Israel is How Europe Can Stick It To Trump

Over the past few days, we've seen a spate of hitherto solid Israel allies in Europe announce they'll be recognizing the state of Palestine. France kicked things off, and it was swiftly followed by the UK and Canada. (There also has been an interesting wave of Arab states calling on Hamas to demilitarize and relinquish power).

I'm not going to comment here on the substance of the decision. Briefly, it is obvious that Palestinians deserve self-determination in a recognized state, and I'm unpersuaded by those who are arguing the move will backfire against the Palestinians. As for those who claim that recognition "rewards Hamas", I say that, if we are to think of this decision in those terms, it's better to see this as not as rewarding Hamas for 10/7, but as punishing Israel for its conduct after 10/7.

But that's not what I want to focus on here. Rather, I want to explore a different question: Why now? What made these countries take this step now?

Obviously, there is not one single answer to that. But in addition to some of the obvious factors -- increased sympathy for the Palestinian cause and increased frustration with Israeli intransigence chief among them -- I suggest an additional cause is that stepping out on Israel is a comparatively cheap and insulated way to symbolically repudiate Trump and Trumpism.

The Trump administration's pivot away from our traditional allies and alliances has been met with a justified mixture of alarm of fury from those we've abandoned. From escalating trade wars to threats of annexation, Trump has done unprecedented damage to America's global standing. People want to see their leaders punch back. But many of the most obvious avenues for retaliation come with substantial risks of their own. As idiotic and self-destructive as tariffs are for the United States, it remains the case that European countries must be careful and adroit in their own trade negotiations. Symbolism has its place there, but it can't be the whole story; missteps can exact real and serious tangible damage on one's own people.

But sticking it to Israel offers much of that same symbolic flouting of Trump, at a much lower risk. Most of the "damage" there, if there is any, will be externalized, not internalized. To the extent some countries might have been reluctant to step out against Israel for fear of alienating the United States, that ship has sailed; today these countries are looking for opportunities to signal they're standing up to the American madman. And while the Trump administration might make noises about retaliation, I think they're fighting on too many fronts for protecting Israel diplomatically to be a serious priority -- and that's even if one believes that Trump's Israel policy is based on sincere ideological commitment, which I don't. If one thinks Trump is just using "Israel" as an excuse to enact various forms of domestic repression, the ultimate disinterest can be doubled. In essence, Europe recognizing Palestine (a) looks increasingly justified and sensible given recent Israeli conduct and (b) offers an opportunity to be seen as standing up to Trump, in a context where tangible blowback is likely to be minimal. No wonder it's looking more attractive!

None of this should be seen as warranting any sympathy for Israel of course. They've chosen their course -- lashing themselves to the most extreme and vicious iteration of global rightwing ultranationalism -- and they have to live with the consequences. That's the risk of hitching your wagon entirely to a single powerful but widely loathed patron -- if daddy gets distracted, you're on your own and you've made yourself an awfully tempting target. Once again, when the right is done finding Israel useful, it will leave it in the wreckage.

The Impossibility of Bibi Agreeing To Peace

A hypothetical question for Israel supporters.

Suppose Israel was asked to craft the contours of a peace deal in Gaza. And suppose they were allowed to put any conditions they wanted into that deal, subject to just two limitations:

1. Palestinians cannot be compelled, directly or indirectly, to leave the Gaza Strip;
2. Palestinians must be given full citizenship and democratic rights in whatever sovereign nation agrees to control Gaza.

The first is essentially a rule against ethnic cleansing, the second a rule against apartheid.

Beyond those stipulations, Israel is allowed to put any conditions it likes into the deal.

I do not claim, to be clear, that so long as these conditions are met any agreement between Israel and Palestine would necessarily be just. Rather, I present these as the absolute, barest-of-the-bare minimum redlines that must be respected no matter how one-sided the remaining conditions are in Israel's favor. And the point of the exercise is that, so long as these minimums are acceded to, Israel can load up the "deal" as favorably as it wants.

Given that, my question is simple: could this Israeli government come up with a deal that meets these parameters?

And my suspicion is no, it couldn't. The "unthinkable thought" of 2019 is now a reality. And the impossibility of Israel agreeing to a peace deal that abides by even this extraordinary minimums is a large part of why Israel drags this war on and on and on.

Start with the second proviso. The framing is a requirement of equal citizenship in "whatever sovereign nation controls Gaza", and that ambiguity is intentional: it could encompass an independent Palestinian state, or it encompass Israeli annexation. But of course, this makes the dilemma apparent: Bibi and his coalition are dead-set against allowing an independent Palestinian state to exist, but they are also implacably opposed to incorporating Gaza Palestinians into the Israeli state (at least, on equal citizenship).

This (for Bibi) conundrum inspires increasingly desperate and fanciful efforts to escape the impossible bind -- for example, proposing that some other Arab state assume control of Gaza (for obvious reasons, nobody seems interested in stepping up). The increasingly open gestures towards full ethnic cleansing also can be understood through this "dilemma" -- the fewer Palestinians who remain in Gaza, the less daunting annexation looks.

And ultimately, the impossibility of resolving this problem makes all the other conditions we sometimes talk about moot. Questions about return of the hostages, demilitarization, right of return, reparations, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state -- I don't want to say they're unimportant, but while Bibi is in charge they're epiphenomenal. Even if Israel got what it says it wants along all these fronts (immediate return of the hostages, a demilitarized Palestinian state, rejection of right of return, compensation for 10/7, recognition), I genuinely don't think that this government could say "yes" to the deal if it meant either accepting an independent Palestinian state or incorporating Palestinians into Israel as full and equal citizens. Maybe if you loaded up some comically evil and implausible conditions ("reparations to the tune of $1 trillion/year") -- but that would just emphasize that the response of the Israeli government to this hypothetical would be to search frantically for a way to not make the deal.

For what it's worth, this toxic feature of Bibi and his cronies does I think mark out a tangible and meaningful difference between the current Israeli governing coalition and its realistic rivals. It's become popular to denigrate the belief (or "fantasy", as Ezra Klein said) among liberal Zionists that "Bibi is the problem" by observing that a core hostility to Palestinian rights and equality is shared among a much broader segment of Israeli society (including leading opposition figures) than many would care to admit. There is, regrettably, something to this critique -- but the hypothetical I'm pursuing here does I think suggest how it might be overstated, because I do think that the main opposition would be substantially different along these lines. They have no eagerness to create a Palestinian state, but it is not an immovable object for them; opposition to it does not lie at the center of their entire ideological being. It's not guaranteed or even easy, but given the right conditions, one can imagine them making a deal. With Bibi, one can't -- and that's a big difference.

But in the meantime, it is Bibi in control of Israel, and with Bibi in charge of Israel the impossibility of resolving this problem is a critical reason why the war continues. Agreeing on the contours of a peace deal only is relevant when peace is at hand. So long as Israel remains at war, it can delay having to decide an impossible choice. (The fact that once the war ends Bibi probably has to reckon with his criminal charges is also a factor, and a related one -- it goes to the point that Bibi wants the war to continue and is endangered by the prospect of it ending, no matter what the terms are).

In a different context almost 20 years ago, Ehud Olmert mocked those who obsessed over the exact acreage of a peace deal as having supposedly existential stakes for Israel's existence. 

“With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop,” he said. “All these things are worthless.”

He added, “Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel’s basic security?”

The hills don't matter, but pretending like the hills do matter, and matter so much that we couldn't possibly make a deal unless we are absolutely guaranteed to control these hills is a way of forestalling having to make a decision on the deal. And the same thing feels true in Gaza. All the talk about needing to destroy one more Hamas battalion, root out one more tunnel network, take out one more "second-in-command" -- who seriously thinks that is what will make the difference? They're delaying mechanisms -- so long as Israel can say "we still must do these military things", they can avoid having to commit to a choice on peace they're fundamentally unwilling to make. Like "airstrikes while you wait", it's something to do while you can't think of what else to do.

All that said, I open to being persuaded otherwise. Tell me a set of provisions -- I wouldn't even demand that they be realistic, so long as they aren't utterly absurdist -- that comports with the above two limitations that you think Bibi would accept, and I'll consider it. But I'm skeptical they exist.

Faithless in Gaza

The other day I was enmeshed in a Facebook thread, as one does, where a colleague was complaining about a post that equally condemned the Capital Jewish Museum shooting by a pro-Palestinian terrorist and the bombing of family homes by the IDF (the sin of "equating", not to be confused with the sin of "one-sided"). The argument was a familiar one: the DC shooter was intentionally seeking to murder civilians (true), while the killing of Palestinian families is an "undesired", tragic byproduct of fighting an urban counterinsurgency.

My response to this argument was not to contest it, exactly. It was to ask my colleague a more basic question: what would falsify his belief? He believes that, for Israel, the deaths of Palestinian civilians are undesired. What evidence would suffice so that he would no longer believe that?

He wouldn't answer.

To be sure, he gave an answer -- but it was just more arguments for why it was still correct to think that these deaths were "undesired". Pressed again to say, okay, but what evidence would make you think otherwise, and I was met with silence.*

That was when it was clear the issue wasn't one of belief, but of dogmatic faith. The bottom line -- "Israel does not desire civilian deaths" -- was written in stone. Everything above that could and would be erased and rewritten to cohere to the bottom line. The "what would falsify" question was impossible to answer, because he knew deep down that if he committed to any non-ludicrous answer, there was a real chance his criteria would be met, and then what would he do?

This does not work. I am familiar with the arguments why the spiraling death toll in Gaza does not mean that Israel "desires" those deaths. I don't find them especially compelling anymore,** but I'm familiar with them. But one argument that has no purchase is the pure tautology: "these civilian deaths are undesired because Israel does not desire civilian deaths". That boils down to rejecting the claim because accepting it would make you feel sad. It does not work.

Nir Hasson had a powerful column the other day about how much of the Israeli media has responded to the IDF killing nine Palestinian children. The media is obsessed with every fuzzy detail or misplaced accent, every AI-generated image or overwrought recharacterization -- but all in order to kick dust around the acknowledged truth that the IDF did kill those children. It is a mirror-image of 10/7-denialism, and, as one expert observes, it is in its perverted way a form of moral self-policing:

"Denying the atrocities that your side has committed is an attempt to maintain your humanity," [Dr. Assaf David, of the Forum for Regional Thinking and the Van Leer Institute] explains. "When you say, 'There are things that my side cannot do,' it is actually a statement saying that I cannot justify these things. It's true that it's a lie and that we do do these things, but denial is trying to set a moral standard."

Denial and justification go hand-in-hand. If it was unjustified then it didn't happen, and if it happened it was justified. Flit back and forth between those positions, and one can keep the faith indefinitely.

But it doesn't work. As one side of the fulcrum grows increasingly untenable, unbearable pressure grows on the other. Here is where one starts to see either absurd exercises in denialism (most 10/7 victims were gunned down by Israel; the images of Gaza destruction are "Pallywood" concoctions) or sickening excursions into justifications (the Bibas children would have grown up to be monsters anyway; Gaza's population are tantamount to Nazi collaborators). Such maneuvers are soul-destroying, but they are inevitable when one's dogmatic faith matters more than truth.

So to my pro-Israel friends, this is my challenge to you. If you still believe that Israel is only acting in the interests of self-defense, that its overall policy and practice is one that provides Palestinian civilians with the protections they are due under international law and as human beings, that the scenes of death and destruction are not "desired" but a regrettable byproduct of the inevitabilities of urban warfare against a terrorist entity like Hamas, I won't argue with you. I'll simply ask you to ask yourself, earnestly and without flinching, what would cause you to think otherwise. Commit to something, now, so that if the evidence does come to pass you don't rationalize it away later.

And if you can't bring yourself to do that simple thing, ask yourself what that really means about the status of your faith.

* The closest he did come to an answer was by citing to civilian:combatant casualty ratios which, he said, were lower in the Gaza campaign compared to other analogous counterinsurgencies (e.g., the anti-ISIS campaign in Mosul, which he said had a ratio of 2.5:1). The Gaza ratio, he said, was closer to 1.5:1 or 1.2:1; so if the Mosul campaign wasn't one of desired civilian death, neither was Gaza. But when I pressed him as to what ratio would flip that intuition (particularly given that the 10/7 ratio was slightly worse than 2:1), he refused to commit to a number -- I suspect because he was not as confident in that 1.2 - 1.5:1 ratio as he made himself out to be and knew that if he, say, matched the 10/7 2:1 figure, he might end up being put to the proof (for my part, I've seen the 1.2 and 1.5:1 ratios cited but I've also seen much worse estimates pegging the ratio at closer to 4:1). The cynic, I suggested, might suspect that the only number he'd commit to is .5 higher than whatever ends up being the real number.

** My view is that the prevailing outlook in both the IDF and the Israeli political establishment is, at best, utter indifference to Palestinian civilian life. To the extent Palestinians civilian safety poses any impediment to a military or political objective -- which always centered around "keeping Bibi in power", and which now includes "conquering" Gaza to boot -- that interest is given virtually zero weight. As the value of children's lives approaches zero, the number of children one can justify killing to get at one Hamas operative (or keep Bibi out of prison one more day) approaches infinity.

Among the bits of evidence that buttresses that view are the spiraling death tally itself (and the individual instances of horrifying death and destruction that are virtually impossible to justify), the regular statements by top-level Israeli officials evincing criminal intentions towards the Palestinian people, the credible reports that the IDF has greatly relaxed its operational controls previously meant to assure adherence to rules of distinction and proportionality in favor of establishing effective "free-fire" zones, and the prevalence of deeply racist attitudes towards Arabs and Palestinians that polling suggests are present in Israel's military-aged populations. 

There may be individual units or actors holding themselves to higher standards; there also are no doubt those holding themselves to a lower one where the death and destruction is itself a desired and terminal end. And none of this is incompatible with the belief that Hamas also is utterly indifferent to the wellbeing of the Palestinian population under its de facto rule, that it operates in civilian areas in a manner designed to further imperil the non-combatant population, and is effectively holding Gaza's population hostage in service of a crude desire to retain power. But in any case, it is wrong to say the deaths Israel inflicts on innocent Palestinians are "undesired", as that implies some level of care and concern for which there is little evidence of.

The Debunkers

Once, when I was in middle school, a friend and I saw a picture of a border guard from some eastern European country inside a Scholastic Magazine and decided it was a fake.

We had a grand time picking out details in the photo that "proved" it wasn't real. The guard's uniform had English on it, not Cyrillic. The rifle he was carrying was wrong (how we know what rifle he was supposed to be carrying, I don't know). There were other "problems" as well that I can't remember now. But I do remember feeling very proud of ourselves for figuring out that the magazine ran a fake photo; when the reality is that the photo was almost certainly real. We were vastly overreading minor "discrepancies" that probably weren't ultimately discrepancies at all.

The New York Times has a really interesting (and long) profile on a TikTok star who announced she had cancer, and then faced an organized community committed to "proving" that she was lying about it for influence, clout, or clicks.

The story doesn't hide the ball for long: unless her oncologist is in on the grift, the woman really has cancer. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to see how many people got so committed, for so long, into being sure she was faking it.

In particular, I noticed the deployment of a sort of Potemkin expertise. The debunkers seized on little details and discrepancies which they persistently viewed as the critical cracks in an otherwise elaborate facade. The tenor was an interesting mix of obviousness ("anyone could spot this is a fake, look at the rubes falling for such a clear con") and sophistication ("look how meticulous my investigation is; the story falls apart when an expert looks at it"). The latter component I think does more work than the former: it concocts an aura of authority that both reassures other readers that the claims are backed up by evidence, and also makes them feel good about being critical consumers not taken in by ruses and cons (when the irony, of course, is that they've talked themselves into not believing the truth).

When I read this story, it reminded me of a similar army of "debunkers" who pore over any claim of atrocity or calamity in Israel/Palestine to "prove" that a claim forwarded by seemingly credible sources (doctors, international media outlets, and so on) is actually a hoax or a lie. For example, this account is dedicated to minute analysis of videos or pictures that purport to show, say, famine in Gaza or bombed out civilian infrastructure, picking out bits and pieces that "prove" it's being staged. There's a whole ecosystem of people on this beat (and not just on the "pro-Israel" side), and their tenor and behavior is very reminiscent of the fanatical debunkers described in the NYT article above. They project expertise via hyper-fixation on detail, and present themselves as simply trying to uncover the truth. But they're obviously not dispassionate; the tiny nits and picks they make to "debunk" adverse narratives are never paired with a similar fine-toothed comb aimed at stories more to their taste. It's not even real skepticism, let alone critical analysis. Yet they have an eager audience from those eager to believe they're seeing through a ruse, who revel in the twin joys of faux-sophistication and confirmation bias.

Now, to be sure, the TikTok case is in many ways simpler: it doesn't have any clear political valence, and it is a single incident capable of being definitively declared true or false. Across the many, many reported incidents of catastrophe and calamity in Israel and Palestine, things tend to be muddier, with more obvious incentives to slant (or invent) claims for political purposes, and there will be inevitably a distribution of results following initial claims. Some will be borne out, some will turn out to be overstated, not what they are initially claimed to be, or even outright falsified. There is value in actual critical assessment and reassessment of what people say is happening inside a war zone -- not the least because even among perfectly good faith actors the chaos of a war zone doesn't lend itself to the conjunction of perfect accuracy and immediate reporting.

Nonetheless, I can't help but think part (though not all) of the deception relies on a persistent assumption that every social calamity is complete and totalizing, such that if there's anything interrupting the grimness then it just cannot be cancer/fascism/famine whatever.

And that's not true. There are times one is living with cancer and yet isn't an emaciated patient confined to her bed. That can be part of cancer, one of the scariest parts of cancer, but a picture that doesn't fit that template doesn't prove the cancer is made up. There are times one is living in a fascist state but does not see jackbooted thugs grabbing people off the streets. That is one of the scariest parts of fascism, but a day one just goes to the market as normal and doesn't see any secret police at all doesn't necessarily falsify the fascism. Cancer isn't always like that, fascism isn't always like that. And famine, too, doesn't always look like "The Vulture and the Little Girl"; a picture of a market with some food in it does not necessarily mean there isn't a famine.

That's why those little bits and pieces aren't the smoking guns they purport to be. Reality isn't as clean as we think it is. People with cancer still go to parks. People under fascism still enjoy nights out on the town. Places afflicting by famine still typically have some food somewhere. Buildings that have been bombed still have unexpected pieces that remain standing.

Each of those faux-"discrepancies" becomes grist for the debunking mill. But it's not real critical analysis; it's just food to keep believing what one already wants to believe.

Like Wildfire

The first I heard of wildfires in Israel, it was in the context of an allegation that the fires were the result of Israeli settlers committing arson while attacking Palestinian farmers.

As best I can tell, that allegation traces back to a stray Haaretz tweet that reads "As wildfire rages in Israel, security source tells Haaretz settlers set Palestinian agricultural land on fire in the West Bank." There doesn't seem to be any further corroboration, and the link in the post doesn't go to any article or news item elaborating (as best I can tell, it was either taken down or never existed in the first place).

Meanwhile, the right-wing coalition running the show in Israel was also quick to blame the fires on arson -- specifically, that caused by Palestinian militants. This, too, seems thinly supported and already has the hallmarks of a smear campaign. Netanyahu, for instance, claimed that 18 individuals had already been arrested for suspected arson; the true figure is three. And one of those three is a sixty-three-year old man with no criminal record who was found with the smoking-gun evidence of a tobacco pipe and some cotton to clean it.

Finally, there are the experts, who posit that the wildfires raging across an arid region of the eastern mediterranean that just had its driest winter on record are probably attributable to ... the climate crisis. Fancy that.

In recent years, right-wing politicians have frequently blamed Palestinians for arson in the wake of wildfire outbreaks, but no one has ever been indicted for nationalist-motivated arson leading to large-scale fires. Most major fires investigated were ultimately attributed to negligence.

The Carmel disaster in 2010 was sparked by a discarded hookah coal. Two of the major fires that scorched parts of the Jerusalem hills in 2016 were caused by a flare gun and welding work. Other large fires were found to have been started by farmers burning waste or hikers making coffee.

The phenomenon of blaming minorities for starting wildfires is not unique to Israel: in Turkey, Erdoğan blamed the Kurds; in Europe, migrants were accused of arson; and in California, claims emerged that LGBTQ individuals in the fire services were responsible for the failure to contain the fires.

It does all hang together, doesn't it. 

Thrilling Over Dead Children

In a generally interesting column about Israel's war aims in Gaza, Raviv Drucker writes:

Today, the lust for revenge, an easy willingness to make use of the madman theory and the widespread view that "they're all terrorists" have led to many actions that cannot be explained or justified. It is immoral, inhumane and taints us all.

This jumped out at me, because of a response to my "Tenth Plague" post I had read a few hours earlier. The response took great delight in trying to come up with myriad thought experiments justifying the killing of children: Would you kill baby Hitler? Would you kill members of the Hitler Youth? Would you kill a neo-Nazi kid who would have voted for Trump? (The last was presented as some sort of gotcha, as if it presented some more difficult quandary than the others).

These meditations, of course, are fun little games one plays in order to rationalize killing children -- a still grimmer (if that's possible) example of refusing to lay down one's toys. They are misappropriations of the famous quip about knowing what one is and just haggling over the price -- the idea being that we're all actually okay with killing children, some are just more clear-eyed about it than others.

The uselessness of the "baby Hitler" hypothetical is obviously that we cannot know in advance who will turn out to be Hitler. The purported way around that is pure racist fatalism -- we do know that these children will grow up to be Hitler, because that is what they do. It is not irony at all that this is exactly the rationale of those who cheered the murder of the Bibas children -- claiming that they will grow up to massacre Palestinians because that is what they do. It's the same sickness, in a slightly different color palette. Let nobody deceive you into thinking that these people are not one and the same.

And what stands out at me, again, about people such as this is the desire -- the thrill -- that some have in finding a way to justify killing children. It reminds me once again of Bernard Henri-Levy's contention about the rise of the "New Antisemitism", speaking of people who want above all else to "feel once again the desire and, above all, the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes, to harass large numbers of rabbis, to kill not just one but many Ilan Halimis...." It's not just about attacking kids, it's about feeling right to do it. And so they are never more thrilled than when they can tell themselves a story whereby the killing is righteous, and justified, and necessary, and beautiful.

A key part of the story they tell themselves, I think, is that everyone thinks this way. Everyone revels in killing the children of the enemy, some just put on a show of pretending otherwise. It is cynicism posing a "realism" that's actually cowardice. It continues to be a lie, and lie whose only purpose is to give despicable people moral license to promote despicable things.

The Tenth Plague in 2025

My least favorite part of the Passover Seder, by far, is the recitation of the Ten Plagues. It is tradition to spill a drop of wine for each plague, to acknowledge the suffering of the Egyptians and how it lessens our own joy at liberation.

For nine of the ten plagues, I'd consider this sufficient. For the Tenth Plague -- death of the first born -- I never have. A single drop of wine as a response to dead children is woefully, horrifyingly grotesque; even when those deaths are in pursuit of the most noble cause of liberation from slavery (though I continue to assert that, as told in the Passover tale, the Tenth Plague was absolutely unnecessary -- it was the Lord who "hardened Pharoah's heart" and precluded an earlier resolution). 

Again, this is something I've believed for many, many years (the above-linked post is from 2007). But it is all the more resonant right now. When one thinks of the Israeli children butchered on October 7, or those murdered in Hamas captivity, or the Palestinian children torn asunder by bombs, or dying in want of adequate nutrition or medical care -- what kind of holiday treats such horrors as a literal drop in the bucket? How can we think that way?

Here, too, the lesson is that such atrocities must not be downplayed, in particular downplayed on the grounds that some overarching "cause" behind them is just; here, too, the lesson also is that what is presented as "necessary" rarely actually is.

Next year without murdered children.

How To Support Anti-Hamas Protests in Gaza

You may have seen that protests have broken out in the Gaza Strip targeting Hamas.

This is a great thing, and the bravery of these protesters deserves nothing but applause. They should be viewed as of a piece with other brave protesters standing up to authoritarian practices in places like Turkey, Israel, and (for that matter) the United States.

But I've noticed some pro-Israel commenters highlighting these protests with a weird tone of empty triumphalism. They're excited about the protests because they're anti-Hamas (makes sense), but beyond expressing that giddiness there's just ... nothing else there in terms of what they, or we, or anyone outside of Gaza might do to back the protesters up.

Nothing on how we might actually support these protests (hint: I suspect they will not find dropping bombs on their heads helpful). And nothing on what, tangibly, we think these protesters should get as an alternative to Hamas rule (again, I doubt they're excited at the process of being evicted to make room for a MAGA seaside resort development).

But if you're going to claim the mantle of supporting these protests, those are the sorts of questions you need to have answers for. You don't get to say "gee, these protests are swell -- anyway, back to bombing!"  (I suppose there is a very slim chance the protesters want the war to continue as a means of ousting Hamas, but anyone making that claim on the protesters' behalf, absent them saying so themselves, bears a very high burden of persuasion). 

And you also don't get to just be coy about the end status of Gaza. I don't have a direct line to the protesters' ears, but I assume they want some form of genuine self-governance and independence. If one isn't willing to accede to that, you also don't get to claim the protests for your own purposes.

Again, the complete inability of Israel to articulate a plausible "day after" upon toppling Hamas is one reason this war is dragging on without end. As long as the war continues, Gaza is Schrodinger's territory -- neither reoccupied and annexed nor granted freedom and independence. Israel doesn't want to commit to either option, so it delays and delays and delays by extending and extending and extending the war.

The Lawless Pit Holding Mahmoud Kahlil

Over the past few days, I like many have been expressing outrage over the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Kahlil, a lawful permanent resident of the United States, due to his involvement in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. Federal agents raided his home and told him that his visa had been revoked; when informed he held a green card, they summarily informed that that had been revoked too.

I know nothing about Kahlil personally or his involvement in the protests (I've seen differing accounts of his role, but I haven't dug deeper because it honestly doesn't matter right now). And on a moral level, so much of what happened here sickens me. It sickens me that a permanent resident could be summarily snatched from his home and detained in clear retaliation for his expression. It sickens me that Jewish organizations putatively "fighting antisemitism" appeared to have played a direct role in his arrest. It sickens me that the ADL has fulsomely praised the operation, tacitly endorsing draconian anti-immigrant legislation that in a prior life it recognized as "the worst kind of legislation, discriminatory and abusive of American concepts and ideals" (I am heartened that other Jewish groups are speaking out against it). It sickens me to see Trump use the word "shalom" as a taunt. It sickens me to witness people trying to argue that this is ultimately Columbia's fault for not cracking down on the protests more aggressively, as if there is some straight line between potential underenforcment of the student codes of conduct and arbitrary arrest and deportation (news flash: university disciplinary issues -- even if you think they're mishandled -- should not be seen as deportable offenses!). 

And finally, it sickens me to see folks trying to finesse the issue by adopting a "well, let's see what the courts say before we rush to judgment" handwash. Partially, that's a problem because the entire seizure of Kahlil is a sterling example of the Queen of Hearts' justice: "sentence first, verdict later." If you've got Kahlil on a deportable offense, go through the legal process and prove it; don't start with the obviously speech-motivated arrest and then after the fact grope around for some figleaf of a legal justification. Everyone and their mother knows that whatever legal argument gets dredged up will be a pretext; the Trump administration is not remotely hiding the fact that it is targeting Kahlil for his speech.

But the bigger problem with waiting for the process of law to take its course is that I don't think people fully realize what a legal blackhole immigration law truly is.

I am not an immigration lawyer. But I do have some experience with immigration law, mostly during my judicial clerkship. My assessment of immigration law following that year can be summarized in two parts: (1) it was some of the most meaningful and impactful work I did, and (2) I never, ever wanted to be involved in it again. The explanation behind both halves of that equation is one and the same: immigration felt like a lawless pit. Our immigration law and doctrine is supersaturated with opportunities for governmental abuse that is largely immunized from any sort of meaningful review. To anyone with a passing familiarity with this system, it is outlandish to assert that our immigration system is too generous to migrants. Our immigration system is cruel, and arbitrary, and unfair, and in many respects essentially lawless. I was involved with it for a very limited amount of time, and to a very limited extent, and it still traumatized me in ways I continue to feel to this day.

So when I read Steve Vladeck's assessment of actual legal questions surrounding Mahmoud Kahlil's detention, I was not surprised, but I was alarmed. Vladeck does not argue that Kahlil's detention is lawful. But he does think it is not as clearly unlawful as is being asserted. The reason why, to be clear, is not that the Trump administration has some secret reasonable argument that's been occluded by the media firestorm. It's that our immigration law is so stacked with vague and abusive rules and dangerously deferential precedents that even misconduct as egregious as this might not be clearly forbidden. The lawless pit holding Mahmoud Kahlil is not something new. The Trump administration might be more brazen in exploiting these opportunities for abuse, but doctrinally speaking it had many tools lying around waiting to be picked up.

Indeed, one interesting thing about Kahlil's case is that it demonstrates a fascinating and underappreciated bivalence in the political salience of pro-Palestinian advocacy. On the one hand, it is very clear that Kahlil was targeted and made vulnerable by virtue of his pro-Palestinian speech. However, it is also clearly true that Kahlil's situation has mobilized and galvanized popular attention also by virtue of the fact that his case involves pro-Palestinian speech. Kahlil's case more clearly demonstrates both the distinct vulnerability but also the distinct power held by pro-Palestinian advocates I can remember in quite some time.

Again, the core problem of abuse in our immigration system -- the ability to arbitrarily and (functionally) lawlessly detain and deport immigrants for any reason or none at all -- is nothing new. I'm sure immigration activists could hand you hundreds or thousands of comparable stories of lawful residents snatched and detained for the most absurd or malicious of reasons. And while I have little doubt that most persons protesting on Kahlil's behalf would, if you gave them those stories, express genuine outrage over them as well, there's little doubt that the reason this abuse and this outrage captured public attention in the way that it did was because it involves an attempt to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, specifically.

This, to be clear, is not a bad thing. It is a good thing -- anything that encourages people to recognize the wild, lawless abuses latent in our immigration system generally and in the Trump administration's enforcement specifically is a good thing. But it is worth noting the more complex relationship with power that is being demonstrated here. Mahmoud Kahlil's story is about how the Trump administration feels empowered to destroy the lives of pro-Palestinian advocates by any means necessary; it also (sickeningly) is a story about how some Jewish organizations are cheering on the project. But it is also a story about how a connection to Israel/Palestine makes people care about things more often and more intensely than they often otherwise would. That is expression of power, and one that has implications that go well beyond this case.

Betar Expulsion as Trump Impeachment

The other day, I wrote about the new(-ish) far-right organization operating in Jewish spaces, Betar. Betar has distinguished itself for its open endorsement of hate and violence directed both at Palestinians (its response to reports of Israel killing children in Gaza was to say "Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!") as well as Jews it views as insufficiently fundamentalist in our Zionism, which in their case means virtually all of us.

Since them, they've gotten into a spat with the ADL after the latter added them to its database of extremism. And then a competing slate in the World Zionist Congress elections, Kol Israel, moved to have Betar expelled from the American Zionist Movement, citing both electoral blackmail tactics and Betar's "abhorrent" calls "for genocide and the murder of Palestinian babies." Betar, through its coalition partner ZOA (there's a team-up everyone could see coming), has warned of filing retaliatory complaints against Kol Israel.

On the one hand, it's always good to see groups stand up to racist thugs like Betar. On the other hand, this feels eerily reminiscent of how the political establishment treated the rise of Donald Trump. 

After years of ignoring, excusing, coddling, and enabling him, January 6 happened and for an instant it seemed like folks woke up and sanity might be restored. But the reality was it was already too late -- the supposedly unthinkable extremism that Donald Trump represented had become normalized through those years of excuse and neglect. Even in the most incredible moment -- the immediate wake of an outright insurrection against the United States -- the effort to rein him in fizzled out, and he would soon reestablish himself as at the center of a conservative movement that at one point would have viewed as the most outrageous slander the charge that it would harbor the likes of Donald Trump. They failed to stop him when they could, and found themselves isolated and alone when they (briefly) roused themselves to try.

That pattern seems apt here. Efforts to kick out ZOA from the Conference went nowhere. A similar initiative at the Boston JCRC, one where it was admitted ZOA "elevated White supremacism", only ended up yielding the eventual departure of the left-wing group the Workers Circle (that group also left the Conference). In Isarel, years of enabling and nurturing the neo-Kahanists have made them into the dominant force in Bibi's coalition -- a cadre that is not just ("just") contained to secondary parties like Jewish Power but is running riot through Likud itself. In the diaspora, too, Kahanism is being ever-more normalized as something other than a violent mob of racist thugs. Everyone who thought this was just posturing, or political jockeying, or unsavory alliance-making, but who was sure that if and when the time came they could pump the brakes has been proven to be a fool. There are no brakes. As wrote in my first post on Betar:

[L]eaders of social groups that simultaneously play footsie with the sort of extreme rhetoric while assuaging themselves that of course their actual politics are humanitarian and egalitarian, they're just revving up a crowd or exaggerating for effect, will quickly learn that much of their base isn't in on the bit. They're in it for the hate, and when someone offers that hate better, they won't listen to your attempts to rein things back in.

So as happy as I am to see groups try to stand up to Betar and ZOA, I am dubious about their likelihood of success. The most likely outcome for Betar and ZOA is exactly what they've enjoyed for years by the mainstream Jewish institutions: averting their eyes, kicking the can down the road, hoping the problem solves itself -- and with each passing moment, what once was unthinkable becomes undislodgeable.

Maybe eventually, someone will learn a lesson. But I doubt it will be this day.

People Hate Mourning Jews

It is hard for me to see a picture of Kfir Bibas and not see my baby.

The news that Kfir Bibas and his family were murdered by Hamas is, of course, wrenching. And for me, at least, it intersected with two of my greatest fears. Of course, there is the fear of harm befalling my son or another a loved one. But there is also the more specific worry, which I've discussed before, of having a loved one die "politically" -- that is, in a context where their death inevitably becomes part of a broader political dispute. It is both unavoidable and unspeakably cruel that Kfir Bibas' death are part of politics now -- the politics of Hamas' depravity, the politics of the horrors of the Israel/Gaza War, the politics of the future of Israel and Palestine where, God willing, nobody will have to experience what the Bibas family has endured.

And it is not just the Bibas family, but the entire Jewish world, who is mourning Kfir's death. And, because we are Jews, that means that some people -- sometimes other Jews -- will tell us we are mourning Kfir wrong.

One way we might be "wrong" is if we have the temerity to focus, for even a short spell, just on the Bibas family. Don't we know others have suffered too? Are you saying that Jewish lives matter more? How tribal, how cloistered, how gauche, to not use this moment to make a statement about the universal value of all human life.

But another way we might be "wrong" is if we do mourn Kfir Bibas by reference to the universal value of all human life -- and in particular, of both Israeli and Palestinian life.

The New Jewish Narrative's statement mourning the deaths of Oded Lifschitz and Ariel, Kfir, and Shiri Bibas spoke in this register. It described the Bibas family as "distinct symbols of the human cost of this conflict," and averred that their "tragic deaths are a painful reminder of the unspeakable loss that this war has wrought." They juxtaposed Ariel and Kfir alongside Hind Rajab and infants in Al-Nasr Hospital. They concluded by renewing their commitment to "a future where children on both sides of the fence grow up safe, free from the horrors of war."

I am not the Bibas family, and I do not purport to speak for them. I can only speak for my own grief, and for me this was a message that spoke to my grief. But I've seen other Jews who were aghast by this statement, who were furious that NJN would use such universalist tones rather than concentrate solely and exclusively on the Bibas children.

Their complaint styles itself as one objecting to "All Lives Mattering", but notice that this isn't quite right. The NJN did not, anywhere in its statement, reproach those who decided this week to speak specifically and distinctively about the Bibases. They did not say that there was something improper or tribal or provincial about having that focus, or that Jews have some unique obligation to transcend their Jewishness and speak solely in universalist tones. They just chose, as an expression of their own Jewish voice, that they would make this universal connection. For them, the way to mourn Jewishly is to draw out this more expansive desire that Jewish children and Palestinian children be free from the horrors of war. If that is "All Lives Mattering", then any project of political solidarity and fellowship is, and I can hardly imagine a more short-sighted and self-destructive commitment than that.

When choosing that framing is presented not as a choice at all but as an implacable obligation, there is a problem. But when choosing that framing is presented as an impermissible option that betrays Jewish peoplehood, there is a problem as well. That Jews (or anyone else) are not obligated to always frame their suffering in universal tones does not mean that Jews should be forbidden from electing, of our own volition, to draw out those connections. The latter move is just as stifling as the former.

When I see a picture of Kfir Bibas, I see my baby, whom I love and cherish and would be shattered if he came into any danger or peril. And I know that every baby has parents who feel the exact same way, who would be shattered in the same way -- and how could I wish such a horrible fate upon any parent? When I imagine how horrible it would be for me, I imagine how horrible it would be for them, and my instinct is to think on ways to avert the horrors for us. If, God forbid, something did happen to my family, I hope nobody would begrudge me for concentrating specifically on my family. But I also hope that if I chose to rededicate myself to trying to prevent similar tragedies from befalling other families and other communities not mine, that that choice would not be begrudged either.

They're The Same Picture

The JTA has an interesting profile on a "new" right-wing Zionist organization, Betar ("new" in quotes because it claims to be a resurrection of a much older Zionist outfit active before Israel's founding). Betar has distinguished itself by its "confrontational" approach -- meaning that it engages in acts of vandalism and violence, and openly calls for things like ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the expansion of Israel's borders well beyond the West Bank and Gaza and into modern Jordan, Egypt, and Syria.

Critical readers will spot a lot of commonalties between Betar and the more hardline elements of the pro-Palestinian movement. Most obviously, Betar uses almost identical rhetorical maximalism -- compare "We don't want two states, we want all of it" heard at pro-Palestinian protests with Betar's recent statement "We don’t want peace. We don’t want co-existence" -- and simply asks listeners to "choose a side". Pick your preferred ethnic cleanser and cleansee.

But there are some other commonalities. Perhaps the most important one to flag is that Betar hates "moderate" Jews as much if not more than it hates Palestinians, and its definition of "moderate" includes many Jews whom external observers would view as hardliners. Consider Betar's confrontational relationship with Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who has organized aggressive (to say the least) counterprotests aimed at pro-Palestinian activism on campus and had to deal with a Betar element crashing his event:

Despite their tiny size, the Betar contingent immediately worried Davidai. Most of them were young men, he recalled; several covered their faces; one had a flag of the Jewish Defense League, an extremist group that the United States has designated as a terrorist organization. “All they did was scream ‘F— Gaza,’ ‘Gaza is ours,’ ‘Here’s a beeper for you,’ ‘Deport them all,’ ‘ICE, ICE, ICE,’” he said. “Just violent rhetoric.”

Davidai is no stranger to provocation: Last fall, Columbia barred him from campus after months of his vocal criticisms of the university’s handling of antisemitism. Yet he views Betar as a serious obstacle to the movement he was trying to build, not least because they were adapting the same tactics as the pro-Palestinian side: expressing support for a terror group and hiding their faces as they did so.

“I think it’s hypocritical to spend 16 months blaming all protesters who are in this Free Palestine movement for not policing their own protesters, but then let hatred and violence take root in yours,” Davidai said. “I said, ‘Look, you’re doing exactly what we’re telling them not to do….’  At some point I asked them, ‘Go do your thing, but don’t be associated with us.’ They refused.”

After the rally, Betar and its followers began targeting him online. On Instagram he blasted them for only joining counter-protests, while never showing up to rallies for Israeli hostages. The rhetoric has only escalated from there, as Betar has mobilized its followers against him, in public and private. “You will be disrupted at all future speeches,” Torossian messaged Davidai on WhatsApp, according to communications shared with JTA. “You are a radical.”

Davidai has also urged his followers against supporting any further killings or mass expulsions in Gaza, a stark contrast to Betar’s own stated views. Yet in the comments, many of Davidai’s own followers have begun taking Betar’s side, accusing him of naively trying to make peace with the enemy.

There are some lessons to be learned here. One lesson is that there will always be someone more aggressive, confrontational, and hardline than you, and those actors will prove almost impossible to police. Moreover, they (in many ways correctly) view more "moderate" elements of their own community as their most important and salient competition and will ruthlessly try to attack and suppress those they deem "traitors" or "appeasers" in order to accumulate more power to themselves as the "authentic" voice of "true resistance" (this certainly characterizes how the BDS movement has been going after Standing Together, for instance). And finally, leaders of social groups that simultaneously play footsie with the sort of extreme rhetoric while assuaging themselves that of course their actual politics are humanitarian and egalitarian, they're just revving up a crowd or exaggerating for effect, will quickly learn that much of their base isn't in on the bit. They're in it for the hate, and when someone offers that hate better, they won't listen to your attempts to rein things back in.

There's also a very important lesson not to learn here. For some people, it is important to hear about groups like Betar so to disabuse any notions that calls for ethnic cleansing and political violence are only something "they" (the other side) does, whereas "our" movement is purely one of peace and coexistence. That illusion is dangerous and must be dispelled. But for others, the main function of groups like Betar is to give people a permission structure for their own counter-maximalism, because "this is what they're really like". If they're out there saying "Gaza is ours", what choice do we have but to fling them into the sea? If they're out there saying "Israel must be rooted out and destroyed", what choice do we have but to "transfer" them out of Gaza? There are a lot of people who just love the Betars or the Within Our Lifetimes of the world, and are constantly searching for examples of the genre. It's not because they agree with them. It's because their existence gives license to be as extreme and uncompromising and hateful as you want, because have you seen what they want?

The only way out of that trap is to recognize that it's the same picture. These organizations may have different preferred winners and losers, but they're fundamentally on the same side -- trying to convince you that the only choice there is to make is choosing your preferred extremism. And that is a false choice. As important as it is to name and shame these sorts of extremists, if you're main motivation in doing so is to validate your preconceived notion that this sort of extremism is the actual true authentic core of an entire people or culture, then you are not shaming anyone -- you are joining them.

The true enemy, as always, is anyone who rejects the equal dignity and democratic equality of Israelis and Palestinians alike. Anyone who rejects that there are two authentic nations whose homeland is in this territory. Anyone who rejects that there are two communities have legitimate claims to democratic self-determination. Anyone who rejects those premises is fundamentally on the same side, and the wrong side, no matter what flag they fly.

A Lawsuit is Not a Press Release

If I were a judge, I think I'd be a lot more sanctions-happy than most judges.

Bad legal arguments bother me. And more specifically, lawsuits that are filed not because there's an actual colorable legal claim, but as a form of press release -- a ritualized airing of grievance trying to drape itself in the seriousness of a lawsuit -- strike me as intolerably obnoxious and abusive. Many defamation suits fit this profile (who needs SLAPP when there's Rule 11?), but there are others. And too often I see people cheer these suits (at least when they fit the right ideological profile), and I hate to see it -- these lawsuits serve no purpose other than to allow gloryhounds to chest-thump their virtue while wasting time and resources, not just of the judiciary, but of the very social movement they claim to be advocating for.

One example is the "class action" lawsuit recently filed against two Bay Area Democratic Representatives claiming that their votes in favor of aid to Israel caused emotional distress to constituents who believe that Israel's conduct in the Gaza war constitutes a genocide. As a matter of law, the suit is patently frivolous -- it is obviously foreclosed by the Speech and Debate Clause, and a moment's reflection should make anyone with half a brain recognize that enabling disappointed constituents to sue their representatives for their congressional votes is a capital-B Bad Idea. The suit has no chance of succeeding and serves no purpose other than to generate headlines, and that is not the purpose of the judiciary. I don't know if the named plaintiffs are willing participants in the charade or are genuinely deluded into thinking there is valid legal claim here, but if it's the latter, then they're being exploited in a terribly grotesque fashion. Either way, I hope the lawyers who filed it are sanctioned.

But lest anyone get too smug, this is not a sin with any particular ideological proclivity. A federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania just dismissed a lawsuit filed against Haverford College alleging a hostile environment against Jews on campus. The dismissal was based on the fact that the pleadings were, in so many words, a sustained rant rather than an attempt to communicate a cohesive legal complaint.

At this stage, a court would typically review the relevant facts. I cannot cogently do so here due to the sprawling and disorganized character of Plaintiffs' Amended Complaint, which appears to detail every frustration and disagreement of Jewish students and faculty that has occurred at Haverford over the last year. It spills pages of ink on lengthy frolics about events on other college campuses and about ideological debates. Rather than isolating instances of harassment and logically relating them to the elements of a hostile environment claim, Plaintiffs set forth a running list of grievances that reads more as an opinion editorial than it does a legal complaint.

I am familiar with this sort of "legal" writing, and I am glad to see a judge call it for what it is. It's written by lawyers who forget that their job is to craft a legal complaint and instead view the courts as a suitably august forum for airing every point of grievance and riding every ideological hobbyhorse they've ever encountered. In some ways, the Haverford case is worse than that Bay Area one, because in the former the judge agreed that some of the allegations might have presented cognizable claims under Title VI but couldn't move forward on them because they were buried inside such an amalgam of irrelevant ranting that they failed to present an actionable complaint. The (potentially) valid grievances of the Jewish plaintiffs at Haverford were, in effect, sacrificed so that their lawyers could play soapbox orator. They treated the lawsuit as one big press release, and everybody -- their clients included -- is worse for it.

The lawyers suing Haverford aren't stupid, at least in the traditional sense (they attended Harvard and U. Chicago Law).* But they decided that this issue was too important for them to act as lawyers, and instead decided to act as demagogues. That's despicable. It's an abuse of the judicial process, it's unfair to Haverford College, and it disserves the Jewish community they nominally purport to defend.

* They literally just took down the link to the bios of all their attorneys,

What Will Trump 2.0 Mean for the Jews?

Short answer: It will be terrible.

But of course, that's the short answer for a lot of people.

Nonetheless, I know more about the Jewish situation, so here's my best assessment of what the near-future will look like for Jews. I'll start with Israel (since, contrary to what some would have you believe, Israel contains many Jews and its future is relevant to discussions about Jews), and then shift over to the American Jewish community.

With Israel, the chalk pick has always been that Trump will allow Israel to do absolutely whatever it wants to Palestinians with gleeful abandon. And, to be sure, there are a lot of good reasons to lay money on that bet. But I think the range of plausible, if not necessarily probable, outcomes are wider than many people realize.

To begin, I think there is a good chance that upon Trump's inauguration Israel does end its war in Gaza (or at least transitions to something that it can say with a half-straight face constitutes ending the war). Trump wants it, and getting it might (fairly or not) instantly solidify the significant inroads Trump made amongst Muslim voters this election.

The real question is whether Bibi will give it to him. The answer to that question, as to literally every decision Israel has made for the past several years, depends entirely on Bibi's craven assessment of his personal self-interest. To that point though, I genuinely believe that Bibi does not care about Gaza. I mean that in the most bloodless way possible -- he does not care if Gaza rebuilds or is razed to the ground, he obviously does not care about Palestinian life, he does not care about some significant security posture, and he certainly does not care about the hostages. If Bibi wanted to, he could declare victory right now. He's not "doing" anything in Gaza anymore (other than killing and immiserating thousands upon thousands of people, of course), there's nothing he's trying to accomplish other than whatever he thinks will save his political skin.

So the question is whether he thinks giving Trump something to crow about will be in his interest. Obviously, I think Bibi benefits in many ways from sucking up to Trump. And because Bibi's supporters (in Israel and abroad) are hacks, dupes, or sycophants, they'll happily agree to any declaration of victory (whereas if something similar occurred under a Biden or Harris administration, they'd be raging about how Israel was "forced" to "surrender" before "the job was completed").

Beyond that, though, things get murkier. Again, the most likely scenario is that Trump lets Israel run riot for four years. But unlike some I never thought this was guaranteed. Trump is a mercurial sort; past alliances are no guarantee of future loyalty. He has certainly noticed that Jews have continued to oppose him despite what he's done for, er, "our country". And he also noticed the spike in support from prominent Arab and Muslim politicians -- there's a reason why Arabs and Muslims, and not Jews, got a positive shoutout in his victory speech. More broadly, the isolationist, nativist, and flat-out antisemitic branch of the Trumpist movement has always been present and continues to grow in influence. J.D. Vance tried to disaggregate abandoning Ukraine from abandoning Israel, but the underlying logic from an isolationist "America First" standpoint is the same. And while obviously there is an ideological affinity between the right-wing authoritarians running Israel and the right-wing authoritarians taking power here, when it comes down to brass tacks doesn't Trump have just as much in common with the murderous religious fanatics in Hamas, or the incompetent kleptocrats of Fatah?

All of which is to say, while I'm skeptical that Trump would go flat-out "pro-Palestine", it is not absolutely inconceivable that if the going ever gets tough he'll leave Israel to twist. It goes without saying, of course, that he'd make this decision for all of the worst reasons -- a mix of antisemitism, isolationism, xenophobia, and good-old-fashioned pettiness. Still, right-wing Jews who voted for Trump because he's "good for Israel" may well be wise to look out for leopards.

So that's my Israel story. What about American Jews? Unsurprisingly, it's going to be if anything even grimmer.

First and foremost, we will continue to see the rise of antisemitic harassment and targeting by a far-right that correctly sees Trump as an avatar and legitimator of their ideology. Antisemitic conspiracies -- regarding "globalists", "cultural Marxists", Soros money, and more -- will gain even more traction in the center of American public life. Bomb threats, vandalism, assaults, and more will remain facts of life for Jews nationwide. Christian dominionism will continue to crest and will continue to isolate and marginalize Jews in public spaces, and the nominal "religious liberty" turn of the Supreme Court will not deign to protect us or even recognize us as real Jews. Orthodox Jews, who have increasingly de facto seceded from the broader American Jewish community, will greet these developments with apathy at best and enthusiasm at worst -- they will happily sacrifice religious equality in the public schools most Jews (but not them) attend if it means more public money funneling into their private religious academies. More and more blatant public antisemitism will be tolerated, mainstreamed, and incorporated into centers of power. Indeed, "far-right antisemitism" will increasingly become an anachronistic term, because it won't be "far" from anything -- it will be near-and-dear to the epicenter of the Republican Party.

In terms of the left, at one level I think we will for better or worse see a partial ebbing of the centrality of anti-Israel protest as attentions shift and people's priorities turn inward. That said, I think we will still see significant targeting of Jews in "left" spaces -- such as college campuses -- for the simple reason that they are convenient and available targets. A lot of people are very angry, and the actors and institutions they really want to hurt are largely immune and out of reach. Jews are considerably more proximate and considerably more vulnerable, and punching a Jew (metaphorically or occasionally literally) is a lot more satisfying than punching your pillow. Indeed, while various campus protests and movements relating to Israel have had, let's say, a range of approaches towards how they oriented towards their mainline Jewish peers (i.e., those who are by no means Israel über alles but still have significant care and concern for Israel's future and believe in its legitimacy as a Jewish state), I expect over the next several years the center of gravity will shift further away from effective and nuanced organizing that at least conceptually could include mainstream but Israel-critical Jews, and more towards inchoate, exclusionary lashing out. This will be bad, and it will further isolate and alienate young Jews especially at a time when they desperately need solidarity and allyship.

Finally, there is the question of how the Jewish community is positioned to respond to all of this. Here I daresay Jews have never been weaker in our ability to effectively mobilize and defend ourselves in the public square. And on that point my story is one that can largely be told around the current status of the ADL.

In recent years, I've taken to analogizing the ADL to Hobbes' Leviathan: It is the giant, overbearing sovereign that we must nonetheless offer allegiance to because the anarchic alternative is too terrifying. 

Agree or disagree with the normative prescription, we may be about to test my prediction about what the alternative looks like. Because right now, the hegemon is crumbling.

In 2017, the ADL was able to position itself as a central pillar in the resistance to Trumpist predations, a focal point of mobilizing the political agency and priorities of Jews rightly terrified about what Trumpism meant for us and for our friends and neighbors. It certainly cannot do so now, not the least because it suffers from a terminal case of Washington Post syndrome. Jonathan Greenblatt has spent quite a bit of time cozying up to Trump and his cronies, and the effusive welcome he gave to Trump's victory (that saccharine congratulatory message was the last email I got from the ADL before I unsubscribed from their listserv) shows he is ready and eager to comply in advance. Even if it were welcome in the progressive organizing spaces that are going to try to rally against Trump, it's far from clear the ADL is even interested in participating this time. I can't imagine it's going to see a repeat of the donation wave it received after 2016.

Some have chalked up the ADL's position to the increasingly untenable position of the Jewish "center" (in quotes because "center" for Jews is still left-of-center for Americans). Certainly, increased polarization (inside and outside the Jewish world) has placed pressure on legacy mainline institutions. But I think this story gives the ADL too much credit -- it could have pivoted to stick with the Jewish center-of-gravity, it just decided not to. Nothing -- not campus protests, not BDS activism, not "drop the ADL" chants -- forced the ADL to call Elon Musk a modern-day Henry Ford (as a compliment!), and nothing forced them to just be okay with Donald Trump treating Hitler as a fount of inspiration. Its missteps and mistakes are choices, not compulsions.

But here's the thing: if the ADL no longer can serve as the focal point for Jewish self-advocacy, none of its competitors -- from J Street to JFREJ, IfNotNow to Ameinu, JVP to DMFI -- are anywhere close to being able to replace it.

For starters, none of them are comparably resourced. None have the penetration and influence at all levels of American political life that the ADL does (even after everything I said above, if my kid experienced antisemitism at a Portland school, I still have no idea who I'd reach out to other than the local ADL branch). When it comes to the security threats faced by synagogues contemplating another Colleyville, nobody out there can replace what the ADL offers -- and I'm sorry, but if you think the "safety through solidarity" chants are right now an adequate substitute you are divorced from reality.

And even if we could get past that, no other group can come close to claiming to be a comprehensive or umbrella representative of the American Jewish community writ large. An increasingly common critique of the ADL was that it is not truly "representative" of the entirety of the Jewish community because its staunch pro-Israel attitudes necessarily didn't include the anti-Zionist Jewish minority. I'm dubious that any group can truly be uniformly representative; I do think that for many years the ADL was sufficiently tied to the median American Jewish position that it could credibly claim the label. But however far that criticism applies to the ADL (now or throughout history), it applies tenfold to its leftward alternatives, all of which occupy even more partisan, provincial, and particularistic lanes of American Jewish life. That's not a criticism -- it's fine to have a point of view -- it's only to say that these groups necessarily cannot replace the ADL's role as a sufficiently unified voice of the Jewish community writ large. The ADL may or may not at any given point failed to satisfy its mandate of being a broad tent, but there's no disputing that essentially every alternative out there is self-consciously narrower, not broader, in who it purports to speak for.

So what we are looking at over the next several years is an American Jewish community that simultaneously is under unprecedented threat and is wracked by unprecedented internal division. What I expect to see, then, is that a depressingly large proportion of Jewish political action will take the form of fratricidal squabbling and internal jockeying for position. If the suzerain is falling, the border lord upstarts are going to race to annex as much territory as possible.

In fact, not only will Jewish organizations largely end up concentrating on fighting internal political battles, I also expect to see a crabs-in-a-bucket effect where different Jewish factions actively try to sabotage the ability of others to garner external influence. I noticed this a bit in the whirlwind attempt to kneecap Josh Shapiro as a Vice Presidential contender -- an anti-campaign that in its initial manifestation was largely pushed forward by other Jews. This endeavor was nominally justified by  Shapiro's Israel positions, but I don't think that really is the full explanation (in part because Shapiro's record on Israel is, if anything, arguably to the left of Tim Walz's). Rather, the problem was that if Shapiro became the VP nominee, he would immediately be positioned as perhaps the highest-profile emblem of what “Jews” (and Jewish liberals) are, and what they believe, in the public imagination. In a world of identity capitalism, where significant power flows from who is seen as "representing" a group, that possibility threatened the influence of competing factions of Jewish progressives whose views don’t align with Shapiro’s in a way that Walz could not replicate even if Walz’s substantive positions on Israel were materially indistinguishable from Shapiro’s. In short, while a VP candidate with Josh Shapiro's views on Israel would be acceptable to left-wing Jews (and indeed, more or less, that's what we got), a Jewish VP candidate with Josh Shapiro's would be a disaster because those Jews (correctly) understood that Shapiro's elevation would solidify the power of a rival faction internal to the Jewish community.

I expect to see this dynamic to be replicated and proliferated across all areas of Jewish political action. One faction's attempt to document campus antisemitism will be met with another's counter-letter decrying the initiative. Adopting one group's definition of antisemitism will lead to others' furious denouncements and demands to select an alternative. Even as external threats grow ever grimmer, Jews will relentless concentrate on our own internal power plays -- trying to grab space for ourselves and prevent the growth of our rivals.

Now again, maybe you think that the status quo hegemony of the ADL-type organizations was sufficiently awful that this transition is necessary and salutary, notwithstanding the growing pains. I won't argue the point here. But necessary or no, during the anarchic interregnum it's hard to imagine Jews being able to leverage much in the way of political influence. We are weak externally, and we are weak internally, and that is a very scary position to be in no matter how you slice it.

UPDATE: This post was already so long, I forgot one more point that's probably pretty obvious -- the Democratic Party is going to have a nasty fight over Israel in the near future. To some extent it will be about policy, but I think much of it will rhetorically take the form of debates over a tactical blame-game regarding who is responsible for losing the 2024 election. On one side there will be those who say that blind, lockstep support for Bibi's war on Gaza cost Democrats key voting blocs and possibly the election, and that we need to purge the party of people who thought defending genocide was a higher priority than keeping the presidency. On the other side will be those who believe that radical performative edgelording about refusing to commit to opposing an existential threat to American democracy was recklessly irresponsible, and that anybody who indulged in such antics should be shot into the sun as de facto Trumpist collaborators. I don't know who will (or should) win that fight, but it's going to be terrible too.

And precisely because the fight will focus on electoral tactics and not policy, it also is going to primarily end up being about securing factional gains rather than trying to recraft an Israel/Palestine policy that is sensible, broad-based, and genuinely attentive to and protective of the valid interests, fears, and aspirations of Jews/Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians alike. So even to the extent Democrats very much could use a genuine rethinking of our approach to Israel/Palestine -- one that recognizes that we're not going to snuggle Bibi into accepting Palestinian equality without swinging over into treating Jews and Israeli as inhuman invaders who need to be wiped off the map -- I think such efforts will be swamped by factional knife-fighting within the party.

"... But They're Doing Great" at UW

The University of Washington has just released a joint task force report on antisemitism and Islamophobia on its campus. I haven't read it cover-to-cover, but I have looked it over, and it seems to be an excellent and thoughtful report on an obviously touchy subject, for which the authors deserve kudos.*

There's a lot of interesting data to sift through, but there was one chart in particular that stood out to me, and not in a good way.

For those who can't read the chart, it asks a set of affected campus constituencies (e.g., Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims) how they assess the campus climate for themselves and all the other groups. The results were basically that each group said "things are awful for us and ours, but they're doing great!" So, for instance, when Israelis were asked this question, they overwhelmingly reported a hostile campus climate for Israelis and Jews, but generally reported that the campus was comfortable for Arabs, MENA people, Muslims, and Palestinians. Palestinian respondents reported the opposite -- they thought the campus climate was swell for Israelis and Jews, and terrible for Arabs, MENA people, Muslims and Palestinians.

I'll leave aside the first half of the equation ("things are awful for us") for now, though it's bad enough. One could I guess try to contest it if one wanted to, but I see little reason to doubt that the relevant communities are accurately reporting their own experiences in what has almost universally been characterized as a very rough year. But for the latter half of the finding ("... they're doing great") the polarization in responses is especially disturbing. 

The best case explanation I can think of is a failure of empathic imagination. Over many years, I've observed variations of this phenomenon where one's own lived experience of hurt and marginalization is paired with a decided conviction that everybody else is getting life fed to them on a silver platter. This certainly is part of my story around "Us Too-ism" -- everybody else supposedly can get a hostile speaker canceled at the first sign of discomfort, so why not us too? -- but it long predates it. Eight years ago I was writing about circumstances at Oberlin where both Jewish and Black students contrasted tepid community responses to discrimination targeting them with what they saw as "hypervigilant" reactions enjoyed by the other. That post in turn referenced a post almost ten years before that about the "pane of glass" which is obvious to someone standing in one position and invisible to their neighbor looking from a different vantage. We're all able to see the pane of glass standing as an obstacle in front of us, while blind to the pane of glass similarly blocking our neighbor.

And so, perhaps, at UW. The Jewish and Israeli students feel lonely and isolated. They look over at the encampments and the teach-ins and the flag-wavings and think "how lucky they have it -- clearly, the community has their backs when they cry out." The Muslim and Arab and Palestinians students, meanwhile, feel hyperscrutinized and overpoliced. They observe the congressional hearings and the discipline meted out to protesters and think "how lucky they have it -- look how responsive the powers-that-be are to them when they claim injury!" Both groups feel as if they're walking on eggshells, both feel that the tremendous stress and strain they are under is being ignored. In concept, this shared vulnerability could be a vector for solidarity and compassion -- these feelings are commonalities, not distinctions. But the problem is this shared vulnerability isn't perceived as shared at all, but rather unique, and that further entrenches the feeling of loneliness.

And this, as I said, is what I'd consider the best case scenario. Another explanation for the polarized responses is that we're seeing, not a failure of imagination, but a motivated refusal to acknowledge the vulnerability of the "other side", in favor of a constructed image where their power can be contrasted with our weakness. I would not be the first to observe that there is a strand of contemporary politics that aggressively valorizes weakness and vulnerability as its own justification for political solidarity. Though sometimes identified with the identity politics left, there's actually no intrinsic political cadence to this -- the right makes this move all the time. Who can forget when Breitbart, playing off investigations into "Big Oil" or "Big Pharma", created an entire subsection of his website dedicated to resisting the overawing power of "Big Peace"(!)? And of course, the contemporary right contains no shortage of claims that it stands against the elites, the powerful, the globalist cabal -- all attempts to claim the mantle of weakness against the evils of strength.

The true cynic would point to this politics to explain why each group is so emphatic about its own vulnerability -- it wants to stay on the right side of the empathy line. As I said, I don't think one needs to go that far -- I think it is more than likely that each group is accurately recounting its own experiences about itself. The point is, though, that where vulnerability (or at least the perception thereof) is a political resource, it can become a strategic imperative to deny it to one's competitors. Acknowledging that a given community -- Jews and Israelis, or Palestinians and Muslims -- are in a vulnerable state means acknowledging them as valid subjects of empathic concern and legitimating some flow of solidaristic political resources in that direction. Denying that acknowledgment can obstruct that flow, and better maintain an asymmetry in who is worthy of care and concern. Even in circumstances where antagonism isn't that overt, where resources of care and concern are assumed to be scarce, there still will be the temptation to withhold that acknowledgment and try to direct the flow to oneself.

The reason why this is worse that the first explanation is that it isn't something that can be resolved just by expanded imaginative capacities. Again, it speaks to a motivated refusal to recognize the aforementioned joint vulnerability. It's not just ignorance, there are reasons behind it. The work of overcoming this refusal to extend empathy means, in a very real sense, insisting on sharing a political resource that feels very much in short supply with a group that may in important respects feel like a rival. That is not an easy task, least of all in present climates.

Which is the true explanation? To be honest, I suspect there's a little of column A and a little of column B. That does give me a little hope, because I still believe -- justifiably or not -- that there are enough people who won't run away from their expanded empathic imagination such that, once they're peeled away from their more fundamentalist fellows, a new core of solidarity can emerge. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. But I don't see much of an alternative.

* I also read a critique of the report issued by a small group of Jewish UW stakeholders (I actually read the critique before the original document). I'm not a member of the UW community myself, and so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. But to be perfectly honest I found the critique to be churlish, even petty, clearly partisan in its motivation, and ultimately not at all compelling. 

The overall theme of the critique was a contention that the report was intentionally suppressive of anti-Zionist/pro-Palestinian Jewish viewpoints and so generated skewed conclusions. That contention was extremely weakly supported -- it seemed to me that the critics came in spoiling for a fight and made a series of tendentious or stretched inferences to justify picking one. For example, a single passing mention of the IHRA antisemitism definition (which the report said it "took into consideration along with other definitions", and then never mentioned again) inspired a veritable temper tantrum by the critics and a demand that the university instead adopt the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism as its preferred definition (ironic, since JDA at its inception insisted that it should not be used as a definition of antisemitism in official proceedings!). It also lambastes the report for "attacks" on DEI work, but there is no such attack -- the report actually recommends incorporating antisemitism education and training into existing DEI structures. One can contest the mechanisms through which that incorporation would occur, but this is not an "attack" in any sense -- so where on earth is this defensiveness coming from other than preloaded beliefs that reports such as this are presumptively part of an anti-DEI crusade?

Perhaps the most serious allegation contained in the critique is its speculation that the report authors skewed their focus groups toward pro-Israel identifying students. This is a very grave charge, but the critics give absolutely no concrete evidence to support it. Literally their only basis for making this claim was that "one focus group was held at UW Hillel (an organization with standards of partnership that explicitly disallow affiliation with Jews critical of the state of Israel)." That and that alone was sufficient for the critics to assert with confidence that "We know" (we know!) "that whatever steps were taken were not sufficient" to ensure proper representational diversity.

This is absurd on a multitude of levels. First, the critic's position apparently is that an attempt to connect with the UW Jewish community should have a blanket policy of refusal to work with Hillel (again, their complaint is that one focus group was held there), which is an absolutely wild claim to make and utterly incompatible with actually trying to get a deep cross-section of the UW Jewish community. Second, it's simply false to say Hillel's partnership standards "explicitly disallow affiliation with Jews critical of the state of Israel." The partnership standards aren't directed at students qua students to begin with, and they are a fair flight more specific than targeting those who are merely "critical of the state of Israel" -- an especially important distinction because the UW report is actually very good about recognizing the heterogeneity of Jewish views on Israel and expressly disaggregating those who are "critical of Israel" from those who are outright "anti-Israel" (in the sense of wanting Israel to cease its existence). At most, only the latter would find Hillel an exclusionary space, but the numbers suggest that this cadre is a small (though not non-existent) minority amongst Jewish students. 

Finally, and most damningly, the report clearly did speak to and incorporate the views of the anti-Israel minority. How do we know? Because the report (to its credit!) specifically delved into and devoted an entire section to experiences of marginalization by anti-Zionist Jews -- something one does not see every time one of these reports emerges but is absolutely appropriate given the subject matter. The report even says it included comments from "self-identified anti Zionist/anti-Israel Jews in proportion to their representation in the random sample of quotes provided to the task force co-chairs (18%)" -- that 18% figure is either equal to or if anything higher than (the report was fuzzy on this) the proportion of anti-Israel Jews in the UW Jewish community. Despite all of this effort, none of it is given any mention whatsoever in the critics' document. Perhaps they missed it. But it I think decisively belies the unsupported assertion that the report deliberately ignored the diversity of Jewish views on Israel at UW.

Ultimately, as someone who periodically does consulting work with university leaders on issues of antisemitism, I found this critique tremendously disheartening and frustrating. The report seemed unusually attentive to the diversity of views amongst Jews on matters relating to Israel, and seemed like a good faith attempt to accurately communicate the sentiments of the Jewish community as a whole. That even an effort like this was met with a response like that -- the near-reflexive at this point fuming about Zionist hegemony and suppression of dissident voices etc. etc. is, to be honest, a substantial deterrent in continuing that work forward. There's just no pleasing some people.