What Israel does matters

Just because they're after you doesn't mean you're not paranoid

Chuck Schumer’s speech last week urging Israel to hold new elections (and, implicitly, to select a different prime minister since almost all polling suggests Netanyahu would lose such an election) seems as good a time as any to write about a broader point underlying Schumer’s thinking — the things Israel does make a difference in how Israel is perceived in the world.

That’s not unique to Israel!

All countries need to make decisions about how to conduct themselves in the world, and that calculus normally includes considerations of how their actions will be perceived by the larger world and the consequences that might follow. One consequence of Vladimir Putin’s reckless invasion of Ukraine is that Sweden and Finland moved to join NATO. On the other hand, Putin isn’t so reckless that he’s dropping nuclear bombs on Kyiv and Lviv. I’m not sure exactly what the global reaction to that would be, and I don’t think Putin is either, but he clearly doesn’t want to find out.

Israel is the target of a global campaign of delegitimization that casts the basic Zionist premise of a Jewish state as equivalent to apartheid South Africa. This campaign urges the global community to boycott both Israeli companies and foreign companies that do business in Israel, to refuse to sell weapons to Israel,¹ and ultimately, to impose sanctions on the Israeli government. The idea is to try to force the collapse of the Israeli state and its replacement with some kind of poorly explained but ostensibly binational alternative. If you don’t want that to happen, you need to argue against the people calling for that to happen. And if you want to prevail in those arguments, you have to care about how Israeli choices influence global public opinion.

Instead, the Israeli public is so deeply marinated in the theory that Israel is criticized by irrational haters and anti-Semites that they believe there is no reason to care about such things.

This is a common fallacy that all kinds of people in all kinds of situations make. It is absolutely true that Israel faces a lot of unfair criticism, much of it from people with bad motives and much of the rest from people who are being manipulated by people with bad motives. It is true that many of these critics are completely implacable. And it is easy, especially in a social media world, to obsess over the most unfair criticisms and most implacable critics and get yourself into a bunker mentality. But just like it’s not true that every single Trump voter is part of a racist MAGA cult impervious to Democratic arguments and policies, it’s also not true that every single Israel critic is mindlessly repeating anti-Jewish incantations. And you play into the hands of those who are by acting like that’s what’s going on.

Roots of a paranoid worldview

When I made this point on Twitter, a bunch of people responded with either the exact words “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you” or something to that effect.

I would really urge Israelis and Zionists in the Jewish diaspora (which I suppose is where I would place myself) to think harder about that idea and, in fact, to turn it inside out: Just because there are people who are genuinely after you doesn’t mean that you’re not being paranoid. If you’re American, try to step outside your Jewish identity for a moment and think about something else: Is racism real? Are there people who harbor anti-Black stereotypes and prejudices? Of course. And have you ever seen false, flimsy, or wildly overreaching charges of racism flung around? Of course you have. And while some of that might be cynical, it always seems to me that it’s mostly sincere. It’s totally understandable how a person concerned about something real might come to see more of it out there than there really is.

And the same applies to Israel.

Why were there people around the world, including seemingly mild-mannered writers and intellectuals, who reacted to 10/7 with celebration and glee? Why is there so little sentiment in the Arab and Muslim worlds that the bad actor here is Hamas for insisting on fighting to the last dead Palestinian baby rather than doing what most defeated and cornered armies in history have done and laying down their arms? Why does Egypt admit refugees fleeing north from Sudan and not those who would like to flee south from Gaza? I find the extent to which the global community of progressive, humanitarian-minded cosmopolitan types simply imbibes an Arab nationalist worldview and views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through that lens to be maddening.

I also find the content of that worldview — a worldview that elevates the virtue of standing and fighting for every inch of land, no matter how many Palestinian lives need to be sacrificed on the altar of resistance — to be very disturbing.

You’re probably familiar with polls showing that the vast majority of American Jews favor a two-state solution, are skeptical of settlements, etc. Something you may not know — and which makes Schumer’s speech so risky — is that in experimental settings, even mild criticisms of Israeli that Jewish Americans agree with perform terribly with Jewish audiences. I think most American Jews think that the worldwide “criticizing Israel” industry is largely full of shit, and they want to hear the John Fetterman “I’ve got your back, the other guys are the ones at fault” message.

I get where that’s coming from.

But there are 8 billion people on the planet. A million different people could post deranged anti-semitism on social media every day of the year and you’d feel totally besieged, but that would amount to less than 5% of the world population. Just because these people are real doesn’t mean they are the only people out there. And the fact that they’re real doesn’t change the fact that fixating on them to the point where you’re ignoring everyone else is a terrible strategy.

There was a lot of sympathy toward Israel after 10/7

Since the immediate aftermath 10/7, there has been a very deliberate effort in pro-Israel circles to raise the salience of Israel’s most unhinged critics. Social media accounts started ginning up right away to identify, name, and shame content that was anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas, or just straight-up stupid. That’s part of the game in modern-day politics. Everyone tries to highlight their most loony-tunes adversaries to embarrass the other side and try to provoke infighting.

But something that I think got a little lost in that discourse was the reality that on the whole, the mainstream response to 10/7 was extremely pro-Israel.

Joe Biden, of course, was staking out pro-Israel positions. At the time, those stances had near-uniform bipartisan support in congress. Not absolutely unanimous, but “the Squad” is a very small group of people who got a lot of attention at that moment while representing less than two percent of the membership. France, Germany, Italy, and the UK denounced Hamas and pledged to “support Israel in its efforts to defend itself and its people against such atrocities.” The government of India called for “solidarity” with Israel.

Obviously, global response was not uniformly pro-Israel. Arab states, in particular, tended to condemn Hamas while also basically urging Israel not to do much in the way of counter-attack. The government of Egypt, for example, called for “exercising maximum restraint and avoiding exposing civilians to further danger,” and Saudi Arabia called for an “immediate cessation of violence.”

That said, several weeks into the Israeli military response, the Saudis were still talking about their desire for a diplomatic normalization deal with Israel.

Crucial context for the attacks themselves, after all, is that Israel actually wasn’t surrounded by implacable enemies driven by Jew-hatred. Israel has enjoyed polite, if chilly, relations with Jordan and Egypt for a long time. And over the past 15 years, it’s become a lot closer to the Persian Gulf monarchies. Israel established diplomatic relations with the UAE and Bahrain under Trump, and the Biden administration was working hard on an Israel-Saudi accord. The goal of all of this, from the American point of view, is to construct a broad anti-Iranian alliance in the region that would presumably encompass Kuwait as well.

It’s not clear exactly what Hamas was hoping to achieve with the 10/7 attack — they probably assumed based on past Israeli behavior that there would be more openness to a prisoner exchange — but certainly one result of the ensuing war has been to scuttle that diplomatic progress. Israel is now in a situation where western countries that strongly backed it are condemning it, where Arab states that were looking to forge alliances are hesitant to move forward, and where an American president who strongly supported Israel is being embarrassed by the Israeli government’s refusal to pay any accord to American diplomatic priorities.

There were plenty of people who had genuinely unhinged responses to those attacks. But there were plenty of people — including most of the people who matter most in the world — who did not, and who wanted to work toward a continued alignment of Israel with the western democracies and the Sunni Arab states. But the Israeli government chose a course of action that fairly predictably eroded that moment of opportunity.

Non-politics by other means

The Gaza Strip is a dense urban area. There is no realistic way to wage war there without killing and maiming kids and other civilians. I don’t think you can reasonably blame Israel for wanting to mount a significant military response to a threat that proved itself to be less-contained and less-deterred than the Israeli public had believed. And I think it is wrong to see the civilian death toll as purely a result of IDF brutality or evidence of genocidal intent.

But in a war, people do care about the question of intent.

And war, as they say, is politics by other means. It matters what you are fighting for. Sane people see a clear difference between Ukraine fighting for its independence and Russia fighting to snuff that independence out. In Gaza, Israel is fighting to destroy or defeat Hamas. Fair enough, Hamas seems bad. But defeat them to what end? This is the question that Biden politely and now Schumer more forcefully have been asking of Israel. It’s not that the fighting has to end, per se, with the declaration of an independent Palestinian state. But if Israel is going to move away from the pre-10/7 standoff approach to Gaza to one that involves a lot of bloody fighting, people around the world would like to hear that the fighting has some kind of aspirational endgame.

Absent that, and with the presence of far-right parties in the governing coalition, it sounds like ethnic cleansing.

I don’t know exactly how to bring the long-term conflict to a peaceful resolution (it is, famously, a difficult and thorny one), but the principles of the two-state solution with limited land swaps and annexations remain sound and defensible. Even if it’s true, as Israeli skeptics say, that Palestinians wouldn’t be satisfied with any kind of reasonable deal, the mere existence (or non-existence) of a process makes a difference to how the world understands the situation. For many years, Netanyahu-led Israel governments got away with a non-process precisely because Hamas was running Gaza and they also rejected the idea of good-faith talks. He settled for occasionally “mowing the grass” as an alternative to seeking a solution, and implicitly backed Hamas rule. It seemed like it was working until suddenly it wasn’t.

To be clear: This, rather than some dovish turn in Israeli opinion, is why Netanyahu is unpopular and why he wants to avoid new elections he would lose. His pitch was security and he failed to deliver it. The difference isn’t that a new coalition would call off the battle against Hamas. It’s that a new government would not have a political self-interest in endlessly prolonging the war, and a new coalition that’s not beholden to far-right and religious parties would want to be seen as desiring a comprehensive resolution of the conflict while prioritizing Israel’s regional diplomacy. And I think that if Israel did different things, then many (not all but many) people would respond differently to Israel.

Ends against the middle

I’m not saying anything about this that Thomas Friedman hasn’t said in a dozen columns dispensing friendly advice to the Israeli politic and Israeli political leaders.

For his trouble, Friedman was specifically targeted by Palestine solidarity protestors at the New York Times Company’s annual corporate meeting, where Friedman as an individual and the Times as an institution were charged with genocide.

It’s not a coincidence that Friedman is seen as an especially egregious enemy here rather than a friend — just because Israelis are paranoid doesn’t mean there aren’t people who are out to get them. There is a dedicated anti-Zionist movement around the world, and while that leads to a lot of debate as to whether this is a per se anti-Semitic position, I think that even if it isn’t, it’s an extreme demand.

The specific thing that has transfixed a global audience of idealistic young people is the concrete suffering of Palestinian civilians. That’s something that could be resolved far short of dissolving the State of Israel. Not just in the sense that you could have an interim cessation in the fighting, but that you could have a peace deal in which Palestinians are citizens of their own sovereign state (or of two separate Palestinian states) that, like Jordan and Egypt, control their own borders and are at peace with Israel. There are plenty of people who don’t like that idea, who want to reverse the nakba of 1948 and liberate all of historical Palestine. But those people would get far less international support if Israel were acting the way Friedman says they should act. Which the protest organizers know, so they show up to protest not the furthest-right American Zionist opinion writers, but the most prominent moderate.

And that’s Netanyahu’s game, too. Extremists on both sides get that extremism on the other side helps them, because both sides think that if everyone keeps pushing more and more chips into the pot, they will ultimately win. There’s a view that global opinion will turn so hostile to Israel that they will eventually get the apartheid South Africa treatment. And there’s a view that Israel can make a durable alliance with the most Islamophobic political movements all around the world and win. Netanyahu himself seems to positively welcome the idea of undercutting pro-Israel Democrats to try to get Jewish voters to switch to the GOP.

I have no idea who will ultimately win this “ends against the middle” gamble. But I do think it’s obvious that it will induce a lot of avoidable suffering along the way.

1. A lot of anti-Israel discourse is deliberately ambiguous between criticizing American financial assistance to Israel, which is relatively minor, and the idea that American arms sales to Israel (which are not at all minor) should be ended.