When Loyalty Becomes More Important Than the Country

What America’s Reconstruction can teach us about Israel today

I have to admit, I’ve only recently started reading about the American Civil War and its aftermath. I knew surprisingly little about this period of history, but I’m beginning to wonder whether it might help shed some light on what’s happening in Israel today.

I started with Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist, whose writing about citizenship, equality and the rights of minorities has some striking parallels with the position of Arab citizens in Israel. That’s something I want to explore in another piece.

But as I began reading about Reconstruction, the period that followed the Civil War, something else caught my attention. What happens to people who have supported a political cause after that cause has brought catastrophe upon them? How do they understand their own suffering? And why might they remain fiercely loyal to the very leaders and political movements whose decisions helped bring about that suffering?

I couldn’t help thinking about Israel today.

In 1865, the American Civil War ended. Four years of fighting had left much of the South devastated, hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, and the Confederacy defeated. The political order that Southern leaders had fought to preserve, built upon slavery, had collapsed. You might imagine that such a catastrophe would have prompted some serious soul-searching. Had their leaders misled them? Had the cause been worth the suffering? Had their loyalty come at too high a price?

Some undoubtedly asked these questions, but many others responded quite differently. Rather than abandon their political identity, they held on to it more fiercely. Defeat became humiliation, criticism was treated as persecution, and those who challenged the old order were branded traitors. The enormous suffering of the war, rather than discrediting the cause, became part of the mythology that sustained it.

There is something uncomfortably familiar about all this. The historical circumstances are very different, and pretending otherwise wouldn’t help us understand either society. But Reconstruction raises questions about political loyalty, collective identity and the willingness to hold our own leaders accountable that seem particularly relevant to Israel today. How does a political community reach the point where loyalty to its own side becomes more important than loyalty to the country itself?

When disagreement becomes betrayal

One of the things that struck me about Reconstruction was the treatment of white Southerners who broke with the dominant political consensus. Some supported the Republican Party, accepted the outcome of the war and wanted to build a different political future. Their former neighbours called them scalawags, a term of contempt suggesting that they had betrayed their own community. They weren’t simply wrong in the eyes of their opponents. They were disloyal.

For many opponents of Reconstruction, being a good Southerner meant remaining faithful to a particular understanding of Southern identity. You could have lived your entire life in the same town, cared deeply about your community and wanted the best for its future. But if you challenged that political identity, you could find yourself treated as an outsider.

We hear an echo of this in Israeli politics. The word ‘leftist’ has, in some political circles, become much more than a description of someone’s political beliefs. It’s an accusation. Add the word ‘traitor,’ and the transformation is complete. Someone who disagrees about the future of the country is no longer a fellow citizen with different ideas, but someone suspected of working against it.

This didn’t happen overnight, and it certainly didn’t begin on October 7. Netanyahu has spent much of the past three decades cultivating precisely this understanding of Israeli politics. His political language has repeatedly divided the country between those who supposedly represent the real Israel and those who threaten it: the left, the media, the courts, the elites. His infamous election warnings of both 2015 and 2026 that Arab voters were heading to the polling stations “in droves” were perhaps one of the clearest examples of how he could turn the democratic participation of fellow citizens into a threat against his own political camp. The message, repeated in different forms over the years, is that his opponents are not simply wrong, but dangerous, and that he alone can protect the country from them.

Bibi has made the exploitation of these divisions a central part of his political success. After decades of this language, we shouldn’t be surprised that some of his supporters have come to see opposition to Netanyahu as opposition to Israel itself. It is not an accidental consequence of his leadership. It is part of the political culture he has helped create.

Consider Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff who has spent much of his adult life serving the Israeli state, and a father whose son Gal was killed fighting in Gaza. Yet outside his home, a protester recently accused him of having killed his own son. Think about what that means. Eisenkot’s military service, his sacrifice and his bereavement were apparently not enough to protect him from being treated as an enemy. His political position had become the only thing that mattered.

What has to happen to someone’s understanding of political belonging for such an accusation to become possible? At what point does political disagreement become so consuming that even the most basic human sympathy disappears?

When suffering makes loyalty stronger

Perhaps the most troubling lesson from the post-Civil War South is that catastrophe doesn’t necessarily lead people to reconsider their political allegiances. We tend to assume that when a political movement leads its supporters into disaster, they will eventually recognise what has happened and demand accountability. But it doesn’t always work like that.

After the Civil War, the mythology of the ‘Lost Cause’ gradually transformed Confederate defeat into a story of honour, sacrifice and victimhood. The war had been lost, but the righteousness of the cause was preserved. Its leaders could still be celebrated as heroes, while uncomfortable questions about their responsibility for the catastrophe were pushed aside. The suffering itself became part of the justification for continued loyalty.

It’s also worth remembering that the Lost Cause mythology didn’t simply emerge on its own. It was actively cultivated by former Confederate leaders, veterans’ organisations, writers and other influential institutions that had an interest in preserving the honour of the defeated Confederacy and the social order it had defended. They helped shape how the war would be remembered, who would be blamed and who would be celebrated. Slavery, the central cause of the war, was pushed into the background or rewritten as something quite different. The story became one of a noble people overwhelmed by superior force, rather than a political leadership that had taken its society into a disastrous war to preserve slavery.

The parallel to today is that political leaders can play an enormous role in shaping how their supporters understand defeat, suffering and responsibility. They can encourage people to ask difficult questions about their own side, or they can offer them a story in which their side is always the victim and their opponents are always to blame.

There are obvious dangers in applying this comparison too literally to Israel. October 7 was a massacre perpetrated by Hamas. Israel faces real security threats, and the subsequent war cannot simply be explained through domestic political loyalties. But the political response to catastrophe is another matter. October 7 was an extraordinary failure of the Israeli state. It happened under Netanyahu’s government, after years in which he had presented himself as uniquely capable of guaranteeing Israel’s security. For some Israelis, the disaster destroyed whatever confidence they still had in him. For others, loyalty remained remarkably strong.

Why? There are several possible explanations. Some genuinely agree with Netanyahu’s policies and decisions. Others fear the alternatives, or identify strongly with his political and ideological positions. But the history of Reconstruction suggests another possibility worth thinking about. When political identity becomes deeply embedded in someone’s sense of belonging, admitting that a leader has failed can feel like admitting that the community itself has failed. And that’s much harder.

This is where Netanyahu’s long political career matters. For years, he has encouraged Israelis to see him not simply as a politician who happens to lead the country, but as the person standing between Israel and disaster. Criticism of him becomes an attack on the right, an attack on his supporters, sometimes even an attack on the country itself. Once that identification has taken hold, holding Netanyahu accountable for October 7 becomes much more than a judgement about the failures of one prime minister. For some of his supporters, it threatens an entire political identity that has been reinforced over decades.

The more suffering people have endured, the more emotionally costly it may become to question the political identity through which they have understood that suffering. It is perfectly possible to lose faith in a government without losing faith in your country. But when a leader, a political movement and the nation itself become intertwined, that distinction becomes increasingly difficult to make. The very catastrophe that might have been expected to destroy a leader’s political standing can instead become another reason for supporters to rally around him.

Who does the country belong to?

Another central conflict during Reconstruction concerned something even more fundamental than loyalty to the Confederacy: who had the right to govern? The Confederacy’s defeat did not mean that its supporters automatically accepted the new political order. White Southern opponents of Reconstruction frequently regarded governments formed by Republicans, Black voters and their white allies as fundamentally illegitimate. They weren’t simply arguing that these governments had bad policies. They questioned whether such governments had the moral right to exercise authority at all.

This is where the comparison becomes particularly relevant to Israel’s current political moment. The October 2026 election has produced a deeply divided Knesset. Netanyahu’s bloc has fallen short of a majority, and the possibility of an alternative government has once again raised questions about which political alliances are considered legitimate. At the same time, Likud has advanced allegations that the election was stolen, despite election officials saying that the irregularities identified do not justify overturning the result.

There is nothing inherently wrong with challenging an election result through legitimate legal channels. Quite the opposite. That’s part of democracy. But encouraging people to believe that an unfavourable democratic result cannot possibly be genuine is something very different. It suggests that the country somehow belongs to one political camp, and that a government led by anyone else is an illegitimate intrusion.

This, too, fits a pattern that Netanyahu has helped establish over many years. The suggestion that a government supported by Arab parties is somehow less legitimate, or that a coalition excluding Likud cannot truly represent the Israeli public, rests on an assumption that some citizens and political movements have a greater claim to the country than others. Netanyahu has repeatedly encouraged that assumption when it has served his political interests.

Democracy cannot work like that. It requires more than voting. It requires accepting that the other side has an equal right to win, not because we agree with their policies, admire their leaders or think they’ll govern well, but because the country belongs to its citizens, not to whichever political movement currently holds power.

Loyalty is not the same as patriotism

During Reconstruction, accusations of disloyalty were used to enforce political conformity. Those who challenged the dominant identity of their community could be accused of betraying their neighbours, their history and their people. But loyalty to a political movement and loyalty to a country are not the same thing. Sometimes patriotism means supporting a government, sometimes it means opposing one, and sometimes it means telling people with whom we share a political identity that they are wrong. If we can no longer make those distinctions, we’re in trouble.

Tomer Persico has recently written about what he calls the ‘shtetlization’ of Israel, describing a society in which a shared civic identity is increasingly giving way to competing political and cultural tribes, each with its own loyalties and expectations. I think there’s something important in that argument. The problem isn’t that Israelis disagree. We are a remarkably diverse society, with different histories, cultures, beliefs and ideas about what Israel should be. Political disagreement is inevitable, and in many ways healthy.

The problem begins when we stop recognising obligations towards people outside our own political camp. When the suffering of an opponent becomes an opportunity for abuse or celebration, when accusations of betrayal replace political arguments, or when institutions are considered legitimate only when they deliver the result we want. We cannot build a shared future if we recognise only the members of our own political community as fully deserving of respect.

And while this is a problem that all of us have a responsibility to confront, responsibility for creating it is not equally distributed. Netanyahu has held extraordinary political power for much of the past three decades. He has had countless opportunities to lower the temperature, to recognise the legitimacy of his opponents and to remind his supporters that those who disagree with him are no less Israeli. Too often, he has chosen the opposite. Division has been politically useful to him, and the damage to our shared civic life has been enormous.

What Reconstruction actually teaches us

The American Civil War ended in 1865. Reconstruction lasted until 1877. But the struggle over American citizenship, democratic government and national belonging continued for generations. The Confederacy had been defeated militarily, yet its political and social assumptions proved much harder to dislodge. Indeed, the abandonment of federal protection for Black citizenship and the subsequent rise of Jim Crow segregation showed just how devastating the consequences could be when those assumptions regained political power.

I think that’s one of the most important lessons for Israel. An election may remove a government, but it cannot, by itself, change the political culture that sustained it. Netanyahu has dominated Israeli politics for so long that his way of defining political loyalty has become embedded far beyond his own party. The suspicion of political opponents, the language of betrayal, the idea that some Israelis have a greater claim to represent the nation than others: these are not things that will simply disappear when he leaves office. They have been encouraged and reinforced for decades, and they may well outlast the politician who did so much to cultivate them.

Even if Netanyahu eventually leaves office, the deeper questions won’t disappear. Why has political loyalty become so central to the identities of some of his supporters? Why can criticism of a leader be experienced as hostility towards an entire community? Why has the language of treason become so readily available in arguments between fellow citizens? And perhaps most importantly, how do we rebuild a sense of common belonging without demanding that people abandon their different histories, cultures and political beliefs?

I understand the temptation, particularly after a bitter election, to regard the other side as a lost cause. To conclude that its voters are irrational, immoral or simply incapable of change. But I think that’s a mistake. In fact, it’s part of the very problem I’m trying to understand. We cannot criticise the way Netanyahu has encouraged his supporters to see political opponents as enemies and then respond by treating all his supporters as enemies ourselves.

Reconstruction shows us how powerful political identities can be, how humiliation can deepen divisions, and why defeating a political opponent is not the same as persuading a fellow citizen. It also shows that reconciliation alone is not enough. Democracy needs common rules, accountability and a willingness to accept that no political community has a permanent claim to power. The failures of Reconstruction are a reminder of what can happen when those principles are not secured, and when reconciliation with a defeated political movement comes at the expense of the rights and equality of other citizens.

I’m only at the beginning of reading about this period, and I don’t want to pretend that the parallels are exact or that American history offers some ready-made answer to Israel’s problems. But it has already made me think differently about the question of political loyalty.

Israel doesn’t need to become a society without political tribes. That isn’t possible, and I’m not sure it would even be desirable. What we need is a society in which belonging to one tribe doesn’t cancel our obligations to everyone else. Where the son of a political opponent is still mourned as a son of the country, where criticism of a prime minister isn’t treason, and where losing an election isn’t automatically treated as evidence that democracy has been stolen.

A society where loyalty to Israel means something greater than loyalty to whoever happens to lead it.

Netanyahu has spent decades helping to create a political culture in which that distinction has become increasingly blurred. Undoing the damage will take more than removing him from office. It will require us to confront the assumptions about loyalty, legitimacy and belonging that have taken root during his years in power, without falling into the trap of denying the legitimacy of those who supported him.

I don’t know how we get there. But I suspect that understanding why people hold so tightly to their political identities, even when those identities have been associated with enormous suffering, is part of finding an answer. That’s what I’m hoping to learn from Reconstruction. Not how to defeat the other side, but how a country might begin to live together again after its citizens have come to see one another as enemies.