If Jews Vanished: A Thought Experiment About Israel and the World

Let’s imagine, as a (tremendously unsettling) thought experiment, that Jews everywhere suddenly disappeared. Not as the result of violence or expulsion, but all at once and without explanation. The value of such an exercise is not rhetorical shock, but analytical clarity. It forces a consideration of what is actually held together by Jewish presence, and what would happen if that presence were removed.

This thought experiment engages a set of claims that have become increasingly common in public discourse, claims that frame Jewish disappearance, or the end of Jewish sovereignty, as an implicit or explicit solution. These claims surface in antizionist slogans heard at protests and online, such as “we don’t want ’48, we want all of it,” or “from the river to the sea,” and in more overtly antisemitic statements that invoke the murder of six million Jews as an unfinished project. At their core, these claims share a belief that the removal of Jews, or of Jewish self-determination, would produce moral clarity, justice, or peace. While those who advance such claims are generally beyond persuasion, this thought experiment is aimed at those who encounter them and have not yet examined their assumptions or consequences.

The implications of this thought experiment are, unsurprisingly, clearest when applied to Israel. Israel would experience the effects immediately, even though roughly a quarter of its population is not Jewish. Arab citizens, Druze, Bedouin, and other non-Jewish communities are deeply embedded in the country’s institutions, economy, and civic life. However, their continued presence would not mitigate the shock of Jewish disappearance. On the contrary, it would make the collapse more visible. Israel would not transition into a new political form. It would lose the personnel that sustain its governing apparatus, security forces, courts, hospitals, universities, and much of its economy. Borders, ports, airspace control, and critical infrastructure would be left unmanned. Non-Jewish citizens would not inherit a functioning polity. They would find themselves inside a vacuum.

That vacuum would not remain abstract for long. Regional actors and global powers would intervene quickly, driven less by ideology than by the need to contain instability and secure sensitive assets. The territory would become contested space, with competing claims from Palestinian factions, neighboring states, and non-state actors. The central question would not be who deserves sovereignty, but who can impose order. Seen this way, the assumption that Israel’s disappearance would automatically resolve the conflict and produce a Palestinian state begins to look less like an outcome than an article of faith.

Israel has long been the central reference point around which Palestinian politics, regional alliances, and international diplomacy have been organized. Remove that reference point and coherence does not follow. Internal divisions would intensify, economic systems dependent on trade, labor flows, and shared infrastructure would collapse, and what is often imagined as a clean transition would resemble fragmentation. Beyond its material role, Israel has also served as an organizing symbol. Entire movements, militias, advocacy organizations, and even governments have defined their legitimacy around opposition to Israel or Jews more broadly. For some, that opposition is foundational. Remove it, and their raison d’être collapses. And this is not a stabilizing outcome, despite what many antizionists and Jew haters may want to believe. History suggests that institutions and societies organized around a single adversary rarely become more stable when that adversary disappears. Instead, they tend to fracture or redirect their energies toward new targets. Thus, the disappearance of Jews would not eliminate the need for a scapegoat. It would sharpen the search for a new one, with internal minorities, rival sects, political dissidents, or external powers quickly filling the void, often with heightened intensity rather than restraint.

Only after following this logic does it make sense to look beyond Israel itself. The disappearance of Jews in the Diaspora would register differently, but no less profoundly. Jewish communities are embedded across professional, academic, cultural, and civic life in Western societies. Their sudden absence would disrupt institutions that rely on continuity, mentorship, and dense networks of expertise. And this is not a claim about Jewish uniqueness. It is an observation about how systems behave when entire communities are removed at once.

There is also historical precedent for considering what happens to societies when Jewish communities disappear from them. In medieval Europe, in parts of the Islamic world, and in modern authoritarian states, the expulsion or destruction of Jews was often followed not by social cohesion or renewal, but by economic contraction, institutional weakening, and increased political repression. Commercial networks frayed, urban centers declined, and regimes that had removed Jews frequently turned toward harsher forms of internal control. This recurring pattern is sometimes captured, in biblical language, by the phrase “I shall bless those who bless you,” but it can also be read in secular terms. Societies capable of sustaining Jewish life have often been those able to tolerate pluralism, manage dissent, and maintain complex institutions. When Jews disappear, it is rarely an isolated event. It is usually a signal that something broader has already begun to fail.

The social consequences would extend further. Antisemitism has often served as a way to give shape to diffuse anxieties about power, inequality, and modernity. The disappearance of Jews would not resolve those anxieties. It would leave them unmoored. The object of resentment would change. The underlying impulse would remain.

A version of this thought experiment was explored years ago in the Russian-language film Lekh Lekha, directed by M. Kovensky and released in 2009. (The title refers to the biblical command to Abraham, usually translated as “go forth,” but more precisely rendered as “go to yourself,” marking the beginning of Jewish history as a journey shaped by rupture, responsibility, and moral demand.) Made well before October 7, the film imagines a world grappling with the sudden absence of Jews and finds not resolution, but disorientation and instability. The fact that the film predates the current war does not weaken its conclusions. If anything, it underscores how little the underlying dynamics have changed.

This thought experiment does not ask what the world would gain. It asks those who may be sympathetic to claims that frame Jewish disappearance as a solution to consider what would actually follow. The answers are not emotional or symbolic. They are structural. And they make clear that this outcome would not be good for non-Jewish Israelis, Palestinians, the region, or the societies that imagine erasure as a path to justice.