The Israel-Hating Jew

Last week, we were shocked when October 7 th hostage, survivor Noa Argamani, bravely spoke at the UN Security Council, only to be bashed immediately after by the anti-Israel activist Daniel Levy who, with pride, stood next to the PLO ambassador Riyad Mansour as if he were a trophy, spouting lies about the Jewish State.

Israel is fighting an uphill battle every time its detractors represent an international organization, because they transmit an aura of impartiality. The truth is, what Israel’s detractors seek and appreciate the most is a Jew who attacks Israel. The Israel-hating Jew is priceless because it absolves them from the obvious accusation of antisemitism. Israel is held to a different standard than any other country but its not because the international organizations doing so are antisemitic. Look at Daniel Levy who also hates Israel and is clearly not Italian!

In these sad, decadent times, dominated by social media and identity politics, the Israel-hating Jew is a walking contradiction. In all other cases, lived experience is treated as sacred—only the oppressed can speak on their own oppression, only the colonized may critique colonialism.

Yet, the Israel-hating Jews like Daniel Levy operate in a paradox: they invoke their Jewish identity as a license to attack Israel, while insisting that Jewish identity itself holds no collective meaning. They reject Jewish peoplehood but assert their own Jewishness to grant legitimacy to their arguments.

Daniel Levy stood there with his pseudo-intellectual look and claimed Israel is merely a Western colonial project—despite millennia of Jewish presence in this land—while simultaneously invoking his Jewish pedigree to shield himself from accusations of antisemitism.

Levy belongs to a tradition as old as Judaism itself and that has reached its zenith with October 7 th —the possibility of kicking Israel now that it is being attacked on multiple fronts. Organizations like “Not in Our Name” spread in the US liberal minded and ill-informed Jewish community like wildfire. Its members never stopped to think how arrogant and self-centered do they need to be to believe Israel operates in their name when protecting its own citizens.

Daniel Levy, Noam Chomsky, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, Miko Peled fill arenas around the world to hear them slam a Jewish state where they don’t even live in. Figures like Norman Finkelstein illustrate this phenomenon perfectly—his entire career depends on the tension between his Jewish identity and his rejection of it. He will not accept Israel as a Jewish state, but he will also not allow non-Jews to attack it with the same force, as they lack his credentials. Finkelstein is a Middle East expert whose entire academic focus is Israel, and yet he does not even speak Hebrew. Let that sink in. It’s like me dedicating a lifetime to studying China and still not being able to speak a word of Mandarin. How could you trust me to analyze China? And yet Finkelstein’s Holocaust surviving parents grant him complete authority to talk about a country he reads about with the help of Google Translate.

In the end, we can take comfort in knowing that Daniel Levy and the other Israel-hating Jews are not outside Jewish identity but trapped within it, forever defining themselves by the very thing they claim to repudiate. They get the 15 minutes of fame they seek by standing next to Israel’s enemies but their rejection is their brand, and their contradiction is their currency.