In better times: One of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s many visits to the Trump White House in the course of their on again-off again relationship.

While Donald Trump flaunts his success in reaching an agreement with Iran, the self-described master of the art of the deal appears to be the loser in what could be his most important transaction as president – a deal that weakens America’s image and makes Israel dangerously vulnerable.

Ironically, the Memo of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. and Iran should actually be known as the Memo of Misunderstanding, the tragic result of Trump’s lack of recognition of the serious gap between Washington and Jerusalem in terms of the goals and motivation for the ill-fated war with Iran that was launched almost four months ago.

For Israel, the war was seen as a unique opportunity to finally and decisively defeat Iran militarily and politically, eliminating the existential nuclear cloud that has been hanging over the Jewish state since the Iranian jihadist revolution 47 years ago, and opening a path for regime change from within the country’s oppressed population. It was a tall order, but Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been warning the free world of the dangers of a nuclear Iran for more than three decades, recognized that Trump was the only president in the foreseeable future willing to join Israel in such a bold military act.

For Trump, though, taking on Iran was less about saving Israel from the threat of extinction than about his larger desire to dominate countries that could provide financial and/or natural resources and solidify the global image of an all-powerful America – and its president. Ignoring the lessons of America’s failure in its attempt to bring about regime change in Iraq through war, Trump no doubt was thinking of his recent success in ousting the leader of oil-rich Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, in a swift and successful raid that brought him to the U.S. to stand trial. The president has said he would personally control the proceeds from the sales of Venezuelan oil to make sure they are being used to “benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States,” though his history prompts suspicion that he and/or his family may benefit as well.

Based on intuition rather than the advice of top military experts, Trump decided that attacking Tehran, in partnership with Israel, would strike a decisive blow on the regime’s political and military leaders and lead to a civilian revolution. Several weeks before the war began, as hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the street to protest economic chaos, the president posted: “IRANIAN PATRIOTS. KEEP PROTESTING. TAKE OVER ITS INSTITUTIONS…HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

But the help was short-lived. The president ignored or did not comprehend the level of ideological zealotry of the Iranian regime that rightly calls itself the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has spent 47 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in pursuit of becoming a nuclear power and destroying the Jewish state – and ultimately the U.S., as it spreads Islam to the Western world. That is why it brutally killed as many as 30,000 of its own citizen protesters this past winter, why it endured major American and Israel attacks on its political and military leadership, its soldiers and civilians, and suffered a shattered economy as the price it is willing to pay for its revolutionary goals. And there is no reason to believe those goals and that commitment have been changed by the war. To the contrary, the regime is now run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, more extreme than the ayatollahs, and more convinced of its power after staving off the forces of the U.S. and Israel.

It’s hard to believe that Netanyahu, the shrewdest of politicians, did not fully appreciate the transactional personality of Trump, who stopped the war to prevent a Republican lashing at the polls,and went from outspoken ally and partner of Israel and its prime minister, to spouting his frustration with them through public recriminations and foul language.

Trump could call his fighter planes and naval vessels home and move on; Netanyahu knows that Israel has no place to go. Though reluctant to defy Trump’s orders, he seems determined to keep IDF troops in southern Lebanon to protect Israel’s northern communities by continuing to counter Hezbollah’s terrorist actions and maintain Israel’s deterrence over its sworn enemies.

A Weaker Agreement Than The JCPOA

How does the current Memo of Understanding stack up against the Obama administration’s controversial 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) agreement with Iran to limit Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanction relief? Trump has called the JCPOA “horrible, one-sided” and the worst deal ever. During his first term, he tore it up. But it was better than the one he signed this past week.

Consider: While many key issues remain unresolved, Trump’s Memo of Understanding calls for the U.S. to develop a plan and fund Iran with at least $300 billion (no doubt to be used to help rebuild its nuclear program and continue funding its proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis).

The current deal puts off discussions on Iran’s stockpile of uranium and nuclear aims for future negotiations that, based on past experience, will drag on and prove unresolved. In addition, the MOU makes no mention of limiting Iran’s ballistic program, and most troubling for Israel’s immediate concerns, insists that the U.S.-Iran agreement can only go forward if Israel and Hezbollah cease fighting. Already mainstream media is placing the onus on Israel when the two combatants strike at each other, focusing on the damage done to Lebanon and its citizens while generally ignoring the fact that Hezbollah terrorists have been firing on Israeli communities in the north for many years.

In the end, the U.S. is making these concessions in return for Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open when the war started.

The Iranian regime understands that Trump was desperate for a cease-fire because he fears that the unpopular war and global economic crisis could lead to a stinging Democratic victory in November. And despite his countless threats to wreak havoc on Iran, the regime is well aware that Trump wouldn’t dare re-start the war before the midterm elections, if at all.

Trump’s defenders have little to say other than, given his unpredictability, he could change his mind about the agreement and its specifics. Not very comforting.

Adding insult to injury, Trump in recent days has called Netanyahu “crazy,” complained about Israel fighting back against Hezbollah, and said Iran can have missiles to defend itself. Against who? one wonders. Against the U.S. and Israel?

J.D. Vance, while negotiating in Switzerland, presumably on behalf of Israel, has rebuked Jerusalem in the strongest terms, warning its government not to defy the U.S., its only ally in the world.

Not surprisingly, Israelis are feeling left out, frustrated and frightened about being left with the prospect of an endless war with Iran and its proxies.

After all of the bloodshed, grief and trauma of the last 32 months, it is Israel’s enemies, though severely damaged militarily, that are feeling triumphant in having stood up to powerful armies and defiant in their determination to be rid the region of the world’s only Jewish state. Iran’s leaders have leverage over the U.S. in negotiations. Hamas controls the population of Gaza and refuses to disarm as it recruits young men to replace the thousands of fighters killed. And Hezbollah is protected by the MOU and intent on continuing its goal of destroying Israel.

A poll this week found that 92 percent of Israelis feel Israel lost the war – a staggering and deeply disturbing statistic that speaks volumes about the country’s mood today.

One could argue that Trump and Netanyahu deserve each other in this moment of embarrassment for both of them. They share the trait of holding others accountable rather than accepting responsibility for serious mistakes, including going into wars without clear objectives and realistic outcomes. If there is one silver lining for defenders of democracy to the current debacle, it is that both men may pay the price for their actions at the polls this fall. If Democrats win control of Congress, its leaders may be able to stave off Trump’s ongoing efforts to weaken, if not undo, Constitutional law. And if a more centrist coalition can form a government in Israel, it may ease the divisiveness tearing the society apart and begin to re-establish a positive image of Israel in America and much of the world.

If only such changes could have taken place without the terrible bloodshed, trauma and pain that began on October 7.

Mordechai’s message to Queen Esther — a call for action — still resonates today.

Dear Reader,

The most compelling phrase from The Book of Esther, cited in the headline above, frames this timely essay by Rabbi Steven Abraham, a prolific contributor to Substack whose writing is consistently powered by moral clarity. In the piece below, he observes that the sense of safety American Jews have enjoyed for decades is gone, the victim of, among other factors, the far left and the far right.

But “our more dangerous weakness,” he writes, “is that we have raised too many Jews who are fluent in America and illiterate in Judaism.” The answer lies not in fighting antisemitism, he asserts, but instilling our youth with the history of our heritage, and commitment to our covenant.

My thanks to Rabbi Abraham for permission to share this piece with you.

Gary

Rabbi Steven Abraham

When word reached Esther that her people stood condemned, she hesitated. She was, after all, inside the palace. She had proximity to power, status, access, and the illusion of insulation. Mordechai answered her with one of the most unsparing sentences in the Tanach: Al tedami b’nafshech l’himalet beit hamelech mikol haYehudim, “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape because you are in the king’s palace” (Esther 4:13).

I have returned to that verse again and again since October 7.

Not because America is Shushan. It is not. America has been, by almost every measure, the most generous diaspora home our people has ever known. Its promise has been real, its blessings extraordinary, its civic ideals worth defending. But gratitude is not blindness. And the palace was never a covenant.

For generations, American Jews believed that proximity meant protection. We were inside. We had become, by most external measures, the most successful diaspora community in Jewish history. And we mistook success for safety. We mistook access for belonging. We mistook America’s hospitality for an exemption from Jewish history.

That illusion has collapsed. Not gradually. Not politely. Not in the abstract. It collapsed on the campuses where Jewish students were told their grief was politically inconvenient; in the faculty lounges, unions, newsrooms, and feeds where rape was contextualized, kidnapping rationalized, massacre aestheticized, and Jewish fear treated as manipulation.

October 7 did not create the new reality. It revealed it. The massacre revealed the nature of Israel’s enemies. The reaction to the massacre revealed something more painful: the fragility of Jewish belonging in the West.

And still, too many American Jews do not understand what has happened.

That sentence is harsh, and I do not write it lightly. A rabbi should be careful with rebuke; there is a sharpness that wounds without healing. But there are also moments when pastoral softness becomes a form of dishonesty. So let me say it plainly: many American Jews are clueless about the world in which they now live. Not stupid. Not bad. Clueless. They believe they still live in the America of their grandparents’ gratitude, their parents’ upward mobility, or the liberal imagination of their own university years. They believe that if Jews are useful enough, progressive enough, patriotic enough, polite enough, or sufficiently embarrassed by their own particularism, we will be spared the ancient verdict that has followed us across continents: that Jews are tolerated until we are needed as symbols, scapegoats, or sacrifices.

But the world has changed, and the old consensus is gone.

For decades, the architecture of American Jewish security rested on a comforting assumption: that Israel had a right to exist, that Jews had a right to defend themselves, that antisemitism was a civic evil. That consensus is now failing, and it is failing from both ends of our politics at once.

On the left the demolition is nearly finished. Israel has been recast not as a small country making agonizing choices in a hostile region, but as a flattened moral category: colony, apartheid, genocide. Many liberal Jews are only now discovering that the coalitions to which they gave their loyalty, their money, and their moral imagination never intended to reciprocate. They marched for everyone else’s vulnerability and learned that Jewish vulnerability was subject to ideological review. Their dead were complicated. Their hostages were invisible. Their grief required context. The betrayal is not that the left criticizes Israel, for Jews have criticized Jewish power since the prophets. The betrayal is that, in too many progressive spaces, the only permitted Jew is the victim of the past or the dissenter from his own people. The living, sovereign Jew who refuses to apologize for Jewish survival is intolerable.

The development fewer of us have absorbed is occurring on the right. A growing faction now meets every alliance with a single transactional question: what does this do for America? It answers accordingly. The Vice President has said aloud what had until now been said mostly in private, that while American and Israeli interests often align, they sometimes diverge, and Washington will follow its own. Israel may like that or it may not, he added, but the United States will pursue what it judges best for itself, because that is what the president was elected to do.

There is nothing inherently scandalous in that. Nations do not keep permanent friends; they keep permanent interests, and leaders are elected to serve their own people. The scandal, if there is one, is that we ever imagined ourselves exempt. The left increasingly calls Israel a villain. The right increasingly risks calling Israel someone else’s problem. The arguments could not be more different. The destination converges.

The Psalmist says it more plainly than I would dare: Al tivtechu vinedivim, b’ven adam she’ein lo teshu’ah, “Put not your trust in princes, in mortal man, who holds no power to save” (Psalm 146:3). No party owns us. We are not a political constituency in search of a permanent host. We are a covenanted people, and a serious Judaism judges every political movement from within the covenant rather than letting every movement sit in judgment over Judaism.

That is the first lesson we must relearn. The age of automatic alliances is over, and outgrowing it will serve us far better than mourning it.

We Are Jews Illiterate In Judaism

The second lesson is harder: our deepest crisis is not external. It is internal.

It is tempting to write only about antisemitism. That essay is easier; it places the danger outside the camp, and it asks nothing of us. And antisemitism is real, and rising. But hatred from without is not our only problem. Our more dangerous weakness is that we have raised too many Jews who are fluent in America and illiterate in Judaism.

I choose that word with care, and I want to be precise about what it does not mean. Illiteracy is not disagreement. Some of the most serious Jews I know hold views very different from mine; they criticize Israeli governments and rabbinic leadership and communal orthodoxy of every kind, but they do it Jewishly, from inside the tradition, which is itself a form of fidelity. The illiterate Jew is not the one who argues with me. He is the one who has no ground of his own, and so stands on whatever ground is nearest: someone else’s history, someone else’s morality, someone else’s verdict on whether his own people deserves to live.

That is the Jew October 7 found unprepared. Not wicked. Not weak. Unarmed.

We handed a generation tikkun olam without Torah, identity without obligation, social justice without covenant. We taught them to march for every vulnerable people on earth and to feel faintly embarrassed centering their own. Then the world demanded that they explain why Jews have a right to live, why a people returning to the one land it never stopped facing in prayer is not a colonizer, why abduction and rape are not resistance, and too many had no language with which to answer.

This is not their failure alone. It is ours. We confused institutional affiliation with conviction. We mistook a rabbi, a preschool, a camp, a federation campaign, and a Birthright trip for the actual forming of Jews who could stand upright in a hostile world. We became experts at explaining Judaism to the world and amateurs at transmitting it to our own. We built museums to Jewish death more effectively than schools for Jewish life.

A thin Judaism may survive a hospitable America. It will not survive a thickening hostility.

Which is why the question beneath all the others is not how to fight antisemitism. It is why being Jewish is worth the fight. Why raise Jewish children when the world offers easier identities? Why defend Israel when it brings social punishment? The answer cannot be that antisemites hate us. Hatred can alert a Jew to danger, but it cannot sustain Jewish life. We remain Jews because we are heirs to a covenant that has outlived every empire that tried to erase it. Because Torah teaches not only how to survive, but how to sanctify survival. Because Abraham still matters, as do Sinai, and Shabbat, and Hebrew, and Jerusalem, and Jewish learning and marriage and children and memory and argument and obligation and peoplehood.

Israel matters because Jewish sovereignty matters. After 2,000 years of dependence on the mercy of others, the Jewish people returned to history not as an idea, not as a tolerated minority, but as a nation responsible for its own defense. Many American Jews still do not feel the moral weight of that transformation. They speak as though Jewish power were uniquely corrupting and Jewish powerlessness somehow noble. This is a diaspora fantasy. Powerlessness did not make us pure. It made us vulnerable. Jewish power, like all power, is dangerous, and must be disciplined and criticized and morally examined. But Jewish powerlessness was catastrophic. Israel should be held to high moral standards. It should not be required to achieve moral perfection in order to justify Jewish survival.

This, too, we failed to teach. We taught Israel as falafel and flags and summer trips, not as the most audacious renewal in modern Jewish history: the Hebrew revolution, the ingathering of exiles, the rescue of Mizrachi Jews, the burden of borders, the trauma of terrorism, the complexity of the Palestinians, the failures of Israeli leadership, and the sheer improbability that Jews now govern themselves in the land of their ancestors. So our children arrived at college and were told that Israel is a project of settler colonialism, and many had never been given what they needed to see the inversion. A Jew who does not know his own history will borrow someone else’s.

You Cannot Inherit A Covenant By Osmosis

This is why American Jews must stop outsourcing Jewish identity to rabbis, schools, camps, federations, Israel and Holocaust memory. Every Jewish home must become more serious. We need more Torah, more Hebrew, more Shabbat, more Israel education, more peoplehood, more willingness to disappoint polite society, not less.

And we must become less embarrassed by particularism. This may be the hardest work of all. We have been trained to believe the highest moral posture is universalism; we say easily that we care about humanity and uneasily that we owe something specific to Jews. But Judaism never taught love of humanity as an escape from responsibility for one’s own people. Judaism demands both universalism and particularism, and much of American Jewish life has lost the balance, teaching our children to march for everyone else’s pain and to feel ashamed of centering their own. That must end. You cannot inherit a covenant by osmosis. It must be chosen, taught, practiced, and renewed, at home, on purpose, generation after generation, or it thins to nothing in a single one.

So the task now is not first to defend Jews. It is to form them. That requires a massive reinvestment in learning because a people that cannot read its own texts will borrow its convictions from whoever is loudest. A return of the practices that make us distinct, Shabbat, the calendar, the dignity of obligation, not as nostalgia but as the architecture of resilience, the muscle memory that lets a person stand upright when the room turns against him. We need rabbis who will speak honestly, educators who will teach deeply, parents who will stop assuming their children will remain Jewish by osmosis, philanthropists who will fund formation and not only crisis management, and young Jews with the courage to be unfashionable.

That courage is the gift I most want to leave my own children: the absolute confidence that the fleeting verdict of a university quad or a social media feed weighs nothing against the eternal chain into which they were born.

America is not Egypt, Spain or Germany. But neither is America exempt from history, for no nation is. “It cannot happen here” was never a Jewish sentence. It is an American article of faith, and Jews of all people should know the difference between faith and evidence.

Mordechai did not end his message to Esther with a warning. He told her that if she stayed silent, “relief and deliverance would arise for the Jews from another place”(Esther 4:14). Deliverance was coming; the only question was whether she would have the courage to take part in it.

That is our question, too. Deliverance will not arrive from the political princes we have spent decades courting. It never does. The palace was never the point. The covenant is.

The world has changed. The only question worth our strength is whether we will.

Steven Abraham is the rabbi of Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary and holds a Master’s degree in Jewish Education. Follow him on Substack at rabbistevenabraham.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I received a number of comments – always welcome – in response to my most recent column, “Israel Skewed In Back-To-Back Opeds,” which dealt with two highly biased essays critical of Israel, published in the New York Times on consecutive days this week. Several people requested information that might be helpful in gauging mainstream’s coverage of Israel.

Since the journalist’s duty is to hold the media to its professional obligations of fairness, I updated a few observations and suggestions from a column I wrote on the subject in the fall of 2024, and offer them here. I hope they are helpful.

B’shalom,

Gary

Why is Israel at war with Iran? Countless articles about Israel waging war on Tehran fail to explain the reason behind the attacks. News reports often refer to the Iran-Israel conflict without providing historical context. This is especially troubling when so many Americans are unaware of the threat Iran, a revolutionary, jihadist regime, poses to the U.S. as well as Israel. The articles rarely note that Iran’s religious, political and military leaders are committed to bringing radical Islam to the West. That means decimating the U.S. (“Big Satan”) and Israel (“Little Satan”), which is the more immediate target. Iran’s leaders have long called for the destruction of the Jewish state, describing it as a “cancer” requiring a “final solution.” No other country regularly calls for the destruction of any other. That’s why Iran, which has been working toward a nuclear bomb for many years, is rightly described as “Israel’s No. 1 enemy.”

What you don’t see: You will rarely see armed terrorists in photos or reports from Gaza and Lebanon. That’s because it is prohibited. Foreign media reporters and photographers are almost exclusively limited to showing destroyed buildings, mourning men and women holding wounded or dead children, and chaotic hospital scenes. But the media doesn’t mention this reality. Similarly, we didn’t see any bomb shelters to protect Gazan civilians because there are none, and Lebanon has woefully few shelters for its citizens. It’s the terrorists who have tunnels in which to hide while Israel, the enemy, warns civilians of impending attacks.

Check the labels: Are Hamas and Hezbollah made up of “terrorists,” “militants,” or “fighters”? These descriptions are used interchangeably. But every story about Hamas or Hezbollah should have at least one reference to the fact the U.S. and many Western nations have defined each of them as a terrorist organization – no different from other radical Islamic groups such as Isis and Al-Qaeda.

“Pro-Palestinian” is a benign, common description for protesters and “activists” that often means “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Hamas,” which in actuality is not at all pro-Palestinian, given that Hamas cares not a whit about an independent Palestinian state. Its goal is to establish a caliphate, an Islamic state, in Israel’s place. That fact should be provided for context in news stories but rarely is. The same holds true for letting readers know that the Hamas foundational charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.

Be aware of ‘the minders’: Terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah accompany reporters with “minders,” who not only provide translation for interviews – common for foreign media – but also steer the journalists to scenes and people they want to be covered. Innocent citizens being interviewed are keenly aware of the presence of the “minder.” Most importantly, while the “minders” protect the journalist from harm in dangerous areas, their presence is a form of intimidation, an implicit reminder that reporters or citizens who don’t obey the rules are often threatened with physical harm. Unfortunately, media organizations don’t acknowledge this in their reporting.

Blurring the line between news and opinion: The separation between news and opinion, once a foundational policy of major newspapers, has gone the way of the typewriter. News stories often have subjective points of view mixed with factual reporting, tainting the validity of the report, the publication and the reputation of the reporter as an objective journalist.

Lost in the cacophony: The influence of legacy news media – major newspapers, national television networks – has diminished as more and more people get their news from social media. Never has there been such a flow of information, but much of it is unaccountable, unreliable and untrue. And even leading newspapers seek highly “clickable” stories – often fluff — to maintain their readership.

The race to be first: As social media has become more dominant, mainstream news companies put ever greater emphasis on being first with breaking news, scoops, etc. It used to be a competition to be first with the full story. Now, in this highly competitive field, it’s “get the story posted online first, and if we need to make corrections, we’ll do that later.” The faster the effort, the more prone the errors of fact and judgment. The Al-Ahli hospital fiasco that took place shortly after the war in Gaza began is a dramatic case in point where initial headlines regarding the attack were wrong on every count.

Pre-ordained perspectives: Too much journalism today begins with an ideological or political point of view already in place. Readers deserve journalism that begins with a blank slate, a mission of open exploration.

Where’s the story placed? Be aware of which stories make it to the front page, and “above the fold,” and which are found on inside pages. Also key in terms of what gets the most attention is the length of the article, size of accompanying photos, the frequency of a topic making the news, who’s writing it, etc. Look for persistent patterns in coverage of the war.

What’s missing? An often forgotten factor in evaluating a news story is considering not just what’s in it but what isn’t. Have enough voices with different points of view been presented? Who is not being heard? Also, who or what is the source of information? Are they trustworthy? Media often provided Gaza casualty figures from the Gaza “Ministry of Health” without making clear that it is a wing of Hamas, a terror organization with a history of providing misleading information. Mainstream media gradually improved in noting, but not always, that the Gaza casualty figures Hamas provided do not differentiate between civilians and fighters. In other words, no Hamas fighters in the war were reported killed or wounded.

Who gets the last word? One way to tell a reporter’s political leaning on an issue is to see who gets the last quote in the article. It’s the quote that stays with the reader.

That’s why this piece will end with a quote from Israeli author and journalist Matti Friedman, who asserts that “the ascendant force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an empowered strain of Islam that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots.”

Let’s hope so.

Note: If you found this information, please send it to a friend or colleague.

From David to Goliath: Headline and art in the New York Times Opinion piece describing Israel as the aggressor in Lebanon.

I feel compelled to respond to two lengthy, deeply distorted Opinion pieces that appeared in the New York Times on consecutive days this week. Each portrays Israel as the immoral, expansionist aggressor in the current Mideast conflict.

Such one-sided views should not go unanswered.

Israel, like numerous countries, has many faults in living up to its noble ideals. But it has never coveted the land of Lebanon or been at war with its citizens. Israel’s desire is to protect its own people, have cordial relations with bordering states if possible, and at least be left alone by its neighbors. But that is a luxury it has never enjoyed since the day it declared statehood in 1948. The military conflicts between Israel and Lebanon over the years were not with the Lebanese people but with the two terror groups – the PLO and Hezbollah – that have launched attacks on Israel from their perches in Lebanon.

New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen has a different perspective. On Sunday (June 7), her prominently placed essay, entitled “Lebanon Is Fed Up, and Ready to Remake Itself,” describes her visit to the beleaguered country, talking to frustrated civilians who are the pawns suffering from the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

I have empathy for the people of Lebanon, as do most Israelis, but in Polgreen’s essay, Israel is the primary cause of the troubles. Hezbollah, described as “the Iran-backed Shiite militia group … in conflict with Israel, off and on for decades,” is seen as the protector of Lebanese civilians.

Those “off and on” battles have taken place whenever Hezbollah decided to attack Israel. That’s because its sole purpose as a jihadist terror group is to destroy the Jewish state and its citizens. The group’s 1985 manifesto states “our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no ceasefire, and no peace agreements.”

None of this is mentioned in Polgreen’s piece.

The Lebanese people, caught in the crossfire, are in effect being held hostage to Hezbollah, and the Lebanese army is too weak to take on the terror group. Ironically, only Israel has the clout to defeat Hezbollah and restore a sense of order to Lebanon, its northern neighbor.

But Polgreen sees Israel, not Hezbollah, as the source of the violence. She asserts that “the ferocity and indiscriminate nature of the Israeli assault have revived Hezbollah’s image as a protector of Lebanese sovereignty, for all its deep ties to Iran.”

Nowhere in the piece does she suggest that Hezbollah has zero loyalty to Lebanese citizens, and that, like Hamas in Gaza, the terror group uses innocent civilians as fodder – the more casualties that result, the more Israel is blamed.

Israel’s Shakedown Of The Region?

Megan K. Stack, a contributing Times Opinion writer, takes things a step further in her essay, “Israeli Expansionism Is Shaking the Mideast” (June 8). She asserts at the outset that “since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, aggression and expansionism have come to define Israel’s foreign policy.” The Jewish state is “moving with disoriented speed on multiple fronts,” she writes, attributing the IDF’s presence in Gaza and Lebanon to an “emboldened” land grab rather than protecting its border communities in response to murderous attacks on Israeli citizens by Iran-funded Hamas terrorists in Gaza and Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon in their effort to destroy Israel.

Israel also comes in for blame for its attempt to end Iran’s threat to annihilate the Jewish state. “In Iran,” Stack writes, “Israel eagerly tried to induce regime collapse, apparently unconcerned with creating a dangerous power vacuum in a country containing 11 tons of enriched uranium.”

Would the collapse of a regime that slaughtered tens of thousands of its own people in January not be celebrated by Iran’s citizens? And for what purpose has Iran spent an estimated $100 billion over almost five decades to develop enriched uranium other than to make good on its pledge to destroy Israel?

Stack doesn’t address those issues, nor the fact that Iran’s ultimate goal is to destroy “Big Satan” (the U.S.) as well as “Little Satan” (Israel) in its mission to spread Islam throughout the globe.

“Most of all,” she writes,” an assumption of impunity and the willingness to use violence as a political tool are turning Israel into a pariah.”

Sam Harris To The Rescue

Israel is being defamed and unfairly blamed in columns like the ones cited above in mainstream media, and it’s an uphill battle to keep track, respond and point out the layers of bias. Few defenders of Israel are more effective in pointing out the salient facts of the complexities of Mideast conflicts than Sam Harris, a best-selling author, philosopher, podcast host and neuroscientist with a deep interest in these issues. A piece he posted this week on Substack, anchored in facts, logic and moral clarity, offers an important general response to those who oppose Israel.

Entitled “Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel,” the essay summarizes several of his strongest points.

He first cites and condemns Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “corrupt alliance with the far right,” settler violence in the West Bank and the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians. But he maintains that “the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remain vast, and the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.”

Harris insists that “militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is,” and that “the problem in the Middle East is not, and never has been, the existence of the state of Israel.” Rather, he says, it is the “evil jihadists … who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously” in their zealous efforts to rid the Mideast of Jews. He suggests that “if the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace.” But if Israelis laid down their arms, they would be the victims of genocide. October 7 was proof enough of the jihadists’ goals.

“There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies,” Harris writes, adding: “This obsession with Israel and the double standard to which its people are held,” is antisemitism, and that matters not just for Jews but for all open societies. “So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading,” Harris notes. “It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require.”

Harris’s point is well taken and consistent with my belief that calling out blatant bias in journalists’ work regarding Israel is an obligation, not just on behalf of defenders of the Jewish state but of the moral duty to seek the truth.

End of an era: A child of the Holocaust, Abe Foxman led an organization and movement into the 21st century, countering age-old and new forms of antisemitism.

Everybody called him Abe.

The best-known and arguably the most influential American Jewish leader of the last five decades, Abraham Foxman dealt with presidents, kings and ambassadors as he did with the fellow Jews he spent a lifetime trying to protect: as a mensch, connecting person to person, with passion and compassion.

“No chochmas,” as he would say, no nuances or shticks.

Some complained he lacked sophistication. Others loved him for being a straight shooter. Either way, he was an authentic, proud Jew and his greatest strength – and weakness – was that he took everything personally. With his combination of warmth, feistiness, smarts, humor and Yiddishe heart, he personified to many Americans – Jewish and Christian – not only the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) he represented for 50 years but the Jewish community.

For more than five decades, I had the honor of knowing, reporting on and often shmoozing with Abe, who died on Sunday at the age of 86. He was a mentor, friend, news source and sometimes critic. Heralded now in praiseworthy media coverage that he would enjoy, he was often the first call for journalists looking for a Jewish response to the crisis of the moment because he was direct, accessible and highly quotable.

Contrary to the corporate model of some Jewish organizations, Abe didn’t hide his emotions; he wore his deep commitment to Judaism on his sleeve, often peppering his remarks with Yiddishisms. (He was the only major communal leader I knew who would call me “boychik” or “tahtele.”)

Abe was the last of a generation of national professional leaders who experienced the Holocaust first-hand. The issue of antisemitism was particularly poignant for him because it spoke to both his personal history and life’s work. Born in Vilna in the spring of 1940, he was left in the care of a Catholic nanny by his parents who feared for his life. Baptized as an infant and reclaimed by his parents after they survived the war, as a small child he was the center of a custody battle between the nanny who saved him and the parent he didn’t remember.

“As a hidden child,” he told me, “I didn’t know who or what I was.” He said that after he arrived in the U.S. with his parents in 1950, he felt responsible to “work on behalf of the Jewish people and fight the antisemitism that almost destroyed me.” He said his father described him, at 10, as “the old man.”

Having survived the Holocaust, “how dare I be a pessimist?” he would ask. But for a self-declared optimist, he worried a great deal about the Jewish future. In a 2020 interview, he told me that throughout history, depending on the circumstances, the virus of antisemitism has lain dormant or become more virulent. “We’re living in an environment today that is more user-friendly to the virus,” he said, “a time of incivility, lack of tolerance, no respect for the truth. And with it comes politicization, polarization, frustration, anger, hate—all the elements that fuel the virus.”

“Antisemitism is being fed by religion, politics, economics, and social issues,” he added. The “firewalls” of protection that worked in the past — a common base of truth and facts, a shared consensus, fairness and accountability, a media that educates — “no longer have credibility. They’re gone,” Foxman said. “It’s like a perfect storm.”

And that was six years ago.

We first met sitting near each other in the back of shul in Teaneck, NJ, talking too much during Shabbat morning services. Over the years, I interviewed him about the issues of the day (many of them the same issues as today, like tense U.S.-Israel relations, critical Arab-Israeli conflicts, and of course the dangers of anti-Semitism.) When he felt he was right he was willing to put up with outrage, like when he described Mel Gibson’s 2004 film, “The Passion of the Christ,” as anti-Semitic – a criticism that not only infuriated millions of Christians but surely helped the movie at the box-office. “To some extent, that’s true,” he told me at the time. “But I ask myself, did we have a choice? And at the end of the day, I believe the answer is no.”

In his job leading the ADL, Abe spoke truth to power on an almost daily basis, and across party lines. He called out President Obama for blaming Israel for the lack of progress in peace talks while giving the Palestinian leadership a pass, warned President Biden that he was sending “the wrong message to our friends and enemies” in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu, described President Trump as a “demagogue” who was a danger to America and American Jews, and came to view Netanyahu as a danger for his actions that have lost support for Israel among Americans, including Jews.

In one of his last, detailed interviews, Abe met with Michael Berenbaum and Gilbert Kahn, co-authors of “A Shattered World: Jews and Israel After October 7,” a book of essays that addresses the impact of the war on the Jewish future. It includes a Q and A transcript of their interview, during which Abe described a personal meeting he had with Netanyahu at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem that is quite revealing. He said Netanyahu initiated the 2023 meeting and urged his guest to “be straight” with him.

It can best be told in Abe’s own words:

“I said to him, ‘why did you have to give Smotrich and Ben-Gvir the positions you gave them?’” Abe asked. “You could have given them something else. He [Netanyahu] says, ‘I made a mistake. That’s it. … And Abe, I’ll fix it. You’ll see.’

“I said to him, ‘Bibi, I have known you for a long time. You’re not a racist. Now you’re a racist. Because now you embrace two racists in your government. You don’t challenge them. You don’t criticize them. … He said, ‘Abe, I’ll fix it. The argument is over. I made a mistake.’”

“I’m still waiting,” Abe concluded.

A final note: Abe was ahead of the curve on so many issues, including the ones he warned about when we spoke in June 2015, just before he retired after 50 years at the ADL. On the subject of antisemitism, he acknowledged in a soft voice, “I can’t promise my grandchildren that they won’t need the ADL. Prejudice and bigotry remain with us.”

Asked what keeps him up at night, he said the same thing that gave him comfort at the time: the U.S.-Israel relationship.

“Israel is very fortunate it has the U.S. as its primary ally, and we have developed strong bipartisan support in Washington. But what’s scary is that sense of dependence. There’s no one else to defend Israel politically, diplomatically and militarily. Israel has nowhere else to go, and we have to be super smart going forward.”

Indeed.

As the interview was winding down, he reminded me that even after he retired he would be available to continue our ongoing conversation. We shook hands and he said with a smile, “call me.”

I wish I could now.

Sharp but civil discourse: Abigail Pogrebin moderates ‘The Great Divide’ at The Streicker Cultural Center featuring journalist Bret Stephens (center) and J Street leader Jeremy Ben-Ami. Photo by Gili Getz.

I had a reckoning of sorts the other night that drove home a harsh reality: American Jews are more vulnerable in our own country today than ever in our lifetime.

What prompted this observation was an incident not that unusual these days, which is part of what makes it so troubling. My wife and I were among the nearly 900 people who attended a lively debate at The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center dealing with “The Great Divide” among Jews on the topic of Israel. (More on that later.) On our way out of the building, we were urgently directed by security officials to exit toward Madison Avenue and avoid a noisy anti-Israel protest, in the other direction, on Fifth Avenue.

But when we got to the corner of Madison, protected by police, we saw and heard a group of protesters, some wearing keffiyahs and holding anti-Israel signs, cursing us as Jews. I realized that, even literally, wherever we turn, and despite law-enforcement protection, we can’t avoid the fact that Jews no longer can take for granted their full and equal acceptance within American society.

And the challenge for us is what to do about it.

The next morning I called Gady Levy, Streicker Center’s executive director, to ask about the high level of security we’d seen employed, which included having attendees show a photo ID along with our tickets, and giving up our phones in the lobby before entering the auditorium. He explained that those cautionary elements, in addition to scores of police and security officials in the area and on site, were also to avoid unruly protests from inside the auditorium as happened last year at a similar event – protests that were videoed by the protesters and seen around the world on social media.

“This is what it takes to be Jewish in New York these days,” Levy ruefully observed.

Of course, he’s right. And it’s not just New York. The problem is global. How sad that we’ve come to expect and rely on increasingly tight security and law-enforcement patrols in and outside synagogues, Jewish schools and other institutions across the country and around the world to protect against the dramatic spike in hate-filled, anti-Israel protests and acts of arson and violence – sometimes deadly.

Is it still safe to be a Jew in America?

Same Question, Darker Answer

Ironically, six years ago I was commissioned to write a piece for The Atlantic given that exact title. I wrote that in more than four decades of reporting on Jewish life, I had “never encountered such a level of palpable fear, anger, and vulnerability among American Jews as I do today, with attacks—verbal, physical, and, in two tragic cases, fatal—coming from the far left and the far right of our own society, and from attackers whose only common denominator is hatred of Jews.

“We had believed that such worries were relegated to our brothers and sisters in Europe, with its centuries of ugly history of Jew hatred and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. Now the attacks are the main topic of discussion among an American Jewish community shaken to its core.”

Sadly, in the wake of October 7, and two and a half years of war in the Mideast, the situation is far worse today. I concluded that Jews were uncertain about whether “the new normal in the land of the free” is to “hide signs of their identity, avoid synagogues, and downplay support for Israel.”

Polls today indicate that twice as many Jews over that six year span now hide their religious identity and say they feel unsafe. There is no need for me to elaborate here on the litany of factors that contribute to this disastrous downturn. We are too aware of the fact that on a daily basis we see how Israel has:

. become a pariah around the world, labeled an apartheid state that has committed genocide in Gaza;

. lost the support of the majority of Americans who now sympathize more with Palestinians;

. been abandoned by a large majority of Democrats, including the top contenders for the 2028 presidential race, and a growing number of Republicans;

. lost a majority of voters under 40 of both parties, including, most troubling, young Jews.

What’s more, “Zionism,” the right of the Jewish people to have a state in their ancient homeland – the movement the vast majority of American Jews have identified with since the creation of the state in 1948 – has become a dirty word for many Americans. That includes Jews on the left who are deeply critical of Israel for its unwillingness to support a two-state solution and for the level of devastation wrought on Gaza and its civilians in the last two and a half years.

The gap is widening between these critics of Israel and its defenders, who assert that it is naive and self-destructive to talk of peaceful co-existence when the IDF is fighting Islamic jihadists – Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and Iran – whose primary goal is not to found a Palestinian state but destroy the world’s only Jewish one.

Debating ‘The Great Divide’

Which brings us to the Streicker Center’s “Great Divide” debate, cited above, that sought to narrow the gap by exploring it and seeking common ground. The program pitted New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a staunch supporter of Israel and its military, against Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of J Street, the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” advocacy group whose dovish positions have become increasingly popular with liberal American Jews, though frequently at odds with the great majority of Israeli Jews.

With journalist Abigail Pogrebin doing a crisp job as moderator of keeping both men on point, the participants modeled the kind of sharp but civil discourse they agreed is all too rare in the community.

Ben-Ami had the home court advantage since the evening’s program was co-sponsored by J Street, many of whose supporters were in the audience. But Pogrebin urged the audience at the outset to “put aside your Team Bret and Team Jeremy jerseys” and take in the viewpoints they were offering with an open mind. And indeed, the full house crowd was attentive and respectful as Stephens and Ben-Ami made their points, parting ways most sharply on the difference between an admirable aspiration – Ben-Ami’s call for two states for two peoples – and a harsh reality, with Stephens asserting that there is no past or present evidence of a Palestinian culture willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state.

Ben-Ami said that “pro Israel for me means having a secure Palestinian state alongside Israel.” Stephens noted that the sentiment was laudable, but “I’d sadly say that if Palestinians were offered a chance to destroy Israel, they would take it, while if Israelis were offered real peace, they’d take it.”

Stephens said anti-Zionist assertions that Israel should not exist as a state are “outright antisemitism,” adding: “I would love to see J Street say that.” Ben-Ami countered that an estimated 20-25 percent of American Jews are non-Zionist or anti-Zionist and that “it would be wrong to call them antisemites.” He said J Street calls for “democracy, not Jewishness over democracy.”

And so it went. Ben-Ami said then when 40 of 47 Democrats in the Senate recently voted against legislation to provide military arms to Israel, it was “a warning shot, a symbolic vote” showing that “pursuing war over diplomacy will lose American support.” Stephens called the Democrats’ vote “shameful, a moral collapse,” observing: “When you’re in agreement with Tucker [Carlson], you’re wrong.”

Most compelling to me was the final question posed by Pogrebin and the two responses. She asked Ben-Ami and Stephens what they would say to a 25-year-old American Jew about being a Jew today.

Ben-Ami said he would promote “a relationship with values, justice, equality – not about land. That’s what it means to be a Jew in the world today. Don’t trade our values for nationalism.”

Stephens said he would say that “Israel is two things: a Jewish miracle and a human example that after 1,900 years, a state was created out of ashes through hope, will and courage,” and that “it’s an example of what brave people can do to keep the Jewish people free, secure and bold.”

In the end, it’s unlikely that either of the eloquent and polished participants changed many minds. Ben-Ami represents the view of a growing number of young Jews for whom Israel and its right-wing government have become a source of embarrassment. It is J Street’s position that resonates with Democrats in Congress today while AIPAC, long strengthened by its bipartisan support in Washington, has become anathema. As reporter Ben Sales noted in The Times of Israel, “J Street has become Main Street.”

Stephens speaks for those most engaged in Jewish life and older Jews with vivid memories of Israel’s long history of wars and futile efforts to make peace. “When Israel vacated land” [leaving Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005] “it got more war,” he noted.

Differing Within The Tent

The Streicker Center program offered the kind of approach that Roberta Kwall, a law professor at DePaul College in Chicago, puts forward in a timely

book coming out this fall entitled “Polarized: Why American Jews Are Divided and What To Do About It.” With the core issues being Zionism and support for Israel, Kwall proposes bridging our communal gap by forming a consensus platform in the American Jewish community that broadens the tent without collapsing it. The key ingredients include agreement that Israel should be a Jewish, democratic state, condemning all forms of terrorism and expressing empathy for all innocent civilians.

“We can differ on defining words like ‘terrorism’ and ‘innocent civilians,’ but the point is to talk about issues without vilifying each other,” Kwall told me this week. She said that conversations within families and between organizations can “help rebuild a strong American Jewish center capable of sustaining disagreement without fragmentation. We have to learn how to communicate more effectively to avoid self-sabotage.”

It’s never too late to promote greater Jewish solidarity, but a clear and present priority is dealing with the antisemitism all around us and the internal debate over whether it’s best to fight it or concentrate on strengthening our own Jewish identities.

Of course it is deeply unfair that American Jews have to choose between openly supporting Israel and feeling safe at home, but that is where we are. No doubt we are experiencing our own collective trauma in suddenly recognizing that the full acceptance into American society we achieved over decades has been shaken, if not shattered.

The differences among us may be more about our psyches than our politics. Either way, though, they are real. And the question now is not whether we are safe as Jews in America but how, together, we can reverse this treacherous trend.

A Request:

If you find this essay worthwhile, please send it to a friend or colleague you think would benefit from it as I continue to strive to broaden my audience.

Thank you in advance,

Gary

‌ Violence is increasing in intensity: There were 378 Jewish settler attacks in the West Bank in the first 40 days of the war with Iran.

‌ ‌ ‌

Dear Reader,

Much attention has been paid to Israel’s military successes and setbacks in its war with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran for the last two and a half years. During that time, the sharp rise of violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank by a small group of Israeli settlers has been largely unconstrained and neglected – at Israel’s peril militarily, morally, politically and diplomatically.

In this Guest Essay, Gabriel Epstein, senior policy associate of the Washington-based Israel Policy Forum, describes the situation, the reasons why it has become such a serious problem, and what needs to be done to address it.

Please note that this is a condensed version of Epstein’s essay. The full piece is on the Israel Policy Forum’s website and can be found HERE. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

It Is In Israel’s Interest To Remove This Moral Stain ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

By Gabriel Epstein

The recent detention of a CNN crew covering Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank, caught on camera and widely reported, brought renewed attention to an expanding and increasingly dangerous phenomenon. The wave of settler violence in the West Bank—378 attacks in the 40 days following the start of the war with Iran, according to a watchdog NGO, that has claimed eight lives, caused hundreds of injuries, and destroyed homes and mosques—can and should be understood as Jewish terrorism. It is also an abject failure of the Israeli state and security services. The frequency of violence is intensifying, it is becoming more organized, lethal, and aggressive, and it is not being effectively contained by either the police or the IDF.

The problem is not individual incidents or failures, but an overlapping web of security, political, and legal failures, some accidental and some by design, which have allowed Jewish terrorism to spread unchecked. The solution has nothing to do with framing or public relations and does not lie in any individual action, policy, or punishment. Combating Jewish terrorism in the West Bank requires a whole-of-system shift in which the IDF, police, and courts work together to track, investigate, quickly arrest, and prosecute offenders across the board, not only when cameras are involved or Israelis are the victims. A reckoning is long overdue.

It is in the U.S. interest to cool the flames in the West Bank: to protect its citizens there, several of whom have been killed in the last two years; to prevent deterioration that would draw American attention away from Gaza and Iran; and to remove a sticking point in its ongoing drive for greater regional integration. It is in the Palestinian interest (just as it is in Israel’s) to not be menaced, attacked, and killed by terrorists. And it is in the Israeli interest to remove this moral stain, improve its security position in the West Bank, and blunt a major point of criticism in its ties with regional and international actors.

Jewish terrorism is a moral abyss on both Jewish and universal grounds. There is no justifying, downplaying, ignoring, or what-abouting these campaigns of intimidation, assault, theft, arson, sexual assault, and murder carried out by bands of Jewish extremists. Those seeking to avoid the subject often argue that it is a small band of extremists with a criminal mentality, and that Palestinian terror attacks drastically outnumber Jewish ones and are the real problem. They are right that Palestinian and Jewish terrorism differ in critical ways: in overall volume, tactics, and organization. Yet these differences do not change the reality: terrorism of any stripe is illegitimate and must be suppressed in a civilized society. And if the problem of Jewish terrorism is so comparatively small, why isn’t it solvable with a fraction of the effort put into combatting Palestinian terrorism?

It is clearly a small minority of settlers that carry out these attacks. The IDF estimates that perhaps 300 extremists commit the majority of settler attacks, and under 100 make up a key vanguard: hardly representative of a population that numbers over half a million. It’s also true that many settlers are opposed to this violence, including a large number of rabbis and community leaders. In addition, growing grassroots initiatives like Bnei Avraham are seeing settlers themselves mirror the role of international and left-wing Israeli activists in accompanying Palestinians as shields or buffers.

Yet polling among the most ideologically hardline settlers, those living deep in the West Bank, shows that nearly half think this violence is justified, and two-thirds do not think it should be punished. Appeals to the rest of the settler population to somehow contain the violent minority of Jewish extremists and repeated attempts to frame it as a social problem border are unrealistic. When someone is committing terrorist attacks, the time for social interventions has long since passed. Those who attack and kill innocents in the name of ideology and hate are unlikely to listen to letters from moderate rabbis or petitions from their law-abiding neighbors.

The unchecked spread of Jewish terrorism is an indictment of an Israeli police force that has, particularly at the direction of Public Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, failed to prevent or prosecute more than a handful of offenders. It is a critique of the IDF, which long adopted a reactive approach and is now reckoning with growing reports of participation in these attacks by off-duty personnel. The government has made it even harder to address the violence by removing the ability of the IDF to put violent Jewish offenders into administrative detention; house arrest or internal expulsion orders from the West Bank are regularly ignored. The result is lawlessness, instability, and the harm and displacement of innocent Palestinians, all the while forcing the IDF to draw troops away from its legitimate counterterrorism activities and exposing them to attacks by Jewish extremists.

Downstream of these moral and policy failures is the devastating effect of such terrorism on international opinion of Israel. There is an (often justified) sense that Israel will always be criticized, regardless of whether its actions are good or bad. Yet policy should be made based on the substance of the complaint, not who is levying the criticism. Here, there is a moral rot that cries out to anyone, and the only proper course is to address it. Jewish terrorism is indefensible, just as Palestinian terrorism is indefensible. But whereas Israel acts swiftly and effectively against the latter, Jewish terrorism has risen unchecked.

The vast majority of Israelis reject this violence, when they think about it. There is growing media discussion of the epidemic, largely because of an uptick in settler attacks on left-wing Israeli and international activists and IDF personnel, the latter of which is a sore spot for nearly all Israelis. But in an environment of massive insecurity, mutual distrust, and prejudice, and more immediate concerns from Gaza to Iran and Hezbollah to Palestinian attacks from the West Bank, it is easy to ignore the monster growing in the hills of the West Bank. And for many on the growing political right in Israel, it is easy to quietly oppose Jewish terrorism in the abstract while avoiding attacks from the far-right for denouncing it clearly. But the consequences of settler violence, whether understood fully in Israel or not, reverberate around the world, including in the U.S.

The current Israeli coalition is likely incapable of making hard but necessary moves to quell the violence: a proactive policy to contain and dismantle outposts and farms that are violent hotspots, including high arrest and prosecution rates of offenders; immediate dismissals of security personnel, whether in the IDF, police, or in local settlement security squads, who participate in or abet attacks; and strict punishments to break the sense of impunity and create a deterrent to would-be terrorists.

Yet the U.S. should push for serious progress on these benchmarks on moral and strategic grounds, avoiding cheerleading for cosmetic actions. Settler violence and lawlessness in the West Bank undermines the Trump administration’s 20-point plan for Gaza and its dreams of broader Israeli integration and normalization with the region, not to mention that it is utterly and rightly objectionable to Americans. The Trump administration possesses substantial leverage, and has at several points already been sharply critical of settler violence. But harsh words are no substitute for clear policy demands.

Though the situation is complex, one point is clear: Jewish terrorism in the West Bank only benefits extremists on both sides, and only hurts innocents. It must end.

Gabriel Epstein is senior policy associate of the Israel Policy Forum, based in Washington, D.C. This essay is posted with permission of the Israel Policy Forum. To read the full version of this essay, click HERE.

Flickering lights, flickering hopes: Honoring the memory of those who died for their country, including too many since October 7.

Israelis have had more than their fill of sirens lately.

During the war with Iran, they lost count of the number of times they were awakened at all hours, the loud sound piercing the night sky, warning everyone to enter a safe space in anticipation of missiles possibly headed their way from the regime in Iran or Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But the one-minute, nationwide siren they will hear Monday evening is not a call to rush for cover. On the contrary, men, women and children will stop in their tracks – where they are walking or driving – and stand silently at attention as the mournful sound ushers in Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day). The 24-hour period of prayer and reflection marks the loss of more than 25,000 Israelis killed in wars and terror attacks since 1948. It comes one week after Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), recalling and honoring the millions of European Jews who had no Jewish state to save them from Hitler.

On Tuesday morning, the saddest day on the Jewish national calendar, Israelis will gather in silence again as a wailing blast is heard – for two minutes this time – prior to memorial services held in military cemeteries throughout the country. Hardly a family is untouched by the loss of a loved one or friend during Israel’s decades of struggles to ensure the survival of the Jewish state.

This traditional season of “The Yoms” culminates with the tears of Yom HaZikaron giving way to the celebration of Yom HaAtzma’ut (Israeli Independence Day), marking what many consider the miracle of declaring statehood 78 years ago.

Twice in the last four years, my wife and I were in Israel at this time. We stood on a normally busy street in the German Colony of Jerusalem as the siren sounded. We felt privileged to share in the experience and sense the deep connection Israelis have to their history and culture, and to each other. For a moment, at least, their sharp religious and political differences were drowned out by the modern-day shofar calling each of us to reflect on what it means to be living in a Jewish state whose national anthem is “Hatikvah,” (“The Hope” to be a free nation after 2,000 years of yearning).

But that was before October 7.

It’s true that Israelis are known and admired for their qualities of resilience. But I wonder how, amidst the chaos and confusion of the current, on-again, off-again war, a society still in extended trauma – for the third year since October 7 – can squeeze even more emotions into this annual drama recalling the tragedies and triumph of recent Jewish history.

These are the days we speak of “Zachor” (Remember) and “Never Again.” But Israelis and their supporters in the diaspora are painfully aware that much of the world today has little knowledge or interest in recalling the heroic story of how a tiny, ancient people has survived thousands of years and brutal persecution to return to its homeland. And it has become all too clear in the last several years that “Never Again” does not mean that widespread and often violent antisemitism is a thing of the past.

In practice, the date “October 7” has already been added to the national Jewish calendar as a day to memorialize the many hundreds of Israeli men, women and children who were slaughtered, raped and burned; a day the IDF and the government failed to save its innocent citizens; and a day that many diaspora Jews underwent a profound change from within, realizing that in the eyes of the world, their identities were entwined with those of their Israeli brothers and sisters. This caused some to double down in their support and affiliation for Israel while others chose to step away and view Zionism in a negative light.

Diaspora Jews have numerous choices that Israelis don’t have. The challenge Israelis face each day – trying to regain some form of normal life while facing enemies on multiple fronts whose primary goal is to destroy the Jewish state and its people – may seem impossible to most of us. But Israelis do it because they have no choice.

The president of the United States has the option of declaring victory and ending America’s military efforts in the region as they become increasingly unpopular at home, a few months before national elections. Thousands of miles removed from the Middle East, America is not in danger of attack from Iran. At least not yet. But Americans are fooling themselves if they think Iran — an Islamic fundamentalist and self-defined “revolutionary state” devoted to spreading Islam to the West, defeating the U.S. (Great Satan) and eliminating Israel (Little Satan) — is prepared to set aside its martyr-driven foundational beliefs or its estimated $500 billion investment in becoming a nuclear power to “make peace” with us.

This is not a territorial dispute. It’s an effort to prevent a jihadist power that tortures and kills its own people from not only continuing its reign of terror at home and in the region, but from becoming an all-powerful nuclear threat to us all.

Still, the U.S. can walk away from Iran. Israel can’t. It has no place to go, and that’s why most of its citizens want to continue the fight, though exhausted from two and a half years of war, and 47 years of threats and murderous terrorist acts and wars initiated by Tehran and its proxies. Israelis know that much of the world is already against this war and that no other American president is likely to join them militarily in seeking to defeat the regime in Iran, so they feel this is their chance.

Of course there are solid arguments against continuing the war, including the fact that it has no clear “day after” plan or that it could lead the battered regime to become even more determined to gain and use nuclear weapons.

But as Israelis take this brief moment to reflect on the tragic and triumphant events of the past, and ponder their uncertain future, it’s important for us in the diaspora to understand their feelings, recognize that they, not we, are on the frontlines – and join them in praying for a brighter path.

I’m excited to introduce in this space a vital new voice speaking out on the Jewish issues of the day.

It is only in recent days that I discovered the writings of Rabbi Steven Abraham through his Substack column, which he launched last year. I was impressed immediately.

Rabbi Abraham, who leads Congregation Beth El in Omaha, Nebraska, writes with wisdom, style and moral clarity on complex issues critical to the Jewish world with insights that often touch on politics, history and Jewish texts.

“I write because I believe ideas have consequences,” he says. “My essays grapple with Israel, antisemitism, memory, and the moral challenges facing American Jewry. I do not write to be popular. I write because silence in the face of moral confusion is a dereliction of rabbinic responsibility.”

I learn from every post Rabbi Abraham writes, and I encourage you to follow him at rabbistevenabraham.substack.com

B’shalom,

Gary

Israeli Jews are responsible for themselves. American Jews over time learned to see acceptance as security. But times have changed.

Rabbi Steven Abraham

The distance between Israel and American Jews is not measured in miles, nor in time zones, nor even in policy disagreements. It is measured in posture. It is the distance between a people who have decided they do not need permission to exist and a community that has flourished precisely because it mastered the art of securing permission. That distance is not political before it is theological. It reflects two fundamentally different ways of standing before power, before history, and before God.

There is a striking passage in Berakhot 58a in which Rav Shila is confronted by a man who threatens to report him to the Persian authorities. Rav Shila strikes him. When challenged—why did you hit him?—he does not apologize. He answers with a verse from Torah, reframing his act of self-defense as an act of covenantal fidelity. He narrates his action not in the grammar of Persian law but in the language of his own tradition. The audacity of the moment lies not in the blow but in the refusal to translate. Rav Shila does not seek validation from the regime under which he lives. He acts as a Jew first and explains himself as a Jew second. The empire’s comprehension is irrelevant.

Compressed within that refusal is a claim so radical it unsettles nearly every assumption of modern diaspora life: existence precedes justification. A Jew does not first demonstrate worthiness and then receive the right to act. He acts from within the covenant, and the covenant is its own authority. That claim—that Jewish selfhood is not contingent upon external validation—marks the deepest fault line in contemporary Jewish life, deeper than any argument about settlements, Gaza, or the occupant of the Prime Minister’s office.

Two images flickered across American screens during Super Bowl weekend. In Robert Kraft’s “Sticky Note” advertisement, a Jewish teenager walks down a high school hallway, humiliated by a note reading “Dirty Jew” on his backpack. Redemption arrives from a Black classmate who covers the slur with a blue square: “I know how it feels.” The ad was designed for the vast American middle—the “unengaged” majority whose empathy must be activated. Jewish safety, in this framing, depends upon persuading others to care.

Within hours, the Israel Defense Forces released an eleven-second video: soldiers carrying rifles, Bad Bunny on the soundtrack, the caption reading, “This is our Super Bowl commercial.” No plea for empathy. No narrative of victimhood. No appeal to allies. Jewish safety, in this frame, depends upon Jews.

You could not design a more distilled expression of the chasm.

Both images are honest. The diaspora ad reflects a theology of the guest who relies on the host’s conscience. The IDF clip reflects a theology of sovereignty. But only one requires someone else’s permission to work. And the Kraft advertisement, examined closely, is not merely a strategy. It is a confession of faith—faith in the redemptive power of other people’s empathy. Its soteriology is liberal and social: if enough people of goodwill see our pain, the pain will stop. That theological architecture is not Jewish in any particular sense; it is the universal grammar of minority appeal, available to any group that has learned to narrate its suffering compellingly. What makes it remarkable is the unconscious assumption that this grammar is sufficient—that we do not, finally, need to secure our safety ourselves.

Israeli Jews, whatever their ideological leanings, live within a reality where Jewish power is exercised daily in all its moral complexity. Decisions about strikes, ceasefires, and military operations are not theoretical debates but operational choices with consequences measured in blood. Sovereignty is not an abstract value; it is an existential category. The return to Jewish sovereignty means the return to history’s tragic necessities. You do not get to field an army without confronting what armies do. This does not mean Israeli society is monolithic in its confidence—the secular left has its own anxieties about European opinion, and the Haredi world exercises a kind of internal exile even within sovereignty. But the gravitational center of Israeli life is agency. The arguments happen within a framework where Jewish power is the given, not the aspiration. After two millennia of statelessness, sovereignty is not an embarrassment but a restoration.

The Talmud in Sanhedrin 37a teaches that whoever saves a single life, it is as though he has saved an entire world. In American Jewish life, this teaching has become a universalist emblem, etched onto memorials and invoked in interfaith gatherings. But in its original context, the passage addresses judges in a capital case. It is a halakhic instruction about the gravity of wielding life-and-death authority. It presumes a court, a system, a sovereign framework. The rabbis understood that saving a world is bound up with the exercise of power. Those who save worlds are those entrusted with the terrible responsibility to condemn or to spare. That distinction—between power as sentiment and power as sovereign burden—maps precisely onto the Israeli-American divide.

American Jews inhabit a different narrative. The twentieth-century American Jewish project was one of integration. Jews entered universities, courts, media, finance, and politics. We proved that Jewishness and Americanness were not antagonists but partners. The implicit entry fee was a posture of non-threatening particularity—ethical, compassionate, justice-oriented, and above all, not aggressive. This strategy worked magnificently. It allowed Jews not merely to survive but to flourish.

Yet it shaped our instincts in ways we rarely examine. We learned to see acceptance as security. We internalized a reflex of translation so deep it became invisible—and then it became the content of our Judaism itself. When challenged, we explain. When Israel arises in polite company, the first move is to establish distance: I don’t support this policy; I oppose that coalition. These may be sincere positions, but they function as credentials at the door. They say: I am the kind of Jew with whom you can be comfortable. And when that need for acceptance becomes not merely a social strategy but the animating principle of communal life, the strategy has replaced the covenant. Translation has become the religion.

A fair objection arises here. Jewish tradition is replete with models of operating brilliantly within foreign power structures—Joseph in Egypt, Esther in Persia, Nehemiah before Artaxerxes. One might argue that coalition-building is not weakness but sophisticated Jewish wisdom refined over millennia. The argument is correct as far as it goes. But the critical distinction is between strategic alliance, which assumes Jewish agency as its foundation, and psychological dependence on approval, which erodes it. Joseph never forgot he was Joseph. Esther revealed her identity at the moment of maximum risk precisely because she understood that concealment had limits. These figures used the empire’s tools without mistaking the empire’s approval for the covenant’s mandate. The question for American Jews is whether our engagement with the surrounding culture still resembles Joseph’s strategic wisdom or has drifted into the dependent gratitude of a guest who has forgotten he has a home.

The Maharal of Prague, in Netzach Yisrael, described exile as a metaphysical distortion, an unnatural state in which Jewish existence is suspended from its proper order. A people who live perpetually as guests—even honored, prosperous guests—will inevitably shape their theology around acceptability. The need to be welcomed becomes part of the religious grammar. Many American Jews lack not talking points but a theological vocabulary for Jewish power. They have been taught prophetic ethics but not national sovereignty, tikkun olam but not Jewish deterrence. Power, in this framework, feels like a deviation from Jewish authenticity rather than an expression of it. Thus, when confronted with Israel’s hard edges, the instinct is to apologize or to distance rather than to articulate a Jewish theology of justified force. The Israeli does not begin there—not because Israelis are less morally serious, but because they inhabit a Judaism in which force is not a theoretical scandal but a daily reality.

If Judaism requires the approval of one’s social circle to feel viable, if its first reflex is to prove that it is not “that kind” of Judaism, then its content thins. It becomes a social strategy rather than a covenant. And social strategies, as Jewish history has taught with brutal regularity, have expiration dates.

The Psalmist’s oath—“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill”—was not about real estate but about identity. It insisted that Jewish selfhood is tethered to a place where Jews are not guests. Jerusalem symbolizes a world in which Jewish agency is primary, where the question is not whether we are acceptable but what kind of sovereign people we will be.

The distance between Israeli and American Jews will not be closed by better public relations or more immersive trips. It will narrow only if American Jews recover a theology that can hold power without apology. Not power without conscience. Not power without anguish. But power without the reflexive need to demonstrate regret for possessing it. The divide is not geography but grammar—the difference between narrating ourselves in the empire’s language and narrating ourselves in our own. Rav Shila’s refusal to translate may not be a blueprint for diaspora life in every respect, but it is a provocation. It asks whether Jewish existence is ultimately justified by external approval or by internal covenant.

The distance between us is more than miles. It is the space between asking permission and assuming responsibility. Closing that space may be the defining spiritual task of American Jewry in our time.

A unique team: The U.S. and Israel are full partners in their effort to eliminate Iran’s threat to the region, and beyond.

From a military standpoint, the joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran has been just short of miraculous, starting with eliminating the Supreme Leader and 40 of his top lieutenants in the first 40 seconds of the conflict.

From an American political standpoint, though, the war appears to be turning into a true dilemma for Israel – and American Jews – as bipartisan support for the Jewish state, a longtime bulwark of the relationship, is cratering.

Israelis believe this moment is their best – and maybe only – chance to free themselves of the existential threat of destruction at the hands of an Islamic fundamentalist regime fully committed to Israel’s demise. Support for the war is strong, and Donald Trump is seen as the one American leader with the resolve and commitment to topple the world’s most aggressive and dangerous source of international terror.

But here in the U.S., signs of discontent regarding Israel are coming from many directions. Large numbers of Republicans are upset with the president who promised no more “forever wars.” Tucker Carlson, hugely popular on the right and increasingly blunt about his anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views, sought to dissuade Trump from allegedly being coerced by Prime Minister Netanyahu into attacking Iran, and declares Israel is a dangerous liability.

On the left, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a likely Democratic presidential candidate and longtime supporter of Israel, said this week that the U.S. should consider “rethinking our military support for Israel” and described Israel as “sort of an apartheid state.” He recently said he “never will” accept money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobby that was once almost universally endorsed by members of Congress. It is now seen as toxic by many liberal and progressive Democrats seeking to distance themselves from Israel since the Gaza war.

Newsom’s comments reflect a dramatic shift away from support for Israel among Democrats.

Another example: A Gallup Poll taken in February found that for the first time in its many years of surveys, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians (41 percent) than with Israel (36 percent). Only 17 percent of Democrats said they sympathize more with Israel; 65 percent favor the Palestinians. Independent voters shifted sharply from 42 percent favoring Israel in past polls to 41 percent favoring the Palestinians today. Republican support is solid, at 70 percent sympathizing with Israel (13 percent favor Palestinians). But the sympathy for Israel was 80 percent – 10 percent higher – in 2024.

The poll was taken before the latest attack on Iran began, and all indications are that the highly unpopular conflict is blamed in part on concern that Trump has offered no specific reason for “why now?” and no day-after plan, as well as the charge that Israel pushed America into it. Jews are used to being scapegoated for causing wars, and this one is no exception. But the notion that Israel pulled Trump into this conflict when in truth he has long called for taking out the Iranian regime, mocked previous presidents for not doing so, and could easily have said “no” to Netanyahu’s entreaties, seems highly unlikely. Still, emotions are stronger than logic for many people, and with anti-Israel conspiracy theories spreading on social media, and politicians, left and right, wary of appearing too close to Israel, the blame-Israel tag could stick.

In a Senate vote along party lines, Republicans blocked a Democratic resolution to rein in President Trump’s powers from continuing the war against Iran without the authorization of Congress. Only one Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a staunch supporter of Israel, voted against the resolution. “Every member in the U.S. Senate agrees we cannot allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Fetterman explained in a post on his website. “I’m baffled why so many are unwilling to support the only action to achieve that.” He joined Republicans in supporting Trump’s decision, based on striking back at a regime that launched a war on America, Israel and the West 47 years ago when Islamic fundamentalists took over Iran. Since then their terror attacks have killed thousands of innocents around the world.

Perhaps more telling than political surveys and wranglings in Congress is the pulse of American culture. Late-night TV hosts are getting big laughs for mocking Trump’s vague comments about his reasons for launching the war. “This could be the first war ever launched based on vibes,” Jimmy Kimmel observed on The Tonight Show on Wednesday night. And Stephen Colbert’s monologue called out Trump for referring to “the war” frequently even though the administration calls the effort “targeted, major combat operations.”

Many Americans, especially those too young to remember the revolution of the ayatollahs in 1979, are unaware of Iran’s history of hostility toward the West, labeling America “Big Satan” and Israel “Little Satan.” On November 4, 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. On October 23, 1983, a suicide truck bomb sent by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. service members (220 Marines). It was the deadliest attack against the U.S. Marines since Iwo Jima in World War II. The list of terror attacks in Europe, the Mideast and South America goes on and on.

In response to the attack, Iran is turning neighboring states in the region into enemies by lashing out at a number of them, including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In addition to its obsession with America and Israel, Iran’s desperate attacks should indicate how dangerous the regime is to the world. But few have made that point.

For now, Israel is focused on winning the war decisively and severing Tehran from its Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthi proxies. But in the longer term, there are ominous signs indicating that the American-Israel relationship, now at its absolute highest point with the two countries full military partners, could be in for a dramatic downturn. A growing number of Americans perceive the war being fought more for Israel’s security than America’s, with some Republicans under the influence of social media powerhouses like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens. And more Democrats are viewing Netanyahu and his hard right government as moving closer to annexing Gaza and the West Bank than toward a peace path. As Michael Koplow, an astute observer of the Middle East and chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum, writes: “the relationship with Israel has become toxic. Israel’s American triumph is sowing the seeds for its American collapse.”

That might sound overly pessimistic to some, but wars tend to become less popular as they drag on and this one has been unpopular in the U.S. from the start. What’s more, as a result of the Gaza war, Netanyahu has become a pariah to many around the world, including Washington. That leads Koplow to assert that “the next Israeli government will need to pivot immediately, pursue normal U.S.-Israel policy processes that involve wide consultation, and most critically, seek buy-in for its aims from Congress and from both parties.”

Winning the war militarily over Iran would be a remarkable achievement, but restoring an authentic bipartisan relationship in Washington for the long term is an imperative.

You Are Invited …

I will be interviewing Bret Baier, Fox News’s chief political anchor and host of Special Report, his popular one-hour weekday news program, at The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center this coming Wednesday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m. The Center is at 1 E. 65th Street in New York City.

The program is free, and available to stream live on-line for free.

To attend in person or to stream on-line, simply Register by linking HERE.

If You Wait Long Enough, Satire Becomes Reality

The lead “news story” in The Jewish Week’s Purim Spoof from 14 years ago, March 9, 2012.

Dear Reader,

The annual Purim Spoof is on leave this year.

Truth be told, the daily headlines emanating from Washington these days trump (ouch!) my best efforts to find humor along the dark path from democracy to monarchy.

More importantly, as the war widens and casualties take their toll, this Purim holiday reflects the mood of Israeli society, calling for resolve, resilience, prayer and faith. Silliness and satire can wait.

At this time our hearts and prayers are with our brave brothers and sisters in Israel, and the men and women of the American military alongside them. May the war be brief and successful, leading to a brighter future for Israel and the region. And may we soon laugh again with a full heart.

Purim sameach,

Gary

Leader for life? Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority for a four-year term in 2005. He hasn’t held an election since.

Eighty percent of the nations in the world support a Palestinian state, endorsing a vision of Israel and Palestine living in peace, side by side. I share that ultimate goal but view it today as aspirational, as I do the coming of the Messiah. But based on the just-released draft of the Palestinian Authority’s constitution, a detailed plan for a Palestinian state, I think it’s more likely that the Messiah will show up before a two-state solution comes to pass.

The draft should be a must-read for the 157 countries that recognize a Palestinian state. They’ll find that their perception of a future Palestinian democracy ready to accept the state of Israel next door is a fiction. There is no talk of living alongside Israel. Instead, the draft asserts that Jerusalem will be the capital of Palestine and that Islamic and Christian holy sites will be maintained and protected. No mention is made of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the land since the days of the Bible; no recognition that Judaism is rooted in the Holy Land and that for thousands of years Jewish prayer has been deeply and inextricably linked to it.

In effect, the 53-page document erases Israel and Jewish history. It proposes a state that rejects “colonial settlement occupation… ethnic cleansing … and continued genocide,” to be governed not by democracy but Islamic Shariah law. It legalizes terror by promising to continue the PA’s “pay-for-slay” policy, calling for providing “protection and care for the families of martyrs, wounded and prisoners, and those released from the occupation prisons and the victims of genocide.” So much for a spirit of compromise or confidence-building required to prepare both Arabs and Jews to live as neighbors.

Reading the draft, with its emphasis on victimhood, I was reminded of Abba Eban’s most oft-quoted comment. Two months after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Eban, as Israel’s UN Ambassador and golden-toned orator, noted that Arab leaders “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” He was referring to frustratingly stalled peace efforts.

More than a half-century later, the PA, created by the Oslo Accords three decades ago, continues a long tradition of rejecting attempts at diplomatic solutions to produce an independent state. Made up of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other terror groups, the PA has consistently rejected Israeli and U.S. peace initiatives, often inciting violence against Israeli citizens, and teaching children from an early age to hate Jews. It has been a highly unpopular failure among its own people politically, financially and lacking in legitimacy. Ninety-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, elected to a four-year term 21 years ago, has not held elections since 1995 because he knows he would lose. He rules by executive decree, cracking down cruelly on critics and dissidents. His government is seen as corrupt on many levels, including nepotism and embezzlement, by more than 80 percent of Palestinians.

The details of the new draft of a PA constitution are particularly problematic at a moment when international calls for a Palestinian state are growing louder. The U.S. and other Western countries, well aware of the PA’s weakness and incompetence, have based their hopes, in part, for resolving the postwar Gaza crisis on bolstering a reformed PA that could have a key role in bringing stability to the area. “Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority,” President Biden wrote in The Washington Post in November 2023. But that would mean new elections and a wholesale revamping of the government, leading to more freedom and rights for Palestinians and more security for the region.

The fact that the draft calls for the opposite – more Islamic fundamentalism and refusal to coexist with or even recognize Israel – not only dashes the hopes of solving the Gaza situation but strengthens the Israeli right, which has long insisted that the two-solution is a fantasy. As Nachum Kaplan, an Israeli-based journalist wrote in his Substack newsletter, Moral Clarity, “the draft doubles down on erasure, grievance and theological supremacy … It also reveals that the PA has no intention of living peacefully alongside Israel. And anyone who believes otherwise is part of the problem.”

In this latest version of missing an opportunity, the PA has shown its true colors. The only ones who benefit, at least short term, from this diplomatic disaster are those in Israel who want to claim Gaza and the West Bank free of Palestinians forever. Or at least until the Messiah arrives.

A young martyr: Hind Rajab, 5, was killed two years ago. The feature film about her death, which includes her cries for help, has been lauded by film critics for its emotional power.

Israel, through blood, guts and tears, has achieved a military victory over Hamas terrorists. But in terms of public perception here and around the world, the Jewish state has suffered a stinging defeat – in part, and increasingly, through well-produced, deeply biased “historical dramas” that cast Palestinians as noble victims at the hands of violent, inhumane Jews.

Three of the five entries short-listed for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards on March 15 deal with Palestinian history through a one-sided lens. Given the current political climate, with Israel widely seen as a pariah state, and Hollywood’s reputation as a bastion of progressive views, it seems certain these films will receive a great deal of laudatory attention on Oscar night, in front of a global audience, and going forward.

As Rachel O’Donoghue of HonestReporting observes in a thoroughly researched analysis, “a new genre is taking shape with lasting consequences: by framing Gaza through the moral language of historical atrocity, these films risk cementing distortions that will outlive the war itself.”

Each of the films is emotionally charged, fully sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle, presents Israel in villainous terms and makes little effort to back moral claims with sufficient facts and historical context. In large part, film critics have been so impressed with the emotional impact of these films that they pay little attention to the bias of the narratives – or they simply share the sentiment.

Family saga: ‘All That’s Left of You’ has received numerous awards and little criticism for its imbalanced portrait of suffering Palestinians and cruel Israelis.

For example, in reviewing “All That’s Left of You,” the Jordanian entry that scored 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Daniels, a Chicago-based film critic writing on RogerEbert.com, said the film was “immaculately rendered” in offering a fictional multi-generational drama of the suffering of one Palestinian family from 1948 to current times. Produced by Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo, the film depicts the family enduring violent displacement, trauma and humiliation from inhumane Israeli soldiers. There is no effort to provide context for the war that began on May 15, 1948, when five Arab armies attacked and sought to destroy the state of Israel, which had declared independence the day before. But Daniels wrote that the film “smartly interweaves … instances of degradation with varieties of violence inflicted at every level of Israel’s occupying apparatus. Some of it is physical – like arrests, imprisonment and death – some psychological, and others bureaucratic.”

One-sided history: The Arab revolt against Britain and Jews as shown in ‘Palestine 1936’ does not deal with violence committed against Jews living in Palestine.

The Palestinian entry for an Oscar, “Palestine 36,” stars Jeremy Irons and focuses on the 1936-1939 Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine, casting the Jews in a harsh light. It received a 20-minute standing ovation after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, and rave reviews from numerous film critics. This, despite the fact that some historians noted the film avoids mention of Arab violence against Jews that set off the revolt, and the role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who supported and collaborated with Hitler in opposing a Jewish presence in Palestine.

Writing in The Free Press, author and journalist Oren Kessler concludes in “The Bad History of ‘Palestine 36” that the film is “a morality play of colonial cruelty” that portrays Jews as “voiceless pantomime figures” or wretches.

Perhaps best-known and most heart-wrenching of these Oscar nominees is Tunisia’s entry, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” based on the true story of the death of a five-year-old Gazan girl trapped in a car in the midst of the war. Responding to an IDF evacuation of an area, she and six relatives fled from the fighting on January 29, 2024. Their car was fired on and everyone else in the car was killed. Hind managed to speak by phone to her mother and Palestinian rescue dispatchers, who sought to save her but were unable to. She was found dead in the car 12 days later.

To add weight to the tragedy, Hind’s frantic conversations from the car were recorded. They became the emotional core of this highly praised “docudrama” and of a foundation launched in Hind’s name. Its core mission, it says, is to use “offensive litigation” and take legal action for “war crimes” and “atrocities” against the state of Israel.

Real voice, disputed facts: Recordings of the young victim’s voice are used in dramatic fashion in ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab,’ but the film is not a documentary and the facts surrounding her tragic death are under dispute.

In effect, the story of Hind’s death has become a powerful political and cultural cause with major implications. And while the details surrounding the events of that tragic incident two years ago are under dispute – Israeli officials have said IDF forces were not in the area of the car that fateful day – The Hind Rajab Foundation doggedly pursues Israeli soldiers for war crimes, and the film advances the narrative of Israel as an evil force, heartless in its efforts to destroy the people of Gaza, including a helpless child.

There is no mention of Hamas or its brutal attack that launched the war by slaughtering 1,200 Israeli men, women and children, and taking 251 hostages on October 7, 2023.

A disclaimer at the outset of the film says it is “based on real events,” and filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania asserts, “this is not a story. This is history.” But HonestReporting’s O’Donoghue notes, “emotional power does not absolve factual responsibility. If anything, it heightens it. That obligation is precisely where ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ fails.” She charges that vital, disputed aspects of the incident “have been systematically flattened into certainty by activists, NGOs, and – now – cinema.”

In this case, O’Donoghue cites the efforts of Mark Zlochin, an independent researcher and data analyst whose detailed report on Substack raises a number of inconsistencies about the incident, involving low visibility and fog-of-war battlefield conditions, unexplained timeline gaps, shifting accounts and omitted communications. Zlochin writes that soon after the tragedy took place, major media outlets like Al Jazeera, the BBC, The Washington Post and Sky News “published reconstructions that turned a chaotic battlefield episode into a tale of deliberate execution … meticulously engineered for maximum outrage.”

The combination of a film that “flattens war into myth,” as O’Donoghue writes, and journalists who repeat and expand on unproven allegations, has a powerful effect. It creates and advances a false narrative that soon becomes accepted as fact, as history.

The tragic Hind Rajab episode, and how it has been reinterpreted and deployed as a propaganda tool, brings to mind the death of another innocent Gazan child more than 25 years ago. On September 30, 2000, the day after the Second Intifada broke out, Muhammad al-Durrah, age 12, reportedly was killed while huddling with his father to avoid Israeli and Palestinian cross-fire near the Gaza border. The Arab world claimed the shooting was deliberate, and made a symbol and martyr out of Muhammad, memorializing him on postage stamps. Israel conducted its own investigation and found that the fatal shots most likely came from Palestinians. Thirteen years later, another Israeli report said the “shooting” was staged and the boy was not harmed. All these years after the incident, the debate – and search for the truth – continues.

The Hind Rajab tragedy may well suffer the same fate. Rachel O’Donoghue told me the reason she continues to report on the Mideast conflict, separating fact from fiction, is because she is an optimist, hopeful that in the end the facts will prevail. But she and others believe there will be more films like these three because much of the world population and mainstream media are open to the images of Israelis as oppressors and Palestinians as victims. “Not only Gaza, but Israel’s entire past, will be re-imagined through this lens,” O’Donoghue wrote – “a process that does not merely criticize a state but delegitimizes its very existence.

“And once committed to the big screen,” she concluded, “those myths will be far harder to dismantle.”

Lynchings as spectacle: Often publicized in advance, lynchings sometimes attracted thousands of people who celebrated the event. Some posed for picture postcards with the victim.

How does a society memorialize the sins of its history? The very first step is to recognize that sins were indeed committed.

For some, as America approaches its 250th anniversary this year, the debate over that initial acknowledgment remains an open issue, and an increasingly heated one. In recent years, while celebrating the remarkable achievements of the world’s first modern democracy, attention has been paid to its long mistreatment of African Americans, from brutal slavery to more recent forms of prejudice and inequality.

There are those who say that those historical negatives have been over-emphasized. Most notably, President Trump said last week that as a result of landmark legislation in the 1960s that banned racial discrimination in employment and voting, “white people were treated very badly.” He has also called on the Smithsonian Museum to revise its narrative of U.S. history, saying it is too “divisive” in regard to race and slavery. Others insist that racial injustices have been downplayed for far too long and that only an honest reckoning on these issues can lead to national healing.

That was the dramatic and powerful message of three prominent Civil Rights sites I visited recently, each telling a dark, shameful story. Through basic facts and high-technology they convey a narrative of centuries of black suffering in America at the hands of whites who treated them, at best, as less than equal, and at worst, as virtually inhuman. Much of what I saw was hard to look at – yet harder to look away from.

It seems fitting, as we mark the 97th birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) on January 19, to reflect on the civil rights movement he led in the 1950s and ‘60s, the impact his life – and violent death at 39 – had on the struggle for racial equality, and the long history of racial injustice and violence that dates back to America’s earliest days.

My own grappling with these issues of late has taken me many hundreds of miles in recent days to Atlanta, Georgia and Montgomery, Alabama, visiting several civil rights national landmarks and museums – and many years back in my memory to my own early encounters with racism.

Growing up in the 1950s in Annapolis, Md., just south of the Mason-Dixie Line, I first became aware of the extent of the racial divide between African American and white people one day when I was about 10 years old and at the movies.

My older brother and I were watching one of those three-hour-plus epic films popular at the time, like “Ben Hur” or “Spartacus.” At intermission, when we came out to the lobby to buy some candy, I caught sight of, through the glass door, a group of African Americans – then commonly referred to as “colored” – outside the theater. They were carrying signs and calling out, though I couldn’t make out the details. My brother explained that they were protesting the theater’s “white only” policy, off limits to people of color. I also learned that the other two movie theaters in town had the same policy, and that in a neighborhood in a different part of town there was a “colored movie theater” (which happened to be owned by a member of the synagogue).

I was taken aback. It had never occurred to me that I saw no black people when I went to the movies. I was also unaware that the public elementary school I attended, a short walk from home, was segregated until I was in fourth grade. A landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 ruled that segregated schools across the country were illegal. But integration in Anne Arundel County, where I lived, began a year later and progressed slowly, one grade per year, due to local resistance. The local schools weren’t fully segregated until 1966.

When you’re young, you tend to accept your surroundings as normal. I didn’t know at the time that public bathrooms and water fountains in town were labeled “White” or “Colored.” (I also didn’t know that a local country club had a sign banning Jews. My father, the only rabbi in town, played a key role in opening the club to Jews and some nearby beaches to blacks.)

‘Legacy Of Violence … And Injustice’

There were several far more troubling facts I’ve only now come to know about Annapolis – and hundreds of other towns and cities throughout the country – after my visit to the South. My wife and I spent two days at The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, deeply compelling major sites in Montgomery, Alabama devoted to presenting the hard, awful facts of much of the black experience in America. It was there that I learned that at least five lynchings of black men by white mobs took place in or near Annapolis between 1875 and 1922. (A historic marker was placed in the center of town in 2021, noting “the legacy of violence, intimidation and injustice that has not previously been acknowledged.”)

That discovery was part of a dramatic lesson in American history for me that, to my embarrassment, I had not fully understood until now. It began in Atlanta, where my wife I were visiting family, that we toured the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which reopened in November after a $58 million, 10-month expansion and renovation. The impressive, state-of-the-art museum is centered on the life and career of MLK. It emphasizes his insistence on non-violent protests that underscored the moral difference between the restraint and dignity of civil rights advocates, and the violence and hate-spewed language of those who countered them, including officers of the law.

In addition to housing many of MLK’s writings, the museum’s galleries feature interactive displays that include touchscreens, videos and audio to highlight major events in the civil rights struggle, including Freedom Riders being beaten as they seek to sign up black voters; the huge March on Washington in 1963 for the right to vote, where MLK delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech; and the somber cortege at MLK’s funeral after his assassination by a white racist five years later.

Videos show clips of civil rights volunteers being trained to remain silent and curl up bodily to protect against body blows if attacked. One of the most popular and emotionally difficult exhibits is a recreated lunch diner counter where you, as a seated civil rights protester, are asked by a museum staffer to put your hands down on the counter and put on a pair of headphones. You are told that you will hear through those headphones taped shouts, taunts and curses aimed at you, to simulate real-life experiences. Your task is to stay calm and keep your hands in place on the counter during the 85-second verbal assault in your ears. A box of tissues is nearby for those who come away tearful, shaken by the experience.

Overall, the museum – largely funded by private sponsors and donors, including Atlanta-based Coca Cola – focuses on the 20th-century-history of the black experience in America in a forthright manner, including positive signs of headway as well as outrageous injustice. “It’s the story of black progress and white backlash,” noted Kama Pierce, the curator of the new exhibit, in a New York Times report. “We feel like we’re still in this cycle in this country.”

New Perspective In ‘The Cradle of the Confederacy’

From Atlanta, it was on to Montgomery, a 200-mile drive south to Alabama’s state capitol, which for a brief time in 1861 hosted the first White House of the Confederacy. We spent two days visiting two remarkable Civil Rights sites, a few blocks from each other, that opened in 2018. One is The Legacy Museum, which tells the story of slavery in America, dating back to the 1600s, and its legacy. The other, as cited above, is The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the first memorial dedicated to the thousands of black victims of lynching, many of which were undocumented. Both projects were created under the direction of Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney and founding executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit that describes itself as “challenging racial and economic injustice, and protecting basic human rights.”

Stevenson, a MacArthur Grant Fellow and author of a highly praised memoir, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” says he chose Montgomery, in part, for the locale because of its authenticity as the “Cradle of the Confederacy” at the time of the Civil War. But also because it’s the city where, a century later, the successful boycott against segregation on city buses began, thanks to activist Rosa Parks, and where MLK led an historic, five-day march to Selma, Alabama for black voting rights.

Stevenson has said that Montgomery’s transition from a center of the domestic slave trade to a starting point for racial healing indicates that it could be a model for other cities in the U.S.

Two heroes of the civil rights movement: In downtown Montgomery, Alabama, a statue of John Lewis, a leading activist and later Congressman from Georgia; in the foreground, Rosa Parks, who sparked a boycott of Montgomery buses in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to whites and sit in the “colored” section in the back. (Note her shown sitting on air, as if above the fray.)

Both the museum and the memorial have a strong, visceral impact on visitors. They utilize a wide range of creative elements, from engraved steel monuments to high-tech holograms, to drive home the horror and inhumanity of how slaves were treated. Even after the Civil War, when they were legally free, thousands of African Americans were tortured and lynched by white mobs as recently as 1955.

The museum was built on land where slaves were warehoused before being sold in the mid-19th century. The essential message of the many exhibits, first-person narratives, videos, short documentaries, interactive technologies and maps is based on two prominently displayed messages. One, on a wall, reads: “Slavery Did Not End. It Evolved.” The other, written on a large American flag, reads: “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.” The unifying theme is that racial inequality began with slavery, and that today, centuries later, blacks are often still presumed dangerous and guilty. The museum is based on the belief that only in confronting and absorbing the hard truths of history can justice be advanced.

For me, those hard truths were conveyed not only through facts and statistics, but most eloquently through the hundreds of haunting sculptures at both the museum and the nearby National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Created by Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, they show the fear and trauma on the faces of enslaved men, women and children.

Life in chains: One of hundreds of life-sized sculptures by Ghanian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo seen at the two Montgomery, Alabama civil rights sites.

The memorial is built on more than five acres of hilltop land and, on entering the peaceful area, one feels the presence of sacred space, honoring the thousands of African Americans tortured and lynched, often in the presence of thousands of spectators. The visitor soon confronts some 800 six-foot-high steel monuments suspended from above and engraved with the names of the sites, victims and dates of lynchings. The feeling evoked is of a cemetery headstone, hanging above, like a lynching victim.

Hanging from above: More than 800 suspended monuments at the lynching memorial contain the names of victims, the dates of their murder and the county and state where it took place.

What we learned – and what was not taught in schools across the country – is that while most of the 4,400 documented lynchings took place in 12 Southern states, all but seven of the Continental United States had at least one lynching in the period between 1877 and 1950. Also shocking was that these murders were “acts of terrorism because they were carried out with impunity, sometimes in broad daylight, often ‘on the courthouse lawn,’” according to EJI research. The lynchings were not “frontier justice” because many took place in cities with court systems.

Walking down from the hilltop and reading the names, the reasons given for the lynchings, and the gruesome violation of the bodies was gut-wrenching. As a tool of oppression, lynchings were common punishment for minor social transgressions, for approaching a white woman, or for voting. They often were announced in advance in newspapers that encouraged people to come and celebrate the spectacle.

No one was ever charged for these public murders.

Read all about it: A Mississippi newspaper front-page story announcing the time and place of an upcoming lynching where the victim “will be burned.” The article notes that the governor announced that he is “powerless to prevent it” and that a Baptist pastor intends to attend the lynching and “entreat the mob to use discretion.”

As an American Jew born soon after the Holocaust, and coming of age during the 1960s’ era of Civil Rights activism, I recognize the impulse to memorialize one’s own – millions of all-too-often-forgotten victims of racial and ethnic hatred. That applies to Africans and African Americans who were enslaved, tortured and killed on these shores as well as the millions of European Jews rounded up and methodically murdered by the Nazis.

Standing in front of a huge wall at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, I read the following words and thought of the victims of slavery and the victims of the Holocaust:

“For the hanged and beaten. For the shot, drowned and burned. For the tortured, tormented and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law.

“We will remember. …”

The impetus and message is the same: “Zachor,” remember, as commanded in the Bible.

That imperative to remember is the concluding message of a remarkable essay published in The Atlantic (December, 2022), entitled, “How Germany Remembers The Holocaust, And What America Can Learn About Atonement.” Written by Clint Smith, an Atlantic staff writer, it focuses on the complexities of Germany’s various efforts to memorialize the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust by providing of tours of concentration camps, creating major memorials and placing small concrete blocks on the street in front the homes of Jewish victims. The blocks, called a Stolperstein, are covered with a brass plate with the name and dates of birth and death of the victims. There are now more than 90,000 such stones set into the streets and sidewalks of 30 European countries, noted Smith, who observed: “Together, they make up the largest decentralized memorial in the world.”

He cites the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery as having “a similar emotional texture to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” a vast maze of several thousand concrete slabs in the center of Berlin.

In the end, though, Smith writes: “It’s impossible for any memorial to slavery to capture its full horror, or for any memorial to the Holocaust to express the full humanity of the victims. No stone in the ground can make up for a life. No museum can bring back millions of people. It cannot be done, and yet we must try to honor those lives and to account for this history, as best we can. It is the very act of attempting to remember that becomes the most powerful memorial of all.”

Echoes of Yad Vashem: In memorializing the nameless, some of the hanging monuments at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice list the site and dates of lynchings and “Unknown” for the many victims whose names could not be documented.

Opening their hearts: Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin spoke to a recent JOFA conference about their experience as full-time advocates for Israel’s hostages. Moderator Abigail Pogrebin is at left.

We are living in a season of trauma that began in Israel on October 7 and has not gone away. On the contrary, as the war went on and Israel became an international pariah, expressions of antisemitism have increased around the world, from university campuses in the U.S., to violent attacks against Jews in Europe to the murder of innocent men, women and children celebrating Chanukah on a lovely beach in Australia.

One of the great frustrations for supporters of Israel is trying to change the minds of Hamas supporters in this country who embrace liberal values even as they defend a terrorist group dedicated to killing Jews and destroying the Jewish state. The most telling example I’ve heard comes from Jon Polin, husband of Rachel Goldberg-Polin and father of Hersh, a”h, probably the most well-known of the hostages abducted to Gaza on October 7.

Jon shared the story with journalist Abigail Pogrebin, who moderated a poignant conversation with Rachel and Jon at the recent JOFA (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance) conference in New York. He told the large, spellbound audience that during a rare few days of solitude last summer, he and Rachel visited a close friend in a small town in Oregon. One morning they went to a local coffee shop and noticed that the barista was wearing a “from the river to sea” button. Rachel cautioned Jon not to bother getting into a conversation with the young man. Jon didn’t, but their host did engage the barista, leading to an argument.

After a few moments, Rachel walked over, put her hand out to the barista, asked him his name – Jake – and showed him a picture on her phone of Hersh. She explained, as she held Jake’s hand, that Hersh was her 23-year-old son, an advocate for peace and co-existence, who was one of six Israelis murdered by Hamas in a tunnel after being starved and tortured for almost 10 months.

Jake’s reaction was immediate. “Well, you guys are committing genocide,” he said angrily.

So much for compassion.

“He could have first said ‘I’m sorry for your loss’,” Jon noted sadly. He said he came to the conclusion that even in a situation with two people in dialogue, holding hands, “it’s so hard to connect on a human level.” It was a powerful moment for him, he acknowledged, a sobering reminder of the difficulty in “convincing anyone of anything” during these fraught times.

The lesson Jon took away from the encounter, he said, was: “just model who you want to be.” A simple statement with profound meaning.

Seeing Rachel and Jon up close, I felt like I knew this widely admired couple personally. I’m sure the audience felt the same way. So many of us have followed their courageous journey as they’ve traveled the world for more than two years, bearing their grief with dignity. Together, they not only advocated tirelessly for all of the hostages but did so with a soft-spoken but fierce display of faith, hope and humanity. That is the kind of modeling Jon was encouraging and that is all too rare at a time when empathy too often is seen as weakness.

As American-Israelis, Jon and Rachel exemplify behavior rooted in American freedom and democracy as well as Judaism’s emphasis on the value of every life, created in the image of God. In a world that seems to be tumbling out of control, with normative societal standards of public discourse, political debate, consensus on facts and respect for those with different views no longer in place, they challenge us to become our better selves.

Along the way, in navigating a deeply divided political climate they have tried to avoid diplomatic pitfalls, speaking out in ways that “widen the circle,” as Rachel put it, and expressing empathy for all who are suffering. “If you only cry for one side’s babies you lose your humanity,” she told the JOFA audience.

Pogrebin, the most sought-after moderator in Jewish life these days, conducted the conversation with great sensitivity. She created a comfort level where Jon and Rachel could be themselves, with flashes of humor, in addition to describing the anguish of their full-time advocacy. Though Rachel is usually in the spotlight in their travels, Jon was a full partner in the discussion.

Rachel spoke with eloquence and displayed her open, direct style in describing her most personal beliefs and fears. “It’s ok to be scared” about speaking out at times, “but don’t let it stop you,” she advised. In her role as a teacher, Rachel said she used to be nervous at times. But “October 7 scared the fear out of me,” she observed. “Even now it’s gone.” She attributes her strength to the comfort she draws from her religious faith. “Thank God I believe in God,” she said, “it’s everything to me.”

Like so many others, I have heard Jon and Rachel on numerous podcasts, read of their meetings with the pope, presidents, UN delegates and Jewish communities around the country. Perhaps most dramatic was the impact they had on the 20,000 delegates who gave the couple a standing ovation, chanting “bring them home,” when they took the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 21, 2024, with millions watching on television.

Rachel recalled during the JOFA interview that she and Jon had been sequestered for three days in a Chicago hotel prior to their appearance at the convention and had been warned to “prepare for boos and hate.” She said she was overwhelmed by the warm response, especially when she saw a woman in the audience who was wearing a kefiya and crying. “I put my head down on the podium,” she said. “I didn’t know how to receive such empathy. I cried.”

She told the world that summer night that she and Jon have been living “on another planet” since October 7, a world of “anguish and misery.” Jon emphasized that their struggle to free the hostages was “not a political issue, it’s a humanitarian issue.” He pointed out that “there is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. In a competition of pain,” he said, “there are no winners.”

Nine days later, their son, Hersh, and five other young hostages were murdered in a Gaza tunnel.

But Jon and Rachel’s tireless effort to speak out on behalf of the remaining hostages did not falter after learning the tragic news of Hersh’s death. They continued to speak out and still do so, though Jon acknowledged, “we’re still figuring out what’s next for us.” He noted that during “such a hard time” for world Jewry, “we try to speak prouder and louder of who we are,” deeply aware of “the link in this long chain” of Jewish history.

In reflecting on her advocacy, Rachel cited the Purim story of how Queen Esther was asked by Mordechai to risk her life to speak out and save the Jews of Persia. “If you keep silent at a time like this, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from some other place while you … will perish,” Mordechai warned her. “And who knows whether it was for just such a time as this that you became queen.”

Taking that lesson to heart, Rachel said, “I want to carry this weight more gracefully,” adding that she and Jon “will carry this tremendous weight until we are in the ground next to Hersh, on either side of him.”

Her words hung heavy in the air, no doubt prompting each of us in the audience to ask ourselves how best we can respond to just such a time as this.

United in anguish and faith: Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, with photos of their son, Hersh, soon after October 7.

Note: Elliot Cosgrove, the rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue and a leading voice in American Jewish life, published a poignant and timely book in 2024. It sought to place the tragedy of October 7 in the context of Jewish history, exploring how Jewish faith can apply in modern times. He chose the title “For Such A Time As This: On Being Jewish Today,” noting that “Mordechai’s words to Esther are a reminder of the role of Jewish agency in an out-of-control world filled with pain.”

In the spirit of end-of-year “Best” lists, here are five entries from the 42 pieces I wrote in this space in 2025. I don’t know if they are the best of the lot, but they are the ones that got the most traction, the most views from you.

Not surprisingly, in reviewing the year’s collection, the most common topic was the ongoing Mideast war, and more particularly, my critiques of mainstream media coverage. Three of the five columns below deal directly with that issue, as did a number of other pieces I wrote during the year. I think the issue is vital because media coverage played a pivotal role in framing the conflict against Israel, intentionally or not. And that perception, in turn, influenced global opinion and political course as Israel – viciously attacked by a terror group committed to the destruction of Jews and the Jewish state – became the world’s pariah.

The other two pieces below deal with the authors of two important and very different new books. Reading Joshua Leifer’s ambitious “Tablets Shattered,” part history of the last century of American Jewish life and part memoir, I was impressed with his writing and many of his observations, as well as the sincerity of his concern about the Jewish future. But I was troubled by his views on Israel, which I think are deeply flawed.

I was grateful for the opportunity to spend time with Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, a leading voice in American Jewish life today, while working on a profile of her and reviewing her new memoir, “Heart of a Stranger.” It is easy to see why she is widely regarded as the face of 21st-century American Jewry.

I hope you enjoy reading, or re-reading, these pieces and, as always, I welcome your comments.

Wishing each of you and all of us a brighter new year, and thank you for your support.

B’shalom,

Gary

My Favorite Photo of the Year

‘The Eclipse’s Spell’: This photo by Oliver Mason, editor of Palette, the Atlanta Jewish Academy’s high school newspaper, won first place in this year’s Jewish Scholastic Press Association competition in the category of photojournalism. It accompanied Mason’s essay on ancient Jewish interpretation of eclipses as bad omens.

A Heartfelt And Troubling Challenge To American Jews

Joshua Leifer’s ‘Tablets Shattered’ – eloquent and insightful but at times frustratingly off base – introduces a voice to be reckoned with.

Back in February, I described Joshua Leifer as “a kind of budding, 21st century Bob Dylan, the voice of a growing segment of disgruntled Jewish young people rebelling against the ways of their elders – in this case, in what they see as blind support for a ‘genocidal’ state of Israel.”

Though I disagree strongly with much of his politics, it would be a mistake to dismiss this 30-year-old author’s stinging rebuke of virtually every form of American Jew, especially Zionists, in his deep engagement with and concern about the future of Judaism and Israel.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Leifer, his is a voice that should be heard, and challenged.

(This column was the most-read piece of the year, by far.)

Read it HERE.

The Party’s Over

A call for Democrats to abandon Israel leaves me shaken but not shocked.

In an Opinion piece in The New York Times a few weeks ago, entitled “This Is The Story Of How The Democrats Blew It On Gaza,” President Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes asserted that “it is past time for Democrats to stop supporting this Israel government.” He called on his party to reclaim its values, bring about a bigger and more solid coalition “and start building the world they want rather than defending the indefensible.”

He said, in effect, that Israel is not part of the world Democrats want and has become indefensible.

I, in turn, found his takedown of Israel to be skewed and unfair. While acknowledging that Israel needs an alternative to its current course in Gaza and some key domestic policies, I believe Rhodes’s message was itself indefensible – factually and morally. I offered a counter argument.

Read it HERE.

These Columnists Doth Protest Too Much

Two progressive Jewish New York Times writers defend Mamdani against Jewish critics.

The premise for many Jews who support Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York who has had a hard time backing down from calling for “global intifada,” is that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are quite different. They dismiss the fact that most American Jews view support for the state of Israel as an integral part of their Jewish identity and religion, a modern-day expression of God’s promise of the land of Israel to Abraham in the Bible.

In June, I took issue with Times columnists Michelle Goldberg and M. Gessen and maintained that Mamdani’s rejection of the Jewish state’s right to exist is an example of “the new antisemitism.”

Read it HERE.

Half-True

NYT news analysis of Israel today is an example of why media shares blame for Jewish state’s tarnished image.

Michael Shear’s front-page analysis in July of how Israel has succeeded militarily in fighting its enemies while losing political and diplomatic support in the U.S. and around the world was factually correct. But by not dealing with the history, context and some basic facts about the Gaza war – like, for example, that Hamas, a terrorist group, garners world sympathy by using its civilians as canon fodder while Israel seeks to avoid Gazan civilian casualties – Shear exemplifies a false equivalency common in mainstream media coverage of the war.

Read it HERE.

An ‘Unlikely’ Rabbi

Angela Buchdahl is a ‘stranger’ no more.

Born in Seoul, the daughter of a Buddhist Korean mother and Jewish American father, Angela Buchdahl, 53, is senior rabbi of New York’s Central Synagogue and one of the leading voices in American Jewish life today. Commissioned by Hadassah Magazine to write a deep-dive profile of Buchdahl, incorporating a review of her beautifully written new memoir (“Heart of a Stranger”), I found her to be a rare blend of intellect, spirituality and compassion whose primary mission is to build strong Jewish community.

(This piece, linked below, first appeared in the October-November issue of Hadassah Magazine.)

Read it HERE.

Heartbreaking image: This NYTimes photo was taken by Saher Alghorra in Gaza City. Some similar widely circulated photos were found to be of children suffering from illnesses from birth.

As I looked through the 63 photos in The New York Times annual “Year In Pictures” section (December 21), I asked myself this question. If, as the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” what is the value of having seven of the eight photos related to the Gaza war emotionally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause?

You be the judge. Here is the breakdown, in sequence:

Pages 10 and 11:

A large, dramatic spread across two pages of the vast ruins of Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza. A family is shown breaking their fast during Ramadan “in the rubble of their destroyed home,” explains photographer Saher Alghorra in a lengthy accompanying note. Alghorra wrote, in part: “I lived in constant tension and anxiety – fear for my family on one side, and the possibility of death at any moment on the other. I worked under immense pressure, but I was committed to conveying images from Gaza.”

Page 12:

A young man holding a child, both looking disheveled, in Gaza City. “The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike that killed two people and wounded over 30,” reads the caption, adding: “Bombings were again a part of daily life for Palestinians after a cease-fire collapsed.”

Page 13:

A photo showing the back of a young, robed woman at Columbia University “arrested during pro-Palestinian demonstrations outside the campus during the commencement ceremony.” The photo focuses on her hands zip-tied tightly behind her, an ominous black-gloved hand – presumably a policeman’s – holding her right arm.

The price of protest? Photo by Alex Kent for The New York Times.

Page 16:

A tender photo of Mahmoud Khalil, “a pro-Palestinian activist detained for his role in protests at Columbia,” according to the caption, holding his infant son in his arms and kissing his head, with his smiling wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, at his side. As the caption noted, Khalil returned home to his wife and newborn son “after being held for 104 days.”

Family reunion: This photo was taken by Todd Heisler of The New York Times.

Page 21:

A poignant photo of a young mother in Gaza City holding her severely thin two-year-old son, his face nestled in her shoulder. “Amid Israeli restrictions on aid,” reads the caption, “health workers, struggling to heal wounds and illness, saw rising malnutrition.”

Page 21:

A few Palestinians in the West Bank are shown “picking through debris for whatever could still be saved” after “the Israeli military bulldozed their dwelling,” according to photographer Daniel Berehulak and the photo’s caption. “Israel accelerated its seizure of Palestinian land in the West Bank,” the caption said.

Page 30:

In a photo of an Israeli military helicopter, Ziv Berman, 28, one of the last hostages released by Hamas, can be seen waving out of the window. An accompanying note from photographer Avishag Shaar-Yashuv noted: “To see him standing in a strong and powerful way after two years in captivity, taking his body almost outside the airplane, was really special.”

Homeward bound: This photo was taken by Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times.

Page 31:

A large group of Gazans in Khan Younis are shown clamoring for packages being distributed by a food aid convoy two days after a cease-fire was announced. “The trucks were stripped bare,” the caption said.

One more dramatic photo, spread across pages 28 and 29, is indirectly related to the war.

It shows then-Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mandani smiling on stage at a late-October rally in Queens, looking out at a sea of exuberant supporters raising their lit flashlights. “The vibe was super-energized, but also had a feeling in the air of, we can’t let up and have to keep pushing until the very last minute,” noted photographer Vincent Alban in an accompanying comment. “ It was pretty electric … I wanted to try to show the vastness of his base and the strength of it.”

In all, the Times photos chosen to represent key events of 2025 include those that emphasize the ruins of Gaza, the suffering of its citizens in a war that was launched by Hamas, and the heavy price paid by supporters of Hamas in this country for protesting Israel’s actions. The one photo sympathetic to Israel is the small image of a proud and smiling released hostage.

I am tempted to write more here, to repeat a long litany of facts too often overlooked by mainstream media and take note of the trauma Israelis continue to deal with since the barbaric attack on its citizens October 7, the inhumane strategy of Hamas in using its unprotected citizens as canon fodder while its soldiers hide below them, the practice of Hamas stealing food and aid for themselves from convoys, the brutal beatings and starvation that Israeli hostages endured in dark tunnels, etc. etc. But words and facts are far less effective than emotional, visual images.

And The Times has spoken volumes with its end-of-year images.

Abe and Bibi in happier days: Prime Minister Netanyahu and ADL’s Abraham Foxman in photo dated July 2023.

Seventeen months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a major American Jewish leader that his appointment of Itamar Ben Gvir as national security minister and Bezalel Smotrich as finance minister was “a mistake,” and added, “I’ll fix it.”

Netanyahu has never stated publicly that bringing the two far-right ministers into his coalition was a mistake. On the contrary, he has defended his decision against those who say that the policies and statements of the two ministers – primarily, their call for Israel to continue the war, seize permanent control of Gaza for resettlement, and annex the West Bank – has played a major role in Israel’s isolation in the international community and its image as a racist and genocidal state.

The conversation took place in July 2023, in Jerusalem between Netanyahu and Abraham Foxman, national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who led the organization from 1987 to 2015.

Their discussion came to light this past week with the publication of “A Shattered World: Jews and Israel After October 7,” a book of essays published by Purdue University Press that addresses the impact of the war on the Jewish future. It includes a Q and A transcript of an interview with Foxman, conducted last spring by Gilbert N. Kahn, a professor of political science at Kean University and co-editor of the book. Michael Berenbaum, a noted Holocaust scholar, is the book’s other co-author. (I contributed a chapter on mainstream media coverage of the war.)

Foxman, arguably the American Jewish community’s leading defender of Israel during his long career, is often cited for his directness and authenticity. In the book, he described having an hour-and-a-half conversation in the prime minister’s office that Netanyahu initiated, encouraging his guest, who he knew well for many years, to “be straight” with him.

“I said to him, ‘why did you have to give Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’ the positions ‘you gave them?’” Foxman asked. “You could have given them something else. He [Netanyahu] says, ‘I made a mistake. That’s it. … And Abe, I’ll fix it. You’ll see.’

“I said to him, ‘Bibi, I have known you for a long time. You’re not a racist. Now you’re a racist. Because now you embrace two racists in your government. You don’t challenge them. You don’t criticize them. … He said, ‘Abe, I’ll fix it. The argument is over. I made a mistake.’”

In a phone interview with Foxman last week, he confirmed the accuracy of the transcript and added that Ron Dermer, the former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. who recently stepped down as minister of strategic affairs and has long been Netanyahu’s closest confidant, was also in the room for part of the conversation in 2023.

The prime minister’s office and Dermer did not respond to requests for a response.

Shared Values

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of Ben-Gvir’s and Smotriches’ presence in the Netanyahu coalition. Though together they make up only nine of the Knesset’s 120 seats, they hold the balance of power, as the prime minister well knows, and he could lose his post, and possibly face a prison term, if they pull out.

“If Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have powers beyond their number in the government,” Gershon Gorenberg observed in The Atlantic last spring, “they are monsters Netanyahu has helped create.”

The two ministers have their differences, but both live in the West Bank and call for settlement expansion and annexation there. They also assert that Israel be governed by Jewish law, be free of Arab citizens, continue the war until Hamas is completely destroyed, and renew the Jewish settlement of Gaza.

Smotrich, as finance minister, has withheld tax revenues that are set aside for the Palestinian Authority, which he opposes, and describes himself as “a proud homophobe.” Ben-Gvir is a devotee of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, a violent extremist who promoted the expulsion of Arabs from Israel. The national security minister has dramatically increased the distribution of handguns to Jews in the West Bank during his tenure, and ignored or defended the increasing number of violent acts committed against Palestinian residents by Jews in the area.

Western media tends to quote the extremist anti-ceasefire, anti-Arab, anti-LGBTQ+ views of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as emblematic of the government, perceived around the world as a pariah state. With it all, Netanyahu often has given in to their demands – like resisting a ceasefire for months and cutting off food and essential aid to Gaza for months – to ensure his government stays in power.

Looking ahead, it seems clear Netanyahu will seek to remain in office when national elections, scheduled in 2026 for no later than October 27, are held. Despite the fact that he has not acknowledged responsibility as head of state for the tragic events of October 7, few are counting him out. A case can be made that Netanyahu would like to shed Ben-Gvir and Smotritch and the charedi parties next election campaign and look to political allies in the center-right and center. But it should be noted that several of the key potential partners like former defense minister Benny Gantz, former deputy prime minister Avigdor Lieberman, and prime-minister-for-a- year Naftali Bennett (2021-2022), share a deep distrust of Netanyahu, having worked closely with him, and may well reject offers to join him.

For now, the prime minister is trying mightily to balance his need to satisfy President Trump by not escalating the unofficial war in Gaza while keeping Ben-Gvir and Smotrich assured that Hamas will be completely destroyed.

As for the prime minister’s pledge almost a year and a half ago to “fix” the Ben-Gvir/Smotrich problem, Abe Foxman’s response, at the end of his interview with Gilbert Kahn, was brief but pointed.

“I am waiting,” he said.

Hunger strike for Gaza: Zohran Mamdani went on a hunger strike in 2023 to highlight suffering Gazans.

Intentionally or not, New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani is ignoring the connection between the massacre of 15 Jews at a Chanukah celebration in Sydney, Australia and pro-Hamas supporters calling for “global intifada.”

In a lengthy statement issued on Sunday morning, Mamdani described the attack at Bondi Beach as a “vile act of antisemitic terror” and noted that “what happened at Bondi is what many Jewish people fear will happen in their communities, too.”

A major reason why so many Jewish people share that fear is because pro-Hamas, anti-Israel activists have adopted phrases like “global intifada,” a call to wage war against Jews everywhere, and “from the river to the sea,” urging the fulfillment of the Hamas mandate to destroy Israel and create an Islamic state in its place.

Mamdani has avoided condemning such phrases, asserting that they champion universal rights and oppose Israeli occupation but do not call for violence. Tell that to the Australian Jewish community whose members saw their relatives and friends murdered on the beach, and to Jews around the world who know their history – of a people that all-too-often has seen hateful rhetoric morph into murderous attacks.

“Mamdani’s distinction between accepting Jews and denying a Jewish state is not merely a rhetorical sleight of hand or political naivete, though it is, to be clear, both of these,” noted Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove in a recent sermon to Park Avenue Synagogue congregants in New York. “He is doing so to traffic in the most dangerous of tropes, an anti-Zionist rhetoric that, as we have seen time and again … has given rise to deadly antisemitic violence.”

That was in October.

Mamdani has been meeting of late with rabbis and Jewish leaders, seeking to convince them that as mayor he will protect the Jewish community. But as long as he refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state – acknowledging the Jewish people’s right to settle in their homeland – and as long as he refers to Israel as “genocidal” and “an apartheid state,” he is making such language normative and implicitly, if not explicitly, giving license to those who would commit violence against Jews. Another Pittsburgh, Poway, Boulder, Washington, D.C. And now Sydney.

A war of their own: Haredim have held mass protests against inscription in the army and some have turned violent.

Dear Reader,

The longtime rift between Israel’s haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community and the rest of the society reached crisis level on October 7, 2023. It has only widened as the war has gone on, with the IDF’s need for soldiers and reservists becoming critical and the charedi community’s resistance to serve – and insistence on more funds for its yeshivas – grown stronger.

Haredi leaders assert that their young men are serving the country through Torah study, a kind of spiritual resistance. Many rabbinic scholars counter by citing the words of the Torah, with the response Moses gives to the tribes of Reuben and Gad when they sought permission to settle apart from the Promised Land and the other 10 tribes. Moses says: “Shall your brethren go to the war and shall you sit here?” (Numbers: Ch. 30, v 6)

In the end, the tribes of Reuben and Gad agree to arm themselves and serve with the other tribes in time of war, and Moses grants them permission, warning “but if you do not do so, you have sinned against the Lord.” (Numbers: Ch. 30, v. 23)

It may well be argued that no segment of Israeli society is more frustrated and angry over the haredi community’s position than religious Zionists, many of whose sons attend yeshivot hesder — yeshivas that combine Torah study with army service. Given the high motivation of religious Zionist young men, many choose to serve in combat units. Though religious Zionists represent only about 10 percent of the Israeli population, it is estimated that they account for as much as 40 percent of soldiers who fell in Gaza

A poignant example of the anguish felt in the religious Zionist community is an open letter from mothers and wives of soldiers and female soldiers to the mothers of haredi yeshiva students that circulated in the early months of the war. As cited by Natan Slifkin in his Substack newsletter, Rational Judaism, “The Letter of the Mothers” reads in part:

“We know that many [of you] are praying for the welfare of the soldiers, the healing of the wounded and the return of the hostages” and that you “attach great importance to Torah study” … But “it is impossible to live here without an army, and we are all responsible for one another: it cannot be that others will take risks and risk their children for me, when I and my children will not take risks for them. My blood is not redder than theirs.”

I am grateful for Dr. Shuki Friedman’s permission to post his important essay on the situation today. It underscores that the haredi position is not only having a strong negative impact on the unity of Israeli society but poses a real threat to the future of the country as we know it.

‘A Knife In The Back To Those Who Serve’

By Shuki Friedman

The draft law promoted by MK Boaz Bismuth and the ultra-Orthodox (haredi) parties is, in essence, a bill to entrench draft evasion and increase subsidies to the haredi sector. Introducing a full-scale draft-exemption law during wartime is not only a moral disgrace but a knife in the back of those who serve. If the proposed legislation passes, the consequences will be far more disastrous than merely perpetuating the unbearable burden on Israel’s reservists. Israel stands at a historic crossroads: a choice between restoring the Zionist project or continuing to capitulate to the haredi political leadership – leading, in the not-too-distant future, to Israel’s decline into a third-world state with questionable long-term viability.

Already today, nearly one in three children in Israel’s Hebrew-language public school system is haredi. In other words, roughly a third of Jewish students in Israel are ultra-Orthodox. Demographic projections indicate that within four decades, a third of all Israelis will be haredi – without even accounting for the rising number of mostly secular Israelis who are emigrating.

At present, the haredi community’s economic contribution is negative: the participation of haredi men in the workforce is low, and the salaries of those who do work are, on average, just 57 percent of what non-haredi Jewish men earn. They pay significantly lower taxes while receiving far more welfare benefits and subsidies. In economic terms, the monthly fiscal gap between a Haredi household and the average Israeli household amounts to roughly NIS 6,114 ($1,890). The equation is simple: as the relative size of the haredi population grows, the financial burden it places on the country will increase — until the system collapses under its own weight.

But the economic dimension is only part of the picture. There is also an ideological and civic dimension. The haredi community lives in a fortified cultural ghetto, detached from – and often hostile to – the core civic values of the Zionist state. Many do not view themselves as part of the collective or as sharing any responsibility for sustaining it. As several haredi rabbis and political leaders have made clear in recent months, they would prefer to leave the country than shoulder their fair share of the national burden.

But when it comes to political attitudes, the haredi public is the most hardline in Israel, especially on questions of war, minorities, and national policy – positions that lock Israel into an endless conflict, for which others pay the price in blood.

There is also a fundamental security dimension. The debate over haredi IDF service is no longer just about equality. The war has placed an immense and prolonged strain on Israel’s military manpower. The coming years will require a larger standing army and a much larger reserve force. This will likely mean extending mandatory service for those who already serve, alongside annual reserve duties that routinely exceed 100 days a year. This is an impossible burden – one that fewer and fewer Israelis are willing to bear, especially in light of wholesale haredi non-service.

The current draft bill does not even pretend to solve this national crisis.

Zionist Israel was built on a shared ethos: participation in the economic, civic, and security burden. A sober look at demographic and social trends shows that unless current patterns change drastically, the number of Israelis carrying that burden will shrink as the burden itself grows. As surveys already show, the willingness of secular, middle-class Israelis – the backbone of Israel’s military and economy – to continue carrying the weight of haredi non-service is eroding. Many are already contemplating leaving the country.

Zionist Israel will not disappear overnight. In the short term, we will witness a deterioration in public services, a shift in the character of the public sphere, and profound changes in the fabric of Israeli society. But in the longer term, the result may be a fundamental transformation of the state’s identity: no longer a liberal, modern Jewish nation-state, but a more religious and less democratic polity. In the face of constant existential threats that require Israel to maintain close alignment with the West and technological superiority, it is far from clear that such a state could remain viable.

The debate over haredi conscription has long since ceased to be about fairness or shared sacrifice. It has become a historic moment of reckoning over the very identity of the State of Israel. If the current exemption bill becomes law, it will fortify the haredi enclave and send Israel hurtling down a steep and dangerous slope – toward the unraveling of the Zionist enterprise as we have known it, and place Israel’s long-term survival in jeopardy.

Dr. Shuki Friedman is the CEO of the Jewish People Policy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank, and a law lecturer at the Peres Academic Center. He is the former chair of the Sanctions Committee against Iran. His essay first appeared in The Times of Israel (TOI) and is posted here with his and the TOI’s permission.

Book Note:

“A Shattered World: Jews and Israel After October 7,” one of the first scholarly collections of essays to address the impact of the war on the Jewish future, will be published December 15 by Purdue University Press. For more information, click HERE.

Among the contributors to the book, edited by scholars Michael Berenbaum and Gilbert N. Kahn, are Rabbi David Wolpe, Jonathan Sarna, Arnold Eisen, Steven Windmueller, Shaul Magid and me. (Two excerpts from my essay, “Covering Israel: How the Media Frames the Conflict and Impacts on American Jewish Life,” appeared in Between The Lines last month. Part One and Part Two.)