You Do Not Speak for Israel

There is a growing foreign political right that has begun to talk as if it owns the State of Israel. As if they have adopted a lost orphan and are taking it home to raise as one of their own: this scares me.

Evangelical political machines and the American culture-war media do not speak for me, and they do not speak for most Israelis. They speak for a fight in another nation’s primary, and when we sign up for that, we are taking sides and alienating supporters. There is no reason for us to assume that the right is better for Israel or any proof they have made Israel safer. I would argue they have made things considerably worse — because they fuel conflict and otherness.

When the Israeli flag is rented to support the American right’s fight for power, Israel becomes a costume: MAGA abroad, “the right” at home. That is not how a state that still needs friends on more than one side of an ocean should talk.

Israel was built as a labor-Zionist project — messy, argumentative, and left of the podcasts that now claim it. I am an Israeli, I am a Zionist, but I am not your girl. And I doubt Golda or Ben Gurion would agree with you about much of anything.

Capitalism has a role in the Israel that exists. High-tech, trade, and private industry are not the enemy. At the same time, socialist tools that actually worked at integrating and absorbing people are not the enemy either.

The country does not have to choose a sermon. It can run a hybrid: markets where they build commerce and profits, and common institutions that hold a society together.

The kibbutz was one of those institutions. It took in the stranger, taught a shared load, and made a neighborhood out of people who had no neighborhood. Cutting that fabric for a pure market story, or for a pure enclave story, is how you lose the machine that made Israelis.

Affordable healthcare and thriving Kibbutz that teach tolerance and respect for Israel’s citizens may not be the right’s future visions of Israel, but it’s mine.

What is an Oasis Zone? Kind of Like a Kibbutz but Better

An oasis zone is similar to a kibbutz, offering work, education, integration, and community. An Oasis is a safe space with a gate: work, school, clinic, mixed streets for people who pass a check.

Equating the State with Trump-world media has a cost you can measure. In the United States, “anti-Trump” and “anti-Israel” fuse on campus. Students learn the Jewish state as a Republican brand. Jewish students are then forced to choose their left-leaning values over their loyalty to a state that no longer shares those values.

American warmth toward Israel has polarized by party and fallen among the young. That gap opened with the war. Wrapping the flag around a red hat locked it in. Neutrality in American elections is not weakness. It is how we stop being a prop. We can draw support from both sides of the aisle without demanding right-wing loyalty.

Do not let entertainers write our values. I recently watched an airing of right-wing pro-Israel podcaster Nick Matau arguing on air that E. Jean Carroll was a liar and was never raped. This is not Zionism. This is blind obedience to a political candidate with over 27 sexual harassment and assault allegations made against him and a host of criminal charges.

Matau is not Jewish. He does not live in Israel. His values are not mine. They frighten me. Pinning the Israeli flag to men like that does not win over a college campus. It confirms the cartoon narrative of an abusive bully.

Take political evangelical friendship with care. A church lobby that treats the land as a prophetic asset will crowd out the people who built the State and try to recode a Jewish refuge as someone else’s end-times stage. A haven for Jews fleeing persecution is not a franchise for another pulpit.

The same fever shows up in uniform. We are the IDF. We fight Hamas and Hezbollah. We are not Joshua at Jericho fulfilling the call of Moses. Stop promoting the Bible narrative in the IDF; it does not serve us, and it is dangerous.

In August, a Givati mission in Gaza was canceled because religious troops would not board an APC with a female paramedic. That is a canceled operation, not a midrash. Talk of shrinking women’s service so men who will not serve with women can feel comfortable is gender apartheid in fatigues. It harms female soldiers and the career force. Stop feeding it.

The other face is the IDF woman as content: dancing TikToks, the image of females in fatigues presented as pin-ups rather than fellow soldiers serving their country.

Contempt at home, a cheap story abroad. The army told the Knesset it logged 2,420 reports of sexual assault and harassment in 2025 — up from the year before, and far above 2022. Most of the victims are women. Sexism is not a side issue for the military. It is how people become décor, and décor does not get believed when it matters.

We do not need more religion in the chain of command. We do not need more separation by sex as a political sop. We do not need more foreign shows shouting “pro-Israel, pro-Trump.” We need rules that protect every Israeli. Mixed towns, mixed schools, mixed businesses — funded instead of isolation. Keep the kibbutz. Build gated work zones on the edges of conflict and inside the country for Israelis first, and for neighbors who clear security and will live under the same law.

Not everyone wants peace. Where a shared street is possible, take it. What will save Israel is less imported rhetoric and less extremism, and more of the hybrid that already worked: a modern economy beside an institution that still knows how to absorb a human being.