Here is the thesis, so you know where I’m going. To be fully Israeli, you have to prove you are not an Arab. Some people can pay that price. Some people cannot, because they are Arabs. On Tuesday you’ll be able to see exactly where that line falls — printed in a newspaper, in three columns.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yfm9Um97QrD8YCMGL9zMgNIs7daC0mxl/view?usp=sharing

Who built it

The people who built this state were refugees from violence. Not from the Holocaust — that came later. From the pogroms. Kishinev in 1903. The Russian pogroms before it. The Ukrainian pogroms of 1918 to 1921, which killed something on the order of a hundred thousand Jews. Ben-Gurion came from Płońsk in 1906. The generation that ran the Labor party, the army, the unions and the kibbutzim came out of that.

I am not going to tell you that being a victim turns a person into a victimizer. That’s a cheap law, it isn’t true, and it is the precise shape of an argument that gets used against Jews as a people.

What I will tell you is narrower and harder to answer: having been a victim did not prevent it.

Half the country, speaking Arabic

Then came the Jews of the Arab and Muslim world. Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Iran, Tunisia. We call them Mizrahim — Easterners. Hundreds of thousands within a few years, most arriving with nothing.

Within about a decade they were roughly half the Jewish population of the country.

And here is the thing that governs everything that followed. They arrived speaking Arabic. Arab names. Arab food. Arab music. Liturgy in Arab melodies. They were, by every cultural measure the new state used, the thing the new state had defined itself against.

The price of admission

So they were asked to pay.

Hebraize the name. Drop the language — and their children dropped it, which is why Arabic died in two generations in families that had spoken it for a thousand years. The music stayed off the radio. The religious practice was reclassified as folklore. The family structures became a problem for social workers.

And the clearest possible proof that you had crossed over, that you were on this side now, was hostility toward the people you had just stopped resembling.

That is not psychology. It is a visible, documented mechanism, and Israeli sociologists have written about it for forty years. It explains more about this country than any amount of talk about trauma.

The sorting

They were sprayed with DDT on arrival, in the reception camps, in front of each other.

They were held in ma’abarot — tent and tin-shack transit camps. They were directed to the development towns on the periphery: Dimona, Yeruham, Ofakim, Kiryat Shmona. Not offered. Directed. Their children were streamed into vocational tracks while European children went academic.

The state did not think they were enemies. It thought they were raw material.

Not nice people

In 1971 the children of those camps organized. They called themselves the Israeli Black Panthers, taking the name from Oakland, deliberately, because they understood exactly what they were describing.

The Prime Minister at that time, Golda Meir, of the Labor party, met them. Afterwards she said “they were not nice people”.

Ask an Israeli of a certain age what Golda said about the Panthers. They’ll know.

1977

Six years later the Mizrahim did what any sorted people eventually do. They voted against the people doing the sorting. Menachem Begin’s Likud won. We call it the Mahapach, the upheaval — twenty-nine unbroken years of Labor government ended, and it ended on Mizrahi votes.

The Israeli Left has not forgiven them in forty-nine years, and the vocabulary has been consistent the whole time: they’re uneducated. They’re primitive. They vote against their own interests. They’ve been manipulated by the Right.

Americans will recognise that list. It’s close to what your own left says about the people who stopped voting for it.

Every one of those sentences is the same sentence that sent their parents to Dimona.

What the price bought, and what it didn’t

Let me be fair about what they achieved, because the usual version of this story is condescending in its own way.

Mizrahim transformed this country. The music is theirs now — it’s what plays everywhere. The religious life is theirs. Shas is a major political force. Much of the governing coalition’s base is Mizrahi. They did not merely change the government in 1977; they changed the culture permanently.

What they never got is the top chair.

Begin was born in Brest, in Poland - Ashkenazi. Shamir in Ruzhany in Poland - Ashkenazi. Netanyahu’s father in Warsaw - Ashkenazi.

In seventy-eight years this country has never had a Mizrahi prime minister. Not once. The Left produced one serious Mizrahi contender — Amir Peretz, born in Morocco, who won the Labor leadership in 2005 — and the Israeli press spent his campaign on his moustache.

They paid, and it bought nearly everything. The music, the politics, the religion, a place in every coalition. It never once bought the prime minister’s office.

And then there’s the boundary

Everything above is about hierarchy among Jews, and I don’t want to blur what comes next, because it is different in kind.

Palestinian citizens of Israel — about twenty percent of this country, the people who stayed in 1948 and hold Israeli passports — cannot pay the price of admission. Not because they refuse. Because the price is proving you are not the thing, and they are the thing.

There is no name to Hebraize their way out of.

Tuesday

Israel’s parliament has a hundred and twenty seats; you need sixty-one to govern, and nobody ever wins that outright, so you build a coalition.

This week’s four-poll average puts the opposition bloc around fifty-four and Netanyahu’s bloc around fifty. Neither reaches sixty-one.

The Arab parties hold about fourteen and a half. Which is exactly what either side needs.

Now look at how the table is printed. Change bloc in one column. Netanyahu’s bloc in another. The Arab parties in a third, off to the side, outside both.

Not as an argument. As a formatting decision. Nobody writes a sentence explaining it, because nobody thinks a sentence is required.

And it isn’t one man’s doing

After the 2021 election Netanyahu tried it himself — went looking for a coalition resting on an Arab party’s support, and his own far-right partners refused to sit in any government that depended on them. It collapsed. Then his opponents did the identical deal, and for the first time in Israel’s history an Arab party sat in a governing coalition.

Netanyahu spent the following two years telling the country that this proved the government was illegitimate.

One side cannot. The other side did it once and was punished thoroughly enough that nobody will hurry to try again.

What I’m not going to tell you

I’m not going to tell you what comes next for Palestinian citizens of Israel. I don’t know, and I’ve been wrong about endings before.

I’ll tell you what’s on the record. The Nation-State Law of 2018 declared national self-determination in Israel to be exclusive to Jews and downgraded the status of Arabic. Ministers in the current government came out of Kahanist politics, and proposals for loyalty oaths and population transfers have been made by people who now hold office.

That isn’t a prediction. Those are laws already passed and proposals already made, by people who hold office now.

So

Nothing changes on Tuesday. Not because the Right wins, not because the Left wins — the Left is polling at eight percent and had to merge two parties to manage it; Labor alone won more than a third of the parliament in 1992.

Nothing changes because a government that can only be assembled out of Jewish parties contains nobody who needs this to end.

The Mizrahim paid the price and got almost all the way in. On Wednesday morning the rest of the arithmetic will be printed in three columns, and nobody will remark on the third one.

It’s the racism, stupid. It always was.

So let’s drop the usual argument about whether Israel wants peace. Put that way it’s a question about a nation’s feelings, and nobody can settle it — which is exactly why it gets asked.

Here is a question that can be settled. What did its governments do?

A government isn’t a mood. It’s a set of decisions, taken by named people, written down. You don’t read its intentions off its speeches. You read them off its conduct.

The money.

Four days ago TIME published an investigation built on letters between senior Israeli security officials and Qatari leaders.¹

Qatar began sending money into Gaza in 2007, after Hamas took it over. Israel wasn’t directly involved at first. By 2012, Netanyahu’s government had approved a system giving Israel a direct role. Israel helped deliver the supplies. Israel determined which families qualified. Israel disbursed funds and enabled Qatari-financed expansion of Gaza’s electricity.¹

An analysis given to Israeli ministers put the transfers at roughly $1.1 billion by 2018. In October 2018, Israel, Qatar and the UN signed an agreement financing fuel deliveries. A letter from July 2019 describes $6 million reaching twenty thousand beneficiaries — chosen by Israel — at $300 each.¹

In 2020 the head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, wrote to the Qataris praising their aid.¹

And about two weeks before the seventh of October 2023, the Mossad director David Barnea asked Qatar to renew the funding.¹

The Prime Minister’s office declined to comment.¹

What that policy was for.

For over a decade, successive Israeli governments did not merely tolerate Hamas’s rule in Gaza. They helped administer the arrangement that sustained it, selected who received the money, and asked for it to continue — up to the week before the attack.

One reading makes sense of that. A Hamas governing Gaza means there is no unified Palestinian leadership. No unified leadership means no partner. No partner means no negotiation. No negotiation means nothing has to be conceded, ever.

That is not a failure to find peace. That is a policy of preventing the conditions under which peace would have to be discussed.

Netanyahu’s answer.

He says the payments were meant to prevent humanitarian collapse by keeping Gaza’s civilian administration running, and he denies the remark attributed to him at a Likud meeting in 2019.¹ Published rebuttals argue the whole framing is a myth,² and they aren’t nothing.

But the humanitarian explanation has to account for the letters. You can feed a population through the UN. You do not need your own intelligence service choosing the recipients, and you do not need the head of that service writing to thank the funder. Aid does not require the Mossad. Managing a rival’s survival does.

Who pays if it stops?

The Prime Minister. The coalition that keeps him in office does not survive the end of this war, and his corruption trial is not waiting politely.

The settlement movement. The settler population in the West Bank grew from roughly 110,000 at the signing of Oslo in 1993 to around 190,000 by 2000 — nearly doubling during the process that was supposed to end it.³ Conflict adds hills; agreements subtract them.

The defense industry. And here the number isn’t mine — it’s Israel’s own Ministry of Defense. Defense exports reached $19.2 billion in 2025, a record for the fifth consecutive year.⁴ The trade press described the demand as being for “battle-tested technology.”⁵ That phrase is the business model said out loud: a weapon’s market value rises with demonstrated use.

The security establishment, whose budgets and standing rise with threat and fall with calm.

Now name one constituency with power whose position improves the day it ends.

I can’t.

What cuts against me.

This war has been expensive. The deficit ballooned, public debt climbed, and the major credit agencies downgraded Israel during 2024. Hundreds of thousands of reservists came out of the workforce. Tourism collapsed. Anyone telling you Israel is getting rich from this is wrong, and I’m not telling you that. The full numbers are in next week’s piece.

Look instead at who carries which column. The costs are public — the deficit, the rating, the small business that closed while its owner was in uniform, the family paying for all of it. The benefits sit in a small number of specific places: a coalition, a movement, an industry, a bureaucracy.

The costs are shared. The gains are not. That is the structure of every arrangement that never reaches an ending.

And the asymmetry I won’t pretend away.

Hamas is not a peace movement. It launched the seventh of October, which destroyed the very arrangement described above.

But Hamas is an armed faction governing a besieged strip. Israel is a sovereign state with an army, a treasury, an air force and allies. Treating their incentives as comparable is a way of avoiding the only question that matters: what the party holding the power chose to do with it.

So here is my conclusion, and I’ll put it plainly.

The governments of Israel have not wanted peace. Not in the sense of failing to find it — in the sense of working, deliberately and for twelve years, to prevent a Palestinian leadership with whom it would have to be made.

That is not a guess about anybody’s heart. It is what twelve years of decisions add up to, and the decisions are in writing.

I am not saying it about Israelis. My sister is one, my parents are buried there, and most of the people I grew up with want this over. I am saying it about the people who made the policy, and I am saying it because the policy is now in their own correspondence.

Ask who pays if it stops. Then read what the head of the Mossad wrote to Qatar — and what his successor asked for, two weeks before the seventh of October.

Next: people will tell you this is about money. It isn’t — and the numbers say so.

Sources

1. “Exclusive: Documents Show How Israel Steered Qatari Payments to Gaza,” TIME, 18 October 2026 — time.com

2. “The myth that Israel/Netanyahu created/funded Hamas,” JNS — jns.org

3. Peace Now, “30 Years After Oslo: The Data That Shows How the Settlements Proliferated Following the Oslo Accords” — peacenow.org.il

4. Israeli Ministry of Defense, “All-Time Defense Export Record: Israel Crosses the $19 Billion Threshold” — mod.gov.il; see also Times of Israel

5. “Israel defence exports hit record $19.2bn amid global demand for battle-tested technology,” Jewish News — jewishnews.co.uk

So let me show you what your own movement put in writing.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ciwOjs9USj-lU5TqtBCNhIAFWZjOHvEQ/view?usp=sharing

Pittsburgh, 1885:

The Pittsburgh Platform was the official doctrine of American Reform Judaism for over fifty years. It states that Jews are “no longer a nation, but a religious community,” and therefore “expect neither a return to Palestine... nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

That is not a fringe pamphlet. That is the founding statement of the largest Jewish religious movement in American history, and it held until the Columbus Platform of 1937 began to shift the position. In 1942, Reform rabbis who objected to that shift founded the American Council for Judaism specifically to oppose the creation of a Jewish state. Reform rabbis. In America. Organizing against it.

The man from San Francisco:

Judah Magnes was born in San Francisco in 1877. An American Reform rabbi, educated in American universities, formed by American ideas about pluralism and democracy. He led a major congregation in New York. In 1912 he moved to Palestine, and he helped found the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and led it for years.

And he spent his life arguing against a Jewish state.

Not because he opposed Jews living there — he moved there and built its university. He argued for one country, shared: Jews and Arabs, equal, two languages, two school systems, one democracy, neither side ruling the other. In 1946 he put that case to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, in public, under his own name.

He lost. He was shouted down. He died in 1948.

And then he was erased from the history they taught me in school in Haifa. I had never heard his name until I found a dollar paperback of his writing on the bottom shelf of a used bookstore in the Mission District, in my thirties, in the city where he was born.

He was not alone, and the company is not minor:

Brit Shalom, founded in the 1920s, argued the same case. Its people were Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem — the two most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, the men whose books sit on your shelf and were assigned to you in college. Hugo Bergmann, the first rector of the Hebrew University. In 1942 Magnes and Buber founded Ihud to continue the argument, and among its members was Henrietta Szold.

The founder of Hadassah.

These were not marginal cranks. This was a significant part of the intellectual leadership of the Jewish world, and it held that a state built on Jewish political supremacy over an Arab majority was both wrong and unsurvivable.

Now the part I’m obliged to say, because it’s true:

They lost for a reason, and the reason was not that they were outargued.

Six million Jews were murdered. The St. Louis was turned away. At Évian in 1938, thirty-two countries met to discuss Jewish refugees and almost every one of them declined to take more. The world demonstrated, at length and in detail, that it would not take Jews in. After that, Magnes’s position didn’t look wrong so much as suicidal, and anyone who tells you the American Jewish shift to Zionism was mere opportunism is not being honest with you.

My own parents left Europe for Haifa in 1936. Everyone they left behind was murdered. The movement I argue against is the reason I exist.

So I’m not going to stand here and tell you the 1885 position was obviously correct and that the Jews who abandoned it were fools or cowards. They had the best reason anyone has ever had.

But here is what I will tell you:

The argument didn’t end. It was buried.

There is a difference between losing a debate and being written out of the record. What happened to Magnes was the second thing. He is not a footnote in the curriculum, he is absent from it. Brit Shalom is not taught as the road not taken; it is not taught. A Jewish child in Haifa in 1960, or in Scarsdale in 1990, learned that there was one Jewish answer to this question, and that anyone outside it had stepped outside the Jewish people.

That is what makes the charge of betrayal work. It only works if you don’t know the argument existed.

Why this matters more than a history lesson:

Because of what happens at your own table.

When you say something careful and uneasy about what has been done these two years, and someone tells you that you’ve turned on your own people — you’re not actually being answered. You’re being told a piece of history that was edited.

You are not outside Judaism. You’re inside an argument that is older than the state of Israel, that was held by its own university’s founders, and that was never settled. It was closed.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ciwOjs9USj-lU5TqtBCNhIAFWZjOHvEQ/view?usp=sharing

In 1948 the respectable ones had a name. It was the Haganah.

The three forces:

People outside Israel hear “the Jews” and imagine one army. In 1948 there were three, and they were not the same.

There was the Irgun — the Revisionist breakaway, aggressive, openly insurgent. There was Lehi, the Stern Gang — the smallest, most extreme, the ones who shot Bernadotte. The British called them hooligans. The mainstream Jewish leadership called them adventurists. These were the terrorists.

And then there was the Haganah — the big one, the mainstream one, controlled by the Zionist Labor establishment, disciplined, institutional. The one that later became the Israeli army, the IDF.

The Haganah’s whole identity was that it was not the other two. It didn’t blow up hotels. It didn’t run death squads. It was respectable.

What the respectable one did with its respectability:

In July 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel — ninety-one dead. The Haganah condemned it, and then profited from the panic it caused.

In April 1948, Irgun and Lehi massacred over a hundred villagers at Deir Yassin. The Haganah condemned it. And the news of Deir Yassin travelled ahead of the Haganah like weather — it terrified Arab families across the country into fleeing before the Haganah itself arrived. The respectable force got the benefit of the terrorists’ terror and kept its hands clean.

In September 1948, Lehi shot the UN mediator Count Bernadotte dead in the streets of Jerusalem. Not the Haganah.

So the respectable force could stand there through all of it and say: not us.

And here is the Haganah’s own record:

In July 1948, Operation Dani. The twin towns of Lydda and Ramle. Roughly fifty thousand people, some accounts say seventy thousand, driven out. The people of Ramle were put on buses. The people of Lydda were made to walk, in July, in the heat, toward the Arab lines. An unknown number died on that road — the estimates run from a handful to five hundred dead.

This was not the Irgun. This was not Lehi. This was the Haganah. The expulsion order was signed by the operation’s deputy commander, a young officer named Yitzhak Rabin.

And it was not an improvisation. In March 1948, before a single regular Arab army had crossed the border, the Haganah issued Plan Dalet — its operational blueprint, which provided for the destruction and clearing of hostile Arab villages.

So look at the division of labor. The respectable force deported. The terrorist force massacred. Two hands on the same project. And the respectable one got to keep its reputation, because the reputation was never about what it did. It was about what it wasn’t.

Then the punchline:

The hooligans became prime ministers. Menachem Begin, commander of the Irgun, became Prime Minister in 1977. Yitzhak Shamir, of Lehi, became Prime Minister in 1983. Within thirty years, the “adventurists” and the “gang of hooligans” were running the country. Nobody calls them terrorists. We call it the underground — which is a compliment in Hebrew.

Now the part that should sound familiar:

Who calls themselves respectable today? The Left. In Israel. In America. The liberal Zionists. The ones who say, in every conversation: we’re not the settlers. We’re not the right-wingers. We’re the good ones.

And what do they do? They deplore the violence — and then benefit from it. They condemn the settlements — and keep the land. They feel bad about Gaza — and fund the war.

And here, let me be precise about who does what, because it’s the whole point. The Left supplies the moral cover. The Right — the settlers, the nationalist camp, the rough voice — does the work. It has been a division of labor since 1948: Haganah and Irgun then, Left and Right now. The presentable force and the rough force, both hands on the same project.

It’s the identical structure. The Haganah condemned Deir Yassin and then emptied Lydda and Ramle itself. The respectable Left condemns the occupation and then keeps everything.

And the alibi is load-bearing:

Here is the part that took me longest to understand, because I was raised inside it.

The respectable side is not a brake on the system. It is the reason the system is tolerable. A state that did the things Israel does, with no Left at all, would be unbearable — it would be seen, plainly, for what it is. The Left exists to make sure that never happens. Its bad conscience is a service. It lets the country say we are troubled by this while doing exactly what the Right does, and it lets people abroad say I support Israel, but and feel that the “but” has done something.

It hasn’t. The but has never once cost the Right a settlement, a hill, a law, a war. If your guilt doesn’t cost the other side anything, it isn’t guilt. It’s a subscription.

The third generation:

And the lineage didn’t stop. The current government of Israel contains men from the same line — the settler right, the heirs of Jabotinsky and Begin — and they hold the ministries. The man who runs the national police force kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the 1994 Hebron mosque mass murderer, on his living room wall for years.

The terrorism didn’t stop. It got renamed. Now it’s called the national security ministry.

And the respectable ones are still standing to the side, saying “not us”.

Why this matters more than a gotcha:

You can dismiss all of this as a clever rhetorical parallel. So let me put it as a claim, not a parallel.

Respectability is not a moral position. It is an alibi. It has never been the thing that stops a state from doing what it does — it is the thing that lets the state do it and keep the credit. The Haganah was not the good force. It was the presentable force. The Left is not the good side. It is the presentable side.

And the presentable side has been saying not us for seventy-five years. Deir Yassin, Lydda, the occupation, the settlements, the war — at every stage there was a respectable voice deploring it and a rough voice doing it, and the land changed hands all the same, and the respectable voice is still respectable.

We called them terrorists until we won. Then we called it a war of independence. And the respectable ones have been saying not us ever since.

Subscribe for the next piece — on what the respectable Left’s bad conscience actually costs the Right, and why the answer is: nothing.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l1DZuK4Z-dEoSGPCp3d1_Gqzx8tN-W6Y/view?usp=drivesdk

The first film, simply titled “NAZA,” is a devastating, 80-minute exposé by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. It is not an easy watch. It is a meticulous, horrifying look at the automated, AI-driven targeting system the IDF has used in Gaza. The film’s title comes from the Hebrew term nezek agavi—”collateral damage”—and it details how the military created a system to calculate and authorize the killing of civilians on an industrial scale.

Its sources are 24 anonymous insiders from the Israeli military and intelligence community. They speak not of isolated mistakes, but of a systemic, bureaucratic process. One source claims there was an explicit approval to kill 500 civilians for the assassination of a single Hamas commander. This is not a story of a few bad apples. This is the story of the orchard itself, poisoned at the roots.

The response from the Israeli establishment was swift, coordinated, and utterly predictable. They did not deny the existence of the targeting system. They could not. Instead, they attacked the film’s credibility, calling its anonymous sources liars and its creators traitors.

And then, they released their own film.

The second film is titled “NAZA: The Real Story.” It is a 49-minute rebuttal, produced by a team of IDF reserve officers. Its stated goal, as one of its creators said, was to “seize the media narrative back.” It is a piece of counter-propaganda, designed to be shared by embassies and influencers to muddy the waters.

And here is where the lie reveals itself.

The Rebuttal Proves the Point.

The rebuttal film’s entire argument rests on the idea that the IDF is a moral army, forced to fight a Hamas that uses human shields. It features senior, on-the-record commanders who speak of strict rules of engagement and of cancelled strikes to avoid civilian harm.

But think about it. In trying to “debunk” the original film, the Israeli military did something extraordinary: they put their senior commanders on camera to defend their targeting process.

They didn’t deny the process. They defended it.

The original “NAZA” alleges a cold, bureaucratic killing machine. The rebuttal film, in its frantic attempt to sanitize that machine, parades its operators in front of us, not to deny its existence, but to assure us that the people pulling the levers are good, moral men. It is a confession disguised as a defense.

It’s the same logic I was taught in the IDF: we are the “most moral army in the world.” This was the psychological shield that allowed us to do immoral things while believing we were righteous. The rebuttal film is that shield, welded into a piece of metal and held up to the world.

The War in a Name.

The most cynical tactic is the title itself. By calling their film “NAZA: The Real Story,” the IDF reservists are engaging in deliberate information warfare. They are trying to hijack the narrative, confuse search engines, and drown out the original film’s reporting. It is the digital equivalent of shouting “fake news” so loudly that no one can hear the facts.

But the act itself is an admission of guilt. You don’t build a multi-million dollar, multi-language counter-narrative, promoted by your state’s embassies, if the original accusation is baseless. You do it when the accusation is true, and the truth is a threat.

The original “NAZA” film is a historical document of a specific, horrifying military doctrine. The rebuttal film is a historical document of that doctrine’s public relations strategy. One film shows the machine. The other shows the machine’s media team.

I spent my life deconstructing the lies I was raised on. The lie of the empty land. The lie of the “generous offer.” The lie of the “unavoidable” occupation. This is just the latest version. The lie has simply become more technologically advanced and its defenders more sophisticated.

But the architecture is the same. It is a structure built to obscure the truth, to protect the powerful, and to silence the witnesses. The original filmmakers are the latest witnesses, and for their courage, they are being threatened and demonized.

The rebuttal film is not the “real story.” It is a desperate attempt to stop the real story from being told. And in its very creation, it proves that the original filmmakers told the truth.

Drop Site News reported on Monday

Drop Site News

CIA Report Warns Israel Could Head Toward Civil War, Total Collapse

As a reader-funded independent news outlet, we operate free from the influence of governments, advertisers, and corporate backers. This is essential to our mission: to report on what matters most, beholden only to the truth. In that spirit, we made a commitment to ensure that our journalism is free for everyone, not locked behind a paywall. But that mea…

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18 days ago · 1401 likes · 124 comments · Aída Chávez

“Just as you predicted,” she wrote. She’s right. I did predict it. Someone asked me in the questions after my talk last Saturday where I thought Israel was heading, and I said it was heading for a fracture from inside and a civil war — the Haredim, the army, the settlers, the soldiers coming home.

I should not have said it.

From the lectern, twenty minutes earlier, I had told that same room: I am not going to describe the ending. I have been wrong about the ending before. Then somebody asked a direct question, I had an answer ready, and out it came. A rule you keep until someone asks you nicely is not a rule.

So let me do now what I would do if the forecast had gone against me, and look at what this document actually is.

Drop Site News reported on Monday that two US sources described an August paper titled “Fracture From Within.” It lists economic strain, military spending, anger over the Haredi draft exemptions, settler violence in the West Bank, and soldiers returning from Gaza, Lebanon and Iran with serious psychological trauma, ahead of the elections on 27 October.

Three things about that, before anyone starts celebrating.

It was written to be contrarian. The paper came from the CIA’s Red Cell, a unit whose entire function is to challenge the prevailing consensus and argue the alternative case. A Red Cell paper is not what the agency believes. It is what the agency pays people to argue so that assumptions get tested. “The CIA says Israel is collapsing” is not what happened here.

Nobody outside that room has read it. Two anonymous sources described a classified document to one outlet. That may be entirely accurate. It is not the same as a report you can check.

It reportedly concerns only Jewish Israelis. It does not account for Arab citizens, about a fifth of the country, let alone the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control. It reportedly concerns only Jewish Israelis. It does not account for Arab citizens, about a fifth of the country, let alone the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control. That is the same hole I described earlier today in Schueftan’s argument, and I didn’t notice it here until I went looking — which tells you how easily it passes when the conclusion suits you.

What strikes me most is that Schueftan and the Red Cell are looking at the same fault line and reading it in opposite directions. He spends twenty minutes of an eighty-two-minute interview on the Haredi draft exemptions as the central internal threat to Israel’s future. So does this paper. One concludes Israeli society is strong enough to survive it. The other concludes it may not be.

Neither of them knows. And neither do I — including on the evening I stood in a church in San Anselmo and told a hundred people that I did.

This post draws on reporting by Drop Site News and on my memoir, The Awakening.

Dan Schueftan heads the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa. He has advised Israel’s National Security Council and taught at Georgetown. He is not a settler ideologue, he is not messianic, and he is not a crank. He is one of the most serious hawkish analysts Israel has produced, and the interview is worth your time whatever you think of him.

So let me start with what he gets right.

He refuses the word “solution.” He says most human problems don’t have one — you can only find a מענה, a response that brings a threat down to the level of a tolerable nuisance, the way good policing brings down crime without ending it. That is a serious and honest position, and it is close to my own refusal to describe how this ends.

He is right that Hamas will not disarm. He is right that Israel’s enemies are militarily far weaker than they were in October 2023. He calls this the worst government in Israel’s history. He calls Ben-Gvir and Smotrich ugly distortions. And about Jewish settlers who burn Palestinian homes, he says plainly: ואלה ברברים... הייתי יורה בהם — these are barbarians, I would shoot them.

Anyone who tells you Schueftan is simply a propagandist hasn’t listened to him.

My disagreement is narrower than that, and it comes down to one word.

Listen to how he talks about two peoples in the same hour

About Haredim (ultra religious Jews)— whom he attacks in this interview more often and more harshly than anyone else — he is careful. Repeatedly, deliberately careful. He stops mid-sentence to correct himself:

אני לא מדבר על כל מי שיש לו אמונה חרדית... חרדי שעובד, משלם מיסים ומשרת בצבא, זכותו לקיים כל אורח חיים שנראה לו.

I’m not talking about everyone who holds Haredi belief... a Haredi who works, pays taxes and serves in the army has every right to live however he sees fit.

He adds that this way of life is an Israeli invention of recent decades, that it didn’t characterize Haredi communities historically or elsewhere in the world. The problem is a structure, not a nature. And because it’s a structure, he can say how to change it: cut the money, and they will have to go to work.

Now listen to what he says about Palestinians:

זה מהותו של העם הפלסטיני. אין לו שום דבר קונסטרוקטיבי. הוא קם בבוקר בשביל להרוג יהודים — כקולקטיב לאומי.

That is the essence of the Palestinian people. It has nothing constructive. It gets up in the morning to kill Jews — as a national collective.

Essence. Not a leadership. Not a movement. Not an ideology, not Hamas, not the PLO, not a generation shaped by particular circumstances. Essence.

The half-sentence that follows — “I’m not talking about each Palestinian separately” — repairs nothing. He has already placed the thing in the national collective itself.

Why this is the hinge and not a side point

There are two different kinds of claim you can make about a group of people.

The first, about the haredi Jews, is about structures and behavior: this leadership makes these choices, this movement holds this ideology, this system produces these results. Claims like that can be argued with, tested against evidence, and changed. Leaderships fall. Ideologies lose support. Circumstances shift.

The second, about the Palestinians, is about essence: this is what these people fundamentally are. That claim cannot be argued with, because no evidence counts against it. Point to a Palestinian surgeon, a university, a negotiator, a poet, and the answer is that they are exceptions, or camouflage, or irrelevant to the collective. The claim is built so that nothing can disturb it.

Schueftan makes the first kind of claim about Haredim and the second kind about Palestinians.

And that distinction is doing enormous work, because you can grant him nearly everything else and still not arrive at his conclusion. Grant that Hamas won’t disarm. Grant that Iran built a ring of fire around Israel and has now lost it. Grant that Oslo failed and the Arab Spring went badly. None of that gets you to his position that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will be in Gaza, and that this is acceptable.

To get there you need one more premise: that nothing on the other side can ever change. Only the essence claim supplies it.

Remove it and his own framework points somewhere else entirely. If the problem is leaderships and structures, then leaderships and structures can be changed — and permanent war becomes a choice rather than a fate.

He knows how to make that distinction. He makes it for Jews, on the same page, in the same hour.

The cockroaches

The most honest thing he says is this. If Hamas rules Gaza again, fine:

אם היום הבנים והנכדים שלנו נמצאים בעזה, גם הבנים והנכדים שלהם יהיו בעזה.

If our sons and grandsons are in Gaza today, their sons and grandsons will be in Gaza too.

He compares it to cockroaches under the kitchen sink. You call the exterminator; they come back in three years; you call him again. Then he asks how many good meals you cooked in that kitchen in the meantime.

He means it as reassurance. Read it again. A man is calmly accepting war across generations — his grandchildren and theirs — on the grounds that life in between is pleasant. That isn’t a strategy. It’s a condition, and he is asking us to be content inside it.

The missing denominator

His case for Israeli success rests on data: eleventh in the world happiness index during a war, birth rates among secular and traditional women, a health system that cares about you, יש לנו פה חיים טובים — we have a good life here.

I don’t dispute any of it. My own family is part of that life.

But every one of those measures counts citizens. Several million people living under Israeli control between the river and the sea appear in this interview only as a threat to be managed. That is not a disagreement about values — it is a hole in his own evidence. A security analyst who left a population that size out of his data in any other context would be sent back to do the work again.

One question, on his own ground

He is an analyst, not a moralist, and he has little patience for moral arguments. So here is an analyst’s question, and the only one I want answered.

Two years on: is Israel safer?

Not better positioned against Iran. Safer. Fewer enemies than before, or more? More allies, or fewer? Jewish life outside Israel more secure, or less? More young Israelis staying, or more applying for the foreign passports he mentions holding himself?

He says Israel’s enemies have collapsed. Perhaps. He also says this will continue for another hundred years, and that we should be satisfied as long as the kitchen is pleasant in between.

Both of those cannot be a victory.

The interview is in Hebrew. To watch it with English subtitles on a computer: click the gear icon in the player, choose Subtitles/CC, then Auto-translate, then English. A warning — these are machine translations of machine transcriptions and they garble a good deal. That is why I’ve given both the Hebrew and my own English for every quote above, so you can check me against the original rather than against a machine.

The recording of my 3 October talk at First Presbyterian in San Anselmo is coming shortly. I’ll post it here as soon as I have it.

This essay draws on the published interview and on my memoir, The Awakening, which is coming soon.

During the Q&A session after the talk, a man stood up and challenged me.

I want to start by giving him credit, because what he did was harder than what everyone else in that room did. Sitting in an audience that has just applauded me and saying out loud that he thinks I was wrong takes guts. Most people who disagreed with me that night said nothing and went home.

Here is what he said, as close to his words as I can manage. That what is happening in Gaza is not a genocide. That it is nowhere near as bad as Sudan, which nobody talks about, and that on the seventh of October, Hamas raped women, beheaded babies, and put them in ovens.

And here is what I did. I did not answer his arguments. I got angry, and I questioned his humanity.

He came up to me afterwards and told me I had treated him with disrespect. He was right. I have spent four years learning to give up my own best lines when they will not hold, and when a man stood in front of me and said things I could answer, I went at him instead of at his claims. I would like to speak with him properly. I don’t know his name. If he reads this, he knows how to find me.

So let me do now what I should have done then.

On Sudan. He is right that the war in Sudan is under-covered, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Far more people have been killed there, and most Americans could not tell you the names of the two forces fighting. But the under-coverage of one atrocity is not an argument about another. And there is a difference that matters: my government does not arm the factions in Sudan. It arms this one. That is why I speak about this one.

On the beheaded babies. This story is false, and I can tell you exactly how it was made. On 10 October 2023 a correspondent for the Israeli channel i24NEWS broadcast from Kfar Aza saying soldiers had told her they found babies with their heads cut off. Thirty-five minutes later she posted separately that soldiers believed forty babies and children had been killed. Two claims, minutes apart, fused into one sentence that travelled the world in a day. The IDF could not confirm it. CNN found nothing to support it. President Biden said he had seen photographs; the White House walked it back the same day, because there were none. Le Monde traced the rumour to its source, and the Israeli government press office told them plainly: there were never forty decapitated babies, not at Kfar Aza, not anywhere.

But I am not going to leave it there, because the correction is not the whole truth. Twenty-eight children were killed that day. One baby was murdered: Mila Cohen, ten months old, shot along with her father Ohad at Kibbutz Be’eri. She was real. Her death is documented. She does not need to be multiplied by forty and decapitated in order to matter — and the multiplication is exactly what lets someone wave the whole day away.

A word to people on my side of this, since I have watched them go wrong here. I said something on Saturday night that I want to correct: I told him there were no rapes. That was wrong. What is true is that forensic evidence is largely absent, which is not the same claim — and I know the difference, because I have spent four years insisting on it.

It is sometimes said the sexual violence allegations were all disproven. They were not. Specific accounts collapsed, and that collapse was news. But the United Nations mission led by Pramila Patten found reasonable grounds to believe conflict-related sexual violence, including rape, occurred that day, and released hostages have testified to abuse in captivity. Anyone telling you the whole category was invented is doing to those victims what the forty-babies story did to Mila Cohen.

On genocide. I don’t ask anyone to take my word. B’Tselem is an Israeli human rights organization, based in Jerusalem, staffed by Israelis. In July 2025 it published a report called Our Genocide. Read it and disagree with it if you can.

That is the answer I owed him on Saturday night and did not give.

The talk was recorded and I will post it here once I have it.

Note added 9 September 2026. This went up on 20 August under the headline “How All Zionism Became Antisemitic.” I have changed the title and I am leaving the piece as it was, with this note in front of it.

Three things were wrong. The word All was the first. I have written a whole chapter about Judah Magnes, a Zionist who spent his life arguing for a shared binational state and was destroyed for it, and I hold him up as the road my country did not take. A word like All runs him over on its way to a headline.

The second is worse. I opened by widening the definition of antisemitism until it covered what I wanted to say. I have spent a book insisting that a claim you cannot support has to be given up rather than made true by adjustment. I gave up a quotation attributed to Ben-Gurion for less than this.

The third is that I put two different arguments under one roof. What Christian Zionism does to Jews — a theology in which we convert or are destroyed at the end — is not the same as what Jewish nationalism did to Jewish life. The first case is strong and I stand behind it. The second is a real argument about erasure and it deserved its own piece rather than a ride on the first.

And I left something out. My parents left Poland in 1936 because of the movement I am writing about here, and everyone they left behind was murdered. Without Zionism I would not exist. I know that, I have written it elsewhere, and it does not appear anywhere in this post. A case that omits the one fact that cuts hardest against it is not a case. It is an argument for people who already agree.

I am leaving it up because the sin is not the claim. It is the silence afterwards.

By Coby Friedman

I was raised on the lie that Zionism was the ultimate defense against antisemitism. As a former IDF soldier born in Haifa, I was taught that our survival depended on the state, the army, and the land. It took me a lifetime to understand that the ideology I was raised on was, in its own way, promoting an antisemitic worldview.

When I say “antisemitism,” I am not just talking about hatred of Jews. I am talking about the hatred or dismissal of Judaism itself—the reduction of a rich, ancient faith into a nationalist political project.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: All Zionism, whether Jewish or Christian, has become antisemitic because it erases the true soul of the Jewish people.

1. The Erasure of Judaism by Jewish Zionism

Zionism reduced the vast, 3,000-year-old Jewish civilization—its philosophy, its debate, its spirituality, and its diversity—into a singular, militaristic identity centered on the state of Israel.

• It Erased the Diaspora: Zionism historically viewed the Jewish diaspora not as a source of strength and culture, but as a place of weakness and shame. It framed 2,000 years of Jewish life in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa as a “mistake” to be corrected.

• It Rejected Jewish Universalism: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was replaced by the god of the tank. The prophets who demanded we “do justice, and love kindness” were silenced in favor of a theology that valued tribal strength over universal ethics.

• It Suppressed Debate: Dissent within the Jewish community is often silenced as “self-hatred.” A healthy tradition thrives on debate, but Zionism demands absolute loyalty, treating Jews as a monolith. This is a classic antisemitic trope: the idea that all Jews are the same and must act in unison.

2. The Weaponization of Judaism by Christian Zionism

If Jewish Zionism reduces Judaism to a flag, Christian Zionism reduces it to a prophecy. They support Israel not out of love for Jews, but to bring about the Apocalypse.

• The “Useful Idiot” Theory: Christian Zionists support Israel’s hard-right policies because they believe it fulfills biblical prophecy. They don’t care about Jewish safety or well-being; they care about their own eschatology.

• The Apocalyptic Betrayal: The End Times narrative in their theology involves the rebuilding of the Temple, the battle of Armageddon, and the final judgment where Jews who don’t convert to Christianity will be destroyed. This is not friendship; it is theological antisemitism. It uses the Jewish people as props for a story in which they are ultimately cast aside.

• The Cynical Alliance: Prominent Christian Zionist leaders have made explicitly antisemitic statements in the past, yet they are celebrated by pro-Israel groups. This proves the alliance is based on political expediency, not shared values.

3. The Convergence: A Betrayal of the Jewish Soul

Both forms of Zionism converge on the same dangerous point: they both see Jewish identity as something other than what it has been for millennia.

• Jewish Zionism reduces Judaism to nationalism.

• Christian Zionism reduces Judaism to a prophecy.

In both cases, the living, breathing, diverse reality of the Jewish people and their faith is secondary to a political or theological goal.

A Call to Reclaim Judaism

True antisemitism is the hatred of Jews. But a close cousin is the hatred of Judaism itself.

I am asking my fellow Jews to reject the narrow cage of Zionism and reclaim the full, beautiful, and diverse soul of our own tradition. The real friends of the Jewish people are not those who cheer on its militarism, but those who have the courage to demand it live up to its highest prophetic ideals.

The fight against antisemitism must also be a fight to reclaim Judaism from the nationalists who have hijacked it. It is a call to return to a Judaism of questions, of justice, of debate, and of universal ethics.

I was born in Israel. I served in the IDF. I believed in the cause.

Then I saw the truth.

The state I served is not the safe haven I was told it was. It is an apartheid regime built on the displacement of Palestinians and the suppression of human rights.

From Moses to Supremacy is my platform to expose the lies that sustain this system and to advocate for a single, secular state where all who live in the land have equal rights.

My podcast, From Moses to Supremacy, is now live. Episode 1: “The Origins of Supremacy” is available here:
👉 https://share.transistor.fm/s/88c1e097

In this episode, I break down how the ideology of supremacy took root and how it is driving the current conflict.

What you can expect here:

• Weekly articles exposing the reality of the occupation.

• Podcast episodes deep-diving into history, politics, and the path forward.

• A space for honest conversation about the only solution that will bring true peace: justice for all.

I invite you to join me on this journey.

— Coby