic goals, not military ones.

But the effect can still matter. In an active conflict, even small increases in revenue can affect an adversary’s capacity to sustain its operations.

None of this implies hidden motives or wrongdoing. It reflects a basic reality of today’s world: economic tools are now part of strategic warfare. Trade, finance, and war are no longer separate systems. They interact constantly.

It is in this context that the phrase “aid and comfort” sometimes reappears in public debate. Legally, the term is strict and narrow. It requires intent and a high standard of proof. By that definition, sanctions relief is not treason.

But the fact that the phrase still appears and resonates in public discourse tells us something important. It reflects not only a legal misunderstanding, but also a perception problem: lawful economic decisions can still be seen as materially benefiting an adversary during wartime.

In that sense, “aid and comfort” is less a legal category that raises questions and causes unease with the end results. It captures the intuition that an action may be legally permissible yet strategically troubling. The law draws a clear boundary. Perception often does not.

What makes this harder is that the boundaries between economics and security have blurred. Sanctions, energy markets, financial systems, and military competition now operate within a single connected system. A decision made for domestic economic reasons can quickly become a strategic event. There is no longer a clean separation between economic policy and national security.

This creates a problem of judgment, not just legality.

A decision to allow oil shipments already in transit to proceed may be reasonable to prevent market disruption. At the same time, it may also reduce pressure on a state that the United States is actively confronting militarily. Both interpretations can hold at once.

The difficulty is that there is no single framework that fully resolves this tension. Simply pointing to the legal definition of treason does not resolve the concern. But ignoring the strategic effects of economic decisions is also inadequate.

This is the condition of modern conflict: not a clear separation between war and peace, or between economic policy and strategic action, but overlapping domains in which the same decision can be justified on one register and contested on another.

That is where the deeper discomfort sits, not in the law itself, but in the perception of a situation in which the United States is fighting Iran while simultaneously easing economic pressure on it through sanctions relief. It raises, at least implicitly, a harder question: what does it mean to be “on one side” in a conflict when elements of state policy appear, however defensible in economic terms, to benefit the other, and for some, that perception edges as far as accusations of treason, even if the legal standard clearly does not.

As Orwell suggested, modern warfare is often less about winning than about the management of ongoing conflict, becoming protracted in ways that help keep the combatants in power.

Please check out my book, Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond. https://www.amazon.com/Op-Ed-Musings-Peace-Middle-Beyond/dp/B0FG2Q9HLL/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title