The Crossroads Obscured, Redux

Reaching a different and wider audience means hearing from different voices.  I have been told that the opposition to the policies of the current Government in Israel is simply the product of years of indoctination by educators in the United States and has no actual relationship to those in charge today.  That may be so, but it is dangerous for Israelis and diaspora Jews to attribute all we are seeing today to “leftist” opinionmakers.  When the relentless critiques of Israel come as much from Tucker Carlson or the Vice President of the United Sttaes as they do from the Mayor the City of New York, it is a grave mistake to discount them as simply the product of rogue influencers.

Ths following was published elsewhere last June when a series of democratic socialists opposed to Israel won primary elections causing a level of panic and abandonment among many American Jews and was an attempt to explain what is happening both in the Unuted States and elsewhere that does not further the cause of Jews in the diaspora or in Israel:

It is not, as is sometimes said, the fault of the Prime Minister. His Government was formed after a series of national elections and reflects, as best elections can do in one governed that way, the will and mood of the people who live in Israel. That has been the case for most of the time since what is now Likud, then led by Menachem Begin, took over the Government after the shocking, and nearly fatal to Israel, Yom Kippur War, and then the intifada (the attacks on the civilian infrastructure and persons in Israel) after the Oslo accords were reached.

If neither of those events ring a bell, or tell you anything important, you really have no basis upon which to view the situation that exists in that part of the world. Yes, a tiny sliver of what was then called Palestine, was set aside as a homeland for Jews after the attempt to annihilate people based on their ancestry in what many of us call the shoa and more call the holocaust. The Arab countries surrounding that sliver of land decided they did not want any such sliver to exist and attacked it, while expelling the Jews who had lived in their lands for centuries. they have never stopped doing so.

Under those circumstances, and particularly after the near final destruction of the State of Israel in 1973, it is perhaps understandable that Israelis would decide that the generally socialist (and ashkenazit) Government that had largely governed Israel since its inception should be replaced by one which Israelis believed would do better at protecting them. Without going through chapter and verse of what happened after that, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a person opposed to any steps toward some resolution of the otherwise never-ending threats to Israel’s existence, we can skip to the era we are now in where for most of time since first becoming Prime Minister in 1996, Benyamin Netanyahu has been the head of the operational Government of the State of Israel.

The Labor Party, which first lost control of the Government to the party led by Menachem Begin in 1977, is barely a shell of what it once was. It has even changed its name before this year’s elections where it will run as “The Democrats.” In the most recent period when Netanyahu was dislodged from being Prime Minister, from early in 2021 until the end of 2022, the coalition which controlled the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) was made up of parties that disagreed with each other on virtually everything other than the idea to keep Netanyahu away from controlling the Government, collapsed leading to elections which gave a Netanyahu led coalition a barely sufficient majority to again take control of the Government.

This coalition, though, was quite different from any other which had led Israel even after Labor virtually disappeared. It had, and still has, very extreme elements which have no interest in any agreements with elements in the region favoring the creation of an independent state for what are now called “Palestinians” (generally meaning non-Jewish, mainly Arab, people related to those displaced, by force or by choice by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948) and who actively support the annexation of parts (if not all) of the areas on the west bank of the Jordan River which were not part of Israel in 1948 but which has essentially been occupied under Israeli military control since Israel defeated Arab forces which attacked it in 1967.

The most notorious of those members of the current Government, at least in my eyes and that of many, many others, are Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of “national security,” and Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance. Before Prime Minister Rabin was murdered, Ben-Gvir made what was effectively a public threat against him on national television, idolized a mass murderer from a right wing movement, and was deemed too dangerous to conscript, but has now been placed in at least nominal control of national security. Twenty-seven years after Rabin was assassinated, Smotrich made an incendiary speech alleging without any evidence (and contrary to the assassin’s own statements) that the security forces within that Government was responsible for the murder and, in any event, right-wing rhetoric against Rabin at the time was justified.

The Prime Minister’s fear of alienating these two men (I am resisting the more colorful descriptions of them which pop into my head), which could have led to the collapse of his narrow coalition, has resulted in their having quite outsized influence over the Government, despite together holding only 13 seats of the 120 member Knesset.

The influence of these two men, and the movement they speak for, is not abstract. It shows up on the ground in the West Bank, where settler violence against Palestinians has, over the past two years, reached levels not seen in the two decades such things have been tracked — on the order of eighteen hundred recorded attacks in a single year, an average of five a day, ranging from the burning of homes, vehicles and olive groves to the killing of farmers on their own land. What makes this the Government’s problem, and not merely the problem of a few zealots, is what the Government does and does not do about it. Arrests are rare; prosecutions rarer still. One accounting of some fifteen hundred Palestinian deaths over roughly eight years found that Israeli authorities opened barely a hundred investigations and obtained a grand total of one conviction. When seven Israelis detained for such acts were released in early 2025, the Defense Minister explained that it was better for the families of Jewish settlers to be happy than for the families of released Palestinian prisoners to be. And the two ministers in question have repeatedly praised the very young men responsible for the worst of the outpost violence as “pioneers.” When a state declines to enforce its own laws against one population while enforcing them ruthlessly against another, the failure to act is itself a policy. The fact that the Prime Minister was eventually moved, under international pressure, to issue an unusual directive ordering the army to rein in this violence only proves the point: he was, in effect, issuing a warning to members of his own cabinet, because the problem was emanating from inside his own Government.

The same hands have been busy at a quieter and more consequential project: making the establishment of any future Palestinian state, on any contiguous piece of land, practically impossible. Smotrich, not content with the Finance Ministry, secured for himself a second portfolio inside the Defense Ministry and a new bureaucracy of his own creation, through which civilian — that is to say, political — control has been substituted for military administration over the West Bank, and through which settlement approvals are accelerated. New outposts have multiplied; large tracts have been declared “state land” by administrative fiat, with the burden placed on Palestinian families to prove ownership they have held for generations; and the reach of settlement has been pushed even into the areas that the Oslo framework had assigned to Palestinian civil control. None of this is security in any honest sense. It is the deliberate creation of facts on the ground, parcel by parcel, designed to ensure that when the day for negotiation finally comes — if it comes — there will be nothing left to negotiate over. You cannot partition a territory that has been deliberately rendered un-partitionable, and that is precisely the intention.

Behind the bureaucracy sits an older and franker ambition, which its holders no longer trouble to disguise: the steady removal of non-Jews from the land between the river and the sea. When a senior minister announces that Gaza belongs to Israel and that the people living there are merely “guests” — and the Prime Minister says nothing — that is not a slip of the tongue, it is a statement of program. And here it is worth noticing something that the maximalists themselves prefer to blur. Gaza is not, by any traditional reckoning, part of the biblical Land of Israel at all; it sat outside the borders that the religious-nationalist camp invokes to justify its claims in Judea and Samaria. So when the same voices reach for Gaza too, the biblical argument falls away and what is left is simply the appetite for land without the people on it — which is the thing itself, stripped of its disguise.

None of this is meant to slight the fear under which Israelis actually live, or the rawness of the seventh of October, which for them remains an open wound and not a talking point. That morning was the worst single day of slaughter visited upon Jews since the shoa — some twelve hundred dead, most of them civilians, and some two hundred and fifty dragged into Gaza as hostages. Hamas bears the responsibility for that atrocity, fully and without dilution, and nothing I say about the failures that preceded it shifts an ounce of that guilt onto the victims. The instinct of a people so attacked to place its own security above every other consideration is not only understandable; it is human, and I will not ask anyone to pretend otherwise.

But here is the difficulty, and it is one that Israelis themselves, by large majorities, have been pressing far harder than any critic abroad. After the near-catastrophe of 1973, a traumatized Israel did the hard and honorable thing: it convened the Agranat Commission, an independent state inquiry, and allowed the truth to fall where it would — and it fell high, ending careers. That is the Israeli tradition; some twenty such commissions have been seated over the life of the state. Yet after what is, by any measure, the gravest intelligence and operational failure in the nation’s history, this Government has resisted precisely that reckoning. It has offered instead a body of its own appointment, its scope shaped by a ministerial team the Prime Minister himself would head — what its critics, not unfairly, call a commission convened to investigate itself. As I write this, the High Court has given the Government until the first of July to produce a “suitable” framework, and the framework it has produced is the politically controlled substitute. The Prime Minister allows that the seventh of October was a severe intelligence failure but insists it was not a betrayal, and he would have any inquiry reach all the way back to Oslo and to the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza — anywhere, that is, except the long years of his own watch.

The consequence is that we still do not know, in any authoritative and trustworthy way, how much was known before that morning and then waved aside — though we have powerful reason to believe the answer is: a great deal. The young women known as tatzpitaniyot — the “eyes of the army,” stationed unarmed at Nahal Oz, barely a kilometer from the fence — had for weeks been reporting what they saw with their own eyes: Hamas openly rehearsing an assault on a full-scale mock-up of an Israeli tank, drone activity, squads studying the cameras, the gates, the breaches in the fence. They sent these warnings up the chain of command, and the chain, by numerous accounts of the survivors, dismissed them as the overwrought nerves of teenage girls. On the morning of the seventh, fifteen of those young women were killed at that base and several more were seized and held in Gaza for well over a year. They saw it coming. They said so, plainly and in time. They were not believed, and then they were left to pay with their lives for the failure of the men who would not listen to them. A people that genuinely honored its own security would want, before all else, to know how that was allowed to happen — and a government that resists knowing is not protecting Israelis. It is protecting itself. To insist on that inquiry is not to attack Israel; it is, once again, to stand with it, and with the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who deserved to be heard.

It is all of this together — the violence enabled, the partition foreclosed, the open talk of a land emptied of its non-Jewish inhabitants, and a leadership that will not honestly account even for its own catastrophic failures — that has fed a growing antipathy toward Israel abroad, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Much of that antipathy is, in its origins, a perfectly rational response to conduct that I myself find indefensible, and it is shared by a great many Israelis and by Jews like me who consider the present Government an obstacle to the only future in which Israel survives as both Jewish and decent. What this Government has brought upon Israel and, by extension, the Jewish people there and in the diaspora, cannot be ignored. But this is exactly where the road forks, and where I part company with much of what I have been hearing of late — because there is all the difference in the world between opposing what a government does and indicting the people in whose name it claims to act, and the failure to hold that line is not a refinement of the argument but the abandonment of it.

It needs to be said plainly, because so much of the alarm since Tuesday has gotten this exactly backwards, that the antipathy toward Israel now surfacing in our politics did not begin with Zohran Mamdani, nor with the candidates who won with his backing this week. They did not manufacture that sentiment; they were elected by voters who had been moving in this direction for years, and the politicians have merely ridden the wave — some cynically, having seen where the votes had gone, others out of a conviction they held all along. To treat the mayor’s words as the origin of something, as though a single politician had conjured a national mood out of nothing, is not only wrong; it is dangerous, because it lets us mistake the symptom for the disease. You do not turn back a tide by denouncing the surfer. The current was running well before he caught it, and it will keep running until we are honest about what set it in motion — which is the whole of what I have been trying to describe here.

None of this, I should add, is meant to excuse the genuinely unhinged criticism that has lately passed for argument, which does a different kind of damage. To accuse Israel of “genocide” is to abuse a word of precise and terrible meaning — a misuse that, whatever its authors intend, cheapens the real exterminations the word exists to name (the shoa among them, and arguably the murder of Israeli civilians in their own homes on the seventh of October as well). And to call Israel an “apartheid state” is to assert something that falls apart the moment it meets the facts within Israel’s own borders, where Arab citizens vote, sit in the Knesset, and have served on its Supreme Court, and where an Arab party — Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am — sat in the very governing coalition that preceded this one. That is not a thing that can happen in a regime that actually practices apartheid. When criticism runs to charges that extreme, it becomes more than difficult to see the merit in whatever else is alleged; the exaggeration discredits the whole.

This is not to pretend that the continued occupation of the West Bank is without serious problems, because it plainly is: there, beyond Israel’s recognized borders and under military rule, some people are governed differently from others who live beside them, for reasons hard to reconcile. But here, too, the reasons the occupation has lasted are written all over the history of the region — the intifada that followed Oslo, the buses and cafés torn apart just as Israel had begun, however haltingly, to step back, would by itself illustrate why ending it is no simple matter. None of which changes the essential thing: a resolution is necessary, and it is one this Government, whatever else may be said of it, plainly has no interest in achieving.

I too was concerned and unhappy about Tuesday night, which is not good for the Democratic Party and worse for the country. But these candidates are not the problem. They are going where the votes are, and the votes are decidedly against Israel and those of us who care about Israel. Some of that opposition is a fair response to a government I oppose myself; but it has also become the costume under which an older hatred can walk around in daylight. Much of that is the product of the always present and sometimes latent antisemitism that creeps among us (different, but a close cousin, of the anti-immigrant, anti-almost-everyone-who-doesn’t-look-like-me-ism that pervades the country). What has brought it out of latency as to Jews and Israel is a Government that sees Israel as a power to rule over people who do not want to be ruled over by Israel, which countenances violence by settlers against others who live among them, and which no longer shows an interest in living in peace, no matter how difficult that struggle to do so might be. That is not the Israel I grew up with, and there are many reasons for the change in direction, but it is that — and no US political party or leader is responsible for it.