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Last week I mentioned that I don’t sound like an Oleh when I speak Hebrew, and that the origins of my Hebrew fluency would be a story for another dispatch. That story starts not in Israel, but at a Chinese restaurant in Vancouver.

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My abba and I both love soccer.

He played competitively in Israel, and even went semi-pro after moving to Canada. We’re season-ticket holders for the Whitecaps, Vancouver’s Major League Soccer team.

A few weeks after October 7, my mom recommended we go to a game. My dad and I had been glued to the TV since the Hamas attacks took place. A break and a game we loved would do us well, she reasoned.

Inevitably, the conflict followed us to BC Place, the Whitecaps’ home stadium. A man a few rows back spent the first half waving a Palestinian flag, chanting “free Palestine,” and high-fiving anyone who appeared to agree. There were no Israelis or Palestinians on the field. At halftime, I found an usher, a friendly Canadian who probably didn’t know much about the Middle East and may not have understood what I was asking. He went over and had a word, and the flag came down. Waving a flag is a form of expression, and I was the one who stopped it. I would do the same thing again.

Dor Turgeman scored for the New England Revolution in Montreal on Saturday. He’s only 22, from the port city of Ashdod, and is already considered one of Israel’s most promising young players.

In Montreal, he heard the crowd all game. Dor’s father, Gabi, told Sport5 that his son was subjected to chants of “death to Israel” and “free Palestine” throughout, and that Dor knew they were aimed at him.

Gabi watched the match live from Israel. He said it was both moving and infuriating, that he had spoken to his son before and after the game, and that he had not expected this to happen in Canada.

One person waving a flag in Vancouver is just one person. In Montreal, it was a whole section.

When I shared Turgeman’s story, the anti-Zionist pundit Glenn Greenwald responded by mocking him. “Poor Israeli soccer player,” he wrote. “You should hear what happens to the top Palestinian soccer players,” he continued, sharing headlines of Palestinian footballers killed by the Israeli military in Gaza.

That’s always how abuse of Israelis abroad is answered: a hand wave and a finger pointed at something the Israeli government did in Gaza or the West Bank.

I’m here to tell you that the phenomenon Turgeman faced isn’t new. It may have been energized after October 7 and the Gaza War, but it didn’t start in 2023, nor even in 1967.

Wind back the clock to 1948. The Olympics opened in London on July 29, ten weeks after Israel declared independence. The Palestine Olympic Committee—representing the Jewish community in the British Mandate—had been recognized for over a decade and had registered for the Games early that year. However, by the summer of 1948, the entity it represented had a different name.

Israel hoped to send two women to the Olympics. Its 50 qualifying male athletes were in uniform, fighting. The IOC ruled Israel ineligible on the grounds that it was not yet a member. This was an excuse: in actuality, Egypt warned it would not compete if Israel were recognized. Egypt competed, of course. So did Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, all of them at war with Israel. Israelis watched from home. The Jewish state did not appear at the Olympics until Helsinki in 1952.

When Egypt pushed Israel out of the Olympics in 1948, there was no occupation, no settlements, no Gaza war, and no Netanyahu government. Israel was only 10 weeks old.

Fast forward a decade, and Israel entered qualifying for the 1958 World Cup in the Africa-Asia zone. Turkey refused to play the Israeli team and withdrew. Indonesia, Egypt, and Sudan soon followed.

That meant Israel progressed without playing a match, which FIFA decided wasn’t acceptable. The international soccer federation created a new rule that no team could qualify without playing at least one game. So FIFA held a draw among European runners-up, teams that had already been knocked out, to see who would play Israel. Wales, already eliminated, was chosen and beat Israel.

Four years later, in 1962, Indonesia hosted the Asian Games. They refused visas to the Israeli team, and Israel withdrew. The occupation was still five years away. The Gaza War was more than six decades in the future. Itamar Ben Gvir had not yet been born.

Sixty-one years after Indonesia refused those visas, the same country was chosen to host the 2023 Under-20 World Cup. That March, six months before the Gaza war, Israel’s U20 team qualified on the field for the first time in its history. The governor of Bali refused to host the Israeli team. Indonesia’s federation canceled the draw. FIFA moved the entire tournament out of the country and fined the federation. Indonesia gave up its own automatic place as host, in a competition it hadn’t reached since 1979, rather than let Israeli teenagers play.

The tournament went to Argentina. Israel beat Brazil in the quarterfinals, and the winning goal in the 105th minute was scored by Dor Turgeman.

In 1974, at the Asian Games in Tehran, Kuwait—an authoritarian monarchy—and North Korea—a single-party communist dictatorship—refused to play Israel. Kuwait suggested expelling Israel from the Asian Football Confederation altogether. The resolution passed 17-13, with six abstentions. Israel had been an AFC member for two decades; they even won the Asian Cup at home in 1964. It was in Asia that Israel qualified for its first and only World Cup appearance in 1970.

For the next 20 years, Israel was homeless in international sports. Israel played competitive matches with countries in Oceania, traveling 25,000 kilometers to face teams like New Zealand, Australia, and Samoa. This continued until UEFA, Europe’s federation, accepted Israel during the hopeful years after Oslo.

Most people who call for Israel’s expulsion from European football today don’t know how Israel ended up in Europe’s leagues to begin with; the history of the Asian boycotts is simply not on their radar.

Now Europe, the Israeli athlete’s safe haven after decades of exclusion in Asia, is no longer safe. A year before Montreal, Rangers were interested in signing Turgeman. On July 11, 2025, a group calling itself Concerned Rangers Fans wrote to the club’s chief executive and board, asking them not to sign him. They weren’t judging his football, they said. He was 20 at the time. They wanted to know whether he had served in the IDF, suggested that if he had, he might be guilty of war crimes, and wrote that this “must be immediately disqualifying.” Nearly 70% of Israeli footballers serve. The rule they proposed would exclude most of them.

They also made a commercial case, urging the board to consider resale value, given that the market for Israeli players is limited and shrinking. And if the signing went ahead, they “would feel unable to continue to support the club monetarily.” That deal fell through, and Turgeman signed for New England that August. His father later said European clubs weren’t eager to sign Israeli players during the war, and that part of the decision was to send him somewhere more welcoming. A 20-year-old went to America because Europe wasn’t really an option.

Israel and Ireland play each other twice this fall. Israel’s “home” game will be held at the Nagyerdei Stadion in Debrecen, Hungary. Ireland’s home game will be played without fans at a 4,500-seat stadium in Bačka Topola, Serbia. The Football Association of Ireland, whose members voted to ask UEFA to suspend Israel, cited “operational challenges” for moving its own match out of Dublin. Neither country will play this match at home. One isn’t allowed to, and the other would rather not. I wrote in May about why Ireland, in particular, can’t stop thinking about Israel.

The war in Gaza has given the movement to isolate Israel in sports a new legitimacy. Shunning Israeli teams and harassing Israeli players is no longer confined to the Arab and Muslim world, or to the Cold War regimes that first championed it.

But that is where it started. It was there before October 7. It was there before Israel controlled East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. It will be there after Netanyahu leaves office. It may get quieter. It won’t go away, no matter what righteous excuses the people screaming at a 22-year-old in Montreal come up with.

This dispatch is the first in a new slice-of-life series I’m calling Notes From Tel Aviv, dropping every Thursday evening. Today’s installment will be available for all subscribers with a free trial; subsequent Notes From Tel Aviv will be exclusive to paid subscribers.

There’s a photo on my phone from Saturday, April 23, 2022, and every year it feels a little stranger to me.

That morning, I was walking my dog Igal on the Tayelet—in Hebrew, “the boardwalk”—the beachfront promenade where Tel Avivim jog, ride scooters, argue, and sip iced coffee.

On weekends, plenty of locals avoid the Tayelet altogether because it fills up with people from all over Israel.

But on this particular Saturday, I decided to brave the crowds and venture out. Even amid the heavy weekend foot traffic, you just can’t beat a springtime Mediterranean breeze. Igal needed a good walk, anyway.

Near the Dan Hotel, I noticed a group of large men in plain clothes moving quickly, out of sync with the usual boardwalk pace. Then I saw the white hair and the black polo shirt.

It was Benjamin Netanyahu, power-walking right down one of Tel Aviv’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfares.

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Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Washington on Monday night knowing exactly what was waiting for him: a meeting, a funeral, and uncharted political terrain.

Netanyahu knew Israel had already been excluded from negotiations on Iran, the issue that mattered most to him. Mediators from Pakistan, Egypt and Qatar spent the previous days working on a proposal to resolve disagreements over the Strait of Hormuz and revive the memorandum of understanding the United States signed with Tehran last month. Iran and Oman approved it. The only outstanding item is Trump’s signature, and the White House was holding off on that decision until the president had seen Netanyahu. Despite starting the war on the side of the US, Israel will not be a signatory. It was not at the table, and it cannot amend the 60-day deadline for resolving issues related to Iran’s nuclear problem that expires next month. Here, Israel is totally dependent upon the United States.

Netanyahu knew before he arrived in Washington about the civilian nuclear agreement that the US had signed with Saudi Arabia the week before. He knew that this agreement contained no clause on a coveted normalization of ties with Israel. He knew about Trump’s Truth Social post saying that the agreement hinges on Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords. And the prime minister knew that the Saudis had immediately clapped back, saying that social media posts do not alter signed agreements. Asked later about the normalization condition he had attached to the Saudi nuclear agreement, the president said he had not spoken to Saudi Arabia about the Abraham Accords.

Here too, Israel is left dependent on America.

Netanyahu had also heard what the president was saying about him. On Monday, Trump was asked about Israel’s objection to selling F-35 stealth fighter jets to Turkey. This has long been Israel’s policy, and earlier this month, Netanyahu pushed that position personally with an appearance on Fox & Friends. Trump doesn’t like being told what to do (Bibi should know this by now), and said as much to the reporter who asked him about the F-35s. Turkey is no fan of Israel or of Netanyahu, Trump acknowledged, but “they’ve been great for me.” Then on Tuesday morning, hours before the meeting, Trump went on the Fox show, where he was asked about the intelligence Netanyahu was bringing him on Pickaxe Mountain, the underground site near Natanz where Israeli intelligence believes Iran has moved centrifuges. Trump said the US Space Force had the best cameras in the world trained on it and he knew exactly what was happening there. It was not a big problem. He was irritated that Netanyahu had announced it publicly rather than raising it with him privately. “I don’t need Bibi to tell me that. Bibi’s telling me that because he wants me to stay involved.”

Amid all of this, Netanyahu knew too that American sympathies had crossed over: for the first time since Gallup began asking in 2001, more Americans side with the Palestinians than with Israel, 41 percent to 36, with independents flipping for the first time and Republican sympathy at its lowest point since 2004. Here, Israel is truly at the mercy of America—not just the government, but the overwhelming tide of popular opinion.

Benjamin Netanyahu boarded the plane to DC anyway, because a meeting with Trump was the only thing left available to him. Israeli surveys this week show that the government’s handling of October 7 is the top issue for undecided voters. The achievements in Iran that Netanyahu expected to run on have not materialized. Jewish Israelis backed the Iran campaign at 93% in early March, a level of support no government has seen in decades. Likud now polls at its lowest since August 2025 and trails General Gadi Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar party in Channel 12’s latest poll.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham died on July 11, and the memorial service was what finally got Netanyahu into the Oval Office. He had spent weeks trying to secure the invitation, and American officials told CNN they were frustrated by what they saw as Israeli attempts to force the meeting onto the president’s schedule through leaks to the press.

The funny thing is, Lindsey Graham of all people had told Netanyahu that this would happen.

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Last November, at the Republican Jewish Coalition summit in Las Vegas, Graham told the Jerusalem Post that annexing the West Bank would isolate Israel and cost it American support, doing more damage to the country’s future than any Iranian bomb. A single state would either end Israel as a Jewish state or leave millions without rights. The only way to keep Israel both Jewish and democratic, once security conditions allow, is two states.

Graham also spoke about Saudi-Israel normalization. It would require a political solution with the Palestinians. Graham was not channeling any special wisdom here; he was only repeating what Saudi officials have been saying very clearly since the 1980s, a message that Israeli leaders have consistently opted to ignore.

“Being pro-Israel means telling hard truths,” the late senator said.

Nobody could question Lindsey Graham’s commitment to Israel’s security. Unreleased documentary footage obtained by the Wall Street Journal and reported on Sunday, shows Graham in his Senate office on March 4 preparing to fly to Florida and persuade the president to bring the United States to support Israel with a bombing campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, on top of the Iran war already underway. Elsewhere in the footage, Senator Graham celebrates the war in Iran that he helped bring about and compares Trump and Netanyahu to Roosevelt and Churchill.

There is always an excuse to dismiss warnings from outsiders. They don’t understand Israel’s reality. They don’t have our best interests at heart. Could Israeli leaders make this argument in good faith about Lindsey Graham? No chance.

Good faith or not, Netanyahu chose to ignore him. The consequences came home today, on precisely the thing he had flown to Washington to get.

Graham was deeply invested in Saudi-Israel normalization, and he understood what it would mean for the Jewish state. He had met the crown prince himself and spent the Biden years assembling the Republican votes any Senate-ratified Saudi security guarantee would need, since 67 senators is not a number a Democratic administration reaches on its own. That work does not transfer. Two days after he died, the governor of South Carolina appointed his sister Darline to serve out the term; she inherits the seat but nothing else.

The Netanyahu-Trump meeting ran ninety minutes and was closed to the press throughout. Netanyahu entered through the West Executive Avenue door, only partly visible to reporters, rather than the West Wing entrance, where Trump has previously come out to greet him. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who met Trump earlier that morning, used the same door.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt covered both meetings in one sentence, calling them positive and productive. Zelenskyy went on Telegram afterward and described what he and the president had discussed: licensing to produce Patriot interceptors, and how to restart talks with Moscow. Netanyahu’s office released a photo of the president and prime minister sitting beside a model of Air Force One.

In the end, Netanyahu came to Washington as a sideshow to a funeral. The prime minister of Israel was reduced to asking America for a prize that the man being buried had already told him how to win, and had warned him he would lose. He got a photograph with a toy airplane.

An announcement from The Middle Ground: this Thursday, July 30, I'm launching Notes From Tel Aviv — a weekly personal dispatch, a slice of life from here. The first one is about an awkward encounter with Benjamin Netanyahu on the Tayelet, and it's free to everyone. After that, Notes goes out to paid subscribers, $8 a month or $72 a year. The regular essays stay free.

Dear readers,

The Middle Ground just passed a thousand subscribers.

When I started this project just a few months ago, I was mainly writing for my lovely mother and a few dozen others. It was a personal project to get some of my thoughts on the page: the hopes and frustrations, the tragedy and the promise that comes with living in Israel in 2026.

Yet it became clear very quickly that my Ima wasn’t the only one who wanted a different perspective on Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish world. There are so many who want something new, something that hits that nuance between thoughtless cheerleading and reflexive condemnation.

I’ve heard from people in Israel and around the Diaspora with strong feelings, some agreement, some disagreement. I’ve been flattered to have my work shared by people whom I deeply admire like Judea Pearl, Ambassador Daniel Shapiro, Magdi Jacobs, Dan Senor, and Michael Koplow; it’s also been mentioned on major podcasts and featured in newsletters. And I’ve attracted a couple of haters. It comes with the territory.

Now I want to tell you about what’s coming next.

I’ll continue to publish my regular essays, and these will remain free for everyone.

Starting next Thursday, July 30, I’ll be launching Notes From Tel Aviv, a series of short personal dispatches that capture the things that don’t fit neatly into my political essays: a slice of life, what it really feels like to write from Israel, to be raising a young family here, and to be working for a Jewish, democratic future for this country.

New installments in Notes From Tel Aviv will drop every Thursday evening—a little something before Shabbat. The first one will be available to all readers; after that, these pieces will be exclusive to paid subscribers. You can support The Middle Ground and get access to this series by joining at just $8 a month or $72 for an annual subscription. This will help me grow The Middle Ground and put out even more work like this.

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And if you’re one of the handful of people who were already paying—before any subscriber benefits were announced—first, I’m incredibly honored, and second, you will, of course, get access to Notes From Tel Aviv!

Whether you’ve been here since the first post, or are just joining now: toda raba, a thousand times over.

— Eli

When I lived in New York, I always looked forward to that September week when the world arrived. I worked near Grand Central, and the streets filled with motorcades and world leaders. For a few days, everyone’s attention was on just a few blocks of Manhattan. Zohran Mamdani knows how powerful that spotlight is.

He recently told the New York Times that his administration was “in conversations” about whether it could arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when the Israeli prime minister visits for the UN General Assembly. Mamdani then made a video just over two minutes long, with an American flag behind him and soft presidential lighting. This time, there was no charming smile or warmth. Instead, he read a sentence seriously, as if he wanted you to believe he could make it happen. The video was well made. That’s the first thing to notice.

I won’t say Israel fought this war perfectly. It was long, brutal, and fought under impossible conditions. There’s a lot that deserves close scrutiny and will be debated for years. But Hamas wanted and started this war, with the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. That fact is missing from Mamdani’s statement. Many of those killed were Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. Israel did strike hospitals, and Hamas operated from inside them, which Mamdani leaves out. I can recognize all of this at once. Mamdani cannot, or does not want to, and that’s the point. He is a committed anti-Zionist, but a sophisticated one, and that’s what makes him dangerous.

This sophistication is important to understand, because it is central to his approach. Mamdani does not deny October 7 or traffic in crude conspiracy; he doesn’t have to—he simply steps around it. He builds his case out of things that are true, or true enough to pass a fact-check, and does his real work through what he leaves out. A swastika would drive away the reasonable people Mamdani wants to reach. Instead, he reassures them. He offers a flag, a suit, the language of international law, and a number—73,000—and asks you not to notice the war that led to it. This is a much more effective approach than older forms of antisemitism, and it is why he, not the students chanting at campus rallies, is the one to take seriously.

You can see the craftsmanship in how he handles the one inconvenient truth. The video opens with its headline: “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.” This is not, strictly speaking, Mamdani’s own accusation; it is the International Criminal Court’s, supported by international law. No one can call him an antisemite or an anti-Zionist for repeating a warrant the ICC has already issued, and that is the sophistication again. He lets the institution make the accusation and stands behind it.

Then he builds up to what sounds like an announcement, but when it comes, about ninety seconds in, it is actually the opposite: “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.” He has no power to arrest anyone, and he knows it. So he hides this admission in the middle of the video, beneath the production, and ends by calling Netanyahu “not welcome” in the city, which is what you say when you cannot say “not admitted.”

Mamdani is clever in his omissions. In almost two minutes about a war, the word Hamas never appears—no October 7, no hostages, no fighters shooting from beneath hospitals. I do not believe what happened in Gaza is genocide, and the film itself shows why the word needs so much help: genocide is staged with a single actor in the frame, so everything that would put a second one there is cut. But the most revealing cut is the last one. Israel is three months from an election.

Just before Mamdani released his video, Yair Golan’s Democrats held their first primary. Turnout reached 86 percent. Nearly a hundred thousand voted—reservists, protesters, Israelis who chose to rebuild the left after October 7 rather than abandon it. Golan called his group the spearhead of the camp for change. Polls put the camp for change ahead of Netanyahu’s. Mamdani never mentions a two-state solution or any vision for Israeli-Palestinian peace. An Israel that can replace its government is an Israel with a future, not one destined for disappearance. That fact undermines his narrative, so it is omitted, along with Hamas.

Netanyahu had already been dismissing the threat on New York talk radio, presenting himself as the last man standing between a Hamas-supporting mayor and the only democracy that shares American values. Here is what the coverage misses: someone as sophisticated as Mamdani knows that a war-criminal video is a gift to Israel’s prime minister. It lets Netanyahu play the last defender of a besieged nation and rally the voters who decide Israeli elections. But the same two minutes are a gift to Mamdani too: they thrill the progressive base that elected him and mark him, well beyond New York, as the one politician willing to say it out loud. What helps Netanyahu in Netanya and Beer Sheva helps Mamdani in Brooklyn — and he made it knowing exactly that. On this point, the two are not enemies. They are each other's best material, and both know it.

So notice who is disappointed when the Zionist left shows signs of life. A real two-state camp—with serious leaders, strong turnout, and a true alternative to the right—should be good news for anyone who wants this war to end. For the kind of politics Mamdani practices, it is a threat, because that approach is based on the idea that Israel can only be ended, not fixed. He is the clearest example of this: a man who can watch a hundred thousand Israelis vote to remove the annexationists from power and find nothing in it worth mentioning. The sharpest irony, which should trouble Netanyahu most, is that his own October 7 government invigorated this left. The annexation, the settler impunity, and the endless war gave the camp for change a turnout it could never have achieved on its own.

Imagine an Israel with a different government: no Ben Gvir, no Smotrich, no Netanyahu. The war in Gaza would look the same on a map, but everything around it would change. There would be no annexation minister overseeing the West Bank, and no prime minister whose survival depends on keeping the most extreme members in his cabinet. The war would simply be a war again, and hopefully it would end. Mamdani would keep all his beliefs, but lose the one thing that made them spread: the increasing sense, even among former skeptics, that he is just describing what everyone already sees.

Mamdani’s approach cannot survive an Israel that debates, corrects, and refuses to continue the path of Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and Netanyahu.

The way to answer Mamdani’s theatrics is not with a better video or a sharper rebuttal to his arguments. Mamdani is wrong about a lot, but he is sophisticated enough to make sure his arguments serve his agenda. You answer it by becoming the country he insists you cannot be.

This is something Benjamin Netanyahu understands. It is why he wants this fight, and why the mayor’s attack was a gift. He needs Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani needs Netanyahu.

Both New York City and Israel would be better off without either of them.

For a few weeks this summer, Charles Clore Park was the happiest place in the country. Thousands of people in sky-blue and white, most with no real connection to Argentina beyond a post-army trip through Buenos Aires and Patagonia, gathered on the Tel Aviv shoreline to sing songs they had learned by heart. “An Argentine is born wherever he wants,” one person told Haaretz. This was the closest we have come to having a national team at a World Cup. Israel last qualified in 1970, its only appearance, and most Israelis doubt we will qualify again soon.

I remember what that feels like. In fall 2001, Israel reached the last game of World Cup qualifying needing to beat Austria at home. I was a boy in Vancouver, where we couldn’t watch the game, so my father sat at the computer refreshing the score. We were a minute away from the result we needed when Andreas Herzog drove home a free kick to make it 1-1. Austria took the playoff place, and we were left out. That draw is the closest we’ve come since 1970, and I think it was also the last time my heartbreak over this team was only about football.

This summer, Israel was not at the World Cup—it has never been in my lifetime—so I did what I could. My other country is Canada, where I grew up, and the co-hosts were the one squad nobody had assigned a meaning to, which suited me fine. When they were eliminated, I adopted Argentina, like half of Israel. Not for their pro-Israel President Javier Milei, not for Netanyahu, but for Messi, for the fans, for the true relief of ninety minutes that—after the last three years Israelis have been through—were allowed to be only about a ball. The final did not reward the devotion: a dreadful, boring 1-0 that crawled into extra time, and I am a lifelong fan who fell asleep before the only goal. The holiest war of the summer was waged over a match I slept through. Which is the point—it was never really about football.

The day of the match Prime Minister Netanyahu put on an Argentina shirt, took a ball from the Argentinian ambassador, and posed for the cameras, saying, “I don’t hide that I’m an Argentina fan. We have no greater or better friend.” Smotrich, banned from Britain over the settlements, pulled on the full Argentina kit and posed with the ambassador in his office: “I may not be able to enter the UK because I am destroying the idea of a Palestinian state, but two goals got in nicely.” Ben Gvir posted a photo of Milei and Messi at the Western Wall, writing, “we will love those who love Israel.” The foreign minister, the UN ambassador, and the transport minister all made videos with the envoy, as if a football result was a treaty they had helped negotiate. Baruch Marzel went further, filming himself burning a Spanish flag. Marzel spent a decade as Meir Kahane’s right hand in Kach, the movement Israel banned as a terrorist group, and once threw a Purim party at the grave of the man who killed twenty-nine Palestinians at prayer in Hebron.

Loving a team and claiming it are different things. The kids at Charles Clore Park loved Argentina because they could, because of Messi. The ministers loved it because Milei loves Israel, which let them recast a happy crowd as an endorsement and conscript everyone at the party without asking. Shared happiness, to this government, is one more thing to use.

I won’t pretend that only one side tried to claim the moment; the other side wasn’t any better in its own right. When Argentina beat Egypt, whose manager had waved the Palestinian flag after an earlier win and told a press conference that anyone without compassion for Palestinians “is not a human being,” roughly one in ten posts about Messi or Argentina turned antisemitic within a day, more than 300,000 of them. Someone changed the referee’s Wikipedia page to say he was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, a claim the cited source never made, and the screenshots spread faster than the correction. “Egypt lost to Zionism,” went one Egyptian YouTube video. Supporting Palestinians is not antisemitism. Making up a Jewish referee to explain a lost match is.

Neither country fits the roles they were given. Spain, cast as the villain, has under Pedro Sánchez become Israel's fiercest Western critic: it recognized Palestine in 2024, embargoed arms, and called the war a genocide. It also expelled its Jews in 1492 and didn’t recognize Israel until 1986. Whatever Spain is in this story, it isn't the good guy. But Argentina isn’t perfect either. Argentina is where Eichmann hid after the war, where the embassy was bombed in 1992, and the AMIA Jewish center in 1994—twenty-nine people died, then eighty-five, in the country’s worst terror attack, which is still mostly unpunished. It’s also where Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor who accused President Kirchner of covering up that attack to protect Iran, was found dead with a bullet in his head days after making the accusation. That’s the country we chose as our national team. To love it without seeing its flaws is also a kind of denial, just a softer version of what I’m criticizing in others.

Messi, at thirty-nine, is unlikely to be back, and for a few weeks a country this divided did gather around one player and one team.

The government made sure it didn’t last. The same week the ministers wrapped themselves in an Argentina shirt, they marched to the Gaza fence under the banner “Gaza is ours,” demanding the settlements be rebuilt. A government that cannot let a football match stay a match will not let a ceasefire, a court, or an army stay what it is either. The instinct is always the same: take what belongs to someone else and make it a campaign prop. The real contest is still ahead, and unlike Sunday’s final it answers to no referee. Election day is October 27, and the outcome is ours.

As the final approached, I found my own joy draining out. I had adopted Argentina for the relief of ninety minutes allowed to be only about the game, and watching Israel’s government and Kach activists climb into the shirt and claim the crowd as its own had taken even that.

So here is who was missing from all of it. Not the ministers, not the Egyptian coach, not the accounts inventing a Jewish referee—none of them cared about the people at the center of the story. The players were props; so were the fans. Smotrich and Marzel are not soccer fans, and never were.

If you want to see the real Argentina in Israel, it isn’t Milei’s revolution or a jersey from an ambassador. It’s the Gaza border. Start in 2014, with Daniel Tragerman — four years old, from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, killed by a Hamas mortar with three seconds between the siren and impact, not enough time to reach the safe room. His family’s photo of him showed a boy in a Messi shirt, number 10, beside a Lego tower taller than he was.

For Daniel, Argentina wasn’t geopolitics. It was football.

And it is Nir Oz. It is Yair and Eitan Horn, Argentine-born brothers taken from the kibbutz on October 7 and held in Gaza for 498 and 738 days. Yair supports Hapoel Be’er Sheva, the team I grew up supporting, and when he came home, he returned to the stadium and lifted the State Cup with the players. And it is Shiri Bibas and her two boys, Ariel and Kfir—Kfir was the youngest hostage of all, just nine months old when he was taken—an Argentine-Israeli family from that same kibbutz who did not come home. It is Shiri’s husband, Yarden Bibas, and his best friends the Cunios—another Argentine-Israeli family from the same kibbutz, kidnapped that morning and freed only last October. The bodies of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir were returned in February 2025. Milei declared national mourning; Buenos Aires renamed a street for them. That is the real bond between these countries: not a borrowed jersey, not a political stunt, but a mother and a baby, and a kibbutz on the Gaza border.

The same week Israel's ministers posed in the jersey, Milei was greeting Yair Horn at the AMIA memorial in Buenos Aires, at the ceremony for the 85 murdered in 1994. The government spent the week calling Milei “no greater friend.” But the real friendship was already here—the Argentine-Israeli families of that kibbutz, the community that filled Charles Clore Park and then packed Menora, Tel Aviv’s main arena, for the final when the park could not hold them all. The government could have honored them. Instead, on the eve of the final, a Spanish flag went up in flames in the West Bank, held by a man whose politics this government has mainstreamed.

Many American Jews are becoming politically homeless, and this week made it clear why, both in Congress and on America’s most-watched podcast. First, on Tuesday, 103 House Democrats voted to end all American military aid to Israel—not just to reduce or condition it, but to end it. Thomas Massie’s amendment to the 2027 State and Foreign Operations bill would have cut the full $3.3 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing with no exceptions. The amendment failed 104 to 314, but nearly half the Democratic caucus supported it. Minority Whip Katherine Clark, who led floor strategy that day, voted yes, while her leader, Hakeem Jeffries, voted no.

A party whose whip and leader can’t agree on supporting its central Middle Eastern ally is in open conflict with itself. The old certainties are gone.

Many reactions to this vote miss the real issue. This isn’t about Democrats turning against Jews or forcing American Jews out of the party. American Jews are not all the same. Anti-Zionist Jews on the left have found a place in the Democratic coalition. Orthodox Jews joined the Republican Party years ago and have little reason to go back.

The real impact is on liberal Zionists, who make up a big part of American Jewry. They support abortion rights and a Jewish state, care about climate policy, and back the Iron Dome. They might criticize Netanyahu but still defend Israel’s legitimacy. For years, this wasn’t seen as a contradiction—it was what it meant to be a mainstream Democratic Zionist. No one forced them to choose.

That has changed, and this week showed it more clearly than ever. The alliance and aid are still there, but the days when you didn’t have to choose between your party and your Zionism are over.

This is the real trap. On the left, support for Israel has gone from a bipartisan norm to a source of conflict within the Democratic Party. The pro-Israel side is losing ground among young people, activists, and now half of House Democrats. Recent Democratic primary wins by anti-Zionist candidates like Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York and Melat Kiros in Colorado make this clear. It’s understandable that liberal Zionists feel uneasy about these results and Tuesday’s vote in Congress. But the Republican Party, which some suggest as an alternative, isn’t a true home either. Its support for Israel is a receding inheritance: a majority of Republicans under 50 now hold an unfavorable view of Israel—57 percent, up from 35 percent in 2022—and a post-Trump party is more likely to follow its voters than lead them. That same base is where antisemitism is resurging—Nick Fuentes and his “groyper” movement went mainstream through a Tucker Carlson interview watched more than 20 million times, in a year the ADL logged near-record antisemitic incidents.

That leads us to Wednesday. The day after the House vote, Vice President JD Vance spent three hours talking with Joe Rogan, whose show reaches more young American men than any TV network. This is the group whose support for Israel is dropping fastest. The timing was important: the United States was in a war with Iran, and Vance had helped negotiate the deal to end it. On Rogan’s show, he did something Republicans usually avoid—he downplayed Israel’s special status, calling it just another ally like France or the UK. His grievance was concrete: a reported, FARA-registered, Israeli-government-funded campaign that paid conservative influencers to keep young MAGA voters supportive of Israel and that, he said, attacked him over the Iran deal. But he pushed past the documented story, claiming elements within Israel’s system were “beyond a shadow of a doubt” swaying American opinion to keep the war going. Israel, he said, is losing the battle for American support.

Vance went even further. Rogan brought up the Epstein files, a case that has captured the attention of Vance’s MAGA base and which Vance admitted the administration mishandled. Without being asked, Vance said Jeffrey Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.” There is no evidence for this. The idea that Epstein was a Mossad asset is a common claim in antisemitic corners of the internet and has been denied by former Israeli leaders. Vance didn’t just repeat the rumor; he said Epstein was linked to the “left of center” of Israel’s “deep state,” mentioning his real friendship with former prime minister Ehud Barak. A sitting vice president took an old story about Jews and hidden power and, on the country’s biggest platform, gave it the weight of his office. This wasn’t a fringe congressman but the likely future leader of his party, gliding from a real influence campaign into conspiracy. So, in one week, liberal Zionists saw 103 Democrats vote to cut off aid on Tuesday, and the Republican heir apparent spread Mossad conspiracy theories on Wednesday.

Both doors are, in their own ways, shut. This is the harsh irony of the “You have a home with us” ads New York Republicans ran at Jewish voters that week, the ones comparing Democratic Socialists to Nazis. An invitation is not a home. That is political homelessness: they want your vote, not you.

But this is not a rout. Ninety-eight Democrats, including the party leader, voted to keep the aid. This is a party in a difficult, public debate, not one that has abandoned its position.

That half still has ambitious champions. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew and self-described Zionist considering a 2028 run, maintains his support for Israel while criticizing Netanyahu, stating he does not “waffle or waver because of polling.” Rahm Emanuel, also a potential candidate, argues a pro-Israel Democrat can still win the White House, but only if the “status quo” changes. He has told Israelis in Tel Aviv not to expect unconditional American aid. Gavin Newsom also expresses pride in supporting Israel while criticizing Netanyahu and has distanced himself from labeling Israel an “apartheid” state. None are the reflexive Zionists of a decade ago. Together they constitute the surviving pro-Israel position: supportive, done with Netanyahu, and openly conditional. That is the lane worth fighting for.

But honesty goes both ways. These leaders are the exception, not the rule. About three in five Democrats now tell pollsters the United States is too supportive of Israel. The clearest sign of where the party is heading isn’t Shapiro but Ro Khanna, a congressman who once admired Israel’s economic model and now calls its conduct in Gaza genocide. He was among the 103 who voted to cut the aid, and after being detained by armed settlers in the West Bank, he took his case to the likes of Hasan Piker and Drop Site News. Even then, interviewers pushed him to say Hamas had a right to attack Israelis on October 7 and criticized him when he refused. When a former supporter goes that far and still doesn’t meet the left’s standards, it shows the center of gravity is shifting, not staying in place.

The right still has a counterbalance, though it is shrinking. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, defends Israel’s actions and focuses on Iran; the pro-Israel group he represents is real. But Rubio represents the party’s present, while Vance is its future—he is younger, popular with the base, led the Iran talks, and his comments about Epstein were intentional, not accidental. Even Rubio is now negotiating to reduce aid. The right is starting to look like the left: an establishment that still defends Israel, but is being overtaken by a group that does not. The pro-Israel Democrat is losing his party, and the pro-Israel Republican is being replaced by someone who supports Israel one day and questions it the next. Both sides are moving in the same direction, and neither is slowing down.

But the biggest factor is not in Washington at all. Liberal Zionists have lost ground not only because of the American left but also because of Israel’s own path: a government pushing for West Bank annexation, prolonging the fighting in Gaza, and weakening its own democracy. If this continues, no Democratic primary fight will make the pro-Israel position defensible. But this direction is not set in stone. If Israel moves away from annexation and toward regional integration, and works to restore its democracy, it would give its supporters abroad something worth defending again. The way back to a political home depends as much on Jerusalem as on Washington.

Last Wednesday, Representative Ro Khanna of California was stopped on a West Bank road by armed Israeli settlers. Men with American rifles blocked his van near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian village whose residents settlers had already expelled, and held his group for over an hour. When soldiers arrived, according to Khanna, they sided with the settlers and kept his group blocked; the IDF says its troops dispersed the settlers and reopened the road, denies detaining anyone, and notes Khanna never coordinated the visit. Only after police arrived was the road cleared.

Khanna is considering a presidential run. He came on a tour organized by Palestinians, returned to California, and released a video. That video is why I am writing. Almost everything in it is true, which is exactly why it demands attention and anger, though not for the reason he wants.

Nothing Khanna filmed is invented. The impunity behind it is real. The settlers around Khirbet Zanuta include Yinon Levi, who shot and killed Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist, in a nearby village last year, a killing Hathaleen filmed as it happened, and was released within days.

What he invented was himself. “Not as a politician,” he says to the camera, “just as a person.” But this is a man who returned from a campaign trip his campaign paid for, more resolved to run, and booked to tell it all to Hasan Piker on Monday. He arrived without announcing himself, told the embassy the trip was private, did not coordinate with Israeli officials, and only appeared publicly once he was back home with the footage. Someone truly moved by what they saw would not turn it into a communications strategy. Palestinian organizers planned the trip to show him a specific perspective, and they succeeded. What they left off the schedule is revealing. According to the Israeli organizers, he was offered a meeting with freed hostages and declined. He was also offered a visit to the Druze of the Golan and a briefing on how aid gets into Gaza, and he declined both. That shows what he really came for.

He did not have to stage being detained. The West Bank gives that story to anyone who looks for it. That fact is an indictment of this Israeli government and Bezalel Smotrich, and I include myself in that criticism. But searching for the truth is not the same as collecting a story. The real difference is in what someone chooses not to see. In Khanna’s version, every Israeli is a villain: a settler, four soldiers, more settlers, the IDF, settlers who urinate and throw acid from rooftops, guards who beat a man for not speaking Hebrew. No Israeli is shown as a real person. A real person would have made the story more complicated and less convenient.

The Palestinians do not come off any better, even though Khanna’s video tries to show sympathy. In his version of the West Bank, not a single Palestinian makes a choice. They are only shown as victims, there to be pitied and filmed. A people with their own politics, decisions, and debates over decades are reduced to objects, only there to suffer. He erases them just as much as he erases the settlers, only in the opposite way. Neither group is shown as real people. Both are just props in his story.

There are Israelis Khanna could have shown but chose not to. For example, the mother who has spent almost two years not knowing which of her child’s bones are in a tunnel. Or the reservist who stands up to settlers and is called a traitor by his own government for it. The half of the country that has been in the streets against this coalition. Khanna built a trip to make sure he was never in a room with any of them. Then he claimed ideology had nothing to do with what he saw. The itinerary was built to show him one side, and he left with exactly the story he came for.

Then Khanna flew back to California. Leaving was always an option for him, but not for anyone else in his video. He could come, get his footage, and leave when he wanted. The father he mentions in his video keeps his dead son’s room and cannot leave Huwara; he is already home. Khanna passed through, filmed him, and left.

That same afternoon, a two-hour drive north, Rahm Emanuel stood at Tel Aviv University and said tougher things than anything on Khanna’s video, and he said them to the people who could actually respond. Emanuel told a room full of Israelis that their own government was “complicit in the horrors now being inflicted on innocent families in the West Bank.”

He said a true friend is someone who tells the truth “even when it’s painful,” and he called out extremists on both sides—the Greater Israel dream and the river-to-the-sea chant—right to the faces of those involved. Emanuel is also considering a 2028 run. He made his case in front of the people he was criticizing. Khanna made sure those people were far away before he said anything. Emanuel’s father ran guns for the Irgun; Emanuel criticizes Israel as someone who means to remain bound to it. Khanna criticizes it as someone who made sure he would be gone before anyone could answer.

I have spent years doing what Emanuel did from that stage from within Israel: trying to tell this country hard truths, in its own language, because I live here and want it to survive. I have to face what those years have achieved. Huwara still burned. An outpost I stood in was legalized anyway. Ben Gvir passed his death penalty for Palestinians only. The hard truth from someone who stays may be the easiest for a government to ignore, because it comes with the promise that I am not leaving, and I am not. That’s the possibility Khanna’s coldness makes me face. Criticism that costs the critic nothing is easy to dismiss. Criticism that costs everything is easy to wait out. Neither is the answer. I only know mine hasn’t worked yet.

Two Americans, one Wednesday, one country. This is the choice facing the Democratic Party, and it’s clear on the ground. Emanuel stands for the operator wing—those who stay close to Israel and speak hard truths because they want the alliance to last. Khanna stands for the movement wing, which is younger, louder, and speaks to people who question the alliance itself. This week made the choice obvious. I’m not neutral. My position depends on Khanna’s side losing, and I’d rather say that openly than pretend to be detached, as he does.

Someone is missing from Khanna’s video, and increasingly from his party: the Jew who belongs to this land and feels shame for what is done in its name. The one who can call Huwara a pogrom and mean it, but still wants the alliance that could give both peoples a better future. Khanna’s frame erases that Jew just as much as it erases the decent Israeli, for the same reason. He makes the story more complicated. He does not fit into a planned itinerary or a simple narrative.

No one in Khanna's West Bank is fully real to him. Not the settlers he needs as villains, not the Palestinians he needs as victims, not the ordinary Israelis who would have made the story more complex. Everyone is just a tool. And the tour didn't end at the airport. He flew home in time for Sunday's Meet the Press, where he went on opposite Netanyahu and called the IDF liars, booked Hasan Piker for the next day, and, of course, sent out a fundraising email. What looks like emotion is really arrangement, and it all points back to him. Welcome to Ro Khanna's West Bank Theater.

Rahm Emanuel opened his speech at Tel Aviv University this week with four words Israelis almost never hear from a visiting American: I understand your cynicism. Before a word of criticism, he granted the room what the outside world usually withholds — that their suspicion of foreign lectures is earned, that the Palestinian leadership is corrupt, that October 7 broke something that has not set back into place. Only then did he get to the point. The alliance that has underwritten Israel since its founding cannot survive as it is.

Unconditional American support was a mistake, he said, one that produced a prime minister who believed he could ignore Washington at no cost, and Israel will end up alone if it reaches for annexation and a Greater Israel. Then, telling the audience to hold their applause, he pledged to revive and expand the Biden-era settler sanctions: every Israeli who attacks Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, every official who backs them, every bank financing illegal settlements.

Inside the hall, the speech landed as what it was: the room applauded, more than once, even the call for sanctions. It was outside the room that many saw an attack. Online, the sharpest critics said Emanuel doesn’t share Israel’s fate, that he lectures from afar, that he is, beneath the surface, an antizionist pretending to be a Zionist. Many of them were themselves far away, posting, while Emanuel had come in person to speak directly to Israelis. The political left groups him with Democrats who have turned against Israel, while the right calls him Obama’s ally who clashed with Netanyahu over settlements in 2009 and was labeled, in Netanyahu’s own words, a self-loathing Jew. The language changes, but the tactic is the same: dismiss Emanuel so they don’t have to address his arguments. Interestingly, Democratic Majority for Israel, a strongly pro-Israel group, described his speech as serious and genuinely committed to Israel’s security.

None of it fits the man. Emanuel’s father was born in Jerusalem, joined the Irgun, and fought in the 1948 war. The family name honors an uncle buried on the Mount of Olives. Emanuel volunteered with the Israeli military during the Gulf War and spent years working to secure Israel’s future through peace with its neighbors.

The labels attacking Emanuel fit his proposal even less. What he asked for in Tel Aviv was not Israel’s isolation but the end of it: he called the two-state process discredited and sketched a “23-state solution” — full diplomatic relations with the entire Arab world, which would take responsibility for standing up an accountable Palestinian authority. The wish behind it is plain: an Israel normalized, integrated, secure, no longer a pariah. Yet the people reaching for the label file him in the same drawer as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, as though fighting over what kind of state Israel should be and doubting whether it should exist were one position. Rahm Emanuel is as Zionist as it gets. What he practices is liberal Zionism, a brand anyone is free to argue with, and one in steady decline in Israel itself. But if that is antizionism, the word no longer describes a position someone holds. It describes a tribe they’ve been thrown out of.

The most revealing thing Emanuel said all week wasn’t in his speech. He told reporters that in 2010, when he brought his son to the Western Wall for his bar mitzvah, a fringe activist named Itamar Ben Gvir was arrested for protesting his visit. Today, Ben Gvir is Israel’s minister of national security. If Emanuel had given this speech in Tel Aviv in 2005 or 2013, it would have been seen as typical tough love from a friend. The words and the speaker have barely changed in twenty years, but the country he addresses has.

This is the predicament of liberal Zionism, both in Israel and the United States. In Israel, voters keep choosing coalitions that support gradual annexation, ongoing control over millions of Palestinians, and settler violence that has become routine, though to be fair to the Israeli electorate, they haven’t had a chance since October 7, 2023. In America, Emanuel’s party base hasn’t moved closer to him but has moved past him; now, Democratic voters support Palestinians over Israelis by about four to one. Emanuel chooses to fight on both sides, criticizing Netanyahu’s government directly while also calling out those in his own party who cheered on October 8 as morally bankrupt. Still, the middle ground he defends is the only approach that keeps all of Israel’s goals together: being Jewish and democratic, secure, and accepted by other nations. The Ben Gvir–Smotrich approach trades away democracy and the world’s acceptance for territorial expansion and Jewish supremacy. The anti-Zionist left’s one-state idea gives up the Jewish homeland. Only liberal Zionism tries to keep all four, which is why its decline is not just sad but dangerous, and why pushing out its advocates is self-defeating.

I won’t pretend the skeptics are wrong about everything. Emanuel might run for president, and a person can mean every word and still watch the polls. There is also a ceiling here. No number of Rahm Emanuels in Tel Aviv auditoriums will change a single Knesset vote. It’s a comforting myth in the Diaspora that liberal Zionism’s future is decided in American primaries or opinion pieces. In reality, it’s decided at Israeli ballot boxes, where people like Emanuel don’t have a vote.

A speech of this nature serves to sustain the argument until meaningful change becomes feasible. Emanuel could have limited himself to the op-ed he previously published, or to what he called “spitballs from across the Atlantic.” Instead, he traveled to Israel and delivered his message directly, grounding his remarks in personal and familial history before offering criticism.

Emanuel’s timing was deliberate: Israel faces elections in the fall. One possible outcome, the return of the current government, would transform incremental annexation into a permanent reality. The alternative is a coalition comprising generals, centrists, and remnants of the Zionist left. While such a government would not solve all existing challenges, it could halt or even reverse annexation efforts, protect judicial independence, restrain settler violence, and restore responsible governance. This scenario does not constitute peace, but it represents the difference between keeping options open and foreclosing them entirely.

Emanuel was on his weakest ground when he blamed Israel’s isolation on Israeli policy. Some of it is real boycott — scientists dropped from journals, performers pulled from festivals — but the committed antizionist boycotts Israel because it exists, and no government in Jerusalem will satisfy people for whom the Jewish state itself is the offense. No policy change reaches them.

What this government does is worse: it feeds the boycott it can’t cause. People of real good faith, with no animosity toward Israel, watch a Ben Gvir cabinet and a war grinding into its third year that Israel didn’t start but shows little urgency to end, and they drift — until the merely uneasy are indistinguishable from the rejectionists. Those defectors should be argued with, and where they cross into boycott, condemned. But a Bennett, a Lapid, an Eisenkot would give them far less to defect over, and strip the true antizionists of their one real weapon: the appearance of a case. That is much of what a door held open would mean — the boycott shrinking back to the fringe, its recruits from the middle harder to find.

I do not endorse every aspect of Emanuel’s proposals. I remain skeptical that the Arab world is prepared to assume the precise responsibilities he envisions, and there is legitimate debate regarding military aid and sanctions. However, friendship does not require complete agreement, and Emanuel’s willingness to deliver difficult truths directly to those most affected is uncommon. For the alliance to endure beyond the current government, Israel will require advocates with sufficient credibility to communicate its case to Americans who have stopped listening. Emanuel is roughly what a pro-Israel Democrat looks like now — aid conditioned, settlers sanctioned, annexation a red line. That is the friendly wing, and driving him out as an antizionist only speeds the party's walk toward the door.

Near the end of the speech, Emanuel mentioned the elections this fall, Israel’s in October and America’s in November, and said he was hoping for a correction. A man in the audience called back: “So are we.” It was a friendly room, students and Tel Aviv liberals — its own measure of how narrow the constituency has become. But that voice from the seats is the whole argument in three words. Many Israelis are still waiting for the correction, unwilling to concede that what they know today is all that tomorrow is allowed to be.

This is the nuance that simplistic labels overlook. Emanuel did not travel to Tel Aviv to lament Israel’s situation; he came because he believes the nation retains agency, although the opportunity for meaningful choice is diminishing. The alternative to his vision does not promise immediate peace, but it preserves the possibility for future progress. This approach maintains Israel as a nation capable of realizing Emanuel’s aspirations, rather than foreclosing that potential for an entire generation. While this hope may be more modest than the prospect of peace, it remains the central issue at stake in the upcoming elections. For a cause that is nearly without a home, the ability of a country to retain its capacity for choice is of paramount importance.

In 2021, Itzik Saidyan set himself on fire. An infantry veteran struggling with PTSD, he did so after years of being turned away by the Defense Ministry office that was supposed to help him. He survived, badly burned. His story forces us to ask an old question: what does a country owe the people it sends to war?

This week, Saidyan went to the Knesset, where lawmakers debated a new Basic Law that would make Torah study a core value of the state. The law aims to exempt tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men from being drafted into the IDF, even though the army says it desperately needs them. Saidyan reminded them who actually fights. He said that, while Torah study is important, the highest respect should go to those who risk their lives—the few who face danger, lose friends, and recover the fallen. He was not asking for a monument, just that the state not claim in its most important law that staying home to study is equal to what he and his comrades did.

I have tried to explain what’s happening here to my colleagues and friends whom I usually speak with on these topics. Most of them live in North America and have spent years defending Israel in tough places—on campuses and at dinner tables where being called a “Zionist” feels like an accusation. For years, we have prided ourselves on what made Israel unique in its neighborhood: Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

I have always known that this statement is not perfect, and neither is Israel’s democracy — not with the nation-state law, not under an occupation of millions of Palestinians without the vote. Still, I believe it, and so do most people who say it. They point to real things: inside the Green Line, there are independent courts, a free press, equal citizenship under the law, and real elections. That promise made defending Israel feel honest, especially when Israeli governments pursued peace. This month, in the last working weeks of the Knesset before it dissolves for an election, the government set out to finish what it started four years ago and hollow it out.

Let’s start with the courts. On Sunday, for the first time ever, the cabinet said it would not follow a High Court ruling. The case itself was minor—a decision allowing the commercial broadcasting regulator to continue operating despite lacking sufficient members. The government’s argument makes sense; maybe a body below its legal minimum should not make binding decisions. Let’s accept that. But the real issue is bigger: now the government decides which court rulings to follow. Justice Minister Levin said the law binds everyone, including the court, and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi accused the justices of abusing their power.

This is more than just hypocrisy, and it is all on record. In 2019, Prime Minister Netanyahu criticized his own justice minister for saying the government did not always have to follow court decisions, writing that these decisions are binding on everyone. That was his clear position, in his own words. Seven years later, a different justice minister said the opposite and made it official policy, while Netanyahu said nothing. What changed was not the principle, but his need for it to disappear.

Now, the courts are only one front. The Knesset is set to dissolve on July 17, and in the days it has left, the coalition is racing to lock in the rest of its agenda—the product of a deal in which Netanyahu promised the ultra-Orthodox parties their priorities in exchange for keeping his government alive.

It is pushing the Torah Study Basic Law, which Saidyan opposed, toward passage, even as the chief of staff warns the army could collapse without the 80,000 men it would exempt from service. It is advancing a bill to split the attorney general’s powers, the only office that can independently investigate the government. It is moving the communications minister’s media bill toward final passage. And today, a bill headed for its final reading would let universities bar women from academic programs and, in one version, from libraries and labs, overriding the balance the High Court established in 2021. Each move has its own justification, but packed into the final two weeks before recess—when a dissolved Knesset can barely convene its committees—they are one coordinated act: a government stripping away every check on its power at once, before time runs out.

The government’s defenders insist that electoral victory is a mandate. Netanyahu’s coalition won; this is what its voters chose. They claim that an unelected court blocking an elected majority is the real threat to democracy. Winning confers the right to govern and to set policy, even if the opposition seeks to reverse it next time. But a mandate requires operating within the democratic system, and these two weeks—like much of this government’s tenure—have not.

More than a thousand days after October 7, Israel still doesn’t have an independent state commission to investigate the worst day in its history, even though a clear majority of Israelis want one. Instead, the coalition is pushing for a political commission it will appoint itself. In a recent Channel 14 interview, the prime minister boasted, “we brought back all the hostages, to the very last one,” then asked the room, “Is no one going to applaud?” When asked in the same interview what October 7 had cost him personally, he said he had lost a little weight. I wrote last week about what that answer revealed. The families of the murdered and the taken are still waiting for the one thing Netanyahu refuses to give them: the truth about what happened and who was responsible. A commission he appoints himself is designed to make sure they never get it. The October 7 Council calls it what it is: trading truth for political survival. This is the pattern of the week: a government deciding what it will forget, who it will abandon, which institutions it will silence, and which families will wait for answers that will never come.

This is why the real target isn’t the broadcasting regulator. As Haaretz’s Yossi Verter argues, Sunday’s defiance was a test run. Once a government shows it can declare a court ruling invalid “without authority,” the same logic could be used against a decision of the Central Elections Committee after the vote. The committee is chaired by a sitting Supreme Court justice, and coalition figures have already started attacking him. The ballot is the way out of this, which is exactly why the process around it is so important to watch.

But this doesn’t have to be the end of the story. On July 17, the Knesset dissolves, and Israelis go to the polls this October. The last two weeks aren’t a reason to lose hope, but they show what’s at stake. Israelis will decide the outcome. But the ballot isn’t the only thing being decided this year. It’s up to you whether the institutions you support and the conversations you have treat this as just another news story or as something that shapes what you are defending.

Saidyan asked what a country owes the people it sends to war. The answer, at a minimum, is a state worth the sacrifice—courts that bind everyone, a press it cannot silence, a vote it cannot ignore, and the honesty to investigate its own failures. That is what is on the ballot this October.

For years, we’ve relied on a single sentence in our toughest arguments: Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Now, this government is spending its final weeks turning the word “democracy” into a question—even for Israel’s most ardent defenders. Whether that remains true will be tested at the ballot box, and in what all of us who love this place are willing to say, between now and then, about the country we’ve spent so long defending.

This week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat for an interview on Channel 14—think of the outlet as Israel’s equivalent to Fox News or Newsmax.

Netanyahu was asked how October 7 had changed him; he paused and replied, “lost a little weight.” The audience laughed.

I thought of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Twenty-three years old and nearly six feet tall, Hersh was seized by Hamas terrorists from a roadside shelter near the Nova festival after a grenade tore off his left arm. When Israeli soldiers found his body in a tunnel under Rafah at the end of August 2024, he weighed about 115 pounds.

Since then, his mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, has worked to make sure the world knows what happened. After eleven months underground, Hersh was shot six times at close range by his captors. By then, he was emaciated. His body was too light and too small when he was finally brought home.

The same war changed both men, Benjamin Netanyahu and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, but not in remotely comparable ways. The prime minister lost a little weight and drew some cheap laughs. Hersh Goldberg-Polin lost his arm, a third of his body, and then his life.

Today marks a thousand days since October 7. The hostages are all home, so the ritual of counting days has lost its urgency. The Tel Aviv clock that once measured their captivity stopped at 843, when Ran Gvili’s remains were returned.

The thousand-day milestone is a reminder that Israel’s reckoning has yet to arrive rather than a moment of closure.

In the same interview where he joked about his slightly reduced waistline, Netanyahu reviewed the war’s results and briefly mentioned the hostages. He said the first goal was to bring them all back, and that Israel had done so. He did not say many returned in coffins.

A few days earlier, Finance Minister and far-right firebrand Bezalel Smotrich went further on a podcast, claiming it was thanks to him that all the hostages are here. Yet Smotrich voted against almost every deal that could have brought living hostages home sooner. Or Levy, a former hostage, slammed Smotrich’s comments as gaslighting.

This week, the man who led the hostage negotiations for Israel weighed in with a counter to the callous words coming from the prime minister and his cabinet. Nitzan Alon, the major general responsible for the hostage talks from the immediate post-October 7 period until the ceasefire last autumn, spoke at a conference at Reichman University.

Alon said that the war could have ended at least a year earlier. Of the hostages taken alive, about 40 died in captivity. In some cases, different choices or talks might have saved them. He argued the cabinet kept choosing partial deals that allowed the fighting to continue, all for a “total victory” he called a falsehood.

In the end, it took an American president—Donald Trump—to make it stop.

Alon chose his words carefully, and anyone quoting him should do the same. He did not claim that every death could have been prevented. Some hostages were killed by their Hamas captors before any negotiation could have saved them, and a few died from Israeli friendly fire. He did not accuse Netanyahu of killing the hostages, and he acknowledged the necessity of at least some degree of military action against Gaza’s terrorist rulers to bring them to the table.

The government’s defenders also have arguments: military pressure did help bring Hamas back to negotiations, and Hamas left the table more than once. Likud responded to Alon by saying that following his advice would have meant surrender.

Let’s accept all of that. Let’s agree that the situation was harsher and more complicated than any Israeli government has faced and that, as Alon said, there was some logic in keeping up the pressure, and yet—with no official review of the government’s actions after October 7, with no real accountability, we cannot simply accept Netanyahu’s cold dismissals of the hostages and Israel’s conduct in the war. Too many broken families have received more insults than answers from the people pretending to be their leaders.

Before Hersh Goldberg-Polin was killed, his parents confronted officials with a terrible, yet necessary question: If Israel applied too much pressure, would the hostages be executed?

The answer was always no. The government was confident that hostages were assets, not liabilities. Things would not end in a mass killing of prisoners by Hamas. Yet that is exactly how it ended for several. Hersh was shot six times in a tunnel. Now, the same officials who dismissed the risk are claiming credit for the outcome.

Netanyahu’s weight-loss boast was not an ill-considered joke. It is representative of a prime minister who has shunted responsibility aside for two years.

Netanyahu, Smotrich, and their associates will face voters this fall when Israelis elect a new Knesset for the first time since October 7. Their crass dismissal of the victims of the worst attack in Israeli history, one that happened on their watch, cannot get lost in the buzz of an election season. At stake in the election, among other things, is an official commission of inquiry into the Hamas attacks—something Netanyahu has consistently blocked. Instead, the prime minister treats the hostages as a figure to be counted once and set aside, a number that might trouble him for a moment before daily life moves on. For the 40 families whose loved ones came home in coffins, they were never a number. They were everything.

Benny Gantz was supposed to be the leader to end Netanyahu’s career. Instead, he keeps reviving it. The pundits suggested Gantz was on his way out of politics as his party remained below the electoral threshold for months. He hasn't quit, and this week he is back at the center of the race to unseat Netanyahu, which should trouble anyone who actually wants Netanyahu gone.

Gantz hasn’t gained any traction in the polls on his own, and he remains personally unpopular, as his social media posts are ratioed and mocked. His return to relevance isn’t only him and the remnants of Kachol Lavan. It is a new party altogether.

Dedi Simchi confirmed this week that he, Gantz, and Yoaz Hendel are in advanced talks to run on a single slate. The party is pitching itself as standing outside bloc warfare, part of neither the pro- nor the anti-Netanyahu camp. The Israel Hayom poll that ran alongside the talk gave it seven seats.

Before deciding what those seven seats mean, look at who is collecting them.

Gantz needs little introduction to anyone who lived through 2020, when he ran three times on a single promise: that he would not serve under Netanyahu, and then served under Netanyahu. The rotation agreement that justified it produced the most predictable broken promise in recent Israeli history. Netanyahu dissolved the government before the handoff, and Gantz was left having delivered more than a year of legitimacy in exchange for a premiership that never arrived. The episode did more than fail. It extended Netanyahu’s career at a time when three consecutive elections had been engineered to end it, and we know where the government that followed has taken the country.

Yoaz Hendel is not as well known, but his career tells a similar story. He is a former journalist and reserve battalion commander, a man of the national-religious right, who entered the Knesset in 2019 on Gantz’s slate. In March 2020, he and Zvi Hauser broke away to form their own faction, mainly to give Gantz the support he needed to join Netanyahu’s government, which the rest of Blue and White refused to do. Hendel became communications minister in that government, and later held the same post under Bennett and Lapid. He has served as a minister both with and against Netanyahu, without fully committing to either side. The party he now leads, the Reservists, focuses on ending the ultra-Orthodox draft exemption and openly says it will not boycott anyone, including Netanyahu and Ben Gvir.

Simchi is the one name in this trio Israelis recognize, and outsiders don’t, and the one the new party is counting on to launder the other two. He was chief of staff at the Home Front Command and ran the Fire and Rescue services, a serious man with no partisan history. On October 7, his son Guy, a paratrooper on leave at the Nova festival, got his friends into a shelter and, with a friend, unarmed, killed two terrorists before grenades killed him. Simchi recovered the body himself and returned to a Home Front Command situation room in Ramla during the shiva. It is an unimpeachable biography, which is precisely why it is useful. What it obscures is that Simchi’s political run was, until weeks ago, being discussed with the right; as of last month, he was considering running with Likud; and that on the question dividing these very merger talks, the inclusion of the ultra-Orthodox, he is the one least willing to exclude the Haredi parties. He has said he would join a government led by either Netanyahu or Eisenkot if it spared the country another election.

So the new force above the blocs is a man who broke his anti-Netanyahu pledge to serve Netanyahu, the man who engineered the cover for him to do it, and a general who considered running with Likud. None of the three will commit today to the only thing that removes Netanyahu.

That thing has never been complicated. It requires 61 seats willing to sit together long enough to form a government, and no poll in months has put either side within reach. The Zionist opposition sits in the high fifties, the coalition in the low fifties, and the Arab parties hold the ten seats neither bloc will touch, at least that is what they say. A party that won’t say, before the vote, whether it would join a government without Netanyahu keeps the opposition short of 61. The slate also rules out a government that leans on the Arab parties, which forecloses the one majority that doesn’t require peeling seats from Netanyahu’s own bloc.

The seven seats are not new voters, either. They are refugees from the opposition’s latest miscalculation. When Bennett and Lapid fused their parties into Beyachad in April, the joint slate immediately polled lower than its two halves had apart, landing in the low twenties where the two had separately added up to around thirty, and sinking into the teens since. The merger repelled both of its flanks. Lapid’s center-left voters, who never wanted Bennett and his right-wing record at the top of their ticket, drifted to Eisenkot, whose Yashar surged into the low twenties, and to Golan’s Democrats. Bennett’s own right-leaning voters, unhappy that he had tied himself to Lapid, went looking for a right-leaning alternative, a few to Liberman but more to Gantz’s new slate. That disaffected right-of-center vote, joined by Likud voters tired of Netanyahu, is the raw material of the Gantz-Simchi-Hendel alliance, which is why its seats come out of Beyachad and Likud rather than from nowhere. A party sold as the answer to the opposition’s fragmentation is, in fact, the newest expression of that fragmentation.

The situation has flipped since 2020. Then Gantz helped Netanyahu by joining his government; now he helps him by splitting the opposition, a partner added then, a majority taken away now.

The branding is counting on its audience to forget recent history. Blue and White did not collapse because Gantz was too rigid in opposing Netanyahu. It collapsed because he signaled he was open to him. The willingness to sit with Bibi is the very instinct that destroyed Gantz, with voters now being asked to believe he has built a vehicle to end the Bibi era.

Conscription is offered as the wedge between this new party and Netanyahu. They claim to oppose the ultra-Orthodox draft exemption, which is perceived as a threat to Netanyahu’s coalition. It isn’t. Hendel’s party has made clear it will work with anyone, including Netanyahu and Ben Gvir. Simchi backs universal conscription, but in merger talks, he is the least likely to exclude the Haredi parties. Drawing a line against the ultra-Orthodox is not the same as drawing a line against Netanyahu. None will admit it during the campaign, but the likeliest resolution is a softer exemption, something between the status quo and full conscription. That is precisely the compromise that preserves Netanyahu’s coalition.

In 2020, Gantz’s condition was that he would never serve a man under indictment. He served.

The new party draws support from both the Likud and the opposition. But the crucial fact is this: seats taken from the opposition were already pledged to the bloc seeking 61. Seats taken from Likud were not. By siphoning votes from a committed majority and adding them to an uncommitted bloc, the new party weakens the side that needs every seat and strengthens the side that only needs a stalemate.

On Channel 12’s Friday broadcast, the most-watched political panel in the country, Dana Weiss put the question that decides everything: on the day after the election, could Gantz bring himself to recommend Bennett, Eisenkot, or Liberman to the president, or would he find it easier to recommend Netanyahu? The panel reached for an explanation in personal grievance, Gantz eclipsed by Eisenkot and hunting for revenge.

Intent is irrelevant. That is why the pattern persists. Gantz and his partners-to-be present themselves as the responsible adults, above the fray, refusing to be trapped by either camp. The outcome is always the same: a centrist bloc incapable of removing Netanyahu because it will not commit to doing so. Gantz has even rewritten his promise. He no longer vows not to sit with Netanyahu, only that he will avoid the extremes. But a party that refuses to choose a side forfeits any influence over who wins and what government emerges. The promise Benny Gantz is selling is the same one he sold in 2020. He sold it once, and Netanyahu survived. He is selling it again.

Everyone in Israel is reading the New York primaries the same way: the Democrats turned on us. That reading is comforting. It puts the whole problem on the other side of the ocean.

The harder truth is that Israel helped arm the movement that beat its own defenders. Three Mamdani-backed candidates knocked out two pro-Israel incumbents last week, and Netanyahu’s government supplied much of the case against them.

The race to watch was between two Jews who both call themselves Zionists. Brad Lander beat Dan Goldman by over thirty points, and the argument has moved inside the community: not between Jews and non-Jews anymore, but between Zionists, over how much distance to keep from Israel’s government.

I wrote about all of it for Haaretz this week. What happened, why Israel helped cause it, and the one thing it still controls. And yes, about the Knicks.

Read it in Haaretz

Shavua tov,
Eli

On October 8, 2023, the day after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Avila Chevalier stood in Times Square at a rally where signs read "Resistance is Justified when People are Occupied," photographed beside one that said, “Zionism is genocide.” Brad Lander condemned the rally at the time; Mamdani skipped the rally, but twelve days later, he was onstage at a DSA ceasefire rally calling the war a genocide. On Tuesday, with Mamdani’s endorsement, she retired Adriano Espaillat — a five-term incumbent and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — in the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th.

She didn’t do it alone, and that is key. Avila Chevalier was one seat in a slate. Mamdani spent the capital of his mayoral win on a row of House endorsements, and the machine swept the safe-blue city. Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist, took the open Brooklyn-and-Queens seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating, over the successor Velázquez wanted. In Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, Brad Lander buried Dan Goldman by more than thirty points. Mamdani had privately promised Espaillat his backing, then reneged and went with the challenger, and that small betrayal is the shape of the whole night. The coalition that used to make room for an Espaillat or a Goldman spent the evening clearing them out. This is one city on one night. But it’s what the shift looks like once it has somewhere to land — and New York got there first because it had both the density and the machine to convert it.

The Lander-Goldman race is the one that should worry those who share my concerns, and I wrote it up here last week, before a vote was cast.

My case then was that Dan Goldman was the only sincere Zionist in the race. Goldman is a liberal Zionist of the critical kind — he co-led letters calling for sanctions on violent West Bank settlers, was an early backer of humanitarian pauses in Gaza, and opposed the war in Iran — but he believes plainly in a Jewish state and won’t call the war a genocide or the occupation apartheid. Lander claims the label too, and I argued that his is a Zionism hollowed from the inside: a card-carrying membership in IfNotNow, which files Zionism next to apartheid on its list of things to grapple with; an alliance with the most prominent anti-Zionist politician in the country; a son blessed at his brit milah as “a Jew without the Right of Return.” On the campaign trail, Lander used the words genocide and apartheid and ran on cutting military aid. Goldman wouldn’t, and Goldman lost by thirty points.

This is the seam I described after Chris Van Hollen’s op-ed last month, now with the votes counted.

The Zionist who kept the substance and refused the vocabulary is out. The one who kept the label and let the substance go is in. At the far end of the same spectrum sits Avila Chevalier, who kept neither — not a Zionist of any kind, but the activist the vocabulary actually describes. She came up through Students for Justice in Palestine as a Columbia undergrad and came back as an alumna to help organize the 2024 encampment; in 2020, from an account she later deleted, she reposted a tweet that answered a prompt about Israel disappearing with “Trick question — Israel doesn’t exist.” She never said she celebrates October 7 — but the day after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, she stood in Times Square with people calling the slaughter justified resistance. Pressed in the debate, she said she’d gone anticipating Israel’s retaliation. What isn’t in dispute is where she chose to stand on October 8 and next to which signs.

Four years ago, being part of the October 8 crowd would have disqualified a candidate — campaigns would have hidden it or apologized. This week, it was openly part of three winning campaigns. The rally was not a problem anyone had to overcome. It was expected.

I lived in New York in 2018 when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley, and it felt like a major shock. Crowley was the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House and a possible future speaker. Ocasio-Cortez was twenty-eight and had been a bartender the year before. Her win took both a rare talent and an establishment that didn’t see her coming. This Tuesday was different. The candidates who won this time are not AOCs, and that is the measure of this circumstance, not a knock on them. The movement that needed a standout leader in 2018 now wins without one, three times in one night. What surprised New York seven years ago is now just how the city votes.

The map of where the Oct 8 coalition wins is, for now, the map of where the machine reaches. The sentiment is everywhere. The conversion isn’t — yet. In New York’s 12th — the most Jewish district in the country — Micah Lasher won Jerrold Nadler’s old seat on a deliberately unflashy résumé campaign, telling voters he would not support a blanket ban on weapons sales to Israel. Mamdani didn’t endorse him. In Maryland, Adrian Boafo took a safe seat with more than five million dollars of AIPAC super-PAC money behind him, the lobby still buying outcomes where the electorate lets it. Tom DiNapoli crushed two challengers who ran on divesting the state pension from Israeli bonds. And in the Hudson Valley swing seat the party actually has to win in November, Democrats picked Cait Conley, a combat veteran with a West Point degree, not a socialist. The Oct 8 turn owns the young, dense, gentrifying, safe-blue districts and the city delegation they will send to Washington. It does not yet own the districts where Jewish voters are concentrated, where AIPAC outspends the field, or where the seat is genuinely contested in the fall.

What happened in New York is downstream of something national. The floor of all this is generational, and it’s not just among Democrats. A recent Pew survey found that only 23% of Americans aged 18 to 34 have a favorable view of Israel, while 74% view it unfavorably. The winners in this group are not unusual for their age — they represent the average young voter with resources to organize. This trend isn’t limited to Democrats. Pew’s March survey showed that 57% of Republicans under 50 now view Israel unfavorably, up from 50% the year before.

This feeling exists in both parties, but only one side has built the tools to turn it into election wins. The left created the system that turns generational attitudes into House seats. Young conservatives feel the same way, but they don’t have a candidate who can win a primary on those views.

So this is the choice I put to Democrats after Van Hollen, and now it’s being decided district by district by voters, not pundits. The sincere Zionist who won’t use terms like genocide and apartheid loses the safe seat, just like Goldman did. The ones who win either trade the substance for the vocabulary, as Lander has, or drop the pretense altogether, as Avila Chevalier has. The only sincere Zionist who won a contested primary on Tuesday, Micah Lasher, did so in the country’s most Jewish district, on a base of Jewish voters and a retiring congressman’s blessing.

Liberal Zionism is now something you can hold onto in office only where enough Jews live to defend it — a minority politics, protected in a few enclaves, rather than a claim that wins an ordinary Democratic primary. My side keeps treating that as a messaging problem, fixable by saying antisemitism and meaning Israel. But what we’re really seeing is a generational shift and a movement that has built what it needs to last. Every time we answer that movement by calling its voters bigots, we hand them the proof that we have nothing better to say. Welcome to the Oct 8 Democratic Party. We can still make the case, but not in the language we have been using — and the places where that case still wins are running out.

At the White House podium this week, JD Vance offered Israel’s cabinet some unsolicited advice. In their position, he said, he might think twice before attacking the only powerful ally he had left. Two-thirds of the weapons protecting the Israeli homeland, he noted, were built and paid for by Americans. The problem for Israel was not Donald Trump, and anyone in Jerusalem who believed otherwise needed to wake up to their country’s reality. The problem was the Vice President and what he represented.

He had warmed up to this a day earlier. Asked by the New York Times about Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich and their fury at the administration’s emerging Iran deal, Vance was almost bored. What, exactly, was their proposal? “You’re a country of nine million people,” he said. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.” Ben-Gvir shot back that Israel is “not a banana republic.” It was not the comeback of a man winning the argument.

The easy way to read this is as one more chapter in the souring of Trump and Netanyahu. Trump has called Netanyahu “fucking crazy” and reminded the world that “we’re the big partner, and he’s the very small partner.” The relationship was always a marriage of convenience; Trump moved the embassy “for the evangelicals,” by his own account, and wound the war down over Israel’s objections once it stopped paying dividends. Personal, transactional, and very Trump.

But Vance is the one who represents where the party is heading. If the rupture were simply Trump’s vanity, it would end when Trump does. Vance is a different signal: thirty years younger, the heir apparent, and doing what Trump never dared, standing up to Israel and calling out its government directly. That instinct is a worldview, and the worldview is the future of the Republican Party.

That worldview has a name its followers are proud of, America First, and taken to its conclusion it has no seat reserved for Israel. Vance likes to tell of a Ukrainian-American who pressed him on Kyiv, to whom he replied that if you are an American, your country is the United States. The same logic does not stop with Israel for Vance; it intensifies. For a decade, the American right’s support for Israel was treated as a sure thing, when all along it was a coalition, and coalitions change.

After nearly three years of war in Gaza, public opinion of Israel slowly declined, but the latest Iran war really exposed it, because it brought America into the fight. Across much of the United States, including among the MAGA base, the war was seen as Netanyahu pushing Trump into a regime-change campaign that failed. The movement that elected Trump to end other people’s wars was asked to own one, and large parts of it refused. Tucker Carlson called it Israel’s war, not America’s. Joe Kent resigned from the administration rather than defend it, citing the influence of Israel and its lobby. These may be moves on the margins, but the discipline of Trump’s first year has cracked, and the crack runs through the people who will define the right after him.

It would be easy here, and wrong, to dress this up as the old right-wing antisemitism in a new suit. The antisemitism here is real. Candace Owens calls Israelis demonic. Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier, says his war against Israel is the only thing keeping him going. Carlson platforms them and increasingly claims Israel secretly runs the United States. And yes, Vance is friendlier to that crowd than Trump was. But to file him in the same drawer is to misread the threat. His case does not depend on Jews being sinister; it rests on the claim that American power should serve American interests, which makes an ally who torches your deal with your weapons a strain on the arrangement. That argument needs no antisemite or antizionist to carry it, and that makes it durable, and more dangerous.

The base hasn’t all followed. A recent Pew poll shows a majority of Republicans still backed Trump’s handling of the war, with approval running to 84 percent among those sixty-five and older and 49 among those under thirty. But Pew’s read on Israel itself is starker: 57 percent of Republicans under fifty now view Israel unfavorably, against barely a quarter of those over fifty. That gap opened before the Iran war. Unfavorable views among younger Republicans had already climbed from 35 percent in 2022 to 50 by 2025. The war revealed a generational divide: the Republicans raised on the Cold War and the war on terror still all in, the younger ones who grew up in the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan walking away. Those young Republicans will define the party within a decade, and the hawkish evangelical core that anchored Christian Zionism is aging out.

The obvious exception here is Marco Rubio. The Secretary of State is proof that the old pro-Israel Republican remains relevant and influential. But watch what Rubio actually did. He doubted this deal, alongside the defense secretary and the CIA director, and he is nonetheless the cabinet officer now carrying out the diplomacy it set in motion. Rubio did not break with the America First turn; he is administering it. His doubts changed nothing. The Vance wing won the policy, and Rubio is the one now selling it.

A faction whose strongest figure ends a war running a deal he distrusted is adapting to the party’s direction. None of this means the fight for the GOP is over. If Rubio, or someone like him, beats Vance to the 2028 nomination, the old consensus gets a reprieve, but likely the kind Biden gave the Democrats: a last pro-Israel president, not the first of a new line.

Whether the Iran deal is any good is a question for another piece. I think it’s worth noting the size of what the American right just shrugged off: an agreement that leaves Iran’s missiles intact, which Trump waved off by asking why Iran shouldn’t have them when Saudi Arabia does. It also says nothing binding on its enriched uranium, opens the door to sanctions relief, and constrains Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon. These are not minor grievances, and the striking part is how comfortably they were waved away, and by whom. Nuclear negotiations are scheduled to take place in the coming months, but it seems the US is checked out either way.

Which returns us to the bet. When Netanyahu went all in on the GOP, starting with his 2015 address to Congress against Obama’s Iran deal, he wagered the Republicans would stay on Israel’s side for good and paid for it by writing off the Democratic half of the country. The bill on that is already arriving: a deep-blue, heavily Jewish New York district is about to send Brad Lander to Congress over a sitting Zionist incumbent, in part because Lander ran to his left on Israel. The progressive door is closing, slowly and then all at once. And now the door everyone in Jerusalem assumed would stay open forever has a draft running through it.

In 2019, Netanyahu draped buildings in Tel Aviv with banners of himself shaking Trump’s hand, captioned “Liga Acheret (Another League),” as though the friendship were a platform unto itself. What I remember from those signs is that Netanyahu seemed taller than usual. He was photoshopped equal to Trump’s height. Just this month, with elections fast approaching, Netanyahu’s Likud quietly shelved an ad campaign built on that same relationship, having concluded it would no longer move a vote.

A pro-Israel center that once stretched comfortably across both parties is now pressed from the progressive left and, increasingly, from the nationalist America First right, and the middle keeps shrinking.

But what makes the squeeze so hard to escape is that the two sides are pulling away for opposite reasons. The Democrats who are drifting still care what Israel does; their issues run through Gaza, the settlements, the ministers, the war, which means a different government on a different path could slow the drift and perhaps reverse part of it. That door is conditional.

The MAGA door is not the same. The America First objection has little to do with how Israel behaves and everything to do with why this is America’s problem at all. A new prime minister, a quieter cabinet, a war called off a month sooner, none of it answers the question Vance asked from the podium. The left is leaving over what Israel does, the right over what America has become, and no single concession speaks to both. Israel can still choose a path that wins back one door. The other is closing on a logic of its own, and there is no Israeli choice that holds it open.

Brad Lander is poised to beat Congressman Dan Goldman in the Democratic primary for New York’s tenth district, covering Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. In fact, “beat” may be underselling things: polls show the upstart former city comptroller trouncing incumbent Goldman by over 30 points.

The curious thing about the race is that both candidates describe themselves as Zionists, a rarity in the post-October 7 Democratic Party, and Israel has become a dividing line in the contest to represent this deep-blue district.

On one side, Goldman is an impassioned believer in the existence of a Jewish homeland.

“I have a very strong support for the state of Israel, for its right to exist as a Jewish state, the only Jewish state in the world,” the congressman told reporters in January. When Hamas struck Israel two years ago, Goldman was actually in the country to celebrate a family Bar Mitzvah.

Now, Representative Goldman is no Netanyahu ally, despite what Lander would have voters believe. He co-sponsored the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, which would sanction settler terrorists, and he’s appealed directly to President Trump to go after Israeli vigilantes in the territories. Dan Goldman has spoken out on Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes and called for a ceasefire in Gaza as early as February of 2024. More recently, he opposed the US-Israel-led war in Iran.

On paper, Goldman would be right at home with J Street (which endorsed Goldman, while labeling his opponent as “primary approved,” a cop out that feels very… Brad Lander).

Still, Lander is even harsher, accusing Israel of genocide and apartheid.

Naturally, I disagree with Brad Lander, but this isn’t even why I dispute his Zionism. One could, in theory, believe that Israel has committed genocide, that it is practicing apartheid, and that a Jewish state nevertheless has the right to exist in certain borders—the bare minimum to call oneself a Zionist.

The problem is that Lander doesn’t actually seem to believe in a Jewish state. Lander finds his place in the Jewish community among avowedly anti-Zionist groups. This includes groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which outlines its position as follows: “Rather than orienting around Zionism, JFREJ is rooted in Diasporism.”

Or, take IfNotNow, which claims Lander as a “card-carrying member.” The leftist protest group lists among its principles a commitment to “grappling together with apartheid, Zionism, and the state of Israel”—Zionism and Israel listed alongside apartheid as pejoratives.

Then, of course, there is Lander’s alliance with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, perhaps America’s most prominent anti-Zionist politician. Without relitigating last year’s mayoral campaign, it bears reminding that Mamdani is not someone whose anti-Zionism is just one belief among many; opposition to a Jewish state formed the core of his activist career, even before October 7 and the Gaza War.

Lander has spoken of “disagreements” with Mamdani, though he often seems to skirt the meat of those disputes. These days, he seems most at ease campaigning alongside the mayor. Lander calls it “Jewish-Muslim partnership;” generously, I might describe Lander’s role in Mamdani’s court as being a controlled opposition. At this point, the only use in his continued identification with Zionism is so that Mamdani can point to a “Zionist” friend in the handful of venues where it’s politically convenient.

Lander’s diluted non-Zionist Zionism goes deeper than organizational affiliations and campaign endorsements. At the brit milah (ritual circumcision) of his son, Lander and his wife pronounced the newborn “a Jew without the Right of Return.”

It’s not that Lander’s son has to or even should live in Israel (believe me, this country and its current government test my limits every day). But proactively forfeiting even the theoretical right of return means Lander sees himself and his family apart from the half of the Jewish people that live in Israel, evoking the wicked son of Pesach who speaks to his fellow Jews in terms of you and not us.

Lander’s brit milah dedication continues: “Your name contains our deep hope that you will explore and celebrate your Jewish identity without confusing it with nationalism”—that is, Jewishness without Zionism.

I am not here to gatekeep Zionism among American Jews, especially at a time when the term is increasingly unpopular, but there is also a point at which a word has been stretched beyond any recognizable meaning.

This Zionism-without-Zionism doesn’t just paint a contrast with Goldman’s bona fide belief in a Jewish state. Lander also has a strange foil in his own ally, Zohran Mamdani.

The mayor’s anti-Zionism is far more principled and consistent than Lander’s Zionism-lite. Mamdani would never lock arms with groups or individuals whose purpose is to support a Jewish state. This is why City Hall takes its counsel from fringe far-left anti-Zionist Jewish groups and why Mamdani skipped the Israel Day Parade. Say what you will about New York’s mayor: At least you know where he stands.

In the race for New York 10, Brad Lander is working hard to position himself as a man of strong values. Yet it’s Dan Goldman, not Lander, whose beliefs, including his Zionism, are backed up by substance and unwavering resolve, even as he fights an uphill, likely unwinnable, electoral battle.

At the entrance to today’s Tel Aviv Pride march, the police Itamar Ben Gvir commands set up a checkpoint and, by marchers’ accounts and the footage from the scene, began pulling political signs. One woman was stopped because her shirt read “FCK BNGVR,” the slogan of a protest campaign run by Mehazkim, a left-wing group that has spread it on bumper stickers and shirts across the country. She was wearing its Pride edition, and the police let her through only after she took it off. The anti-government signs that have gone up in recent years were left with the officers at the gate.

None of this should have surprised the attorney general. Three days earlier, Gali Baharav-Miara had warned the Central Elections Committee that Ben Gvir was fusing the operational work of the police with the political messaging of his own party, and asked that he be barred from any more police-escorted campaign tours. She has become a state symbol herself: the cabinet voted to fire her last summer, the High Court reversed it as unlawful, and she remains in office as the most visible check on this government, and the one it most wants gone.

The Pride march his officers searched is itself a contested symbol. Israel’s defenders have long held it up as proof of a liberal democracy that endures despite its political turmoil and democratic backsliding, while its critics dismiss it as pinkwashing, an attempt to divert attention from controversial policies in the West Bank and Gaza. The defenders’ case rests on real ground: Israel recognizes same-sex marriages performed abroad, bars anti-gay discrimination in housing and employment, and lets gay couples adopt, far more than any of its neighbors allow. Both sides treat the parade as a prize, and this week the government, and Ben Gvir in particular, claimed it with the police.

Pride is only the latest target. Ben Gvir has spent his entire tenure teaching the police to treat opposition to him as a public-order problem. During the judicial-overhaul protests, he demanded water cannons and mass arrests, and when Tel Aviv’s district commander, Amichai Eshed, refused to use what he called disproportionate force, Ben Gvir engineered his removal; Eshed left the force saying he had paid a price for trying to prevent a civil war. The High Court had to remind the minister that he is not permitted to give police operational orders on how to handle demonstrations. When the hostage families began blocking roads to demand a deal — a deal Ben Gvir opposed at every turn, to the point of walking out of the government over one — it was his police who arrested them.

The clearest preview came from the soccer stands. For two years, officers have been confiscating the very shirt that was stopped at Pride: left-leaning Hapoel Tel Aviv fans barred from matches, their IDs recorded, detained for wearing “FCK BNGVR.” Last December, the club’s supporters were turned away from Bloomfield stadium in Tel Aviv for a shirt branding the police, Maccabi, and the outlawed Kach movement “scum,” in the same stretch that Beitar Jerusalem fans waved Kach’s flag at a match and were left alone. The fans who called the banned Kahanist movement scum were turned away; the fans who flew its flag, the movement Ben Gvir himself came up in, were waved through. Ben Gvir is one of those fans. He sits with La Familia, Beitar’s most notorious fans, and poses for selfies in their stand, the same fans who have chanted the name of Yigal Amir and booed through a moment of silence for Yitzhak Rabin.

Full disclosure: I’m a Hapoel fan, Be’er Sheva first and Tel Aviv too. I keep my team out of my writing, but my stake here runs older than my politics. At eighteen, on a USY gap-year program, I went to a Hapoel Tel Aviv–Beitar match with my cousin and friend and was jumped by Beitar fans on the way out. I’ll tell that story properly another time.

It also reaches past the stands. Two weeks ago, the same slogan stopped a woman at the entrance to the Old City in East Jerusalem, where Border Police called her “FCK BNGVR” cap “provocative,” told her to turn it inside out, and pushed her and her partner back out when she refused. The rule that emerges is simple enough: the far right may say what it likes, and everyone else is screened at the gate.

Pride sits at the center of all this because, for Ben Gvir, the hostility is personal. Before he was handed the police, he was a fixture at the protests against Pride, and in 2006 he helped lead the “Beast Parade,” where activists marched goats and donkeys through Jerusalem to brand gay Israelis as unclean. His old friend Bentzi Gopstein — barred from the Knesset for incitement, sanctioned by Washington and the EU, head of a group whose members have talked about burning marchers — reportedly advises him on police matters and has sat in on meetings at his ministry. His finance minister kept the same company: Bezalel Smotrich organized that 2006 parade too, called himself a “proud homophobe,” and described Pride as worse than bestiality.

The people who hold up Tel Aviv Pride to vouch for Israel’s liberalism just watched the police search it at the gate, but none of this needs to be permanent. A new Israeli government, when the next election hopefully delivers one, will inherit the work of returning the police to the public they are meant to serve, and making the boast about that parade true again.

Ben Gvir made the police force his own. The task ahead is to make it the country’s again.

There’s an argument about Israel that has to be kept going, and almost nobody can stand to keep having it. Stripped down, it is simple: is Israel the side you defend or the side you condemn? The honest answer offers no easy choice. This makes it unbearable. There is no clear side to take. You never get to be proven right.

Eventually, most people find a way out. Some decide the answer is settled and stop listening. Some check out completely, decide the cause is lost and argue only to bury it. Either way, the relief is real, and I have felt it. Over the past week, from opposite ends, two of the most prominent voices in the argument showed how good that relief feels.

Sam Harris wrote an essay explaining why he won’t debate critics of Israel. Peter Beinart answered with a monologue explaining why he should. Their views could hardly be further apart, and they reached the same exit through opposite doors. One won’t come to the table with anyone who disagrees. The other sits down only to flip it.

Start with Harris, because I’ve read him for years and admire him. His reputation rests on one habit. He follows an argument to its end, takes on the strongest version of the other side, and treats his own certainty as the first thing that needs checking. On the subject of Israel, he does none of it.

He won’t take up the history, he says, because it’s “irrelevant to resolving the conflict,” and what matters now is something “everyone knows... to a moral certainty.” Strange, coming from him. Interrogating exactly that kind of certainty is the thing he has spent a career teaching the rest of us to do.

And he stops looking. A national movement with a century of secular, Christian, and Marxist strands he flattens into a single concept expressed five times over: “jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam.” Those strands are real, and in Hamas the most violent of them now governs Gaza, but they were never the whole movement, and Harris writes as though they were. Salam Fayyad might as well never have governed. Israel’s current government’s open drive to annex the West Bank is a footnote.

Harris reads the verdict off what each society celebrates, what it is willing to die for and let its children die for. If Israelis ever came to resemble Palestinians, he writes, if Tel Aviv celebrated martyrdom and its crowds gathered “baying for their blood,” then he wouldn’t care who won the war. No Israeli crowd dances over dead children, and for him that settles it.

Last month, I wrote about pro-Israel accounts posting marathons and birthday parties from Gaza as proof there was no genocide. Life goes on, the kids have cake, where’s the genocide? Where’s the famine? Whatever a marathon shows, it isn’t what is happening behind it. If they are selling fruit at a market in Rafah, it says nothing about what is happening in northern Gaza. I reject the genocide charge. But you don’t reject it by holding up a birthday photo, and Harris doesn’t close the moral question by noting that Israelis aren’t suicide bombers. When I went after people on my own side for this, I meant it, and I won’t pretend I don’t recognize it when a man I respect does the reverse.

If the Palestinians put down their weapons, he writes, there would be peace; if Israel put down its weapons, “there would be a genocide.” Under the swagger, the question is fair: what would each side do if it could do anything it wanted. Hamas has answered, in words and in deeds, and it remains one of the most popular factions among the people it governs, the part the other side keeps hurrying past. Harris is right that the question matters. Where he goes wrong is in what he lets it excuse. One true and ugly fact does not free you from the rest, and the one he found is the one that let him stop. He called the stopping clarity.

The test only runs one way for him. The figures at the edge of this government have answered it too, in words and in deeds. One of its ministers, Amichai Eliyahu, floated dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza and said there were no innocents to spare. After settlers burned Huwara and left one man dead, Smotrich said the state should wipe the town out. Ben Gvir built a career on deciding who belongs on the land and who does not. Harris does not ignore them. He grants Israel has its fanatics, then sets them aside as less representative than the other side’s. That is hard to sustain about men who hold key ministries in Israel’s government. The fringe he describes is one the country elected and put in power.

He is right about the double standard, too. The world scrutinizes Israel as it never scrutinizes Sudan or Yemen and calls the difference antisemitism. The half he skips is that Israel asked to be judged this way, presenting itself as a Western democracy and part of the free world. You get measured against the company you want to keep.

And the refusal is the danger, because of where it points. Harris finds the world’s fixation so unfair, and the answer so obvious, that debating his critics is beneath him. He will make Israel’s case all day, just not to anyone who needs convincing. Harris leaves the door open. He tells his readers to bring better arguments, then prices entry at proving Israel has become as evil as its enemies, a toll built to be paid by no one.

If you strip the philosophy away, what’s left is the line of defense often used by the Ben-Gvir Netanyahu government: all the critics are antisemites, the world is against us, their opinion does not count, so why answer them. Don’t engage. Act, and let them seethe. Arguably one of the most persuasive men alive has reasoned his way to that, and a case made only to people already nodding along changes no one’s mind. He is right that some of the hatred is real. He is wrong that the answer is to leave the table, because leaving is how you lose a fight you could still win.

Beinart caught all this first and caught it well. Harris won’t debate, he says, because he holds his views to be “so self-evidently true” that argument would only waste his time. He’s right about that. But the monologue is its own exit. Everything in it is built to end the conversation.

Harris asked one question. Beinart spent eighteen minutes on everything around it. The West Bank, which isn’t free. The Christians and secular leftists who built the Palestinian movement before Hamas existed. Fayyad, who bet everything on nonviolence and got more settlements for it. All of it true, none of it touching what Harris actually asked. That the Palestinian Authority renounced armed struggle says nothing about what Hamas would do with power, and the movement’s secular and Christian roots say nothing about what Hamas wants now. He keeps winning the fights at the edges, which is how he avoids the one in the middle.

One line gives him away. Peace, he says, can mean nothing more than the absence of conflict, the way Native Americans have peace now, after, in his words, “the Native population was largely destroyed.” Sit with what that comparison does. It makes the peace Israel wants the kind you get once the other people are gone. That is the worst thing you can say about a country, that it is after the disappearance of another people, and Beinart doesn’t quite say it. He buries it in an analogy and moves on before anyone can make him defend it. Which is what he spent the rest of the monologue accusing Harris of doing.

And look at what the comparison has to ignore. The United States never offered the Native nations a state of their own. Israel has offered partition over and over, in 1937, in 1947, at Camp David in 2000, on Olmert’s map in 2008, and every time the Palestinian leadership said no. Argue about how good the offers were, that’s fair. But you can’t square a century of a country repeatedly agreeing to split the land with a secret will to erase the people on the other half. A nation bent on disappearance does not keep proposing a neighbor. Beinart knows this history. He reached for the picture anyway because the argument is on the other side.

His most impressive trick is about legitimacy. Harris says only Israel has to keep arguing for its right to exist. Beinart’s answer is that Washington brands political systems illegitimate all the time, Iran’s, Russia’s, Cuba’s, so there’s nothing special about doing it to Israel. But all of those are governments. When someone calls Putin’s regime illegitimate, they are not saying there should be no Russia. The thing said about Israel, the thing Harris is answering, is that the state should not be there at all. Beinart has to know the difference. His own endpoint is one binational state, which is a way of saying no Jewish state, not a complaint about the one currently running it. He is sneaking a fight about the country’s existence under the language of criticizing its leaders.

Some of his advice to Harris is actually good. Your views aren’t self-evident; go sit with someone who disagrees and risk coming out the other side changed. I agree with this sentiment but he keeps none of it for himself. He will debate, sure; he ends the monologue offering to do it with Harris, the way he has with Dan Shapiro and Coleman Hughes. But he shows up to defend a verdict he has reached long ago. When he spoke at Tel Aviv University last year, he came home and apologized for it, to his own supporters rather than the Israelis he had gone to engage, for the sin of having shown up. The one piece of his own advice he never takes is the part about coming out changed.

For years Beinart held the hard position: a Jewish state and Palestinian freedom in the same breath, no trades. At some point it got too heavy and he set the bigger half down. One state is the lighter load. What’s left once you stop trying to build is the work of tearing down, and he has gotten good at it. I've watched a lot of people pull away from Israel. Beinart is the one who kept going, past the government, past the country, until what he'd left was the idea of a Jewish state at all.

Neither of them will write the one sentence this whole thing demands. Two peoples with real and opposing claims to the same land have to be pulled apart, and getting there means saying Hamas’s aims and this government’s push to annex in the same breath, naming both, not just the one each man already sees. Harris won’t, because the annexation isn’t in the picture he kept. Beinart can’t, because for him two states are already in the ground.

Beinart’s strongest card is Fayyad, and you have to grant it before you can answer it. The most moderate Palestinian leader in a generation staked his whole project on nonviolence, while the Authority’s security forces worked with Israel to put down the Palestinians who kept fighting, and the settlements grew the whole time. He left office calling himself “the address for failure.” Beinart reads that as proof that two states are dead. I read it as something worse. Nobody with leverage ever made Fayyad’s restraint cost Israel a thing, which is why his story indicts the people who abandoned him and not the framework he was testing. He was not defeated so much as left there.

I hold on to both halves for a reason that has nothing to do with principle. Thrown out of Iraq in 1951, my father’s parents reached a transit camp outside Beer Sheva with what they could carry, which was close to nothing. They had lost a country and spent years climbing out of the dust to build another. That is why I can’t pretend the danger Harris points at is invented; my family lived through what happens when a country decides its minorities were never truly its own. The state that took them in was no fairy tale. It left them in those shacks too long and treated Jews from Arab countries as a problem to be sorted rather than a people to be welcomed. None of that is the equal of what they fled, and I won’t pretend it is. It is only enough to keep me from telling the clean story, the one where we are wronged and never in the wrong. So I hold the whole of it, heavier than either half alone.

Both of them stopped. Harris by refusing to sit at the table, Beinart by sitting down only to clear it, both from the comfort of New York City and California, with no rockets flying overhead and no checkpoints to wait at. The people who don’t get to stop are the ones still holding both things at once, that the danger Harris points at is real and the wrong Beinart points at is real, and holding both means the argument never closes and never lets you feel right about it. I don’t think staying at the table changes how any of this ends. I’m staying anyway. What looks like clarity from the outside is just the exit, and I have watched too many people I trust walk toward it.

This is not what I planned to write today, but the events of the last 24 hours gave me no choice.

What’s happening: Israel hit military targets in Iran early Monday, hours after President Trump asked Benjamin Netanyahu not to. By the afternoon, Iran had announced it was halting fire, and Trump was posting that both sides wanted an immediate ceasefire. By evening, Israel had halted its strikes on Iran at Trump’s request, while keeping the fight against Hezbollah going. The first direct Israel-Iran exchange since the April truce opened and closed inside a single news cycle, with Trump setting the terms at both ends and Iran setting them in between.

Why it matters: Trump told Netanyahu directly to hold his fire. Netanyahu, in the account US officials gave Axios’s Barak Ravid, gave no firm answer, then ordered the strikes anyway. Trump gave his own account to Channel 12: he had warned Netanyahu he could end up alone against Iran, said Israel notified Washington only once its jets were airborne, and claimed he had shrunk the strike and then made Netanyahu stop. Hours later Trump told reporters he calls the shots over Israel, all of them. Both things are on the record, and they cannot both be true: Israel struck against his ask and is keeping the Lebanon fight he wants ended, even as it took his off-ramp on Iran. We only see his public performances and social media antics. Whether Trump genuinely opposed the strike or tolerated one he could disown, his public “don’t” was not what decided it.

Catch up quick:

• Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, had warned days earlier that an Israeli strike on Beirut would break the ceasefire and bring a response.

• Sunday, Israel struck Hezbollah positions in Beirut’s southern suburbs after rocket fire on the north.

• Iran answered with its first missile barrage at Israel since April.

• Trump called Netanyahu, said a deal with Tehran was close, and told him not to retaliate.

• Before dawn Monday, Israeli jets hit missile launch sites and a petrochemical plant in southwestern Iran.

• Iran fired back, the Houthis launched at central Israel, and by midday Iran announced it was stopping, on the condition that Israel halt its operations in Lebanon.

Between the lines: Trump frames the deal as stopping the bomb. The lever he actually named on Monday was the blockade of Iran’s ports, which stays in force until a final agreement. That points at oil and the Strait of Hormuz, with the nuclear issue as the headline more than the substance. An Israeli strike on Iranian infrastructure threatens that arrangement, which explains the speed of his reaction and his insistence that he had no part in the decision to strike. Ynet’s veteran military correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai counts the reasons he wants it quiet now: oil prices, Gulf states wary of Iranian threats to their facilities, the November midterms, and the World Cup the US is co-hosting, which starts this week. Israel’s fear runs the other way. A deal that lifts sanctions and frees frozen funds would hand Tehran the money to rebuild its arsenal and resupply Hezbollah, which is why Jerusalem fears the agreement more than the war.

What they’re saying: A US official called the strikes relatively limited and said Washington had no role, a message aimed at Tehran. Even so, the US kept defending Israeli airspace, drawing its line between offense and defense rather than between ally and adversary. Iran’s military command announced a halt while warning of heavier blows if Israel keeps operating in Lebanon. Israeli officials reject the Lebanon linkage and say the campaign against Hezbollah will continue regardless. Netanyahu, in his first public remarks, cast the halt as Israeli deterrence rather than American pressure and told citizens he says the same thing to Trump that he says to them, even as American and Israeli reporting both described a far larger strike on Iran that US pressure had just forced him to scrap.

What it means: Iran has set a rule, and it is widening it. Its foreign minister drew the line at Beirut; its military command has since extended it to southern Lebanon. The rule itself is simple: a hard Israeli strike in Lebanon brings Iranian ballistic missiles down on Israeli cities, and Iran starts and stops them when it chooses. Netanyahu rejected the rule outright, calling Iran’s attempt to link Lebanon to attacks on Israel “a new equation” that was “intolerable,” but saying so does not change it: Israel has agreed to halt its strikes on Iran, not on Hezbollah, so as long as it keeps fighting in Lebanon, the missiles can return. The ceasefire covers Iran, not the fight that set it off. The country writing the rule is the one Israel has spent two wars calling beaten.

Where things stand:

• Netanyahu confirmed Israel has halted its strikes on Iran “for now,” while vowing to keep fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon.

• No casualties reported in the Israel-Iran exchange, though Israel’s strikes in Lebanon continued, killing at least one near Tyre.

• Iran closed its western airspace and the airspace around Tehran’s main airport; in Israel, home-front restrictions are lifting and schools are set to reopen Tuesday.

What to watch: The round is ending on Trump’s terms, but it rests on a fault line Israel will not fix. Iran tied its halt to a stop in Lebanon, and Israel has refused to give it one, so the next hard strike there is the test of whether the missiles return. Washington may not let Israel bomb Beirut again, the New York Times reported, which would leave the trigger in Trump’s hands as much as Tehran’s.

Yes, but: Ben-Yishai reads the strike as calculated, not just defiant. Israel hit Iran to reject the linkage Tehran is imposing between the Lebanon front and any Iran ceasefire, and to keep degrading its missile production. Netanyahu now wants the ceasefire to hold as much as Trump does, for opposite reasons: Trump wants the pause to reach his deal, Netanyahu wants it to forestall one while the blockade keeps squeezing Tehran economically.

The politics: Netanyahu heads toward an election, due by October and possibly sooner, with little to show for years of war. His most spectacular blows, the beeper operation, the killing of Nasrallah, the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, are fading from public memory while Hezbollah and Iran go on striking Israel with ease. This round fits the pattern. Israel hit Beirut, Iran answered, Israel hit Iran and absorbed the missiles, then stood down at Trump’s request while Tehran set the terms in Lebanon. A prime minister who needs a win before voters reach the polls has every reason to find one, and the most available place to look is Lebanon, exactly where Iran has promised the missiles will return.

The bottom line: For all the damage it has done to the Iranian regime and its proxies in nearly three years of war, Israel ended the day with a pause it does not control and a rule written by the side it keeps declaring beaten. The Netanyahu government — still — calls the goal total victory.