Israel/Palestine

AN ETHNO-STATE IS INHERENTLY ILLIBERAL:

The liberal Zionist dilemma: A contradiction in search of a solution increasingly sharpened by war, settlements and demographic parity (Leon Hadar, September 19, 2026, Asia Times)

Strip away the polemics on both sides, and the structural problem is fairly simple to state. Zionism, as a historical movement, was a 19th-century national-liberation project: the claim that Jews constituted a nation entitled to self-determination on a specific piece of territory.

Liberalism, as a political tradition, is committed to individual rights, pluralism, and, in its more universalist versions, a certain skepticism toward ethnic or religious particularism as the organizing principle of a state.

Liberal Zionism is the attempt to hold both of these commitments simultaneously: a state that is both a Jewish national home and a liberal democracy extending equal rights to all who live under its authority, including the roughly five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who have no vote in the government that controls their lives, and the two million Arab citizens of Israel proper who do vote but have long complained of structural inequality.

PHILOSEMITISM REQUIRES MORAL CLARITY:

Israel’s Elimination Project (Yuli Novak, 9/14/26, NY Times)

As a Jewish Israeli, I grew up inside that language. It turned violent domination into “security,” dispossession into “settlement” and large-scale violence into “self-defense.” That language draws much of its power from real fear. I know that fear. I grew up with it. That fear has many sources, including decades of armed attacks against Israelis. The Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, has intensified it. Israeli political language manipulates it by dehumanizing Palestinians, collapsing them into a single category — namely, a threat. It uses violence by some to justify the control and oppression of an entire population. This is one way apartheid sustains itself.

The language I grew up with did not require me to deny Palestinian suffering. I could acknowledge it, even be horrified by it, while still regarding the system that produced it as fundamentally legitimate. Today, after years of deepening dehumanization, Palestinian suffering is simply ignored in much of Israeli public discourse. That is why the language of those who live under this system matters so much. The people who witness, endure and survive under that power can describe what their lives look like: unprotected, shaped by fear, vulnerability and uncertainty.

On Monday, B’Tselem is publishing a report on the process unfolding in the West Bank. It tells a story with deep roots. From the mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced or expelled and the subsequent refusal of refugees’ right to return, through occupation, settlements and apartheid, Israeli policy has repeatedly worked to entrench Jewish sovereignty while making Palestinian presence and political life more precarious.

IT’S NOT ABOUT HAMAS:

It’s Not Just the West Bank Settlers. It’s Israel. (Mairav Zonszein, 9/06/26, NY Times)

But the settler militias terrorizing Qusra and other villages across the West Bank could not continue to act as they are without state and military cover. These are not isolated extremists or hooligans, as Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Netanyahu and other leaders have said.

Nor is this simply settler violence. In the West Bank, Palestinians live in daily fear for their lives. Mr. Ridi is not the only homeowner at risk. Even as the U.S. flag waved over his home, there was another settler attack against a different Palestinian home in Qusra on Aug. 29. Israeli settlers arrived in white pickup trucks, their faces masked, throwing stones. Despite a statement by Mr. Netanyahu condemning the act and assuring that authorities would take action, there has been only one reported arrest related to the attacks in Qusra and a handful of arrests related to other settler-based violence in the area. These moves may not result in much: Even when arrests are made, only 3 percent of settlers are convicted.

In other words, what’s happened in Qusra is a feature, not a bug, of Israeli policy, which has expanded and deepened its control over the occupied territory over the last four years. This has been accomplished through intensifying economic strangulation, restrictions on freedom of movement, transferring governing powers from military to civilian control and, most egregiously, the emboldening of settler militias. Such groups already existed when the current government was formed in late 2022. But in the past three years, these militias have been largely given free rein to intimidate, harass and make Palestinian life in the West Bank unbearable. Since 2023, thousands of Palestinians have been displaced by a combination of settler attacks, military operations and restrictions on access and movement. On Sept. 2, Israeli forces demolished homes and structures in the Palestinian village of Khirbet al Tabban in the southern West Bank, rendering the village’s 70 residents homeless.

Folks might have taken the hint when they changed the constitution to declare it an ethnostate.

A RELIGION OR A RACE?:

Israel Isn’t Debating a Palestinian State. It’s Preparing for Expulsion: Gadi Eisenkot’s position on Palestinian statehood is beside the point. Across Gaza, the West Bank and Israel itself, the machinery for making Palestinian life impossible is already operating, laying the groundwork for mass expulsion (Amira Hass, 9/01/26, Ha’aretz)

The debate over one state, two states or a federation is more theoretical than ever. Any agreed-upon solution requires first acknowledging the problem and agreeing on what it is. Too many Jews in Israel have been conditioned to believe that the problem is the very presence in this land of a Palestinian people with roots, historical and economic continuity, cultural capital and material assets, a rich agricultural heritage and a profound love of homeland.

“Erasure” is the nightmare solution being written into reality every day. Knesset laws, politicians’ declarations, military orders, school textbooks and the holy real estate battalions operating in Gaza, the West Bank and the Negev all work, together and separately, to advance this “solution” diligently and without fear of international condemnation.

There is nothing mnore anti-Semitic than exempting Israel from Judeo-Christian moral standards.

THEY ARE STILL FIGHTING FOR ISRAEL:

These Generals Fought for Israel. Now They See ‘Jewish Terrorism’ as the Threat. (Azam Ahmed, Natan Odenheime, Ronen Bergman, Aug. 31, 2026, NY Times)

“This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,” Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general and former minister of health, said of Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Asaf Agmon, a retired Air Force general, went even further, comparing it to what some Israelis’ forebears endured in the Holocaust — not in the scale of the violence, he explained, but in the effort to erase the Palestinian presence from much of the West Bank.

“Once a society behaves this way,” he said, “that society is doomed.”

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Loving the stranger: this week’s parashah, Ekev (Rabbanit Joanne Greenaway, 7/30/26, The Jewish Chronicle)

Among all these commandments, one has a particular force: “You too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Rashi draws our attention to the reason the Torah gives. We know what it feels like to be strangers because that was once our own experience. Having known vulnerability ourselves, we should never look down on others. Our history is not simply something to remember; it is meant to shape our character. The memory of being strangers should make us more compassionate today.

The Jewish story begins with slavery and displacement. Sadly, it did not end there. In more recent history, British Jewish life was profoundly shaped by refugees escaping Nazi persecution. Nearly 300,000 Jews found refuge in Britain. They arrived carrying immense loss, but also determination and hope. Their contribution has become an integral part of our community.

That legacy can still be seen in the work of World Jewish Relief. Many people know the organisation for its efforts to rescue Jews before and after the Holocaust. Today, it is Britain’s leading Jewish charity supporting refugees of all backgrounds to rebuild their lives through employment, training and practical support. Its reputation rests on both its expertise and the dignity with which it treats every person.

Perhaps that is what makes its work so deeply rooted in Jewish values.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL: A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

How Netanyahu’s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger: Gadi Eisenkot, whose view of war is shaped by the loss of his son, is, in manner and character, the anti-Bibi. (David Remnick, July 27, 2026, The New Yorker)

The sources of alarm seem inexhaustible: the fighting up north in Lebanon; the Trump Administration’s turn from frenetic negotiations with the newly emboldened regime in Tehran to a prolonged bombing campaign; Netanyahu’s deals of convenience with the ultra-Orthodox, a crucial component of his voting bloc; the deepening hostility toward Israel across the ideological spectrum and all over the world. What is far more rarely discussed, in Kfar HaNagid and elsewhere, is the colossal human suffering and devastation in the Gaza Strip and the mayhem committed daily against Palestinians by settlers in villages throughout the West Bank.

Finally, Eisenkot arrives. He is sixty-six, a man of broad belly and pained expression. When he smiles, he winces as if from a twinge of sciatica. He is dressed in a dark polo shirt, his post-military uniform. Eisenkot’s parents were Moroccan immigrants of modest means. He was born in Tiberias and grew up in Eilat, two cities considered to be on the Israeli periphery. Were Eisenkot to win, he would be the first Prime Minister with such a background.

This presents a problem for Netanyahu. Despite growing up in an affluent neighborhood in Jerusalem, and being the Ashkenazi son of a prominent historian of the Spanish Inquisition, Netanyahu has long positioned himself, and his Likud Party, as the security-minded champion of the working class, the pious, the voiceless, and the Mizrahim, who came to Israel from Jewish communities in predominantly Muslim countries. Most analysts here believe that, in a close election, Eisenkot can prevail if he attracts at least some “soft right” voters in provincial cities like Kiryat Shmona, Ofakim, Ashdod, Nahariya, and Dimona. In many traditional Likud strongholds, the journalist Hilo Glazer wrote in Haaretz, Eisenkot is described by his supporters as dialina, Moroccan Arabic for “one of us.” […]

He is just short of dull and makes a virtue of it. Last year, he founded a party called Yashar—the name meaning straight, upright, just. At the lectern, he briskly ticks through his themes and campaign promises, among them a pledge to restore Israel as a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.” This sort of phrase is rarely heard from Netanyahu, much less from two of his most racist and reactionary ministers: Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance. Both are unapologetic in their support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.

The Word Zionism Is Dead: From the start, it’s meant too many things. It’s time to move on. (Nadine Epstein, Mar 18, 2026, Moment)

I am editor-in-chief of a magazine with a great Jewish legacy, and I have never once in my life used the terms Zionist or anti-Zionist to describe myself or anyone else. Why? When I use a word, I want to know where it’s been and how it’s going to be understood, and with anything Zionism-related, that’s a nearly impossible task.

And so I am going to propose something that may sound radical. It is beyond time to strike the words Zionist and Zionism from modern political discourse and relegate them to history, where they belong. They have outlived their usefulness both as concepts and as terms. This means we must immediately cease labeling ourselves and others as Zionists and anti-Zionists, and use the word Zionism only when referring to the historical political movement. […]

If we believe in the right of people to form nations, which at this point of human development most of us do, then Zionism has long been a moot point. Given Israel’s right to exist, I would go a step further and say that the label Zionism has become outright dangerous. The use of the term by its very nature keeps the question of existence unnecessarily alive. It’s like a scab that keeps forming and reforming and never heals. The Zionist family of terms has increasingly become polarizing for the American public, and even worse, it is unnecessarily splintering the American Jewish community, all at a time of rising antisemitism. Wherever I go, and I travel in many circles, I hear the words Zionist and anti-Zionist invoked and hurled with equal God-like certainty, terrifying self-righteousness and perilous imprecision.

The American Jewish community is as mystified by the meaning of Zionist and Zionism as the broader public. Look at the 2026 survey conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America: Only one-third of American Jews said they identified as Zionist. At the same time, nearly nine out of ten said they supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.

A Zionism that does not intellectually make the case for Palestinian self-determination is not worth honoring.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

How Israel Lost Americans (Michelle Goldberg, 7/08/26, The New York Times)

It’s been obvious for some time that Americans are souring on Israel, but a Gallup poll that came out on Friday marks a turning point. For the first time in the poll’s 25-year history, it found, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The shift wasn’t just among Democrats, whose opinion of Israel has been in free fall in recent years. According to Gallup, only 30 percent of independents now sympathize with Israel; 41 percent sympathize with the Palestinians. Among adults under 35, support for Israel has fallen to a record low of 23 percent. With numbers like this, bipartisan backing for Israel, long a constant in American politics, will in time become unsustainable.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel famously prides himself on his ability to shape American policy. As he said in a secretly recorded 2001 conversation, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” Yet he has presided over an ongoing collapse in American Zionism and could eventually go down in history as the prime minister who lost Israel’s most important ally.

Israel’s imploding reputation is largely a consequence of its oppression of the Palestinians, in particular the mass killings in Gaza, which millions of Americans watched up close on social media. At the same time, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — which is increasingly turning into outright annexation — is making Zionism and liberalism seem incompatible. Today, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, about 7.2 million Jews preside over a slightly larger number of Arabs, if you combine Israel’s Palestinian citizenry with the populations of Gaza and the West Bank. The majority of those Palestinians are stateless and have almost no guaranteed rights, as we see in the growing number of settler pogroms in the West Bank and the systematic ethnic cleansing of villages.

As Ariel Sharon understood, becoming the oppressor was always going to be fatal to Israel’s position in the West, nevermind the damage to the state itself and the soul of the people.

WHITE PRIVILEGE:

How to Sell a Genocide exposes the double standards of reporting on Gaza (Jeff Sparrow, May 28, 2026, The Conversation)

The International Association of Genocide Scholars describes the Israeli war on Gaza as meeting the legal definition of genocide. The association’s position came after a vote, so we know it reflects the judgement of 86% of its members.

Almost all the major human rights organisations and NGOs agree, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Middle East Studies Association, Oxfam and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

Yet most liberal news outlets still do not use the word “genocide” in relation to Gaza.

Johnson shows how such lexical scruples do not apply elsewhere. “Even though the destruction of Gaza, by all objective metrics, has been magnitudes more brutal and deadly than that of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine,” he observes, “the totalising moral labels of ‘war crime’ and ‘genocide’ were used on CNN and MSNBC 17.2 times more often in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than Israel’s action in Gaza.”

His review of the first 30 days of the two conflicts found that, on CNN and MSNBC, Ukrainians were described on air as victims of genocide or war crimes 1,790 times: 1,515 for war crimes and 275 for genocide. When the victims were Palestinian, the terms were used 104 times: 92 for war crimes and 12 for genocide.

“Ostensibly non-opinionated reporters and ‘analysts’ on both MSNBC and CNN,” writes Johnson, “often asserted, as a matter of fact, that Russia was committing war crimes against Ukrainians, without this being seen as violating their neutrality.”

The only existential threat to Israel is the way it has degraded its culture.