Who Benefits From Keeping America Confused?

I teach people how to function under pressure. Confusion is one of the first things we deal with because a bad read creates bad decisions. If you don’t understand what is happening, you can have all the tools in the world and still use the wrong one.

I look at America today and see the same problem.

We have taken separate subjects and bundled them into political identities. Gender, sexuality, race, economics, climate, policing, colonialism, immigration, and Israel somehow keep ending up in the same conversation. People are expected to know which opinions belong together.

That should make us suspicious.

What Has Become Confused

Start with sexuality and gender.

I don’t care whom another adult loves or how an adult chooses to live. Gay and transgender people deserve the same basic rights, safety, and dignity as everyone else.

From there, the issues separate.

Being gay describes sexual orientation. Being transgender concerns gender identity. Those are different things. Yet we have packaged them together so tightly that people are often expected to hold the same political positions because they fall under the same acronym.

That makes no sense to me.

A gay man doesn’t automatically have an opinion about children’s medical treatment, women’s sports, pronouns, or what schools should teach. A lesbian woman can disagree with a transgender policy. A transgender person can be politically conservative.

People are individuals before they are political categories.

My concern grows when children are involved. Schools should teach children to treat people with respect. Parents should also be able to question ideas involving sex, gender, medicine, sports, and education.

When an institution teaches a disputed belief as settled truth and treats disagreement as a character flaw, I consider that indoctrination.

Economics has become equally confused.

We use capitalism to mean greed and socialism to mean compassion. Neither word means that.

Capitalism depends heavily on private ownership, markets, investment, competition, and price signals. Socialism moves much more control of production and resources toward collective or government ownership. Most Western countries mix markets with taxation, regulation, and public services.

Israel gives us a useful example because we actually tested communal economics in a serious way.

The kibbutz had almost everything going for it. Small communities, voluntary participation, strong social bonds, shared responsibility, and people who often believed deeply in the idea.

Even there, most kibbutzim eventually changed. They introduced private income, different salaries, outside employment, and more market-based arrangements. By 2010, roughly three-quarters of Israel’s nonreligious kibbutzim had moved into what became known as the renewed kibbutz model.

That doesn’t prove people can’t cooperate. It shows that incentives and human behavior don’t disappear because an economic idea sounds fair.

If communal economics became difficult among a few hundred people who voluntarily built their lives around it, I have a hard time believing the same principles become easier when applied to hundreds of millions of strangers.

The Oppressor and the Oppressed

Another confusion comes from the way we now talk about equality.

The basic American idea is simple. The individual has rights under the law.

A different way of looking at society has become much more influential. It sorts people according to power. One group is stronger. Another is weaker. One has historical privilege. Another has suffered.

History belongs in that discussion. Racism and discrimination are real.

The problem begins when the category decides the morality of the person.

Power starts to look like guilt. Weakness starts to look like innocence.

I see how inadequate that framework is through the people who train with me.

Over the years, I have had students from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other parts of the Middle East. We have trained together, talked, disagreed, and learned about one another beyond slogans. They grew up much closer to the cultures, governments, religious pressures, and political realities Americans argue about from thousands of miles away.

I once had a student from Gaza.

She was training in New York, building a life here, and eventually had to return home after pressure from her family. They considered her an infidel for living the way she was living here. I won’t identify her because it is her story and her safety. I remember it because experiences like hers make the Middle East very difficult to reduce to a poster about oppressors and victims.

Then I watch people who have never lived there explain the region with complete moral certainty after learning about it through social media.

That is hard for me to take seriously.

A TikTok algorithm can show you a thousand videos about the Middle East. It still cannot give you the experience of growing up under an authoritarian government, dealing with religious pressure inside a family, living through terrorism, serving in a war, hearing rockets, or sitting across from someone whose life contradicts the political story you were given.

Information and understanding are not the same thing.

Israel fits very neatly into the oppressor-versus-oppressed story because Israel is stronger than the Palestinians. It has a military, an economy, institutions, and a state. Palestinians are weaker.

If that is all you know, the conclusion is easy.

Then history starts getting in the way.

Jews from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Ethiopia, and many other places somehow become European colonizers. Thousands of years of Jewish connection to the land become inconvenient. Wars against Israel, terrorism, suicide bombings, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and October 7 become secondary details.

This is false dilemma thinking on a massive scale. A complicated conflict gets squeezed into two moral boxes because two boxes are much easier to understand than history.

The same confusion appears in the way we talk about speech and violence.

An insult is different from a threat. A threat is different from assault. Vandalism is different from peaceful protest. These distinctions should be obvious.

Yet we increasingly call words violence while finding softer language for actual intimidation when we happen to approve of the cause behind it.

October 7 showed how deeply this framework had already settled in.

Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel, murdered civilians, and kidnapped about 250 people. Almost immediately, some activists began talking about resistance, colonialism, and oppression.

The facts had barely arrived before the political categories did.

Why Does Israel Keep Showing Up?

This used to confuse me more than it does now.

I would see a climate protest and wonder why Israel was there. I would see people discussing sexuality and suddenly Zionism was part of the conversation. American racial politics somehow became a framework for understanding Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.

Once I understood intersectional politics, the pattern became clearer.

Different struggles are treated as products of the same larger system of power. Racism, capitalism, colonialism, gender, sexuality, policing, climate, and imperialism become connected.

Then Zionism gets added to the list.

Israel can now appear almost anywhere because Israel has been turned into a symbol of power. A socialist reaches it through capitalism and imperialism. A queer activist reaches it through intersectionality. A racial activist reaches it through colonialism.

The actual Middle East becomes secondary to what Israel represents inside an American political framework.

That is one reason I place more weight on conversations with people who have actually lived in the region than on someone who discovered the conflict six months ago through an algorithm.

My Egyptian, Iranian, Saudi, Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, and Arab students don’t all think alike. I wouldn’t expect them to. What they tend to understand is that the region is complicated, cultures are different, governments behave differently, religion can carry enormous social power, and people sometimes pay real prices for choices Americans can make casually.

Their disagreements usually have more depth because reality has touched them.

The same cannot always be said for people who enter the conversation certain that their moral position is superior because the correct videos appeared on their phone.

Groups with radically different beliefs can also cooperate through anti-Jewish hate. They may disagree completely about religion, women’s rights, sexuality, economics, and government. A shared enemy can still bring them into the same coalition.

This way of thinking spreads because it is simple.

History is difficult. It requires context, chronology, conflicting interests, and facts that sometimes damage your own argument.

“Oppressor” and “oppressed” are easier.

That simplicity is valuable to anyone trying to mobilize people.

Why Keep the Confusion Going?

You don’t need a conspiracy theory here. Common sense is enough.

Angry people are easier to mobilize. They vote, donate, protest, share, watch, and stay emotionally involved.

Politicians benefit from that. Activist organizations benefit from it. Media companies benefit from it. Social platforms benefit from it. Influencers benefit from it.

A person who stops and asks, “Is that actually true?” creates a problem for anyone selling certainty.

Then America’s foreign enemies look at the same environment and see an opportunity.

They don’t need to invent our arguments. We already have real disagreements.

They need to push the disagreement until Americans stop seeing one another as people worth listening to.

Who Gains?

Russia gains when Americans stop trusting their government, elections, institutions, alliances, and one another.

China gains when the American system looks unstable and incapable of solving its own problems.

Iran gains when American support for Israel weakens and Americans become more hostile toward one of Iran’s main enemies.

This isn’t theoretical.

Russia has spent real money trying to influence American political discussion. In 2024, the Justice Department accused employees of the Russian state-controlled network RT of directing about $9.7 million into an American media company producing political content for U.S. audiences.

Iran’s involvement around Israel is even more direct. In 2024, then Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said people tied to the Iranian government had posed online as activists, encouraged Gaza-related protests, and provided financial support to some protesters.

That doesn’t make every protester an Iranian operative. Most protesters probably believe exactly what they are saying.

That is what makes the strategy effective.

If someone already dislikes Israel, Iran doesn’t need to convince him to support Iran. It can encourage what he already believes, reinforce the most extreme version of it, and increase his anger toward other Americans.

That is much easier than changing his worldview.

A divided America spends its strength internally. It loses trust, attention, and the ability to act together when a genuine external threat appears.

Our enemies benefit from that.

Who Is Responsible?

There isn’t one culprit.

Foreign governments exploit the division. Political organizations profit from it. Social media accelerates it. Activist movements combine unrelated causes because larger coalitions create greater influence. Schools and institutions contribute when they teach conclusions instead of teaching students how to reach them.

And we help.

Every time we accept five beliefs because we agree with one, we give up part of our judgment. Every time we share something because it supports our side before checking whether it is true, we make ourselves easier to manipulate.

An algorithm can put something in front of us.

We still decide whether to believe it.

How Do We Fix It?

We don’t need everybody to agree.

I don’t want that.

Conservatives should remain conservative. Progressives should remain progressive. Capitalists can defend capitalism. Socialists can make their case. Gay and transgender Americans should live their lives. Parents should question schools when they disagree. Americans should be free to support Israel, support Palestinians, criticize Israeli governments, and argue about war, borders, settlements, and peace.

A free society can survive serious disagreement.

It needs people who know what they are disagreeing about.

Sexual orientation and gender identity are different subjects. Respecting someone doesn’t require adopting every political belief connected to that person’s identity. Government services don’t automatically make an economy socialist. Being weaker doesn’t make someone right. Being stronger doesn’t make someone wrong.

Supporting Palestinians should include opposing Hamas if Palestinian freedom is really the goal. Supporting Israel doesn’t require approving every decision made by an Israeli government.

Being gay doesn’t require a position on capitalism. Caring about climate change doesn’t require a position on Zionism. Fighting racism in America doesn’t require forcing American racial categories onto every conflict in the world.

People should be able to reach one conclusion without being handed the rest of the package.

That is where the fix begins.

Teach definitions. Teach history. Let people hear arguments they dislike. Ask for evidence. Spend time with people whose lives are closer to the subject than your social-media feed. Apply the same standards to your own side that you apply to the other side.

I have learned far more about the Middle East from living there, serving there, losing people there, and speaking with students who came from Gaza, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel than I ever could from an algorithm telling me what should make me angry.

That experience does not give me ownership of the truth.

It does make me deeply suspicious of anyone who learned the region yesterday and arrives today absolutely certain of his moral superiority.

In self-defense, clarity gives you options. Confusion takes them away.

The same is true for a country.

We don’t need to think alike.

We need to keep thinking for ourselves.

Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh