Thank you all again for your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor (if anyone caught my typo last week). You still have a few days left to get 36% (double chai and my age) off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. That’s the price of two overpriced shawarmas in Tel Aviv. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at The Middle Ground in 5787. Also, stay tuned later this week for a full sit-down with October 7 hero and Knesset candidate Maj. Gen. (res.) Noam Tibon.

Wishing all those fasting an easy fast and a Gmar Chatima Tova.

— Eli

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It feels like a different Israel. It was a time when no one could imagine Ben Gvir as a minister, or even a member of Knesset. It was January 4, 2017. On that day, a military court at the Kirya — the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv — convicted IDF soldier Elor Azaria of manslaughter. A few hundred meters away, a crowd chanted that the Chief of Staff of the IDF Gadi Eisenkot should be assassinated.

The words were “Gadi, be careful, Rabin is looking for a friend.” Oren Hazan, then a Likud MK, was out there with them.

“Gadi, be careful, Rabin is looking for a friend” - January 4, 2017

Back then he was considered one of the most extremist MKs in the Knesset. Today he would be just another Netanyahu-coalition lawmaker. The day before, Eisenkot had said that an eighteen-year-old in the IDF is not everyone’s child. He is a soldier, sent to do what the state sends him to do. That was the provocation.

Eisenkot now leads the polls against Netanyahu. In August, Netanyahu-appointed Shin Bet Chief David Zini turned down his party’s request for a Shin Bet detail, telling the Central Elections Committee the agency held no intelligence that anyone intended to harm him. The advisory committee recommended protection anyway.

The man who was threatened with Rabin’s fate and has been physically confronted during this campaign continues to campaign with private unarmed security guards his own party pays for.

On Saturday, two days before Yom Kippur, Isaac Herzog announced he was expunging Azaria’s record, citing the time that has passed, the sentence served, the statute of limitations, and a man’s wish to work.

The army had told him not to.

The Military Advocate General’s office, the Personnel Directorate and the chief of staff all reviewed Katz’s request and came back the same way. Ten years on, Azaria has never expressed regret or taken responsibility. Rivlin refused an earlier version of the same request, arguing it would damage the resilience of the army and the state.

No one is disputing what Azaria did. Palestinian Abdel Fattah al-Sharif stabbed a soldier and was then shot. That is when Azaria entered the scene, about eleven minutes afterward, when al-Sharif lay on the ground with six bullets in him, and Azaria put one more in his head. The court concluded that Elor Azaria had not fired out of any sense of danger. He fired because he had decided the man deserved to die.

Katz says the expungement tells soldiers and their families that we do not abandon our own and do not leave anyone behind. Interesting…

On August 29, 2024, the security cabinet voted to hold the Philadelphi corridor rather than agree to a hostage deal. You’ll remember Netanyahu said that corridor was of utmost importance. Then-defense minister Yoav Gallant was the only minister who voted against. Two days later, the army recovered six bodies from a tunnel under Rafah. Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Eden Yerushalmi. Carmel Gat. Alexander Lobanov. Almog Sarusi. Ori Danino. Forensic investigations found that they had been shot at close range within 48 to 72 hours of the troops reaching them. Three of them, Goldberg-Polin, Yerushalmi and Gat, were on the humanitarian list under the framework Israel had agreed to that July.

They were left behind.

Israel hasn’t left the corridor since, and there’s been no indication it plans to.

Now, President Herzog called his decision one made in the spirit of these days, alluding to the High Holidays, when Jews traditionally ask God for repentance. The Hebrew word is teshuvah. Teshuvah has a sequence; I remember learning it in elementary school at Vancouver Hebrew Academy. You recognize what you did, you regret it, you say it out loud, you undertake not to do it again. The army’s objection, after a decade, is that Azaria has never done the first three. It is not Herzog’s job to do; it is Azaria’s, and he has refused to. Elor Azaria broke the IDF rules in the IDF uniform, and the army is still saying so this week.

But the case wasn’t just about Azaria. It was about who ultimately decides, it was about where the IDF was headed and what it meant to be an IDF soldier. Azaria made the call that this man deserved to die, and the verdict was that call was not his to make. On Saturday the state reversed itself, over its own objection, with the IDF opposed, five weeks before an election.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, who protested for Azaria after his arrest, called Saturday’s announcement moving and joyful, asked the chief of staff to put him back in uniform, and told Herzog to pardon the prime minister next.

Days after the verdict against Azaria back in 2017, Israelis were called to Rabin Square for a rally against incitement, after the threats against Eisenkot and the judges. “We must all go out tonight,” Herzog wrote beforehand, urging people to attend, “to issue a clear and unequivocal call to stop the madness and fervor, and restore sanity and tolerance to this country.” He was the opposition leader then, and now he's the one who cleared his record. That, more than anything, is a powerful indication of where we are.

Shana Tova! Thank you for all of your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor (you’ll see no AI slop on this Substack). To celebrate the new year, I’d like to offer 36% off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel for the price of two shawarmas. I’m excited to see what we can do at the Middle Ground in 5787.

— Eli

At a dinner with friends on Monday night, over a plate of pasta at Taverna Romana in Tel Aviv, I was expecting to get a break from talking about elections, the conflict with the Palestinians, and the future of our country.

I was meeting two friends, both American. One of them—I’ll call him David—is being forced to leave Israel.

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It was 25 minutes of applause, something that even prime Netanyahu couldn’t achieve when addressing Republican members of Congress. That was the ovation filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor received after winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday. Back in Israel, ministers and politicians on both sides issued sharp condemnations. Avigdor Liberman called them two Israel-haters selling out their country for a moment of glory at antisemitic festivals.

I have some thoughts. The first thing that came to mind was Nadav Lapid (no relation to Yair), who I posted about a few months back. Nadav Lapid is a leftist Israeli filmmaker; he made a film about Ahed Tamimi. Lapid was removed from the jury of a festival in Marseille for being Israeli.

Venice gave two Israelis a prize, so maybe the difference isn’t nationality; it was something else. It was that Lapid’s film didn’t serve the purpose leftist Israeli filmmakers are supposed to. His was a surrealist, wartime satirical drama entitled Yes! It was about a struggling jazz musician named Y. and his dancer wife, Yasmin, who abandon their artistic principles and sell out to the nation’s elite following the October 7 attacks by composing an ultra-nationalist anthem. It dealt with Israel’s right-wing nationalist trends in a satirical way, but it didn’t fully bolster the case of Israel’s detractors. There was no genocide verdict or confirmation of ethnic cleansing.

Nadav Lapid was dropped, and Yuval Abraham won the award. Yuval offered what the people wanted. His film, NAZA, offers real testimony from over two dozen Israelis about how the IDF changed its collateral damage protocol following October 7. I should say I haven’t seen it. It premiered in Venice on Thursday and opens in New York next month. When an Israeli is confessing to the crimes they are wanted for, nationality is not a problem. Notice where this appetite for a confession stops. No festival is touring testimonies from October 7. You’ll remember that TIFF pulled a film about a heroic October 7 rescue story, and only reinstated it after the outrage.

The unpleasant fact for supporters of Israel is that the film deals with a real issue: at the start of the war, the IDF increased the limit on the number of civilians it would allow to be killed before carrying out a strike, and decisions were made quickly. The officers describe a system that had civilian deaths already factored into its calculations.

But the film also makes more serious allegations. It accuses Israel of carrying out systematic home destruction to prevent the return of Palestinian residents, without weighing that Hamas spent years booby-trapping houses and building the tunnel network beneath them, which often made destroying them unavoidable. It also accuses Israel of deliberately targeting journalists and medics, another claim that is not established.

The arithmetic also has issues. Around 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The death toll, which includes Hamas fighters, is roughly 3 percent of the population. Those two numbers don’t sit together without the evacuation warnings. An army trying to kill the people inside those buildings would have brought them down on them.

On top of the allegations in the film, the Holocaust parallel the filmmakers themselves draw is just as disturbing. Several pro-Israel advocates have spoken about the letters NAZA, but that is a weak argument when there is a substantial one available.

Jonathan Glazer is the executive producer, and the filmmakers cite Glazer’s line about his award-winning film The Zone of Interest: “victims out of sight but never out of mind,” as shaping how they approached Israelis who did the killing. Zone of Interest was Glazer’s film that told the story of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and life next to the death camp. Their own festival statement asks how one group of people allows the total dehumanization of another, and invokes their grandparents’ generation.

That Holocaust comparison always has an audience. The ultimate crime committed against Jews, reversed and handed back. Israelis who object are usually told the parallel is being forced on them by their enemies. In this case, two Israeli Jews built it in Israel, and the audience ate it up.

And there are also legitimate questions about the issue of collateral damage and why such a film is unique to Israel. Before a targeted strike, it is common practice for militaries to estimate how many civilians are likely to die. NATO countries call it a collateral damage estimate, or CDE, and every professional Western army does it. It’s important to be clear that the number attached to it isn’t permission to kill that number of people. It’s the ceiling on who can approve the strike. If under 20 civilians are at risk, a lower-level commander can sign off. When it’s greater than 20, it goes up the chain of command. The commander still has to weigh the expected harm against the target’s military value and take feasible steps to reduce it.

One of the most quoted moments in the film has an IDF soldier describing how Israel mapped Gaza before the war and knew who lived in which apartment. The film treats that as proof of intent. What’s the alternative? Should the IDF not map the area, not bother knowing who lives where, and bomb without checking who is inside? The knowledge is the precaution, and it’s being used as the charge.

This threshold, which was increased in response to October 7, was also lowered during the war. According to a New York Times investigation published in December 2024, the army halved it to 10 on November 5, 2023, and required special permission above that. By late January, permission was needed for nearly all such strikes. The film, not surprisingly, leaves that out. But it doesn’t restore the prewar standard either, when most strikes were approved only if no civilians were expected to die.

Two lines from the film have been widely quoted since the premiere. A soldier says the work was fun. Another says these are not human beings, they are NAZA. They are 2 men out of 24, and 24 out of an army of hundreds of thousands. The film doesn’t establish that they speak for anyone but themselves. It still lands. We tell the world our army is different, the most moral in the world, and that is not a claim you can make on paper.

This saga is an important reminder of a point I often make and something I realized after spending the year after October 7 between Israel and North America. From both places, I saw the two different publics and the alternate realities they’ve lived in since that day. For Israelis, almost three years of October 7 footage, funerals, hostage videos, and almost nothing of Gaza that wasn’t Hamas. Outside Israel, October 7 was a week, and then almost nonstop footage from Gaza.

Both audiences responded rationally to what they were shown, and both missed out on half. To me, this helps explain the reaction to the film, both the international praise and the Israeli condemnation.

Israelis see it as a betrayal because, to them, what happened in Gaza was a justified war on Hamas resulting from October 7, whereas for critics in the international community, October 7 was just an excuse Israel used to kill Palestinians.

There are many things this Netanyahu government has done that I cannot defend, but this film is different. There is a defense available here, and Israel’s supporters aren’t making it. Nothing is unique about NAZA, about CDE, or about proportionality, and a NATO member reacting to a similar threat likely would have behaved similarly.

Of course, Liberman didn’t dispute this, nor did he cite a threshold, a strike, a number, or explain himself. He called them a small and wretched minority looking for work as moral emissaries at antisemitic festivals. Culture Minister Miki Zohar said he would act immediately to revoke the citizenship of “these despicable creators” for treason, citing their “burning self-hatred.” Bennett, to his credit, at least made an argument: human shields, the warnings before strikes, the house-to-house fighting that cost Israeli soldiers their lives, the polio vaccination campaign. He asks what anyone else would do, and says a terrible war is not genocide. But he called the film a blood libel rather than answering what is in it, and he didn’t mention a threshold either. Most of the online response spent its energy on the fact that NAZA sounds like a mashup of Nazi and Gaza. I guess we’re in election season and anything goes. But this was a film built entirely on Israeli testimony, and the Israeli response was to litigate the Israelis who made it.

And yet that does not absolve those in Venice who applauded for 25 minutes without knowing what a CDE is. And nobody in Israel explained it, and that is our problem.

We have stopped answering criticism, we just deny it. We refuse to engage the merits of the case. If you call us out, you must hate us. If you’re one of us and call us out, you must hate yourself, like Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

We live in interesting times. Things that once belonged to the realm of science fiction are here. And no, I’m not talking about AI and self-driving cars; I’m talking about the Israeli government and the BDS movement in agreement. Both think that boycotting wine from Psagot in the West Bank is the same as boycotting Tel Aviv. One side calls that antisemitism and the other calls it a good start, but not nearly enough.

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, who announced a ban on settlement goods in the Commons on Tuesday, thinks they’re both wrong. That makes him a Zionist, whether or not he’ll use the word to describe himself, and both sides are going to have to deal with it.

Miliband is Jewish and a member of the Labour Party. I remember when he was the next big thing in British politics, before he disappointed greatly in the 2015 general election.

Ed’s older brother, David, also served as foreign secretary. I always preferred how David spoke about Israel. When the Gaza war started in December 2008, David, then foreign secretary, opened his statement with the rockets being fired at Israel. Two years later, in his first conference speech as Labour leader, Ed called for lifting the Gaza blockade without mentioning the rockets at all.

Ed seemed to be pandering to the left flank of Labour, the same left that made Jeremy Corbyn leader after Ed’s resignation as party leader. Under Corbyn, antisemitism in Labour got so bad that the UK's equality watchdog found the party had broken the law. During a 2013 Q&A with a British Jewish audience, Ed Miliband was asked if he was a Zionist. “Yes,” he answered, before adding that it “doesn’t mean I support everything Israel’s government does.”

Miliband’s office walked back the statement the next day, and he’s avoided the Z-word since.

The Zionist label has been hijacked, made toxic, used by critics of Israel in an attempt to paint the entire country as ethno-supremacist colonizers.

So Miliband’s announcement on settlements this past week was a pleasant surprise. It wasn’t pandering, and it didn’t avoid the justice and legitimacy of the Jewish state’s existence.

Of course, the loudest critics didn’t bother to watch Miliband’s full speech in the House of Commons. It is easier to post a picture of him eating a bacon sandwich, as pro-Israel advocate Eylon Levy did. Perhaps Levy has forgotten that David Ben-Gurion admitted to eating a ham sandwich, and Theodor Herzl had a Christmas tree.

Miliband spent the first part of his speech on the settlement-product ban thanking Israel for sheltering his grandmother after the Nazis murdered his grandfather and sixty other relatives. He declared that anyone who denies Israel’s right to exist as the Jewish homeland is wrong and highlighted their eliminationist motivations. He sanctioned Hezbollah’s financing arm, reimposed sanctions on Iran, rejected BDS, and left trade with Israel inside the Green Line untouched.

The Israeli government naturally rejected Miliband’s move out of hand. Israel’s case depends on the Smotrich-led West Bank policy being an integral part of Zionism. When Smotrich approved E1, he called it “Zionism at its best – building, settling and strengthening our sovereignty in the Land of Israel.” Any measure taken against this policy is one directed against Zionism and the Jewish people. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee did the same thing when he accused Britain of Jew-hatred days before the ban, and then called the ban itself discrimination against Jews.

Interestingly, the BDS movement also depends on this definition of Zionism; if the Smotrich-led West Bank policy is Zionism, then Zionism is an illegitimate settler-colonial movement that must be defeated as a whole.

Miliband is making things harder for both the Israeli government and the BDS movement. He is saying that there is a difference between Israel within the Green Line and the settlements on the other side; he is accepting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Miliband’s speech rejects their definition and that is exactly why neither can afford to let him count as a Zionist. Only a few fringe radicals have noticed Miliband’s Zionist bona fides (Ali Abunimah at Electronic Intifada has already attacked the foreign secretary’s speech as fake support for Palestine).

Israel’s response showed how much the government will give up to defend its narrow definition of Zionism and made clear we are in the heart of election season. Within hours, it announced it would close the British consulate in Jerusalem and expel the British Support Team in Ramallah, the UK’s contingent in the American-led mission that has trained Palestinian security forces since 2005. The IDF has long called security coordination with the PA one of the few things keeping the West Bank from collapse. Britain wasn’t acting alone: eleven other countries, including France and Canada, announced restrictions on settlement trade the same day, but Israel aimed its retaliation at London.

Surprisingly, Huckabee’s boss in Washington hasn’t signed on to the Israeli government’s meltdown. Asked about the ban, Trump said he had just seen it and would speak to Israel to find out their thinking. A Western official says Trump was told about it in advance and didn’t ask Britain to wait. Marco Rubio declined to condemn it. If the ban is discrimination against Jews, the president Netanyahu calls Israel’s greatest friend has so far declined to say so.

Many Israelis make Miliband’s argument. E1 and the rapid settlement expansion in the West Bank are designed to make a Palestinian state impossible (Smotrich, who directs much of Israel’s West Bank policy, has said as much). Without a path to two states, Israel has no route to lasting security. Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Olmert both made that argument. When Miliband said Palestinians were being ethnically cleansed from parts of the West Bank, he quoted Olmert and Ephraim Sneh, a retired IDF general.

We can debate the effectiveness of Britain’s new approach as a matter of policy. I have serious questions as to whether such sanctions will actually push Israel toward two states.

I have critiques about the design of the British ban. It covers every settlement, so Modi’in Illit, a Haredi city just over the Green Line that the Geneva Initiative and Olmert’s 2008 map both left inside Israel, lands in the same category as Avigayil, an outpost in the South Hebron Hills. Even Mahmoud Abbas’s 2008 counteroffer left Modi’in Illit inside Israel. Just as the Israeli government and BDS erase the distinction between Israel and the West Bank, the settler movement deliberately erases the distinction between these major settlements along the border and outposts deep in the territories. A policy built on rejecting the settlers’ definition of Zionism shouldn’t adopt their map. The timing didn’t help either: Seven weeks before an election, Britain handed Netanyahu a foreign distraction on the day Haaretz reported that the prime minister had been warned before October 7, a report his office denies.

The timing also pushes Israel’s opposition leaders to play by Netanyahu’s rules and condemn the ban, as Yair Lapid did on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the phrasing could have been sharper. Instead of hammering repeated mentions of a two-state solution when support among the Israeli public is at an all-time low, the framing could have focused on the dangers of West Bank annexation and what that means for Israel. That is an argument that would resonate more with the Israeli public, and it would deflate the Netanyahu government’s argument that foreign governments are trying to reward the Palestinians for October 7 by granting them a state.

A British official said this week that the scope of the sanctions could depend on how the next Israeli government behaves. Whoever forms a coalition after October 27 will be dealing with a foreign secretary who believes in Israel and thinks the settlements are destroying it, which is what I think too. Keeping a two-state window open is essential, even if a negotiated solution is not immediately in the offing. Ultimately Israel will need to choose between two of three things: its Jewish character, its democracy, and its control of all the land. It needs to give up on one.

Shana Tova! Thank you for all of your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor. To celebrate the new year, I’d like to offer 36% off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at The Middle Ground in 5787.

— Eli

The lists are closed, so we know exactly who’s running and who’s on each list. I went through the latest 9 polls and tried to build a government out of it.

Netanyahu gets to 56 at an absolute stretch and has nowhere to find the last five. Eisenkot has a path, but it runs through Ra’am or through one of the small right-wing parties missing the 3.25% threshold.

Fourteen minutes, party by party. Build your own scenarios here: https://kowaz.com/coalitionbuilder/

Shana Tova! Thank you for all of your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor (you’ll see no AI slop on this Substack). To celebrate the new year, I’d like to offer 36% off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at the Middle Ground in 5787.

— Eli

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On Wednesday I was sitting at one of my favorite hummus spots, Abu Hasan in Jaffa. I had just taken my dog for a vaccine, and we sat down so I could eat a quick mana.

Abu Hasan is an institution. Ali Karawan started selling hummus from a cart in Jaffa in the 1950s, and his family has run the place on Dolphin Street since the 1970s. We used to live around the corner, and I’ve been there dozens of times. I’ve always seen it as a symbol of coexistence in Jaffa: an Arab family serving hummus to a mostly Jewish crowd, everyone crammed together at the same tables.

The hummus is delicious, though I know the question of favorite humusiot is a contentious topic in Israel. It has the perfect balance of tahini and lemon. I usually go for half masabha and half ful, which is fava beans. I literally eat it like soup sometimes. It’s that good.

I was in Abu Hasan, minding my own business, mowing down my mana, when I heard him.

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In 2012, I went to Ramallah with a friend. I was nervous. I wore a shirt that said Canada and told myself I’d forget my Hebrew and only speak English. He had a friend there from Hebrew University. For years it had felt like somewhere miles away, but as we boarded the bus in East Jerusalem adjacent to the Old City, I realized how close it was.

Overall, we had a great time, 10 shekels for a shawarma in a lafa for a college student was more than I could ask for, and the knafe was delicious. The shawarma keeper asked me where I was from; I said Canada! He told me he had family in Montreal; I wasn’t surprised. The people were also very nice, and of course they thought I was Canadian. Ramallah is the PA jewel in the West Bank, one of the least radical Palestinian towns. And still I saw it all: tributes to martyrs, portraits of Arafat everywhere, the rare one of Abu Mazen, and multiple times at magazine and book shops, copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic. Now I know about the Mufti’s relationship with Hitler, and how prevalent Nazi propaganda is in the Arab world, but I was still surprised.

Which is why what Mohammed Dajani did two years later was incredible. He was the founding director of the American Studies Institute at Al-Quds University. In 2014, he took 30 students to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This was the first organized visit of its kind and, moreover, a joint program with Ben-Gurion University and Friedrich Schiller University. Two Jewish survivors accompanied them. Make no mistake, Dajani was no Zionist, but he simply thought that Palestinians needed to understand the role the Holocaust plays in Israeli consciousness. I believe these were the kind of steps needed to bring Palestinians closer to understanding Israelis.

Dajani was denounced as a traitor and a Zionist collaborator. He was expelled from the faculty union. He resigned from his post in May. The following January, after death threats, his car was burned outside his home. All this for taking 30 Palestinian students to Auschwitz.

This week, another Palestinian, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, was accused of being a Zionist collaborator after he wrote a powerful guest essay in the New York Times last Friday, “For Gaza to Recover, Hamas Must Be Expelled.” Alkhatib is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the author of Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages. In the essay, he writes that Israel’s bombardment killed much of his family. The attacks against him included fabricated claims about his identity and accusations that he is paid by Israel. A Palestinian-American poet with a large following wrote that he has blood on his hands, that he is a Zionist collaborator and a traitor to humanity, and that Palestinians hate him.

The blood refers to Anas al-Sharif. In February 2025, Alkhatib criticized al-Sharif and his crew for their conduct at the Netzarim corridor. That August, Israel killed him. Some pro-Palestinian activists accuse Alkhatib of being responsible.

Zionist collaborator. Two unrelated acts, twelve years apart.

I accept that for many Palestinians, Alkhatib’s focus on Hamas overshadows the damage Israel has done to Gaza during this war. A war that started with Hamas’s brutal massacre of 1,200 people on October 7, 2023. I also don’t like his word Nazification, and I think the parallel is unhelpful. But instead of viewing his critique as part of the picture, “pro-Palestinian” advocates are charging Alkhatib with collaboration.

The response to Alkhatib is more than anything detrimental to the Palestinian cause. Refusing to listen to a Palestinian who puts blame on Hamas strengthens the claim that Palestinians lack agency and that Palestinians will be unwilling to accept any state on any borders.

So in the end, what is punished is the act of treating the other side as real. Dajani asked Palestinians to take Jewish suffering seriously. Alkhatib asks them to take Palestinian responsibility seriously. Both were called collaborators for it.

This is yet another episode of this sad reality. Dajani was destroyed by Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem. His union kicked him out, his university let him go, his car was burned. Alkhatib has faced threats, harassment, and online abuse. The machines are different, but the words and the reflex are the same, and only one of them costs the enforcer nothing.

Alkhatib has lost much of his family in Gaza. The people calling him a collaborator have, for the most part, lost nothing, and they are the ones deciding who counts. He answered that himself, and it matters that he is the one who said it: nobody holds a monopoly on what counts as a legitimate Palestinian viewpoint.

I say achi too much. My friends tell me. My wife tells me. Translated literally, it means “my brother,” but it’s basically the Hebrew equivalent of “bro,” which is to say, it usually means nothing. I use it on people I have known for 20 years and on people I met four minutes ago.

There is a restaurant around the corner from our apartment called HaAchim, “the Brothers.” We eat there often enough that I stopped hearing the name a long time ago.

Our older son, Eitan, is three and orders the fries, which, as far as he’s concerned, is the entire point of the place. I was there Wednesday night with friends and found myself reminiscing about previous visits. We have had countless meals there. With my parents when they visited, and we’ve celebrated birthdays. My father had his Air Force reunion there the last time he was in Israel, a table of men in their seventies who had not seen each other in fifty years.

After October 7, HaAchim printed T-shirts, one for each of the communities in the south that were attacked that morning, and sent the money to those places to rebuild. During the campaign for the hostages, the restaurant closed on days there were major protests. Everyone who worked there went to Jerusalem to demand a hostage deal. A shuttle left directly from the restaurant. Think about it: a small Tel Aviv restaurant gave up a full day of covers because there was somewhere more important to be.

There’s a little shop attached to the place. For a long time it sold a tote bag with hostage Carmel Gat’s name on it, with the money going to her family. When they started selling it, we were still saying “bring her home.” Then she was murdered in the tunnel in Rafah with five others. They kept selling the bag, and they only took it down a month or two ago. We just marked two years since her death.

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Our people know few more tired cliches than “two Jews, three opinions,” so it’s not surprising that there are two competing definitions of the ways in which people hate us and at least as many non-profits promoting their favored interpretation. Today I want to focus on one in particular: the Nexus Project, an antisemitism watchdog with a lot of potential that nevertheless struggles to talk about, well, antisemitism.

If you’re not familiar with Nexus, here’s a brief history. The group grew out of the Nexus Task Force, a group of liberal Jewish academics and leaders assembled in 2019 to untangle the nexus (get it?) between discussions around Israel and antisemitism in the United States. Two years later, they produced the Nexus Document, with its own definition of antisemitism.

As Nexus was gearing up in the tail end of Donald Trump’s first term, more traditional organizations like the ADL made a parallel effort to get governments to work the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition into official policy.

The differences between the IHRA and Nexus definitions could be the subject of a Talmudic debate, and it’s worth reading them side by side, but to make things brief: IHRA treats double standards against Israel as antisemitism while Nexus argues that there are legitimate reasons for disproportionate public attention to the Jewish state; IHRA focuses mainly on defining what is antisemitic, offering only one example of what is not (“criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country”), while the Nexus Document devotes five paragraphs to exceptions.

The Nexus Task Force raised the specter of American politicians exploiting fears of Jew hatred to silence criticism of Israel. Their concern was prescient: many of Trump’s most egregious abrogations of the First Amendment and principles of due process have leveraged anti-Israel protests as a pretext. Today the Nexus Project lays out its mission as combating antisemitism, upholding democracy, and protecting free speech.

Nexus would argue that its competitors failed by treating those three goals as zero-sum, choosing the first at the expense of the other two. There’s something to that, and Nexus has gained credibility as an alternative to the ADL, as that legacy institution ignores or even enables Trump’s campus crackdown. But Nexus, in its own way, struggles to reconcile its commitments.

Credit where it’s due: Nexus is clear-eyed about right-wing antisemitism, and it moves fast when it wants to, as it did after Nick Fuentes turned up on Tucker Carlson’s show. It calls out Islamophobia too, though that isn’t part of its formal remit. Take “Son of Hamas” Mosab Hassan Yousef’s recent invective at the ADL-sponsored Jewish American Summit, where the author and provocateur declared, “I don’t want Muslims in America.” Nexus called that out without reservation.

But when it comes to the far left, Nexus often struggles to find its voice. This undermines the very first plank of the Nexus Document, which states that “All claims of antisemitism made by Jews, like all claims of discrimination and oppression in general, should be given serious attention.” Even if the group ultimately concludes that a particular case is not antisemitism, it should explain in good faith why so many Jews think it is. But Nexus too often dismisses allegations against the left out of hand.

Last weekend Brad Lander, now the Democratic nominee in New York’s 10th congressional district, showed up outside Madison Square Garden to support a protest against a Hindu nationalist group. Lander was viciously heckled.

Nexus responded on Monday. The post opens with kudos to Lander for focusing on the fight for pluralistic, liberal democracy and calls it a shame that the people heckling him couldn’t appreciate that focus. A shame. It then spends two more paragraphs on Jews who said he had it coming, saving its one word of real heat, “galling,” for them. Nexus did boost Gili Getz calling the harassment antisemitic. But a glorified retweet isn’t a finding by a watchdog, and in its own name the word never came. The Indian American Muslim Council managed more: it apologized to Lander directly and said the hecklers weren’t part of its coalition. And Nexus had nothing at all to say about those, including many of Lander’s allies, who helped make the Z-word a slur.

Nexus’s record on Zohran Mamdani illustrates the same point. In 2023, speaking to a Democratic Socialists of America gathering, the future New York City mayor made “Zionist” the punchline of a joke about insufficient applause for Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian-American candidate for local office. “If you don’t clap for El-Yateem, you’re a Zionist,” Mamdani said.

Two years later, when some Jewish New Yorkers raised that incident and many similar episodes during the mayoral race, Nexus warned that the critics were sensationalizing.

After Mamdani won, the group said it was “deeply concerned by the divisive, hyperbolic, and aggressive response” from some corners of the Jewish community, and called the ADL’s Mamdani Monitor dangerous and counterproductive. Creating a monitor dedicated to one elected official certainly isn’t pragmatic politics, but Nexus’s condemnation of the ADL makes it seem like the focus on Mamdani came out of nowhere.

When Mamdani released his video about arresting Benjamin Netanyahu should the prime minister come to New York for the UN General Assembly, Nexus dismissed the charge of antisemitism as “unfounded, inflammatory, and divisive.” Of course, Nexus’s foundational document doesn’t see undue focus on Israel as inherently antisemitic, but it could have given a nod to the fact that many American Jews were put off by Mamdani’s decision to focus on Netanyahu and not mention diplomats from Russia or North Korea. Nexus would be within its rights to conclude that Mamdani’s video, in which he conceded that he had no jurisdiction to enforce an international arrest warrant, was not antisemitic while still acknowledging legitimate disagreement over the issue.

Nexus correctly called out Hasan Piker after the firebrand streamer said that if Jews in America “keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” A few days later, Nexus Scholar-in-Residence Dov Waxman wrote on X that “Israel’s actions fuel much (but not all) of the anger and hatred directed against Jews nowadays.” “It’s not victim-blaming” to make that association, Waxman wrote, noting that people make the association partly because Israel and major Jewish groups keep emphasizing the connection. Two days later, he took his argument to Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo News.

There is something to Waxman’s argument. But Nexus condemned Piker’s threat and never engaged the reasoning underneath it.

The actions of Israel’s government don’t explain those patterns on their own. No one is asking Sudanese Americans to account for the RSF before joining a coalition. For Jewish Americans, the criteria are very different. It doesn’t stop at condemning the war in Gaza or condemning the Netanyahu government; rather, it asks for renunciation of who they are.

Those who make that demand treat Zionism as an identity: they apply the label collectively, extend it to Jews who have stated nothing, and accept nothing short of disavowal. I’ve seen it happen time and time again, in academic circles, the arts, and the music industry, and it is becoming increasingly mainstream. Nexus has already granted the disproportion. The Nexus document itself states that outsized attention to Israel has legitimate causes; I would say some are legitimate, and many are not, but whatever one makes of that, the group has never bothered to ask what all that attention does to Jews who had no say in any of it.

Nexus cautioned El-Sayed in July over a comment about support for Israel and money. What it never addressed was the association itself. The Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan brought Piker to campus rallies in Ann Arbor and East Lansing and walked into a Detroit event with him on the eve of the primary. Asked in April to disavow Piker’s views, El-Sayed said he wasn’t there to disavow anyone’s views. Following Piker’s comment about American Jews inviting violence, and after Democratic strategists warned that the association had become a liability, El-Sayed put out a statement clarifying that nobody speaks for his campaign but him. The pressure that produced even that came from the ADL, from Mike Rogers, and from Democrats worried about November.

Now, Nexus will likely say this isn’t their beat. They exist to police the weaponization of antisemitism, and the ADL and a dozen others already cover the left. I suspect Nexus fears that condemning left-wing antisemitism too loudly makes them complicit in the Trump administration’s campaign against international students and academic freedom. That is not a legitimate excuse. It’s a cop out. In many ways, it hands Nexus’s credibility to its opponents. If we end up with the only people willing to name anti-Jewish rhetoric on the left being organizations that also want student visas revoked and academic freedom restricted, the audience we care about has no reason to listen, leaving Nexus with no answer when critics say the group exists to provide cover.

Nexus must walk and chew gum. It can say that antisemitism is rampant on the far left and that antisemitic speech is not illegal.

Perhaps it’s a good time to remember the Skokie affair, in which a Jewish ACLU attorney, David Goldberger, defended neo-Nazis’ right to march through an Illinois town with a large Jewish population and a significant number of Holocaust survivors. Goldberger never argued that his clients weren’t antisemites, only that antisemites have constitutional rights too. He reflected decades later that he “still feel[s] bad about the pain” the case “caused survivors.” As the case progressed, he engaged with the Jewish communities in the area. His defense of free speech was compelling precisely because he recognized that the question of antisemitism is still emotionally fraught even when the law is clear.

Nexus fills an important niche. As the ADL’s credibility wanes outside of a narrow echo chamber, and as a cottage industry treats every criticism of Israel as evidence of Jew hatred, we need an institution that applies the serious charge of antisemitism with precision and care. Nexus can be that institution. It has to stop deciding in advance which Jews get taken seriously.

Note, added September 5. An earlier version of this piece said Nexus had been quiet on Abdul El-Sayed. That was wrong. The group cautioned him in July over a comment about support for Israel and money. The paragraph has been corrected.

My friend Evan Gottesman and I were discussing this incident. Evan is the managing editor of The Next Move, the Substack of the Renew Democracy Initiative. He and I worked together at Israel Policy Forum for several years, where we hosted the Israel Policy Pod, and we still talk about the ins and outs of Israeli and American Jewish politics all the time. I’m pleased to share his take on the Lander situation with The Middle Ground.

— Eli

“Zionists,” the left-wing podcaster Emma Vigeland posted on X yesterday, “are functionally Klansmen.”

I wonder if Brad Lander, the Democratic nominee for New York’s tenth congressional district and a self-described “liberal Zionist,” knew that Vigeland considered him a “functional Klansman” when he accepted her support in the primary campaign earlier this summer. The two recorded a video, standing side by side, Lander grinning as Vigeland made her case.

It’s an odd arrangement when you think about it—Vigeland eagerly giving her blessing to a candidate whom she apparently considers the equivalent of a right-wing racist terrorist; Lander accepting that blessing from someone who is deeply contemptuous of his views.

Though Vigeland and others like her welcomed Lander in the race to unseat incumbent Dan Goldman, the city comptroller-turned-congressional candidate’s place in the far-left coalition remains exceedingly awkward.

That awkwardness was made painfully clear this weekend, when protesters shouted down Lander at a protest against a Hindu nationalist group outside of Madison Square Garden.

“We don’t want no Zionists here!” one man screamed at the congressional hopeful. I get it—from the perspective of these leftists, who would want Zionists, “functional Klansmen,” in their spaces?

The video of Lander being heckled at MSG brings to mind another recent incident on the other side of the country, when Scott Wiener was harassed walking through San Francisco’s Dolores Park.

Wiener is a California state senator. He is the favorite to inherit Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the US House of Representatives, though the race may be tightening. Wiener is Jewish. Like Lander, he (reluctantly) describes Israel’s actions in the Gaza War as a genocide. Like Lander, he remains, at least on paper, committed to the idea of a two-state solution and therefore a Jewish and democratic Israel.

Both Lander and Wiener remained oddly placid through their respective ordeals. It’s one thing to maintain your composure under pressure, a good trait in an elected official. Still, Lander and Wiener seem to lack any confidence in their beliefs when it comes to the legitimacy of Jewish self determination. There is no instinct to push back.

After the MSG episode, Lander issued a video on social media, delivered in his sermonic, Reverend Lovejoy style. He dismissed the people who attacked him as “a few loud mouths.” Lander made passing mention of his belief in a Jewish and democratic state, but he didn’t explain why he believes in that concept. He didn’t acknowledge that people in his camp—people with whom he campaigned!—say that holding this belief makes him as bad as the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan.

“We have to face the unfortunate reality that many of those who protest for Palestine and claim to champion Palestinian rights will not accept you if you believe in a two-state solution, a peace process, and human rights for all,” Palestinian human rights advocate Ihab Hassan observed after Lander was attacked. “To be accepted by them, you apparently have to cheer for Hamas.”

If people like Lander and Wiener are going to cling onto the liberal Zionist label, an association that comes with a real political cost these days, they might at least stand up for it and firmly assert why a Jewish state is just as legitimate as a Palestinian one.

Now, some right-wing Jewish pundits reveled in the abuse Lander received. I don’t share their sense of schadenfreude—watching a fellow Jew, even one with whom I disagree, get hounded like that is the last thing that brings me joy.

I do wish this for Lander: that he’d treat those who oppose his vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel from the left with the same clarity he shows when dealing with the annexationists and ethnic cleansers on the Israeli right.

Given the extremism of the Israeli government, the impotence of the American Jewish establishment, and the hostility of the anti-Zionist left, holding that ground might be a lonely course. But things are not going to get better for liberal Zionists until we demand some respect.

Evan Gottesman is the director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative and the managing editor of The Next Move, RDI’s publication on Substack. He was previously associate director of policy and communications at Israel Policy Forum, and has been published in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Haaretz.

I grew up with Israeli heroes. The heroism of Yoni Netanyahu in Entebbe and of daring operations behind enemy lines. I also grew up on the stories of Eli Cohen and Ron Arad. Two of the biggest open wounds in Israeli society. Two Israelis whose fates were never resolved and whose remains were never recovered.

More than anything, I grew up with the understanding that Israel would do anything to get its citizens back. No one would be left behind.

On August 31st, 2024, the bodies of six Israeli hostages were recovered from a Gaza tunnel. Six beautiful Israeli souls were savagely executed by Hamas terrorists. On that day, something changed for me. That feeling of pride I had, that faith in what Israel meant, had vanished.

I write this realizing the complexity of dealing with the most evil terrorists on earth, who ultimately executed our hostages, but I have no expectations from them to be any different. I do have expectations of my own government.

I also write this realizing the complexity of releasing prisoners with blood on their hands, mass murderers, in exchange for hostages. The Gilad Shalit deal released Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind October 7. Still, it was the government that failed the hostages, taken from a music festival and from their homes, and I believe it is the duty of that government to pay that price and deal with the consequences.

On that day, August 31, I was not in Israel. I was on a family visit to Vancouver, Canada. The war was still very much on our minds every single day, thinking about the hostages, friends, and family in the IDF.

I had decided to buy tickets for a concert for one of my wife’s favorite bands. They were by chance in Vancouver. We don’t get many big artists in Israel these days.

So I surprised her with two floor seats to Kings of Leon at Rogers Arena. We got off the SkyTrain and were on our way to the entrance when I got a Telegram notification. I stopped in my tracks, and my wife asked what was wrong. I said, “They’re gone.” I had to sit down. We both sat sobbing on a bench as people flocked past us to the concert.

Israel was the only place I wanted to be, and I had never been further from it. Everyone walking by had no idea what was happening. I was in the town I grew up in, but never felt so alone.

I realize there were 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7, and nearly 1,000 Israeli soldiers killed since, but something about these six hostages felt closer. Maybe it was because I grew up following American and Israeli sports, obsessed with geography, and was enamoured by Hersh and by his eloquent parents. Maybe it was because I saw Eden Yerushalmi’s face every time I drove on the Ayalon highway. Maybe it was because I saw Carmel Gat’s tote bag for sale at my favorite restaurant around the corner. Something about them was different. I felt like I knew each of them. They felt like family.

We ended up going to the concert. I sat and cried the entire time. We probably shouldn’t have gone in. It was the most bizarre experience. I was so disoriented I even hugged someone next to me, assuming it was my wife, Tal. It was another man, and he looked at me, frightened. He, of course, had no clue why I was bawling my eyes out at a Kings of Leon concert, let alone hugging him. He said, “What are you doing?!” I was considering explaining myself, but I ignored him and hugged my wife.

What died in Israel was that sense of solidarity that has always defined it. It was the purpose of why Israel was founded. It was when Israel failed.

I know Hersh, Carmel, and Eden were on a list for a hostage deal that should have happened but was blocked by a Netanyahu government held hostage by extremists looking to resettle Gaza at the expense of returning the hostages, but that is for another piece.

This is more a reflection of what was lost, for me at least. Something in Israel died that day. We owe it to Carmel, to Hersh, to Eden, to Ori, to Alex, and to Almog to do everything in our power to make sure that can be reborn and renewed.

Yonit Levy opened this evening’s news with Amit Segal’s report on whether Jewish extremist Moshe Feiglin would link up with Bezalel Smotrich in upcoming elections. Two years on, none of the six made the broadcast. Two extremist politicians, who opposed the deals to bring them back, did.

I posted this earlier today.

My father’s soccer career never happened, and he tells that story beautifully.

My dad played for the youth team of Hapoel Be’er Sheva, itself the professional soccer team for the southern Israeli city where he grew up. He competed alongside boys who made the senior side. One of those teammates was Yaakov Cohen, who was there for the championship squads of the 1970s and then went to the storied English team Brighton & Hove Albion for 40,000 pounds. My father left for Canada in his mid-twenties and played semi-pro in a league that ran for a few seasons and then stopped existing. He still has the brochure.

I inherited my father’s Hapoel Be’er Sheva affiliation from him: when I watch Israeli soccer, that’s the team I root for. In practice, this meant sitting through two decades of losing. The club was broke. Games turned into three-hour cursing sessions led by grown men standing ankle-deep in sunflower seed shells (garinim), which are now banned from the stands. These were not fun family outings, but tense experiences where I felt tolerated rather than welcome. The only time in my life that anyone has stolen my phone was at a Hapoel Be’er Sheva match in the second division. It is also where I learned what ben zona means (if you don’t know, look it up).

Notes From Tel Aviv arrives every Thursday evening for paid subscribers — a slice of life from Israel before Shabbat.

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Winter has arrived. No, it is still boiling hot and humid in Tel Aviv. And no, not Game of Thrones. By Winter, I mean Ofer Winter, the newest politician on the Israeli right, who launched his party last night in Jerusalem.

Ofer Winter is the Ben-Gvir you would design if you could, which is why his announcement matters more than the polls suggest.

Unlike Ben-Gvir, who never served in the IDF because of his extremist activity, Winter commanded Givati, Duvdevan and the 98th Division. He fought in Gaza in 2014 and again after October 7.

Winter has one solution for Gaza: emigration. When such a line is said by the TikTok minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, that sentence is a provocation, said by an IDF general, it is a plan.

Voluntary emigration as floated by Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, several Likud ministers, and now Winter, is sugar-coated ethnic cleansing. Moreover, early last year the security cabinet approved Defense Minister Israel Katz’s proposal for a Voluntary Emigration Administration inside the Defense Ministry, and Winter was reportedly touted as its director.

Winter is asking to run that ministry, and the crowd in Jerusalem chanted “Our next Defense Minister” back at him.

So who exactly does Winter appeal to? After all, there are so many right-wing parties popping up.

Israeli public opinion has moved right since October 7, while Netanyahu, the prime minister and undisputed leader of the right, has become much less popular. That gap is where Winter is looking for votes, and my instinct is that he is betting the voters who left Netanyahu after October 7 will come to him rather than to the center-right options, and that he can hand Netanyahu a government on the way.

It is much harder to label an IDF brigadier general a messianic extremist than it is Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, one convicted of supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism, the other detained by the Shin Bet during the Gaza Disengagement.

Moreover, this is something Winter thought through, and his list is evidence. Make no mistake, his list is right-wing, but it appears more moderate and more mainstream. Netali Shem Tov anchored Channel 13’s Friday news and spent years at Channel 12. Lali Deri lost her son in Gaza. Neither has been near politics, and that is the point.

Winter’s most notable addition though, is one of Israel’s most well-known advocates on the international arena, Yoseph Haddad. He is an IDF veteran who has spent years defending Israel on cable news and campuses abroad.

He said he intends to be the first Arab in the security cabinet. He also attacked the Arab parties for representing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank instead of their own voters. Winter endorsed him from the stage as the next public diplomacy minister.

Now, nobody thinks this wins Arab votes aside from maybe Haddad’s immediate relatives. I highly doubt Arab citizens of Israel are voting for a party whose leader wants Gaza emptied, because of Yoseph Haddad.

Last week, Likud officials reportedly pushed Netanyahu to reserve Haddad a spot on their list to keep him from Winter, which tells you that he is an electoral asset. Haddad is no asset for Arab voters (they don’t like him very much) but for right-wing Israelis who mistakenly believe that his PR efforts on Israel’s behalf are helpful, and Winter has aimed him at a domestic audience. For example, I have cousins in Beer Sheva who think Yoseph Haddad’s Israel advocacy does wonders for the country, and they vote for the opposition bloc.

And that is very much by design, and for proponents of Israeli democracy, dangerous. Ben Gvir made the Israeli right pay a price in respectability for every position it held; for every Ben-Gvir stunt, from nooses to crocodiles, the damage in Israel and around the world was huge. Ofer Winter gives the extremist policies a trendier vibe, dressed in an IDF uniform, with a list that is mostly secular. Winter’s party is the only Zionist party with an Arab in its second spot.

Now, this also threatens Netanyahu, but the threat isn’t that he will take votes from the coalition because Netanyahu knows he is a natural ally. The threat is that, according to polls, Winter puts Smotrich’s Religious Zionists, a key coalition partner, at risk of dropping below the threshold. Then again, Netanyahu is known for forcing mergers in order to avoid the chance of having right-wing votes go to waste.

Although Winter promises something different, it is much the same. And though Winter says he will not put anyone connected to October 7 on his list, he will recommend Netanyahu for the premiership, the man who carries the most responsibility for that day.

Today, two close liberal friends from Tel Aviv sent me a picture of his list and asked if his party would sit with Bibi. I thought the answer was obvious, it wasn’t. That is the exact point.

Last Tuesday, Israel put out tenders for 1,234 homes in E1, the area of the West Bank sandwiched between Jerusalem and the major settlement of Maale Adumim. Putting out tenders is essentially an opportunity for construction companies to bid on contracts, but this is no normal construction project.

For three decades, Israeli building in E1 has been a red line for Western governments that support a two-state solution because it would disrupt north-south traffic for Palestinians moving across the territory and disconnect the West Bank from East Jerusalem. This is why no Israeli government has taken it this far.

Under the published tenders, the deadline for submissions is October 19, a week before the Knesset election.

Some supporters of Israel believe that the importance of E1 is being overemphasized, since bypass roads make contiguity feasible.

“Stop making arguments that are debunked by anyone with access to a map,” wrote American Jewish pundit Seth Mandel in response to warnings that E1 imperils a two-state outcome.

The road meant to preserve that contiguity, the so-called Fabric of Life route, was first approved in 2020 and funded in March 2025. As of July, the Transport Ministry was still announcing the allocation for its paving. The tenders for E1 went out last week.

If Mandel and people like him are so confident that E1 is not an issue for a future resolution to the conflict, it’s worth asking why Bezalel Smotrich himself states that he is pushing for E1 in order to do away with the concept of a Palestinian state (Mandel brushes this off as mere electioneering). Moreover, anyone with a map can see that the space for Palestinians to move between the northern and southern West Bank would be increasingly narrowed to a thin strip between Maale Adumim and the settlements of the Jordan Valley.

If the threat to a prospective Palestinian state isn’t compelling, then at least the specter of Western sanctions might rouse some Israelis’ attention.

The next day, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband called in Israel’s chargé d’affaires and promised sanctions against anyone taking part in settlement expansion. Britain then issued a joint statement alongside France, Germany, and Italy warning construction companies that taking part in the tender could mean they would be in breach of international law.

By Thursday, Channel 13 in Israel was reporting that the EU had drawn up a package of sanctions to be activated if construction begins, including labeling all Israeli products and suspending parts of security agreements.

On Thursday evening, the right-wing journalist Amit Segal published a column in Israel Hayom arguing that including Itamar Ben-Gvir in a senior role in the next Israeli government would be a disaster.

Ben-Gvir replied, saying the column hit him like a fist to the stomach. On Saturday night, Segal went on Channel 12 and said the thing that could get Israel sanctioned is Ben-Gvir. Not even Smotrich.

Amit Segal is the only real pro-Netanyahu figure with mainstream appeal in Israeli media. He’s also made recent inroads toward building an English-speaking audience with appearances on the Call Me Back podcast and his own Substack.

In his response to Ben-Gvir, Segal agreed that preventing a Palestinian state is crucial to Israeli security, but that Ben-Gvir is compromising that goal for optics and TikTok likes.

The first reason for Segal’s comments is strategic: Ben-Gvir makes it harder for someone like Smotrich to kill the chance of a future Palestinian state. It’s not that Smotrich is less radical than Ben-Gvir, but he’s a little more circumspect. Ben-Gvir is a loud populist who loves media attention and grabs the headlines, but in practice he is not a savvy policymaker. He has succeeded in changing Israel’s police and prison system, but it’s more about the publicity stunts than the tachles (substance). Case in point: the crocodiles Ben-Gvir placed outside a prison.

Smotrich is the opposite. The Israeli right learned from the judicial reform that doing things under the radar was more effective. Smotrich, who holds the influential posts of finance minister and minister in the defense ministry, has spent this term working to change Israeli realities in the West Bank, and the result has been de facto annexation. That’s why there have been no formal declarations of Israeli control over the territories, but there have been significant changes on the ground.

Segal shares the far-right’s goal of killing any chance of a Palestinian state, but he belongs to the Smotrich school that would rather do it with minimal attention. That is the same reason he came out against settler violence. Not because it upsets him deeply, but because it makes it harder to change the facts on the ground with the world watching.

The second reason that Segal is coming out against Ben-Gvir is political. Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit is the only coalition party the polls show gaining rather than losing. It’s eating into Netanyahu’s base and polling at 9 seats, with Netanyahu’s Likud hitting a year-long low at 20 seats, according to the latest Maariv poll.

Ben-Gvir also has more mainstream appeal than Bezalel Smotrich, whose support is mostly confined to West Bank settlements. The national security minister goes out and talks to sectors of Israeli society beyond the national religious, as he did with his recent interview on the October 8 podcast. Ben-Gvir warns voters that Netanyahu seeks to form a broad unity government without him, a scenario that seems unlikely. Segal speaks to this audience, and if he says that Ben-Gvir is causing damage, people pay attention. It also positions Segal as more moderate within the Israeli public.

There’s a limit to how far this act can go. Netanyahu still needs a coalition that will provide him legal cover, and a unity government with Eisenkot or Bennett-Lapid won’t. Segal can make the case, but Netanyahu can’t actually assemble a government without Ben-Gvir’s seats.

The other read is that Ben-Gvir may simply be more toxic to swing voters deciding between the pro-Netanyahu and opposition blocs, and that Segal may mean every word of what he says. Segal writes in his column that in every American Jewish community he’s visited, however Orthodox and right-wing, he heard how hard it is to defend a government Ben-Gvir sits in, and that quotes from Ben-Gvir’s X account travel quickly across the ocean.

Boker tov, Amit!

Both statements could be true, but the E1 saga illustrates that the threat to Israel is bigger than any one provocateur. On the day Segal warned about Ben-Gvir, it was the “quiet” Smotrich who brought Israel the threat of sanctions. Smotrich appears twice in Segal’s column, but only for seat projections. If his real concern is indeed the sanctions, he would have picked a different target.

I’m watching whether other Likud allies make the argument about Ben-Gvir in September, and also whether Netanyahu will rule out a government with the far-right firebrand. He promised not to sit with Ben-Gvir in February 2021, and failed to keep that promise.

Ben-Gvir is ideologically disposable exactly because he makes a lot of noise but brings about little except for harsher treatment of Palestinian prisoners and expanded gun licenses. Segal wants the two-state solution dead too. He just wants it done cheaply and without fanfare. What happens next with E1 will show that the sanctions land on Israel regardless of which minister kills the two-state solution or how quietly it’s done.

Last week I wrote about reconciling a baby name between two grandmothers with strong opinions. This week, I’d like to talk about my own name, which nobody negotiated for on my behalf, and which has caused me more trouble than my son Neri’s ever will.

Eli is for my great-grandfather from Baghdad. Saba Eliyahu, the Hebrew for Elijah. In Israel, this is the least remarkable fact about me.

My middle name is where it falls apart.

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By now you’ve probably heard about Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s call for the IDF to kill “30 to 40 people” each night in Gaza.

Technically, he was referring to Palestinian terrorists, but the line between civilian and combatant is very much blurred in Ben Gvir’s mind. As he went on to say, Israel should take out “not just those who pose an immediate threat.”

“No,” Ben Gvir continued matter-of-factly, “there are people there who are not worthy of life.”

The minister’s comments are horrific, but the substance of what he said is not the most notable thing about the whole affair. Sadly, this is par for the course from one of the most influential officials in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

What stood out about this particular invective was the venue: Ben Gvir made his monstrous appeal on the October 8 podcast, a show hosted by freed hostage Rom Braslavski. As the national security minister details his bloody vision for Gaza, Braslavski nods along—”ken, ken.”

Braslavski even made a personal request: the former Islamic Jihad captive wanted to personally execute the men who’d tormented him for over two years. Ben Gvir, who recently pushed through legislation imposing a death penalty for Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank (but not for Jewish ones), was delighted to say he’d do everything possible to make Braslavski’s fantasy a reality.

I don’t begrudge Braslavski his anger; what he endured in Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s dungeons cannot be done justice in a short piece like this one. He was captured after saving other people at the Nova music festival. Throughout his time in captivity, he was beaten and sexually assaulted. Two months before his release, medical experts warned that he had lost nearly a third of his body weight and faced the risk of multi-system failure.

The desire for revenge Rom Braslavski articulated out in the open on his podcast has certainly been spoken countless times behind closed doors, between friends and relatives of hostages at kitchen tables across Israel and the diaspora. This phenomenon plays out on both sides of the conflict.

To borrow Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s glib explanation of an attack on a US synagogue, “hurt people hurt people” (the assailant in that case lost family members to an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, including two brothers reportedly working for Hezbollah and a young niece and nephew).

El-Sayed should not have rationalized the attempted murder of American Jewish children, but there’s some validity to the Senate hopeful’s armchair psychology. People in pain may sometimes find relief in causing others pain. A good leader channels that anguish away from violence; they sympathize with a wounded public while helping them heal. By contrast, demagogues like Itamar Ben Gvir feed on anger. They weaponize and amplify it. Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups do the same with their people.

The men and women kidnapped by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on October 7 were normal people representing all parts of Israeli society. The experience of captivity in Gaza thrust them into the national spotlight. Those who survived their ordeal continue to be the center of attention, but they were not public figures before 2023. Ben Gvir’s interviewer, Rom Braslavski, was just a security guard at a music festival. The idea of podcasting with senior cabinet ministers probably never crossed his mind.

As with most normal people, Braslavski’s politics are a mixed bag. In his interview with Ben Gvir, he was looking for vengeance. Yet Braslavski has also called for treating Arabs with basic human decency, inviting a deluge of vitriolic comments from Israeli social media users.

“I wish that all of these keyboard heroes would experience being kidnapped for just one day [...] and then see if they’d still be able to open Facebook and write the nasty messages,” Braslavski posted in response.

Ben Gvir, for his part, voted against every hostage deal, including the one that freed Rom. In November, Braslavski wrote that he was suffering from ten panic attacks a day and the state had abandoned him. Neither the prime minister nor Ben Gvir had reached out once since his release. Only with elections around the corner have Ben Gvir’s calculations changed.

Rather than help Rom Braslavski navigate his grief, Itamar Ben Gvir preyed on it in public. Ben Gvir’s interview is tantamount to abuse of a traumatized man, conducted as political theater on a national stage. It is a routine that officials from Benjamin Netanyahu on down have repeated over and over again for the past three years, and this manipulative show will go on and on until Israeli voters finally call curtains.

Driving in Israel is an incredibly stressful experience, and I don’t recommend it. The one exception for me is a night drive on the Ayalon. Little traffic, the city’s lights and skyscrapers, the billboards. During election season, the whole thing gets livelier, and last night it was especially so because the Netanyahu ad I passed had the mayor of New York on it.

The ad displayed four faces: Mojtaba Khamenei, Naim Qassem, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Zohran Mamdani. At the top, it said they want Netanyahu to lose. Below, it told Israelis not to let them win. Netanyahu shared the image himself, writing “Don’t let them win.” The trouble is that some of them would be perfectly happy if he did.

When it comes to Mamdani, the ad has it backward. He wants Netanyahu to win, because a Netanyahu loss would be a blow to his politics.

Set aside for now why the mayor of an American city is pictured with the Supreme Leader of Iran and the Secretary-General of Hezbollah.

In July, Mamdani released a two-minute video announcing that Netanyahu was not welcome in New York. He told the Times his administration was in talks about whether the city could arrest him. A minute and a half in, he conceded what everyone already knew: New York has no independent legal authority to enforce an ICC warrant. He was not going to arrest anyone.

I wrote then that the video instead handed Netanyahu a fight three months before an election he was losing. Whether that was the goal or just a play to his base, he is too calculating not to have seen it coming.

Mamdani’s omission was obvious and yet not at all surprising. Israel was then three months from possibly the most consequential election in its history, with a former chief of staff leading the polls and 61% of Israelis telling the Israel Democracy Institute that Netanyahu should not run again. None of this was secret or in dispute. It was an accepted fact about Israel in July 2026.

One may expect a politician so invested in Palestinian rights to mention that. Israelis who want the Netanyahu government gone: a line to differentiate between the Israeli public and its awful leadership. Mamdani never mentioned it.

Why did he leave it out? Because it doesn’t help his argument. He and his supporters hold that the Netanyahu-Ben Gvir-Smotrich government is what Zionism produces no matter what. For Mamdani et al. this version of Israel is the inevitable result of Israel, not a mistake voters can fix.

This Israeli government is what made his politics work. An Israel with no annexation minister, no Ben Gvir running the prisons with his crocodiles, no prime minister whose survival depends on his most extreme partners leaves him in a different place entirely.

The billboard is still impossible to defend. The mayor of New York was elected by two million people, and many Jews who didn’t vote for him have spent the year saying his view of Israel doesn’t represent their city. He is not Mojtaba Khamenei, and he is not Naim Qassem.

Erdoğan is a similar story. Turkey’s position improves in direct proportion to Israel’s isolation. Just a week and a half ago, the Turkish president stood in Mecca signing a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia, one of the states that was supposed to be normalizing with us, and Trump welcomed it.

The instinct is to view Netanyahu and Mamdani as bitter rivals, but the events of the last month suggest cooperation. Mamdani’s video helped Netanyahu, and Netanyahu put up a billboard that will make Mamdani more popular.

All the while, Netanyahu can say the world hates the only Jewish state and that he is its chosen protector. Just this weekend, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir went on a freed hostage's podcast to call for killing thirty to forty Gazans a night, mass emigration, and resettling the Strip. Mamdani couldn't ask for more political ammunition.

The irony is that a new government without Netanyahu and his extremists would be good for both Israelis and Palestinians, but worse for Mamdani. He has built a politics that needs Israel to stay exactly as it is.

Neither of them pays a real price. The bill goes to the Jews of New York, the ones at Central Synagogue for Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday when a man came in swinging, and to the Israelis and Palestinians who have suffered tremendously since October 7, in desperate need of this government gone.

If you follow the Israel conversation on social media, you might have caught an interesting three-way debate last week. In a series of exchanges on X, American Jewish commentator and Call Me Back host Dan Senor, Haaretz Opinion Editor Amir Tibon, and anti-Zionist pundit Mehdi Hasan argued a question that may prove very consequential when Israelis vote for a new Knesset in two months’ time: How much of the popular American hostility toward Israel can be pinned on Benjamin Netanyahu?

Senor, whose podcast I highly recommend, kicked things off by posing a fair question to Hasan. Gadi Eisenkot or Naftali Bennett could soon replace Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister. Would that change anything about Hasan’s perspective on Israel?

“Would Israel,” Senor asked, “still be a ‘bloodthirsty’ / ‘apartheid’ / ‘genocidal’ state?”

Mehdi Hasan’s answer was that nothing would change. His problem was never just Netanyahu.

Here, Amir Tibon stepped in. According to Tibon, Mehdi was the wrong person to ask. Sixty percent of Americans view Israel negatively now, up from around 30% a few years ago. Mehdi Hasan was always in the original 30% who are fundamentally opposed to the Jewish state. It’s the newer 30% who piled on after October 7 that matter most.

Tibon is right, but I’ve watched a lot of smart people spend the past week trying to explain why he isn’t.

Amir Tibon’s argument is about the numbers, not optimism. If America’s anti-Israel population doubled in the past couple of years, half of those who dislike Israel today are recent arrivals. Whatever activated them is not the same deeply held anti-Zionist ideology that animates someone like Mehdi Hasan. They did not oppose Israel before Smotrich and Ben Gvir became influential in Israeli policy.

Senor pushed back against Tibon by arguing that the Progressive Caucus is the new face of the Democratic Party. He quoted Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter and mainstream liberal podcast host, saying, “Tell us again how Netanyahu is the only reason we should question our relationship with the State of Israel.” Senor’s reasoning is that if Jon Favreau, as cookie-cutter a Democrat as they come, now sounds like Mehdi Hasan, then perhaps Mehdi Hasan is a representative sample.

There’s another way to read Favreau. Mehdi Hasan’s position isn’t spreading; his audience is. Hasan has held this view long before October 7, and what has changed is that ministers in the Netanyahu government keep handing him material that makes it seem as though his anti-Zionist worldview is moderate and even reasonable. Bezalel Smotrich told the Yesha Council that Israel could halve Gaza’s population in two years through voluntary migration, and floated the same approach for the West Bank. Minister Amichai Eliyahu floated dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza; Smotrich also said starving two million people would be justified. If that is what Zionism is interpreted as in the progressive left, then of course people will be open to Mehdi Hasan’s views. Extremists like Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and co. do more for Mehdi’s reach in one evening than Mehdi does in a month. A new prime minister won’t convert Mehdi himself. Nothing will, and that isn’t how you prove him wrong. What it takes away is the supply.

Tibon’s math holds. There’s public opinion data to back him up. According to Gallup, from the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000 to the terror of the Second Intifada and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s two-state offer near the end of the aughts, a majority of Americans sympathized more with Israel than with the Palestinians. Israel even retained its support in the first decade after Netanyahu returned to office in 2009.

But the ground began to shift in 2019, when Bibi first campaigned on annexing the Jordan Valley—the eastern chunk of the West Bank—while the Trump Plan turned the idea of a Palestinian state into a cartographic joke. Israel no longer looked like it was interested in compromise, regardless of whether the Palestinians said “yes” or “no” to a deal. This was the foundation for many Americans’ impressions of Israel going into the October 7 attacks and the Gaza War.

All of this to say: much of the break with Israel is a recent, rapid phenomenon.

Amir Tibon asserted that a new Israeli government is “our best shot” at recapturing the 30% of Americans who turned their backs on Israel. I agree, but we should also be realistic. Since the shift coincided with Israel’s formal abandonment of the two-state solution, it’s worth noting that Gadi Eisenkot has said he does not support two states at the moment, and Naftali Bennett is a longtime proponent of Israel annexing Area C, 60% of the West Bank.

Yet there is reason to be positive. Yoav Segalovitz, a former Yesh Atid MK and former deputy public security minister, is in advanced talks to join Ra’am, making it likelier that Arab citizens will be represented in the next government. He has said he will not join a party that does not recognize Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Eisenkot is not an ideologue. He warned as early as 2020 that Israel was drifting toward a one-state reality and called for separation from the Palestinians through a gradual, supervised process with permanent Israeli security responsibility. Bennett has moderated in recent years. Their hardline rhetoric is viewed as a campaign-season necessity: fighting for the former Netanyahu voters contemplating whether to change sides.

That positioning may be tactical, but Americans don’t grade on Israeli electoral context, and the same line that may win swing votes in Israel will still get quoted in the American press. It also isn’t just positioning. The Israeli electorate remains deeply traumatized by October 7, and that is the part Favreau doesn’t grasp. Israelis withdrew from Gaza, understood it as a gesture toward peace, and got October 7. Proposing the same thing in the West Bank is not a winning slogan here, no matter what it sounds like from the other side of the ocean.

On October 7, Amir Tibon and his family hid in a safe room in Nahal Oz while Hamas gunmen moved through their kibbutz. His parents drove down from Tel Aviv to reach them, his father Noam, a retired major general armed with a private pistol. Tibon wrote about this experience in The Gates of Gaza, which won the Sami Rohr Prize. He still believes that a new government is our best chance.

Someone like Mehdi Hasan will interpret any result from the October 27 elections to fit his long-held anti-Israel views. That was always going to be true.

The question is whether the next government keeps handing him material. A prime minister who confronts settler violence and unlimited settlement expansion, who says out loud that the goal is for the Palestinians to one day govern themselves, is already doing something Netanyahu and his extremist ministers won’t. And a coalition without them cuts off Mehdi’s supply.

Notes from Tel Aviv, my weekly dispatch for paid subscribers, goes out Thursdays. The most recent one is about naming our newborn son.

Ten months ago, our second son was born. That meant it was time for one of the toughest negotiations of Israeli family life: picking a name.

My mother is Ashkenazi, born in Queens. In her view, you name a child after every relative who has passed away, and if you can fit four of them into two names, you have done well. My mother-in-law is a secular Israeli, and she considers this practice borderline abusive. “You are hanging the dead on a newborn,” she says. “You are loading a soul with weight it never asked for.”

I did what I always do. I went for the middle ground.

The plan was simple: We would pick a name that could plausibly be passed off to my in-laws as one that just sounded nice, while retaining subtle significance for my own mother. The baby would not bear the name of any dead person, but there would be a connection.

More from The Middle Ground

So, what did we pick?

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It’s something that you can only do in New York City. At least, that’s my opinion. Explore any culinary scene in the world, and you can do it within the five boroughs. When I lived in the city, I ate my way around the Middle East without once thinking about the politics. It was my way of being in the region from afar.

Miznon or Taim on the way home, Miss Ada or Laser Wolf when someone else was paying, 12 Chairs when I wanted jachnun on a weekend. Not only Israeli places. There was also King of Falafel and Shawarma in Astoria, the most Palestinian establishment I have been to in North America, where I was careful not to talk politics.

Israeli food tells the story of where Jews were forced to leave and where they found new homes. It might be the only cuisine where someone thought to put hummus on an Austrian schnitzel, and it works. Not only does it work, but it’s delicious.

There is also kubbeh in beet soup, which you have to eat with rice, at a spot on Sixth Avenue called Kubeh. Iraqi Jewish food, my family’s food, sold in Manhattan to people who mostly had no idea. It reminded me of my grandmother’s kitchen, though hers was always better.

I was once brave enough to try rolling kubbeh in our apartment on the Upper East Side, but the dumplings came apart in the pot. I wanted to impress my girlfriend (now, my wife) and failed miserably.

That was when I understood I did not have my savta’s technique, and neither does my father. He settles for the occasional omelet and challah French toast.

Melanie Shurka, who opened Kubeh, did the smart thing. After she looked for that technique in cookbooks and found almost nothing, she flew to Israel to learn it from Kurdish, Iraqi, and Persian women, because their kitchens are the only places it survives. Their expulsion is the reason it does.

New York Magazine has now published an entire issue about that world, and it has a rule about which Jews belong to it.

The issue is called Habibi City, and the cover story is by Zaina Arafat. Partway through, she stops to define the term on which the whole package rests. Belonging to the SWANA community (Southwest Asia and North Africa), she writes, meant holding a set of common beliefs: Palestinian human rights, Gaza as a genocide, social justice over capital, caring as nonnegotiable.

Only one of those beliefs is a test. In the piece, Arafat describes Kimia Zakerin’s Farsi Club, which started after the Woman Life Freedom marches in Washington Square. She also interviews El Atigh Abba, the owner of a Crown Heights café, who cannot return to Mauritania because a fatwa was issued against him for his writing about the Arab Spring.

Neither Kimia nor El Atigh risk their place in the SWANA community by speaking out against their regimes, nor would they lose it by staying silent. Israel is, of course, the only country where that determines membership.

In the essay, every Jew is described as anti-Zionist, an Arab Jew, or as someone’s non-Zionist partner. That label comes first and is what lets them be included. To be a Jew in Habibi City, you have to answer the Israel question the ‘right way.’ Criticizing the Netanyahu government isn’t enough for Arafat; most Israelis I know do that all the time. The real test is about the state itself, whether it should exist at all, and no other group faces that kind of standard.

Arafat knows this. She grants that Israel is geographically part of the region, but that is where it ends: topographic acceptance. Whether Israelis can claim a connection depends on the politics surrounding SWANA, and on a person’s ethnic background. She has just raised the Mizrahi question, and she leaves it where it fell.

About 75,000 Syrian Jews live half an hour from Abba’s café. They came from Aleppo and Damascus in the early 1900s and settled along Ocean Parkway in South Brooklyn. Syrian-American writer Joseph Sutton called what they built Aleppo in Flatbush. Later, the community took in Egyptians, Moroccans, and Persians as each of those countries forced out its Jews. Shaare Zion is a synagogue on Ocean Parkway, with a dome visible from the street.

Many Ocean Parkway families are more religious and keep to themselves, which someone will point out. Tens of thousands of Israelis in New York City do not, many of them Mizrahi, running restaurants, throwing parties, and filling the same rooms Arafat counts as a scene. They are not in the essay either.

My family was forced out of Iraq in 1951, along with almost all of the country’s Jews, a community that had been there for 2,500 years. Their belongings were confiscated on the way out. They moved to Be’er Sheva in the Negev Desert; the city was built mostly by immigrants who arrived the same way.

Arafat writes about exile and expulsion throughout the piece. El Atigh Abba, who cannot go home to Mauritania. The Yemenis picked up at the airport and fed on Atlantic Avenue, but not once about the 850,000 Jews displaced from “SWANA.”

Listing what SWANA New Yorkers still face, Arafat names xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism. Two bigotries and a national movement, filed together without comment.

About half of Israeli Jews have roots in the Middle East and North Africa, and they are in Israel because the region threw them out. Netanyahu’s government is a disgrace, and there are things Israel has done in Gaza that are unacceptable, and growing settler violence in the West Bank is a disgrace to Zionism and to Jews. I can hold all of that and still notice exactly what listing Zionism beside Islamophobia is.

The one person I felt a connection to in the piece was El Atigh. He is different. He hosted a Hebrew-Arabic language exchange only to see his comments flooded with people telling him to cancel. He refused.

In July, he hosted a Palestinian singer and an Israeli musician on his stage together. He spends the essay pushing back on his own side. Arafat clearly admires him, but she does not seem to notice they disagree.

So 20 pages celebrating the SWANA diaspora in New York City. The Jews of those countries appear only if they publicly disown the state that took many of them in.

And that brings us back to the Syrian families living on Ocean Parkway in South Brooklyn. They have lived in New York longer than most SWANA countries have existed, and are not mentioned at all. I don’t think it was intentional; they were simply not considered, and most would not have passed Arafat’s test anyway.

Arafat ends her piece on sumud, the Palestinian Arabic word for steadfastness, referring to a quiet refusal to disappear. She should know she has spent thousands of words asking us to do just that.

The Jews of Baghdad had a word for it too. In their Judeo-Arabic, ḏ̣all meant to stay, and when put in front of another verb, it meant to keep doing something. Staying and persisting were the same word. They were there for 2,500 years, and spoke Arabic for the last 1,300 of them. They were in Baghdad before the language was.