On Israel

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

I want to say something carefully, because I know it will be misread by people who are looking for a reason to misread it.

I no longer support the strategic defensive alliance between the United States and the State of Israel.

I say this as someone who remains unequivocally opposed to antisemitism in every form. I say this with genuine respect and affection for my Jewish friends and for the Jewish people. I say this with full acknowledgment that Israel has the right to defend itself. None of that is in question.

What is in question is this: the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has conspired with the executive branch of the United States to prosecute an illegal, unconstitutional war — a war that no Congress authorized, that no declaration of war sanctioned, that proceeds in direct violation of the founding constitutional doctrine of this republic. Israel did not merely benefit from this action. It participated in planning it. It launched strikes in coordination with it. It is a co-author of this constitutional violation.

I have spent this week arguing that the ends do not justify the means. That the means are what we live in. That rule by exception is fascism. I cannot now exempt Israel from that argument because I find the Iranian regime repugnant — which I do. The Iranian regime is a theocratic dictatorship that has murdered its own people by the thousands. If the Supreme Leader is dead this morning, I will not mourn him. But my gladness at the death of a tyrant does not give me license to abandon the constitutional principles I have staked this publication on defending.

Benjamin Netanyahu is not a legitimate leader acting in good faith. He is a man under criminal indictment in his own country for corruption. He is a man whose government, by credible and well-documented reporting, funneled Qatari money to Hamas as a divide-and-rule strategy — deliberately sustaining the very threat he used to justify this war. He is a man who has repeatedly acted to advance his own political survival at the expense of regional stability, American interests, and the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians.

A government that conspires to draw the United States into an unconstitutional war of choice is not a friendly government. It is not acting in American interests. It is acting in the interests of its own survival and its own agenda.

I withdraw my support for the strategic alliance on that basis. Not because Israel has no right to exist. Not because the Jewish people are not owed safety and security. But because this government, in this moment, has demonstrated that it does not share the constitutional values upon which the American republic is founded.

The alliance, as it currently stands, is not between the American people and the Israeli people. It is between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. And I did not consent to either of them.

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