For Love of the Jews

You have an enemy within

I have been holding this in for over a year. I have probably been holding it in for longer than that. The holding-in has become its own moral failure, and I want to undo it this morning before I let myself talk myself out of it again.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist. He has been a fascist for a long time. The Israeli political system survived him, repeatedly, for thirty years because the institutional structures of the Israeli state were strong enough to contain him. The institutional structures have been weakened, deliberately, by his coalition. The weakening is the whole point. The weakening is what fascism does, in every country it takes hold in, and the Israeli case is not exceptional. The Israeli case is the most recent and one of the most fully documented examples of a constitutional democracy being captured from within by a leader and a coalition who view the constitutional order as an obstacle to the project they wish to execute.

I want to walk through what they have done. I want to walk through it in the same voice I have been walking through the postliberal project here in the United States, because the projects are structurally the same project. The donors are different but the form is the same. The vocabulary is different but the program is the same. The leader is different but the type is the same.

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Netanyahu is under indictment in three separate cases, brought by the Israeli Attorney General in November 2019. Case 1000 charges him with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in his receipt of luxury goods from the businessmen Arnon Milchan and James Packer in exchange for official favors. Case 2000 charges him with attempting to negotiate favorable coverage from the publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth in exchange for legislation that would weaken the publisher’s competitor Israel Hayom. Case 4000 charges him with directing regulatory favors to the telecommunications mogul Shaul Elovitch in exchange for favorable coverage on the Walla news site. The trial began in May 2020 and has been ongoing, with every available procedural delay, ever since. Netanyahu has not been acquitted. The trial has not ended. The Attorney General who brought the indictment was the subject of a sustained campaign by Netanyahu’s coalition to remove her from office, on grounds that any reasonable observer would recognize as transparently retaliatory. This is what a criminal head of government does. He attacks the prosecutorial apparatus that has brought him to account. The American instance of the same move is fresh enough in our minds that we do not need to dwell on it.

In January 2023, the Netanyahu coalition introduced a package of judicial reforms whose purpose was the subordination of the Israeli Supreme Court to the political majority of the moment. The package would have eliminated the reasonableness doctrine by which the Court had long reviewed executive decisions for arbitrariness, would have given the governing coalition control over the Judicial Selection Committee, and would have allowed the Knesset to override Supreme Court decisions by a simple majority of sixty-one. The package was, structurally, the dismantling of the only meaningful institutional check on executive power in the Israeli system. Israel has no formal constitution. Israel has no upper legislative chamber. Israel has no federalism. The Supreme Court, with its judicial-review authority and its reasonableness doctrine, was the one institution that stood between an Israeli Prime Minister with a Knesset majority and the kind of authority that, in other democracies, requires the suspension of constitutional order to achieve.

The Israeli public understood what was being done. Beginning in January 2023 and continuing for nine months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets, week after week, in what became the largest sustained protest movement in Israeli history. Reserve pilots refused to report for duty. Reserve officers in elite intelligence units announced they would not serve. Tech executives moved capital out of the country. The Histadrut, the country’s largest labor federation, threatened a general strike. The President of Israel publicly warned that the country was approaching civil war. The judicial coup was, by the autumn of 2023, on the edge of being abandoned because the institutional and civic resistance to it had become unmanageable.

Then October 7 happened.

I want to be careful here. The Hamas attack of October 7 was a real attack by a real organization. It killed twelve hundred Israelis, most of them civilians, in a single day. It took two hundred and fifty hostages, most of them civilians, into Gaza. It was the worst single day of Jewish death since the Holocaust. The grief of the Israeli people in the weeks and months that followed was real, and the demand for a response was, in any historical comparison, justified. I am not the writer who is going to tell you the attack was not what it was.

But I am the writer who is going to tell you what the Netanyahu government did with the attack, and what they did with it was the Bush-and-Cheney move I described yesterday in the piece on the war on terror. They took a real attack and they used it to relaunch a project that the attack had only adjacent relationship to. The project was the dismantling of the Israeli judicial check, the destruction of Palestinian political agency, the de facto annexation of the West Bank, the demolition of Gaza as a habitable territory, the suppression of internal Israeli dissent, and the political rehabilitation of a Prime Minister who, on October 6, had been ten weeks away from being forced out of office by his own people’s mobilization against him.

The intelligence failures of October 7 were Netanyahu’s responsibility. He had spent the previous year strategically empowering Hamas in Gaza, on the explicit theory that a strong Hamas in Gaza would prevent the emergence of a unified Palestinian political authority that could press credible claims for a two-state solution. He had, since 2019, authorized the transfer of suitcases of Qatari cash into Gaza to keep Hamas in power. He had stripped the Egyptian border of intelligence assets in the months before the attack. He had ignored warnings from female border-spotters whose reports of unusual Hamas behavior in the weeks before October 7 went unactioned. The Israeli intelligence community has, in its post-attack inquiries, documented these failures in detail. Netanyahu has refused to allow a formal commission of inquiry, of the kind that followed every previous Israeli intelligence catastrophe from the Yom Kippur War onward, because such an inquiry would document, on the public record, that the worst single day of Jewish death since the Holocaust happened on his watch and partly because of his policies.

He used the attack instead. He used it to suspend the judicial-reform crisis without resolving it. He used it to bring the most explicit Jewish-supremacist parties in Israeli political history — Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism — into the senior cabinet positions controlling police, prisons, settlements, and the territorial administration of the West Bank. He used it to launch what has become, by the conservative count of the Lancet and the slightly higher count of the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry whose figures the Israeli Defense Forces themselves rely on for operational planning, the death of somewhere between forty and one hundred thousand Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, including a documented count of over fifteen thousand children. He used it to displace ninety percent of the Gazan population from their homes. He used it to destroy the agricultural infrastructure, the water infrastructure, the medical infrastructure, the educational infrastructure, and the housing stock of a territory of two million people. He used it to begin the policy of induced starvation that the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has, since early 2024, formally classified as famine in northern Gaza.

He used it, finally, to drag the United States of America into a war with Iran on February 28 of this year. The bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites was a Netanyahu project, executed under American auspices because the Israeli air force could not complete it without American refueling and American bunker-busters. The Trump administration agreed to the operation because the Trump administration had been captured, through the same petro-AI rentier coalition I have been documenting in these pieces, by the same forces that had captured the Netanyahu government. The Saudis and the Emiratis had wanted Iran’s regional position broken for thirty years. The Israeli right had wanted Iran’s nuclear program destroyed for the same span. The American Christian-Zionist political base of the Trump coalition had wanted a war with Iran as part of an eschatological program whose details would embarrass them to defend in public. The bombing went forward. The quagmire opened. The American casualties of the war that has followed are, this morning, four hundred and rising. The Iranian casualties are in the low thousands and rising. The regional escalation is not yet over. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed twice. The price of crude has not been below one hundred fifty dollars a barrel in eleven weeks. The American voter, who did not want this war and was not consulted about whether the United States should fight it, is paying for it at the gas pump and in the casualty lists.

This is what Netanyahu did with October 7. This is what a fascist leader does with a national crisis. He uses it.

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I want to address directly the thing that the reader of this piece may be saying back to it, because the thing the reader is saying back to it is the thing the entire structure of American Jewish institutional life has trained the reader to say, and I do not blame the reader for saying it. The thing the reader is saying back is that the kind of criticism I am leveling at Netanyahu is the kind of criticism that gives cover to antisemitism. The thing the reader is saying back is that even if every fact I have just rehearsed is true, the saying of these facts in public is itself a moral problem because the audience for the saying of them will include people whose hatred of Jews is the real driver of their interest in hearing the facts said. I want to address this argument head-on, because I have heard it from people I love for the entire fifteen years that Netanyahu has been the dominant figure of Israeli politics.

The proposition that criticism of the Netanyahu government is antisemitic is a proposition that has been manufactured, over fifteen years, by the Netanyahu apparatus itself and by the network of American Jewish institutions that has, through a combination of donor capture and ideological alignment, become a delivery mechanism for the Netanyahu government’s preferred framing of Israeli political reality. The proposition has been promoted by AIPAC, by the Anti-Defamation League under Jonathan Greenblatt’s leadership, by the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs through its various American grantees, by the Adelson-funded Israel American Council, and by the larger network of foundations and donor-advised funds that has, over the last twenty years, made Israel-policy alignment a condition of access to Jewish institutional life in the United States. The proposition is false. The proposition is harmful. The proposition is, in its long-term effect, one of the most dangerous things any American Jewish institution has ever done to the security of American Jews.

Let me say why.

Antisemitism is the hatred of Jews as Jews. It is the ascription, to Jews collectively, of characteristics or guilts that have nothing to do with what any individual Jew has done. It is the conspiracy theory that imagines a Jewish hand behind every economic dislocation, every cultural change, every political development the antisemite dislikes. It is the genocidal mania that produced the pogroms of the nineteenth century, the Dreyfus affair, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Nuremberg Laws, the Wannsee Conference, the death camps, and the Pittsburgh and Poway and Colleyville and Jersey City and Monsey attacks of our own decade. Antisemitism is a real phenomenon. Antisemitism is rising in the United States. Antisemitism kills Jews.

Criticism of the Netanyahu government is something else. Criticism of the Netanyahu government is the recognition that a specific government, led by a specific man, in coalition with specific parties, has done specific things — judicial-coup, criminal indictments, induced famine in Gaza, dragging America into an Iran war — that are wrong on their own terms and that no person of conscience can defend. The criticism applies to Netanyahu. The criticism applies to Ben-Gvir. The criticism applies to Smotrich. The criticism applies to the coalition that brought them to power and to the international apparatus, including its substantial American Jewish component, that has shielded them from accountability. The criticism does not apply to the Jewish people. The criticism does not apply to Judaism. The criticism does not apply to Israel as a state. The criticism does not apply to the Israeli people, hundreds of thousands of whom were in the streets opposing Netanyahu’s project before October 7 and many of whom continue, against extraordinary pressure, to oppose it now.

The conflation of these two things — antisemitism and anti-Netanyahuism — is a strategic move by the Netanyahu apparatus and its American allies. The strategic purpose of the conflation is to disable criticism of the Israeli government by making the criticism socially and professionally costly for anyone who undertakes it. The mechanism is simple. You criticize Netanyahu. The institutional apparatus calls you an antisemite. The cost of the antisemitism label is, in current American institutional life, severe enough to end careers, terminate funding relationships, remove people from boards, and exclude them from polite society. The cost is high enough that most people, faced with the choice, decline to undertake the criticism. The criticism is therefore not undertaken. The Netanyahu government is therefore not criticized. The conflation has done its work.

But the conflation has a second-order effect that the people running the conflation appear not to have fully internalized. The conflation cheapens the word antisemitism by attaching it indiscriminately to people who are not antisemites. When the word antisemitism is used to describe Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, or Peter Beinart, who is Jewish, or any of the hundreds of Israeli journalists and academics and reservists and former generals who have been publicly criticizing Netanyahu for years, the word loses its diagnostic precision. When the word is used to describe non-Jewish public figures whose criticisms of Israeli policy are within the normal range of foreign-policy disagreement, the word’s gravity is dissipated.

And here is the danger. When the word antisemitism has been dissipated by overuse, the word no longer carries the moral weight required to mobilize the political coalition that is needed to confront actual antisemitism when it arises. When actual antisemites arise — and they have arisen, in our own decade, on our own soil, with rifles, in synagogues — the people who would normally be the first responders, the people whose moral seriousness about Jewish safety would have been the natural foundation for a defense, have been trained to roll their eyes at the word. They have been trained to roll their eyes because the word has been so frequently and so transparently misused that they have come to assume any deployment of it is in bad faith. They are wrong to assume this. But the assumption has been earned, on a thousand small occasions when the word was used to suppress legitimate political criticism rather than to identify real bigotry.

The American Jewish institutional apparatus has, in service of the Netanyahu government, weakened the antisemitism diagnostic that American Jewish safety depends on. This is the strategic catastrophe. This is the thing that, when Jewish historians look back on this period in fifty years, they will identify as one of the great institutional failures of American Jewish life. The institutions whose mission was the protection of Jews have, in service of an Israeli political project that most American Jews do not support, allowed the word antisemitism to become the discursive equivalent of a small boy crying wolf.

The wolf is real. The wolf is at the door. The wolf is more dangerous than it has been in eighty years. And the boy who would have warned the village has been crying wolf so often, in the service of a political project, that the village has stopped listening.

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I want to claim a tradition, here, because the claim is the only ground I can stand on as a Gentile writer about to spend the next several paragraphs in territory that does not natively belong to me.

The tradition is the prophetic tradition. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible — Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel — were the original critics of corrupt Israeli political power written from within love of the people and the covenant. They did not say the things they said because they hated Israel. They said the things they said because they loved Israel, because they could see what its kings were doing to it, and because they understood that the only way to save the people was to tell the truth about the people who were destroying it from above.

Amos said it. Amos stood at the royal sanctuary of Bethel and told Jeroboam’s high priest that the sanctuary itself was an abomination because the kingdom that sustained it had become an instrument of injustice. I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies… But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Jeremiah said it. Jeremiah stood in the gate of the Temple and told the people of Jerusalem that the Temple itself would not save them if they continued to oppress the stranger and the widow and the orphan. Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, are these.

Isaiah said it. Isaiah wrote that the new moons and Sabbaths and convocations of an unjust regime were a stench in the nostrils of the God who had given them. Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.

The prophets loved Israel. The prophets were Israel. The prophets spoke against the kings of Israel because the kings of Israel were destroying the people the prophets loved. The speaking was the love. The speaking was, in its own moment, treated as treason by the kings and the courts and the priestly establishments that profited from the kings. The speaking was, in many cases, paid for with the prophets’ careers and in some cases with their lives. Jeremiah was put in the stocks. Jeremiah was thrown into the cistern. Jeremiah lived to weep, in the Lamentations, over the ruins of the city he had warned and that had not listened.

This is not antisemitism. This is the oldest love-language Judaism has produced. This is the love-language Jeremiah used in the Lamentations, sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem and weeping for what the kings had brought down upon her. This is the love-language the rabbis preserved in the Mishnah and the Talmud when they argued, century after century, about what a just polity owed to the stranger and the poor and the powerless. This is the love-language the great American Jewish prophetic voices of the twentieth century — Abraham Joshua Heschel marching at Selma, Hannah Arendt writing about Eichmann, Michael Walzer working out the just-war tradition for Jews, Tony Judt arguing for a binational state, Peter Beinart insisting in Jewish Currents on the obligation to tell the truth — practiced for fifty years against the apparatus that called every one of them, at one point or another, a self-hating Jew.

Beinart in particular I want to name, because Beinart has done, in long form and with documented argument and at terrible personal cost, what these pages are a much smaller version of. Beinart has been read out of every mainstream American Jewish institution he was once welcome in. He has lost speaking invitations, board seats, friendships, family relationships. He has continued, week after week in Jewish Currents and in his books and in his lectures, to insist that the moral health of the Jewish people requires the honest accounting of what Israeli policy has become and what the American Jewish institutional apparatus has been doing in its name. He has done this as an Orthodox Jew, as a religious Zionist whose Zionism is the prophetic Zionism of Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber, as a man who loves the Jewish people with a love that any reasonable observer can see in every paragraph he writes. The institutional apparatus has called him an antisemite. The institutional apparatus is wrong. The institutional apparatus is doing damage to the Jewish people every day it persists in being wrong about this.

I am a Gentile. I have no standing in the internal Jewish argument the way Beinart has. But I am the friend of Jews, I am a beneficiary of the Jewish prophetic tradition that has shaped my own writing more than any other source outside the gospels, and I am a citizen of a country that is currently being dragged into a Middle Eastern war by an Israeli government that should not have lasted past the autumn of 2023 if the institutional apparatus around it had been honest. I have a stake. I have a voice. I am using both this morning.

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The things I want for Israel are the things I want for the United States.

I want Israel to be a constitutional democracy with an independent judiciary, a free press, an accountable executive, and a political culture that can survive bad leaders without being destroyed by them. I want Israel to be a state in which the Jewish people are safe and in which non-Jewish citizens of the state are equal before the law. I want Israel to be a state at peace with its neighbors, including the Palestinian people, through whatever institutional arrangement — two states, one democratic state, federation, confederation — the people involved can negotiate. I want Israel to be the kind of state that the people who founded it in 1948 hoped it would become, which was not the state Netanyahu has been building. The founders of Israel were, in their large majority, secular socialists who imagined a Jewish homeland that would also be a democratic society and a beacon of the prophetic ethical tradition. They were not the Kahanists. They were not the settler-movement militants. They were not the corrupt criminal lawyer-king who has spent thirty years using their inheritance for his personal political survival.

I want for Israel what I want for the United States. I want the constitutional order to hold. I want the criminals to be held accountable. I want the judicial apparatus to function. I want the press to operate. I want the universities to teach without intimidation. I want the protests in the streets, which have been the moral pulse of both countries in this decade, to continue and to grow. I want the third American founding I described in the piece on the antebellum cornerstone, and I want the equivalent Israeli reckoning that will, when it comes, be the third Israeli founding — the one that finally settles what kind of country Israel is going to be on the day after Netanyahu, on the day after his coalition, on the day after the apparatus that has been protecting them is finally held to account.

I believe this reckoning is coming. I believe it because the Israeli people are, in their large majority, not Netanyahu. I believe it because the protests of 2023 were real. I believe it because the reservists who refused to serve under the judicial-coup regime were real. I believe it because the Israeli press, even under the pressure the Netanyahu government has put on it, has continued to produce real journalism — Haaretz, +972 Magazine, Local Call, the investigative work of journalists like Ronen Bergman and Yuval Abraham — that has documented what their own government has been doing. I believe it because, in every Israeli election since 2019, the majority of the Israeli population has voted for parties opposed to Netanyahu, and the only reason he has remained in power is the structural distortions of the coalition arithmetic and the specific kingmaking of the small Jewish-supremacist parties that no previous Israeli Prime Minister would have allowed into the governing coalition.

The Israeli reckoning is coming. When it comes, the Israelis who fought against Netanyahu for years will need allies. The American Jews who fought against the apparatus that protected him will need allies. The Palestinians who survive Gaza will need allies. The American citizens of every faith and none who refused, throughout this period, to allow the conflation of legitimate criticism with antisemitism to silence them — those citizens will be the allies the reckoning needs.

I am trying to be one of those allies this morning. I am trying to do it the way the prophets did it — by speaking the truth in love, by addressing it to the people I want to be heard by rather than to the abstraction of an enemy I want to defeat. I am trying to do it without bitterness toward the readers whose instinct to flinch at these words has been trained into them by an apparatus they did not build and largely cannot see. The flinching is not their fault. The flinching is the apparatus working as designed. The undoing of the flinching is the slow patient labor of pieces like this one — pieces that say the obvious thing carefully, with documentation, with affection, and with the prophetic tradition’s standing under-girding the words.

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I want to close with a passage from Jeremiah, because Jeremiah is the prophet who best understood what it costs to love a people enough to tell them the truth about their kings.

Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people. Mine eye trickleth down, and ceaseth not, without any intermission, till the Lord look down, and behold from heaven.

That is the voice. That is the love. That is the eye that does not stop weeping because the destruction is real and the prophet who loves the people is the one who cannot look away from what their kings are doing to them.

I do not have Jeremiah’s standing. I do not have the standing of any Jewish prophet, ancient or modern. I am a Gentile writer in California who has spent a week trying to walk the middle road and who, on a Sunday morning at eleven o’clock, found that the thing he had been holding in for over a year would no longer stay in.

The longer thing I want to say is this. I love the Jewish people. I love the Jewish ethical tradition. I love the friends I have who are Jewish, and I love the writers and rabbis and philosophers whose work has shaped my own. I love the State of Israel as the only state in which the Jewish people have, since the destruction of the Second Temple, exercised political sovereignty over their own collective life. I love it the way I love the United States — as a state whose foundational commitments deserve to be honored and whose corrupt leaders deserve to be opposed. I love it enough to say what I am saying.

Netanyahu is a fascist. The coalition he leads is fascist. The American apparatus that protects him is doing damage to Jewish safety, to American constitutional order, and to the moral seriousness of the word antisemitism that American Jews depend on for their long-term security. The reckoning is coming. When it comes, it will require allies who refused to be silent in the years before it arrived.

I will not be silent. I am not silent this morning. I will not be silent next week or next year. I will not be silent because I love the Jewish people too much to be silent, and because the prophets who loved them most fiercely taught me that love without truth is no love at all.

It is for love of the Jews that I say these words.

That is all I came to say.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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