Preoccupations

Tel Aviv, March 15, 2026

To pass the time during a recent visit to the local public air raid shelter here, I made the mistake of opening some blog posts by people I know. I hoped the young couple trying to calm their toddlers and dog wouldn’t read over my shoulder, though I suspect they would not have been fazed; continuity of life here requires a certain detachment from relentless reproach pouring in from the outside world. In one piece, the author rehearsed the tiresome argument that antizionism isn’t necessarily antisemitism, as prelude to a litany of familiar accusations and denunciations. If I understand his logic, he wants to confirm that antisemitism is bad (thank you), while reassuring us that antizionism is okay. Apparently one doesn’t have to hate Jews to deny their right to a secure national home.

This semantic knot has worked well in choking off reasonable discourse. It has gained in popularity among real Jew-haters and, even more tragically, among sane people frustrated with policies of the Israeli government but incapable or unwilling to separate policy dissent from existential denial. Civic discourse about policy options hits a dead end when it veers into fundamental delegitimization — a lesson many of us learned, for example, when comrades protesting the Vietnam War called for death to America. For a fresher comparison, dare we deny America’s right to exist because its current government is led by someone we dislike and distrust?

Somehow that nuance is off the table when it comes to Israel. Dissent against Bibi Netanyahu morphs into arguments against the very idea of Jewish sovereignty and self-rule, i.e., Zionism, often marinated in pungent sauces of ethno-nationalism and settler colonialism that are abhorrent even for people who can’t really define what the words mean. Others who are infected with strains of Bibi derangement syndrome, but who genuinely care about Jewish survival, argue that Zionism as a movement – and not only the current Prime Minister – jeopardizes Jewish continuity and that we’d be better off in exile. These attempts to romanticize the diaspora (not yet tempered even by the global resurgence of anti-Jewish violence), lead to a question its proponents aren’t eager to address: where exactly will the nine million Jews who call Israel home go? A protestor on my campus back in 2024 had the answer: we should all go back to Poland (presumably not only from Tel Aviv but from Washington and New York, too, while we’re at it). Is this antisemitism? Seems close enough for discomfort.

In any case, the damning phraseology averts what might be legitimate discussion of Israel’s response to October 7 and the US-Israel attack on Iran. Reasonable people who wish to argue about the tactics and timing of these wars (the stuff of incessant radio and television commentary here) are essentially denied the privilege. After all, how can a country without the right to exist be excused for any military action it undertakes in self-defense? As in the case of the second piece I had the displeasure of reading, from a prominent Reform rabbi, judgment is swift and unequivocal: “Trump and Netanyahu’s [decision was] reckless and deadly…” And she lists the victims in alphabetical order – Iranians before Israelis.

And so, important questions get suffocated in a dense fog of disdain. It’s no wonder many Israelis don’t try to offer their critics needed oxygen, and focus instead on their own survival and renewal, albeit under clouds of growing global loneliness. I sense that many of them would really like to save American and other diaspora Jews from their asphyxiating ignorance, but like the instructions we hear in airplanes, it’s better to put one’s own mask on first. My neighbors in the shelter, exhausted like most people living here, hopefully will preserve their mental health and find the resolve to persevere in the face of persistent and aggressive abandonment. Cafes are starting to serve brunch, bus routes are coming back into service, and parents are lobbying for schools to reopen – good signs that the “start-up nation” remains a leader in R & D: resilience and determination.

Coming back to the angrier of those posts, its language is sadly no longer surprising. Like so much of the genre, the author again indicts Israel with familiar tropes that evoke atrocious examples of extermination and persecution – with the Jews as perpetrators rather than victims. In descending order of indecency, Israel is found guilty of genocide, apartheid, and occupation. The moral and empirical vacuity of the first two charges has been documented by scholars of Jewish and world history. A genocidal regime, for example, wouldn’t encourage people they want to erase to evacuate impending combat zones, wouldn’t send medical supplies and doctors to help the wounded, and wouldn’t hold its army accountable for noncombatant deaths and casualties. A Jewish-run apartheid system wouldn’t promote Arab jurists to seats on the Supreme court, wouldn’t boast a higher rate of Arab enrollment at the Technion than enjoyed by African Americans at MIT, and wouldn’t provide funding for “culturally responsive” reading instruction in Arab schools. Unfortunately, evidence and nuance are denied access by the guardians of simplistic narratives.

And then there’s that nasty occupation, always mentioned in critiques of Israeli politics (including in public letters from that rabbi) and blamed for all the problems of the Middle East. It was most stunningly and cruelly evoked starting on October 8, with a “they-had-it-coming” schadenfreude to explain why 1200 Israelis were murdered and hundreds more raped, mutilated, and kidnapped. I am always amazed by this, shall we say, preoccupation with the occupation, which, like much anti-Israelism (mostly from the left), is unburdened with history, logic, or fairness.

The chronology of efforts by founders and elected leaders of Israel to negotiate a solution to what a friend once called the “over-promised land” doesn’t need another rehearsal here. The nagging accusation that Israel is solely or primarily at fault for the failure to establish Palestinian self-rule flies in the face of the endless stream of proposals, rejected with almost perfect automaticity in the most sustained record of intransigence in world history. Did Israel make mistakes in the West Bank? For sure. Is the recent eruption of violence against Arab farmers acceptable? Definitely not. But does anyone know how to remove (or at least loosen) the political, military, demographic, and moral albatross – or think Israel can or should try to do so unilaterally? With the country at war again following two years of trauma, it’s hard to find anyone – regardless of political affiliation – who thinks the time is right for renewed discussion of two-state solutions or peace offerings that might be interpreted as reward for the dastardly deeds of October 7th. Polling data showing that a majority of West Bank Arabs hailed the Hamas butchery are not encouraging.

There are two other problems with the occupation obsession. First, whatever one might think of the post-1967 map and the quality of life for Arabs in the territories, denial of Israel’s right to exist started earlier. The word more accurately refers to the original sin of Zionism, to Jewish presence anywhere “between the river and the sea.” Nakhba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) came into use in 1948, and the PLO charter was ratified in 1964, before the drawing of that famous “green line.” It seems that preoccupation with the occupation ignores the pre-occupation…

Second, most anti-Israel bloggers don’t care for counterfactuals. In their somewhat poignantly imaginary world, they want to believe that if only Israel withdrew from the territories peaceful coexistence would blossom. I admit to harboring that dream, during and at least for a while after the Oslo accords and the Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House south lawn. And it was surely an inspiring hope behind the painful self-extrication of Jews from Gaza in 2005. After Oslo we got the intifada, and after the Gaza disengagement we watched greenhouses get converted to gun arsenals and billions get invested in a terrorist tunnel system bigger than the London tube: searing reminders of something Amos Oz taught about how reality often turns dreams into disappointment.

And there’s more to the saga of Gaza, where higher education enrollments, economic productivity, infant mortality, and other indicators of well-being significantly improved — after 1967. If Gaza became “the largest open-air prison in the world,” another deceit popular with anti-Israel sloganeers, it happened under self-rule and not under occupation. Throwing homosexuals from rooftops is a technique employed by Hamas, not the IDF. It seems, then, that preoccupation with the occupation ignores not only the pre-occupation but the post-occupation too…

Finally, a chutzpah alert. Israel is home to the longest sustained presence of an indigenous population — Jews — of anywhere in the world. I’m not going to argue that this indigeneity justifies renewed settlement in places like Hebron or Nablus. (As the eminent rabbi and historian Arthur Hertzberg once quipped, “God may have promised the whole land to the Israelites. But he didn’t specify when.”) But I do respectfully suggest that critics of Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria, and, for that matter, Tel Aviv, at least have the decency to look into their own backyards: how can occupiers of places like Manhattan or Pennsylvania or Washington sleep at night knowing how the indigenous populations there were displaced? Maybe if Israelis followed the American fashion trend of “land acknowledgements” in email signatures, badgering about Jewish presence in the Middle East would subside? (More dreams.) Meanwhile, more honesty and less hypocrisy would be nice.

We haven’t had air raid sirens now for about seven hours. I think I’ll go over to Dizengoff Square and have a cappuccino. On the way, I’ll stop at the table with framed photos of the brave American soldiers who lost their lives in the recent war, and join in prayer for their memory.