The New Israel-Lites

Rivera is a clothing outlet—a forgettable mix of drapey tops and wide pants—that describes itself online as “your Spanish fashion brand.” Yours, that is, if you live in Andorra, French Polynesia, Nauru, New Caledonia, North Macedonia, the Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, Svalbard & Jan Mayen, Timor-Leste, Wallis and Fatuna—or any one of the roughly 225 countries listed in its checkout drop-down menu.

It’s just not the clothing brand of me, or you, or anyone else who lives in the State of Israel.

Israel simply does not appear on Rivera’s list of nations—both large and so tiny most people couldn’t locate them on a map. Italy follows seamlessly after the Isle of Man, without so much as a whisper of “from the river to the sea.” Because in 2026, who needs to be overtly eliminationist when you can quietly erase an entire country you wish didn’t exist? Declaring your hatred loudly is so 2023.

I emailed Rivera to ask what was going on. A response arrived a couple of days later:

Good morning Danielle,

Unfortunately, we are not currently shipping to Israel. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Best regards,

But why ever not? I replied:

Hi,
Thanks so much for your response. Could you explain why, given that around 225 other countries are listed—including small island nations? Is this due to Gaza? A cultural boycott?

“Elisa,” my once-helpful interlocutor, went silent.

Rivera is, of course—as its name suggests—just a tiny stretch of shoreline along a rapidly expanding coastline of global erasure of Israel and Jews.

I know this inhospitable terrain well. Over 14 years as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch, I repeatedly raised concerns about Israel- and Jew-shaped gaps with managers who failed to acknowledge their existence. There was the outpouring of concern for Arab staff during bouts of Israeli-Palestinian violence—and the near-total absence of acknowledgment when violence occurred (literally) at the end of my street. There was the complete lack of any Jewish staff member in Israel involved in work on the country. There was the colleague who, when I edited his work, refused to engage with me directly, writing emails as if I wasn’t there but insinuating my corrections were motivated by politics or religion.

And after October 7, there was the virtual silence—or worse—in meetings and in output about Hamas’ Israeli hostages, sexual violence, and massacred victims. Poof. Just gone.

If two years ago the face of Israel- and Jew-cancellation was the ranting, flag-waving, keffiyeh-wearing warrior for Palestine, today it is gentler, quieter, and far more dangerous: gentile human resources departments, web developers, and online editors making “neutral” decisions and “administrative” omissions.

They are Israeli-lites—members of a growing global tribe who neither complain nor explain their disdain for Israel; they simply ignore it. They pass over applications with Jewish- or Israeli-sounding names. They fail to invite—or quietly disinvite—Jews and Israelis from forums and gatherings. Lite on reality, but heavy on ideology, they scrub the state that sits between Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt from textbooks, maps, and dropdown menus.

The latest round came on January 25, when UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) wrote to Encyclopaedia Britannica raising serious concerns about historically inaccurate and misleading content on the Britannica Kids website. The materials reportedly describe the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as “Palestine,” including in the present tense, accompanied by undated maps that shade all of Israel and the Palestinian territories as “Palestine.”

We’ve seen this script before, just with a different cast and set. Erasing people from culture, language, and the record is not abstraction; it is groundwork. Not shouted, not protested, but quietly built into systems, until soon enough no one cares what fate befalls you—or even whether you exist at all.