Van Hollen's op-ed is the clearest articulation of a new Democratic position on Israel. Its contradictions show liberal Zionism becoming politically homeless inside the party itself.
I mean, what on earth is the point of any American continuing to even take part in these discussions that are wholly centered on Israeli feelings? It’s our money, reputation, and blood, and no Israeli commenter to this day has remotely been able to give an adequate answer as to what Americans get out of the relationship.
We know you people well enough to know that the half-asses answers that you provide simply show that you do not care what our thoughts are. They’re comically bad; "we provide intelligence” which consisted of convincing Trump that if we bomb Iranians, they’ll love us. The same thing you did with the Iraqis in 2002.
It’s like Israelis are biologically incapable of not being profoundly self absorbed or seeing the world from someone else’s eyes.
This analysis repeats the myth that Weisglass said the goal of disengagement from Gaza was to freeze a Palestinian state. What he actually said was that it freezes the formula in place, the formula requiring that Palestinians stop terrorism before they can have a state which would be a terrorist state. If he were wrong—that is, if Palestinians turned away from terrorism when granted Gaza—then the formula wouldn't have been frozen at all. Weisglass's theory that any new Palestinian state would be a terrorist-run state could've been proven wrong. The problem is, it wasn't. Political changes do not change Palestinian terrorism. Repeating the myth as you did is wrong.
Much of this piece repeats similar problematic analyses that it critiques.
His antizionist nonsense is also crazy, he thinks people who disagree with Israeli government, which is a good 30-40% of Israel at any one time and 70% of democrats are less than human. It’s why he came up with a new name to categorize them, which he doles out sort of like a Yellow Star of David.
I truly believe he would be a disgrace to his Victor Frankl and his ancestors. It’s a shame, the Jewish people are some of the most creative people in history and their experience through the holocaust taught us so much about man’s inhumanity to man.
It’s disappointing to see what many Conservative Jewish Israelis have become.
He hates Americans. And doesn’t support Americans. I’ve spoken to him many times, to see what he was made of, and he doesn’t think Palestinian people are human beings.
What is left out is he also think nothing of Americans dying for Israeli interests and he supports Israel hook, line, sinker to the point that he isn’t able or allowed to criticize the government.
I honestly don’t find him a useful person to talk to as he lacks morals.
Ridiculousness. I’m American, my wife and children are American and I love America. You don’t know me and haven’t spoken to me once. You’ve had some comment threads with me, which most normal people understand is very much not the same thing.
Americans are dying for the American interest of preventing the IRGC from acquiring nuclear weapons. That’s been a policy of every president since Clinton. Your desire to help Iran achieve such weapons is a desire to have millions of Americans killed by the country acting on “Death to America” since 1979.
Supporting Islamist terrorism like you do isn’t moral. Anyone but Antizionist Socialists and National Socialists knows this.
Repeating a lie doesn’t make it a truth. I know that’s something that Free Palestine cult members believe, but your magical realism isn’t magical, nor real.
Keep fighting for Islamist terrorists, though. You’re a true moral authority.
We have to stop letting these people hijack the language and conflate the meaning of term “liberal” vs the nebulous camp of people that may self-id as liberals while worshipping extremists that are open about their singular hates towards liberals that rivals any MAGA orgy. This mob doesn’t begin to understand actual values of liberalism , nor is there a single liberal bone left in their body or mind
That was thoughtful. It does seem that the current conversation (and I use this term loosely) is based on everyone hanging on to their favorite ideology - which as you and Hannah Arendt point out - contains terms that no longer fit the reality. It is difficult to carry on a thoughtful conversation with people who persist in having their heads up their rearends. It is more comfortable to retreat to a kind of mental closure where even a solution from the last century feels more comfortable. Just as the far right in the US has persisted in running itself off of a cliff, I fear the far left is doing the same thing. It is not just a political cliff but a cognitive cliff as well. The US is not trump and those from the outside who think so are hopefully wrong. Israel is not Bibi and his far-right horsemen and hopefully time will prove those who think so wrong. Things do need to change in Israel and in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon and reality points out that Israel is not the only party to finding a remedy. So again thanks for the demonstration of what it looks like when you connect thinking to the actual experience in the world around you.
Van Hollen’s piece was excellent and 30 years overdue, hearkening back to the demise of the Oslo Accords.
Israel should be given a reasonable amount of time, perhaps a year, to withdraw from East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza (where it shamelessly ignores the terms of the cease-fire). This would give Israel a demographic grace of perhaps 100 years to sustain itself as the “3/4 Jewish state“.
And it would give the indigenous Gentiles a country of their own, which could be populated by 20–25% Jews in a mirror image of Israel. Palestine would have to be absolutely as sovereign as Israel, unimpeded by Israeli interference.
The alternative to this two state outcome is, of course, the one state from the river to the sea solution, Palesrael. Jews are already in the minority in that area and that minority status will be pronounced by 2040.
With Jews being in the minority, this new country may be many things, but it certainly won’t be “the 3/4 Jewish state“. Like most other countries, it will simply be a state of all its people. Even now, Israel is in reality the Israeli state rather than the Jewish state since about 1/4 of its citizens are absolutely Israelis even though they’re Gentiles. All Israelis, whether Jews or Gentiles, are 1000 times more important to Israel, as citizens, than, random Jews who are Belgian or Venezuelan.
It would be an excellent start for the United States to actually conform its behavior to be llegal in the context of both Symington amendment and the Glenn amendment as relates to treatment of countries that test and acquire nuclear weapons, and that refuse to sign the nuclear nonproliferation agreement. Israel is absolutely out of bounds where this is concerned and no further military assistance should be granted it until, along with Iran, it pledges to immediately make the Middle East free of nuclear weapons.
Israel’s problem with the United States goes far deeper than a simple statement that it no longer wants endless charity from American taxpayers (and, of course, what Netanyahu said is pure BS). 80% of American Democrats and, even works, 57% of American Republicans under the age of 50 now strongly disapprove of Israel. We are all witnesses to the endless squatter terrorism in the West Bank, which is facilitated by the IDF and the police, all of whom unbelievably report to the morbidly obese thug Ben-Gvir. These images won’t fade away, and Israel will live to regret that it ever tolerated such ongoing daily terrorism by its squatter citizens.
Read the below, credit Haaretz, for a dose of reality.
“Pentagon Leaks Signal Growing U.S. Effort to Blame Israel for Risks of Renewed Iran War
Reports in Trump-friendly U.S. media highlighted the extent of Washington's role defending Israel during the war while exposing growing concern over depleted missile stockpiles and America's ability to sustain another confrontation with Iran
Israel should be concerned by the signals it is receiving from the U.S. defense establishment.
Earlier this week, the Pentagon leaked two documents that appeared to serve a dual purpose: exposing the extent of the U.S. role in defending Israel during the war with Iran while warning of the costs a renewed confrontation could impose on Washington itself.
Both reports, published in media outlets closely connected to allies and sources of U.S. President Donald Trump, centered on a similar argument. The United States expended enormous military resources defending Israel during the war, and its defense industry is struggling to replenish critical munitions quickly enough for another prolonged conflict.
The Washington Post, citing Pentagon assessments and U.S. officials, reported that the United States launched more than 200 THAAD missile-defense interceptors during the war – roughly half of the Pentagon's inventory – in addition to more than 100 SM-3 and SM-6 interceptors fired from Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean.
By contrast, Israel fired fewer than 100 Arrow interceptors and around 90 David's Sling interceptors. "In total, the U.S. shot around 120 more interceptors and engaged twice as many Iranian missiles," one U.S. administration official told the newspaper.
"The numbers are striking," Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told the Post. "The United States absorbed most of the missile defense mission while Israel conserved its own magazines."”
The THAAD numbers prove the opposite of your point. Israel conserved its magazines strategically during the Iran war. The lesson: accelerate independence. Its defense budget is $49 billion and rising. Modi visited Jerusalem last month for deals estimated at $8-10 billion covering Arrow, David's Sling, Iron Dome, and Iron Beam. India has been Israel's largest defense purchaser for years, 34% of total arms sales from 2020-2024. Netanyahu named India and Germany as replacement partners. The decoupling is structured, funded, and underway.
Haaretz has 72,000 daily readers in a country of 10 million. It exists for international consumption. Citing it as a reality check on Israeli strategic thinking is like citing a New York literary magazine for a reality check on Pentagon strategy.
As they say in Te Aviv, “Let’s get Uncle Sam to do it, and pay for it!”
On to a nuclear free Middle East where we use elimination of Israel’s nuclear weapons as the sweetener to ensure Iran never gets to where Israel is as a proliferator.
The Iron Dome deployment to the UAE is not going back in the box. The operational military relationships between Israel and the Gulf states are now established facts with institutional memory behind them — people who trained together, commanders who coordinated, officials who made calls at 3am during missile barrages. That kind of relationship deepens through repetition not reversal.
Saudi normalization probably happens in this window, quietly and with significant Palestinian-flavored language attached to give MBS domestic cover — some formula about Palestinian autonomy or a pathway to statehood that doesn’t actually constrain Israeli West Bank policy but allows the Saudis to say they extracted something. The actual content of the Palestinian concession will be minimal. The form will be elaborate. Both sides will understand the difference.
Iran emerges from the 2025-2026 conflict with its proxy network severely degraded, its nuclear program set back, its missile arsenal reduced, and its domestic legitimacy under serious internal pressure. It rebuilds, but more slowly and with less regional reach than before. The resistance axis that sustained Palestinian maximalism militarily is a diminished force.
Hamas as a governing entity is functionally finished in Gaza. What replaces it is the genuinely open question of this window — some combination of PA nominal authority, international reconstruction administration, and Israeli security control. None of it produces a Palestinian state but all of it produces something more stable than what existed before October 7.
This is where the academic and political left faces its structural crisis. A generation of students is going to grow up watching Arab states with normalized relations with Israel, watching Gulf sovereign wealth funds invest in Israeli tech, watching Israeli and Emirati businesspeople at the same conferences. The lived reality will be increasingly incompatible with the genocide-apartheid-settler-colonial framework.
The wound economy’s Western university loop faces a specific challenge here. The loop runs on the conflict being legible as a simple colonial oppressor/oppressed binary. Regional normalization steadily complicates that legibility. It is hard to maintain the “Israel is uniquely evil” framing when the states geographically closest to the conflict are building defense partnerships and trade relationships with it. The campus activist will face the uncomfortable question of why Jordan and the UAE and eventually Saudi Arabia are all wrong about their own regional interests.
Palestinian political identity undergoes forced transformation in this window or doesn’t transform at all. If PA leadership cannot deliver any improvement in material conditions — and the current trajectory suggests it cannot — the generational transfer of political identity shifts in one of two directions: either toward pragmatic acceptance of a limited autonomy arrangement, or toward further radicalization without military capacity to act on it. The latter is the more likely outcome in the short term but is strategically incoherent. A maximalist political program without military capacity to pursue it is just rhetoric. It exhausts itself.
The West Bank trajectory in this window is de facto annexation proceeding through incremental facts on the ground. More settlements, continued Area C dispossession, nominal PA administrative authority over urban population centers with no sovereignty. The international community continues condemning it. Nothing structural changes that trajectory in the absence of American pressure, and American pressure in either a Republican or Democrat administration has historically been insufficient to reverse Israeli settlement policy.
So in other words one country from the river to the sea, two tribes, three religions, etc. Then it’s a question of whether it’s based on the South African model or on a true democratic model. Read up on the Sullivan Principles.
The South Africa model required a coalition that isolated the target economically. That coalition doesn't exist here and grows less possible every year. Regional military coordination since 2024 has made that clear. Netanyahu just announced on 60 Minutes he wants US military aid drawn to zero. Israel is neutralizing the Symington/Glenn lever before anyone pulls it.
The honest comparison isn't South Africa. It's Tibet. As regional normalization deepens and Israel decouples from the US, Palestine will fade into that same category: a frozen conflict the world mostly ignores. The states with skin in the game have already signaled they are moving on.
The most likely outcome at this horizon is something nobody will call by its real name but which functions as permanent Palestinian autonomy without sovereignty — a demilitarized entity with its own civil administration, international recognition from most states, but no army, no control of borders, no right of return operationalized, and Israeli security presence in Area C indefinitely. It will be called a state. It will not be one in any meaningful Westphalian sense.
Whether Palestinians accept this arrangement depends almost entirely on whether a generation of Palestinian leadership emerges that can tell its people that 1948 is permanent and that the achievable is better than continued nothing. That leader has not appeared. The political culture that would produce them has not developed. But 30 years is enough time for material conditions to force the issue — a generation that has grown up under functional permanent occupation with diminishing international support and no military patron capable of changing the situation may calculate differently than the generation that believed the resistance axis would eventually deliver.
The regional picture at 30 years looks like a Middle East organized around the Iran-versus-everyone-else axis, with Israel as a normalized participant in Gulf security architecture, formal diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia and potentially others, economic integration through tech and agricultural partnerships, and the Palestinian question managed rather than resolved — a frozen conflict with administrative structures around it, like Cyprus or Kosovo in different registers.
That won’t last long anymore than apartheid South Africa did. 30 years from now the indigenous Gentiles will be such significant majority of those in Palesrael that they won’t be ignored.
It is surprising that Israel is such a willing catalyst where the destruction of its reputation is concerned. Just as it is surprising that Israel so willingly and aggressively is pursuing an outcome that will make the existence of a Jewish state impossible, since Jews will probably be no more than 40% of the total population of that state.
Brace yourself. One country, two tribes, three religions and, apparently shockingly, equal rights for all its citizens.
Israel is a country and ¾ of its citizens are Jewish while ¼ of its citizens are indigenous Gentiles. Irrespective of tribe or religion, they are all equally Israelis. Israeli is a nationality and Judaism is a religion. The thought that a random Jew in Belgium or Ecuador is more important to Israel than actual Israeli citizens who are Gentiles is so preposterous that it doesn’t even merit discussion.
You might want to read this (credit the New York Times) to help with your return to the real world.
“The Mideast Is Baffled by Trump’s Call to Expand Abraham Accords
The president said more countries should be required to recognize Israel as part of a deal to end the war with Iran. Analysts say the chances of that happening are close to zero.
The social media post by President Trump made it sound straightforward. The United States would orchestrate a deal to end the war with Iran and, in exchange, a slew of countries across the Middle East and South Asia would join an agreement, called the Abraham Accords, establishing relations with Israel.
In fact, he said, that “should be mandatory.” But half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/world/middleeast/mohammed-bin-salman-us-visit.html in establishing them anytime soon.
As a result, the meandering https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116635193825443617?utm_source=semafor that Mr. Trump shared on Monday was met with a mix of silence and bemusement across the Middle East. Regional analysts said they were not even sure that they understood the rationale behind his proposal. Why would ending the war, which the United States and Israel initiated by bombing Iran on Feb. 28, provide an incentive to recognize Israelfor countries like Qatar, which had lobbied desperately to prevent the war in the first place?
“It’s just bizarre,” said Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel. “What’s the connection between a deal with Iran and that? I’m honestly puzzled.””
Trump is beside the point. Normalization is already happening. Jordan and Saudi Arabia shot down Iranian missiles headed for Israeli cities. Israel deployed Iron Dome batteries with soldiers to Abu Dhabi. A senior Emirati official said: 'We will not forget it. It was a real eye-opening moment to see who our real friends are.' That's the beginning of an alliance.
Your 40% projection requires Israel to extend citizenship to the West Bank and Gaza. No Israeli political faction proposes this. Annexation without enfranchisement preserves Jewish majority indefinitely. The one-state outcome isn't inevitable. It requires a decision Israel will not make.
Zionism was founded by socialist atheists. Jewish identity is ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and national. Secular Jews who observe nothing remain Jews by every legal, genetic, and historical measure. Calling Judaism a religion and nothing more is an error.
But none of this is the main event. Your South Africa analogy needs an isolation mechanism. None exists. The world moves on from intractable conflicts involving capable, integrated states. Not because the conflict resolves, but because it exhausts its utility. Nobody discusses Tibet. That cause had better optics than this one and still faded to nothing in twenty years. Palestine is on the same arc. The Iron Dome is a Gulf product now. The region has voted.
In 20-30 years only cranks and rabid Jew haters will still be flogging this.
The democratic party is done with Israel, and for good reason.
Zionism is and always has been a jewish supremacist movement, which is incompatible with "the left" in any of its forms.
I think zionists are struggling with the reality that their only home moving forward will be with conservative white nationalists who will make for extremely flakey allies.
But. It's a literal ethnostate. What could you possibly expect?
Nothing, as long as you’re not trying to maintain it as one by explicitly and permanently denying political rights to 5 million people that you nevertheless actually hold power of life and death over.
So when Jewish settlers attack them and the IDF looks the other way, that’s because THEIR “government” has sanctioned those actions? It’s THEIR “government” that’s arbitrarily seizing their land, demolishing their homes, and systematically denying them permits to build new ones?
Please. This is all transparent by now. Israelis would be far better off admitting to themselves what all the world already sees.
The attacking goes both ways. And the IDF often failed to protect Israelis. Such as in the many attacks on the roads in chawara and the like. So jews sometimes take matters into their own hands. Sometimes this is not justified but every case is different.
Life for Palestinians in the WB is and has been consistently miserable for decades. And the pace of beatings, killings, land confiscations, home demolitions, and new settlements has accelerated since 10/7, even though that attack was mounted from Gaza, not the WB, and Hamas is not in power in the WB.
Israeli government ministers state openly that their goal is annexation of the WB, not peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians. Some of them muse openly about the forced expulsion (“transfer”) of the 3 million WB Arabs; in the meantime we hear that the Israeli government has quietly approached that of South Sudan with a request to “voluntarily” relocate millions of Gazan refugees there, supposedly “temporarily”, although I don’t think anyone in the rest of the world believes that it would truly be a time-limited thing.
Hard to see how your government isn’t provoking legitimate resentment and resistance among the very people you claim you want to see lay down their arms. I certainly don’t support what Hamas did on 10/7 and I very much support the continued existence of a free and democratic Jewish state in the ME, but there’s no way you’re going to convince me that the current Israeli government, and indeed even the Israeli public at large, is displaying any intention at this point of peacefully coexisting with the 5 million Arabs for whom Palestine is also their home. In the past many of you did, but something has changed over the past few decades and it seems clear now you want land, not peace, and the Palestinians somehow “disappeared” or forcibly confined to tiny bantustans similar to the Indian reservations we here in the US drove our Native Americans onto back in the 19th century; a deeply shameful chapter in our history, let me add, of which we’re not proud.
I submit that the project to systematically immiserate and “bantustanize” the Palestinian Arabs is one that most Americans are also not going to support now that they’re becoming increasingly aware of it, and that this is part of the reason why Israel is losing support so among US voters; there are other reasons, including a weariness on the part of voters to get dragged into distant conflicts like the recent Iran war that aren’t clearly linked to US interests, but the perception that Israel is no longer aiming for peaceful coexistence with the 5 million indigenous Arabs and instead wants to displace and/or permanently repress them is beginning to play a significant role as well.
Lauren, you can’t have it both ways (as a zionist and jewish supremacist, you might disagree, but you’re simply wrong.)
It can’t be “the Jewish state” and not be an ethnostate.
It can’t have as its stated goal, a permanent Jewish majority, and not be an ethnostate.
It can’t do 80 years of blatant ethnic cleansing, and not be an ethnostate.
There are Iranian Jews, American Jews, Polish Jews, anything-you-fucking-want Jews; none of these places are ethnostates.
I am not going to change your mind about anything, but over the next decade you will understand that a genocidal ethnostate is not a cement block you need to chain to your neck.
I hope you make that journey sooner rather than later.
You can’t argue with people like that. They are literally like Nazi level Jew haters. Completely mind warped. No amount of facts or logic can break through their bigotry and hatred.
The reality is that they have no power and because of that their behavior is akin to a toddlers temper tantrum.
Israel isn’t going anywhere.
Israeli and Arab states including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE coordinated directly during Iranian attacks in 2024 and 2026 — Arab militaries intercepted Iranian missiles, shared radar data, and provided airspace access to defend against the strikes. Israel then deployed an Iron Dome battery with Israeli soldiers to operate it on UAE soil during the 2026 Iran war, the first time the system had ever been sent to another country. A senior Emirati official responded by saying “we are not going to forget it — it was a real eye-opening moment to see who our real friends are.”
Israel and its neighbors will likely continue to move toward normalizing relations and developing business and cultural ties between them.
That’s fine, as long as my tax dollars aren’t complicit in the bantustanization / “Indian reservationing” of the OT Palestinian Arab population, nor directed toward any wars in the ME that don’t clearly prioritize the defense of the American homeland.
This is complete horseshit, Dean. Many states were designed explicitly to provide self-determination to a specific ethnic-cultural group. How do you think Eastern Europe broke off from the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia - just randomly? No, obviously not. The transition from empire to nation-state was the geopolitical process of the twentieth century, and happened all over the world. In places where state lines were drawn randomly - in Africa, for example - it’s been a source of endless conflict, and the consensus of every scholar is that the continent would’ve been better off with state lines that reflected ethno-cultural-linguistic divisions.
Moreover, even if Israel were unique, it would be completely justified. A people who’ve been exiled, enslaved, dispossessed, and slaughtered for thousands of years by many different countries should rule and defend itself.
If you define “ethnostate” so that only Israel fits, then, sure, Israel is the only ethnostate.
But then, given reality on the ground, you have to take it all back, that there are many countries that privilege one group over another. The only question, it would seem, is whether the dominant group is an ethnos. And that, in turn, depends how you define ethnicity.
In Israel, the dominant group are Jews, across a fairly wide spectrum of practice and ancestry. I don’t see how Saudi Arabia, where Wahabi Islam predominates, is less of an ethnostate. Its citizenry is more uniform in religious practice and ancestry, and it, too, discriminates against other gorups, even some other Muslims.
Nor is Israel the only small country to define itself on the basis of an ethnic group. Here is the beginning of the current Constitution of Hungary. The capitals are in Wikipedia’s version of the English translation. I do not see a big difference compared to Israel’s proclamation that it is the state of the Jewish nation. And, I might add, Hungary’s record with respect to ethnic minorities is not great.
WE, THE MEMBERS OF THE HUNGARIAN NATION, at the beginning of the new millennium, with a sense of responsibility for every Hungarian, hereby proclaim the following:
We are proud that our king Saint Stephen built the Hungarian State on solid ground and made our country a part of Christian Europe one thousand years ago.
Hungary is far more genetically and culturally homogeneous than Israel, too.
I agree that there are plenty of nations in the world that try to preserve a particular majority group and prevent minority groups from taking over, but in general they do this by preventing the entry of such minority groups into their country. How many nations explicitly state that they intend to maintain a preferred as the majority demographic AND make it clear they intend do so by permanently denying political rights to the threatening minority group? Japan and Hungary are not ruling over territories like the OT, inhabited by millions of people constituting such a threatening minority, while making it clear they intend to ultimately take over those territories whilst leaving those millions of people in a condition of permanent stateless limbo.
Your analogy would work better if Hungary were to take over the government of, say, Transylvania with the obvious intention of denying self-rule to the Romanian minority there because doing so might threaten the demographic Magyar majority within such a larger polity governed from Budapest.
Don’t be so pathetic, really. The ratio of non-Jews in Israel is higher than the ratio of Jews in any of the 56 Muslim countries 21 percent of Israel is Arab.
If you define "ethnostate" as a nation state built around preserving an ethnic or cultural majority, the it's a global norm, not unique to Israel.
In the Middle East, the majority of nations explictly define themselves, in their constitutions, as Arab states, and establish Islam as the state religion.
Egypt - "Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic is its official language. Principles of Islamic Sharia are the principal source of legislation."
Oman - Article 1: "The Sultanate of Oman is an independent, fully sovereign Arab Islamic state..."
Article 2: "The religion of the State is Islam and Islamic Sharia is the basis of legislation."
Qatar - "Qatar is an independent sovereign Arab State. Its religion is Islam and Sharia law shall be the principal source of its legislation..."
Latvia - The preamble to its constitution explicitly states that the Latvian state was created to "guarantee the existence and development of the Latvian nation, its language and culture throughout the centuries," while declaring the right to self-determination belongs to the Latvian nation. Non-ethnic Latvians have civil rights, but the state's fundamental purpose is explicitly exclusive to one group.
Redefining a global political model so it only applies to one country is a party trick.
Worth mentioning that Latvia had to relax its conditions on citizenship for non-Latvians by ethnicity (these were mostly Russians who moved to Latvia during Soviet times) as a condition for joining the EU.
So you know that you Jew haters invented a concept just to describe Israel - even though there are absolutely other countries that fit the definition.
Listen - here’s how confident I am that you’ve been manipulated to believe in antisemitic lies. Come and visit.
Come and see it for yourself.
Talk to people. Come and visit and meet real Israelis - Jews of all ethnicities, Arabs, Druze - just come and see.
I dare you.
And if that idea bothers you - ask yourself why. What would you be if this one thing - that you are so sure of - so utterly convinced of - turns out to be nothing like the real world? Who would you even be? Maybe you need Israel to be this cartoon monster because of something going on with you - not because this one tiny country really makes any difference in your life one way or another.
"It's a literal ethnostate." This sentence just shows you have no idea what you're talking about. Is Japan an ethnostate? What about Latvia, or Hungary, or Bulgaria? Modern nationalism was built around the ethnos. It's America which is the exception to the rule.
To me, his article didn't seem to be advocating a serious policy change. It is vague and aspirational, sort of like a state of the union address. I think his goal is to try to unify his party, and this seems like the kind of thing pollsters are saying Kamala should have said before the last election. Excellent analysis, Eli.
Liberal Zionism, like all centrist positions, is doomed to fail as it refuses to stand on any principle. Liberalism can only campaign, when it comes to ruling it lacks the teeth to accomplish anything more than concession.
His Party didn’t shift around Van Hollen; Van Hollen is among the architects of the shift to appease Antizionist ‘progressives’. He’s the first senator to use Elders of Zion level antisemitic accusations about “AIPAC (Jews) control America”, and those disgusting talking points have spread to liberal democrats from the DSA faction. Van Hollen isn’t confused, he’s intentional with all that Anzi libel he constantly flings. You’re confused about his intent.
The progressive wing have turned the Democrats into the Antizionist Socialist party, and there is no meaningful distinction between Anzis and Nazis - both want a destruction of Israel and a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews.
Let’s stop being loyal sheep and make standing with Israel and the majority of American Jews into the litmus test for any politician. It’s a matter of survival.
"you hysterical coward". I think we all can see who is hysterical. In the real world 40 of 47 Democratic Party senators voted to embargo Israel of defensive and offensive weapons during a war forced on Israel by the IRGC and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies. If you cannot interpret that as trying to get Israelis killed, you have brain damage.
Van Hollen, like every other formerly “moderate” Democrat, is terrified of being primaried from the left. Therefore, like every other “moderate”, he is moving left. This is his move left. While paying lip service to “free and fair elections”, he doesn’t care about that and has no reasonable expectations that such would ever occur in Hamas-run Gaza. Hamas is a criminal enterprise operating as a religious cult. They will not negotiate in good faith, ever. Further, they have the guns and can terrorize the rest of Gaza and the Progs are fine with that. They are allies and that’s the end of the story.
But here’s where Van Hollen and all of the Progs really get it wrong: Israel isn’t going anywhere and isn’t going to countenance another 10/7. The current hard right in Israel wants to de-Muslim the West Bank and Gaza. Under current semantic rules, that is “genocide”. Wanting to rid Israel of all Jews, however, is not. So, we know the kind of crazy the Progs want us to reason with.
Back Israel into a corner and find out just how shitty things can get for the everyday Palestinian who, more likely than not, doesn’t like Jews or Israel but just wants to make a living and play with their kids. Israel has nukes and isn’t going down without a fight. Van Hollen is playing footsies with the most ruthless party in America, the so-called Progressives who are, most likely, DSA-adjacent if not fully on board. DSA equals stupid on many levels and the inability to think past their ideologically blinkered world view is one of their chief problems. The punch line then is simply this: Van Hollen is trading principle for political survival and, in doing so, is clearly pretending to comprehend the consequences just enough to give himself the fig leaf he thinks he needs to ride the Prog/DSA tiger. Good luck, a-hole.
His parents were in the foreign service, and he was born in Pakistan. I don't think in his case it's a question of moving left. I stand by my point that the Democratic party will be controlled by people who would rather that 🇮🇱 not exist. That's the core truth that we must deal with.
I mean, what on earth is the point of any American continuing to even take part in these discussions that are wholly centered on Israeli feelings? It’s our money, reputation, and blood, and no Israeli commenter to this day has remotely been able to give an adequate answer as to what Americans get out of the relationship.
We know you people well enough to know that the half-asses answers that you provide simply show that you do not care what our thoughts are. They’re comically bad; "we provide intelligence” which consisted of convincing Trump that if we bomb Iranians, they’ll love us. The same thing you did with the Iraqis in 2002.
It’s like Israelis are biologically incapable of not being profoundly self absorbed or seeing the world from someone else’s eyes.
In 5th paragraph Eli states he doesn’t believe that what has occurred in Gaza is a genocide. I couldn’t continue reading after that statement😳
This analysis repeats the myth that Weisglass said the goal of disengagement from Gaza was to freeze a Palestinian state. What he actually said was that it freezes the formula in place, the formula requiring that Palestinians stop terrorism before they can have a state which would be a terrorist state. If he were wrong—that is, if Palestinians turned away from terrorism when granted Gaza—then the formula wouldn't have been frozen at all. Weisglass's theory that any new Palestinian state would be a terrorist-run state could've been proven wrong. The problem is, it wasn't. Political changes do not change Palestinian terrorism. Repeating the myth as you did is wrong.
Much of this piece repeats similar problematic analyses that it critiques.
Where it says leave a comment, should it also say leave the Democrats. I dare say yes.
Just for the reason of self dignity and self respect.
His antizionist nonsense is also crazy, he thinks people who disagree with Israeli government, which is a good 30-40% of Israel at any one time and 70% of democrats are less than human. It’s why he came up with a new name to categorize them, which he doles out sort of like a Yellow Star of David.
I truly believe he would be a disgrace to his Victor Frankl and his ancestors. It’s a shame, the Jewish people are some of the most creative people in history and their experience through the holocaust taught us so much about man’s inhumanity to man.
It’s disappointing to see what many Conservative Jewish Israelis have become.
Ignore @Arrr Bee
He hates Americans. And doesn’t support Americans. I’ve spoken to him many times, to see what he was made of, and he doesn’t think Palestinian people are human beings.
What is left out is he also think nothing of Americans dying for Israeli interests and he supports Israel hook, line, sinker to the point that he isn’t able or allowed to criticize the government.
I honestly don’t find him a useful person to talk to as he lacks morals.
Ridiculousness. I’m American, my wife and children are American and I love America. You don’t know me and haven’t spoken to me once. You’ve had some comment threads with me, which most normal people understand is very much not the same thing.
Americans are dying for the American interest of preventing the IRGC from acquiring nuclear weapons. That’s been a policy of every president since Clinton. Your desire to help Iran achieve such weapons is a desire to have millions of Americans killed by the country acting on “Death to America” since 1979.
Supporting Islamist terrorism like you do isn’t moral. Anyone but Antizionist Socialists and National Socialists knows this.
You don’t love America at all. You hate America and want Americans to die in wars for Israel.
You privilege Israeli issues over American ones. And you lack morals and consideration for Palestinian people.
I’ve probed you over multiple conversations and everything I say is true.
Repeating a lie doesn’t make it a truth. I know that’s something that Free Palestine cult members believe, but your magical realism isn’t magical, nor real.
Keep fighting for Islamist terrorists, though. You’re a true moral authority.
We have to stop letting these people hijack the language and conflate the meaning of term “liberal” vs the nebulous camp of people that may self-id as liberals while worshipping extremists that are open about their singular hates towards liberals that rivals any MAGA orgy. This mob doesn’t begin to understand actual values of liberalism , nor is there a single liberal bone left in their body or mind
That was thoughtful. It does seem that the current conversation (and I use this term loosely) is based on everyone hanging on to their favorite ideology - which as you and Hannah Arendt point out - contains terms that no longer fit the reality. It is difficult to carry on a thoughtful conversation with people who persist in having their heads up their rearends. It is more comfortable to retreat to a kind of mental closure where even a solution from the last century feels more comfortable. Just as the far right in the US has persisted in running itself off of a cliff, I fear the far left is doing the same thing. It is not just a political cliff but a cognitive cliff as well. The US is not trump and those from the outside who think so are hopefully wrong. Israel is not Bibi and his far-right horsemen and hopefully time will prove those who think so wrong. Things do need to change in Israel and in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon and reality points out that Israel is not the only party to finding a remedy. So again thanks for the demonstration of what it looks like when you connect thinking to the actual experience in the world around you.
Van Hollen’s piece was excellent and 30 years overdue, hearkening back to the demise of the Oslo Accords.
Israel should be given a reasonable amount of time, perhaps a year, to withdraw from East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza (where it shamelessly ignores the terms of the cease-fire). This would give Israel a demographic grace of perhaps 100 years to sustain itself as the “3/4 Jewish state“.
And it would give the indigenous Gentiles a country of their own, which could be populated by 20–25% Jews in a mirror image of Israel. Palestine would have to be absolutely as sovereign as Israel, unimpeded by Israeli interference.
The alternative to this two state outcome is, of course, the one state from the river to the sea solution, Palesrael. Jews are already in the minority in that area and that minority status will be pronounced by 2040.
With Jews being in the minority, this new country may be many things, but it certainly won’t be “the 3/4 Jewish state“. Like most other countries, it will simply be a state of all its people. Even now, Israel is in reality the Israeli state rather than the Jewish state since about 1/4 of its citizens are absolutely Israelis even though they’re Gentiles. All Israelis, whether Jews or Gentiles, are 1000 times more important to Israel, as citizens, than, random Jews who are Belgian or Venezuelan.
It would be an excellent start for the United States to actually conform its behavior to be llegal in the context of both Symington amendment and the Glenn amendment as relates to treatment of countries that test and acquire nuclear weapons, and that refuse to sign the nuclear nonproliferation agreement. Israel is absolutely out of bounds where this is concerned and no further military assistance should be granted it until, along with Iran, it pledges to immediately make the Middle East free of nuclear weapons.
Don’t Bogart that joint, my friend.
Israel’s problem with the United States goes far deeper than a simple statement that it no longer wants endless charity from American taxpayers (and, of course, what Netanyahu said is pure BS). 80% of American Democrats and, even works, 57% of American Republicans under the age of 50 now strongly disapprove of Israel. We are all witnesses to the endless squatter terrorism in the West Bank, which is facilitated by the IDF and the police, all of whom unbelievably report to the morbidly obese thug Ben-Gvir. These images won’t fade away, and Israel will live to regret that it ever tolerated such ongoing daily terrorism by its squatter citizens.
Read the below, credit Haaretz, for a dose of reality.
“Pentagon Leaks Signal Growing U.S. Effort to Blame Israel for Risks of Renewed Iran War
Reports in Trump-friendly U.S. media highlighted the extent of Washington's role defending Israel during the war while exposing growing concern over depleted missile stockpiles and America's ability to sustain another confrontation with Iran
Israel should be concerned by the signals it is receiving from the U.S. defense establishment.
Earlier this week, the Pentagon leaked two documents that appeared to serve a dual purpose: exposing the extent of the U.S. role in defending Israel during the war with Iran while warning of the costs a renewed confrontation could impose on Washington itself.
Both reports, published in media outlets closely connected to allies and sources of U.S. President Donald Trump, centered on a similar argument. The United States expended enormous military resources defending Israel during the war, and its defense industry is struggling to replenish critical munitions quickly enough for another prolonged conflict.
The Washington Post, citing Pentagon assessments and U.S. officials, reported that the United States launched more than 200 THAAD missile-defense interceptors during the war – roughly half of the Pentagon's inventory – in addition to more than 100 SM-3 and SM-6 interceptors fired from Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean.
By contrast, Israel fired fewer than 100 Arrow interceptors and around 90 David's Sling interceptors. "In total, the U.S. shot around 120 more interceptors and engaged twice as many Iranian missiles," one U.S. administration official told the newspaper.
"The numbers are striking," Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told the Post. "The United States absorbed most of the missile defense mission while Israel conserved its own magazines."”
The THAAD numbers prove the opposite of your point. Israel conserved its magazines strategically during the Iran war. The lesson: accelerate independence. Its defense budget is $49 billion and rising. Modi visited Jerusalem last month for deals estimated at $8-10 billion covering Arrow, David's Sling, Iron Dome, and Iron Beam. India has been Israel's largest defense purchaser for years, 34% of total arms sales from 2020-2024. Netanyahu named India and Germany as replacement partners. The decoupling is structured, funded, and underway.
Haaretz has 72,000 daily readers in a country of 10 million. It exists for international consumption. Citing it as a reality check on Israeli strategic thinking is like citing a New York literary magazine for a reality check on Pentagon strategy.
We won’t Bogart that joint, my friend.
As they say in Te Aviv, “Let’s get Uncle Sam to do it, and pay for it!”
On to a nuclear free Middle East where we use elimination of Israel’s nuclear weapons as the sweetener to ensure Iran never gets to where Israel is as a proliferator.
Here is what is probably going to happen.
0-5 years: consolidation of what already exists
The Iron Dome deployment to the UAE is not going back in the box. The operational military relationships between Israel and the Gulf states are now established facts with institutional memory behind them — people who trained together, commanders who coordinated, officials who made calls at 3am during missile barrages. That kind of relationship deepens through repetition not reversal.
Saudi normalization probably happens in this window, quietly and with significant Palestinian-flavored language attached to give MBS domestic cover — some formula about Palestinian autonomy or a pathway to statehood that doesn’t actually constrain Israeli West Bank policy but allows the Saudis to say they extracted something. The actual content of the Palestinian concession will be minimal. The form will be elaborate. Both sides will understand the difference.
Iran emerges from the 2025-2026 conflict with its proxy network severely degraded, its nuclear program set back, its missile arsenal reduced, and its domestic legitimacy under serious internal pressure. It rebuilds, but more slowly and with less regional reach than before. The resistance axis that sustained Palestinian maximalism militarily is a diminished force.
Hamas as a governing entity is functionally finished in Gaza. What replaces it is the genuinely open question of this window — some combination of PA nominal authority, international reconstruction administration, and Israeli security control. None of it produces a Palestinian state but all of it produces something more stable than what existed before October 7.
5-15 years: the framework shift
This is where the academic and political left faces its structural crisis. A generation of students is going to grow up watching Arab states with normalized relations with Israel, watching Gulf sovereign wealth funds invest in Israeli tech, watching Israeli and Emirati businesspeople at the same conferences. The lived reality will be increasingly incompatible with the genocide-apartheid-settler-colonial framework.
The wound economy’s Western university loop faces a specific challenge here. The loop runs on the conflict being legible as a simple colonial oppressor/oppressed binary. Regional normalization steadily complicates that legibility. It is hard to maintain the “Israel is uniquely evil” framing when the states geographically closest to the conflict are building defense partnerships and trade relationships with it. The campus activist will face the uncomfortable question of why Jordan and the UAE and eventually Saudi Arabia are all wrong about their own regional interests.
Palestinian political identity undergoes forced transformation in this window or doesn’t transform at all. If PA leadership cannot deliver any improvement in material conditions — and the current trajectory suggests it cannot — the generational transfer of political identity shifts in one of two directions: either toward pragmatic acceptance of a limited autonomy arrangement, or toward further radicalization without military capacity to act on it. The latter is the more likely outcome in the short term but is strategically incoherent. A maximalist political program without military capacity to pursue it is just rhetoric. It exhausts itself.
The West Bank trajectory in this window is de facto annexation proceeding through incremental facts on the ground. More settlements, continued Area C dispossession, nominal PA administrative authority over urban population centers with no sovereignty. The international community continues condemning it. Nothing structural changes that trajectory in the absence of American pressure, and American pressure in either a Republican or Democrat administration has historically been insufficient to reverse Israeli settlement policy.
So in other words one country from the river to the sea, two tribes, three religions, etc. Then it’s a question of whether it’s based on the South African model or on a true democratic model. Read up on the Sullivan Principles.
The South Africa model required a coalition that isolated the target economically. That coalition doesn't exist here and grows less possible every year. Regional military coordination since 2024 has made that clear. Netanyahu just announced on 60 Minutes he wants US military aid drawn to zero. Israel is neutralizing the Symington/Glenn lever before anyone pulls it.
The honest comparison isn't South Africa. It's Tibet. As regional normalization deepens and Israel decouples from the US, Palestine will fade into that same category: a frozen conflict the world mostly ignores. The states with skin in the game have already signaled they are moving on.
15-30 years: the long settlement
The most likely outcome at this horizon is something nobody will call by its real name but which functions as permanent Palestinian autonomy without sovereignty — a demilitarized entity with its own civil administration, international recognition from most states, but no army, no control of borders, no right of return operationalized, and Israeli security presence in Area C indefinitely. It will be called a state. It will not be one in any meaningful Westphalian sense.
Whether Palestinians accept this arrangement depends almost entirely on whether a generation of Palestinian leadership emerges that can tell its people that 1948 is permanent and that the achievable is better than continued nothing. That leader has not appeared. The political culture that would produce them has not developed. But 30 years is enough time for material conditions to force the issue — a generation that has grown up under functional permanent occupation with diminishing international support and no military patron capable of changing the situation may calculate differently than the generation that believed the resistance axis would eventually deliver.
The regional picture at 30 years looks like a Middle East organized around the Iran-versus-everyone-else axis, with Israel as a normalized participant in Gulf security architecture, formal diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia and potentially others, economic integration through tech and agricultural partnerships, and the Palestinian question managed rather than resolved — a frozen conflict with administrative structures around it, like Cyprus or Kosovo in different registers.
That won’t last long anymore than apartheid South Africa did. 30 years from now the indigenous Gentiles will be such significant majority of those in Palesrael that they won’t be ignored.
It is surprising that Israel is such a willing catalyst where the destruction of its reputation is concerned. Just as it is surprising that Israel so willingly and aggressively is pursuing an outcome that will make the existence of a Jewish state impossible, since Jews will probably be no more than 40% of the total population of that state.
Brace yourself. One country, two tribes, three religions and, apparently shockingly, equal rights for all its citizens.
Israel is a country and ¾ of its citizens are Jewish while ¼ of its citizens are indigenous Gentiles. Irrespective of tribe or religion, they are all equally Israelis. Israeli is a nationality and Judaism is a religion. The thought that a random Jew in Belgium or Ecuador is more important to Israel than actual Israeli citizens who are Gentiles is so preposterous that it doesn’t even merit discussion.
You might want to read this (credit the New York Times) to help with your return to the real world.
“The Mideast Is Baffled by Trump’s Call to Expand Abraham Accords
The president said more countries should be required to recognize Israel as part of a deal to end the war with Iran. Analysts say the chances of that happening are close to zero.
The social media post by President Trump made it sound straightforward. The United States would orchestrate a deal to end the war with Iran and, in exchange, a slew of countries across the Middle East and South Asia would join an agreement, called the Abraham Accords, establishing relations with Israel.
In fact, he said, that “should be mandatory.” But half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/world/middleeast/mohammed-bin-salman-us-visit.html in establishing them anytime soon.
As a result, the meandering https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116635193825443617?utm_source=semafor that Mr. Trump shared on Monday was met with a mix of silence and bemusement across the Middle East. Regional analysts said they were not even sure that they understood the rationale behind his proposal. Why would ending the war, which the United States and Israel initiated by bombing Iran on Feb. 28, provide an incentive to recognize Israelfor countries like Qatar, which had lobbied desperately to prevent the war in the first place?
“It’s just bizarre,” said Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel. “What’s the connection between a deal with Iran and that? I’m honestly puzzled.””
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/world/middleeast/trump-abraham-accords.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Trump is beside the point. Normalization is already happening. Jordan and Saudi Arabia shot down Iranian missiles headed for Israeli cities. Israel deployed Iron Dome batteries with soldiers to Abu Dhabi. A senior Emirati official said: 'We will not forget it. It was a real eye-opening moment to see who our real friends are.' That's the beginning of an alliance.
Your 40% projection requires Israel to extend citizenship to the West Bank and Gaza. No Israeli political faction proposes this. Annexation without enfranchisement preserves Jewish majority indefinitely. The one-state outcome isn't inevitable. It requires a decision Israel will not make.
Zionism was founded by socialist atheists. Jewish identity is ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and national. Secular Jews who observe nothing remain Jews by every legal, genetic, and historical measure. Calling Judaism a religion and nothing more is an error.
But none of this is the main event. Your South Africa analogy needs an isolation mechanism. None exists. The world moves on from intractable conflicts involving capable, integrated states. Not because the conflict resolves, but because it exhausts its utility. Nobody discusses Tibet. That cause had better optics than this one and still faded to nothing in twenty years. Palestine is on the same arc. The Iron Dome is a Gulf product now. The region has voted.
In 20-30 years only cranks and rabid Jew haters will still be flogging this.
Fantastic analysis.
How are the people running foreign policy in America this ignorant and this bad and basic reasoning?
You can have Hamas, the Ayatollahs, and the PIJ in power or you can have two states. You cant' have both.
The democratic party is done with Israel, and for good reason.
Zionism is and always has been a jewish supremacist movement, which is incompatible with "the left" in any of its forms.
I think zionists are struggling with the reality that their only home moving forward will be with conservative white nationalists who will make for extremely flakey allies.
But. It's a literal ethnostate. What could you possibly expect?
Whats wrong with an ethnostate?
Nothing, as long as you’re not trying to maintain it as one by explicitly and permanently denying political rights to 5 million people that you nevertheless actually hold power of life and death over.
They have their own governments. The PA and Hamas.
So when Jewish settlers attack them and the IDF looks the other way, that’s because THEIR “government” has sanctioned those actions? It’s THEIR “government” that’s arbitrarily seizing their land, demolishing their homes, and systematically denying them permits to build new ones?
Please. This is all transparent by now. Israelis would be far better off admitting to themselves what all the world already sees.
The attacking goes both ways. And the IDF often failed to protect Israelis. Such as in the many attacks on the roads in chawara and the like. So jews sometimes take matters into their own hands. Sometimes this is not justified but every case is different.
Life for Palestinians in the WB is and has been consistently miserable for decades. And the pace of beatings, killings, land confiscations, home demolitions, and new settlements has accelerated since 10/7, even though that attack was mounted from Gaza, not the WB, and Hamas is not in power in the WB.
Israeli government ministers state openly that their goal is annexation of the WB, not peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians. Some of them muse openly about the forced expulsion (“transfer”) of the 3 million WB Arabs; in the meantime we hear that the Israeli government has quietly approached that of South Sudan with a request to “voluntarily” relocate millions of Gazan refugees there, supposedly “temporarily”, although I don’t think anyone in the rest of the world believes that it would truly be a time-limited thing.
Hard to see how your government isn’t provoking legitimate resentment and resistance among the very people you claim you want to see lay down their arms. I certainly don’t support what Hamas did on 10/7 and I very much support the continued existence of a free and democratic Jewish state in the ME, but there’s no way you’re going to convince me that the current Israeli government, and indeed even the Israeli public at large, is displaying any intention at this point of peacefully coexisting with the 5 million Arabs for whom Palestine is also their home. In the past many of you did, but something has changed over the past few decades and it seems clear now you want land, not peace, and the Palestinians somehow “disappeared” or forcibly confined to tiny bantustans similar to the Indian reservations we here in the US drove our Native Americans onto back in the 19th century; a deeply shameful chapter in our history, let me add, of which we’re not proud.
I submit that the project to systematically immiserate and “bantustanize” the Palestinian Arabs is one that most Americans are also not going to support now that they’re becoming increasingly aware of it, and that this is part of the reason why Israel is losing support so among US voters; there are other reasons, including a weariness on the part of voters to get dragged into distant conflicts like the recent Iran war that aren’t clearly linked to US interests, but the perception that Israel is no longer aiming for peaceful coexistence with the 5 million indigenous Arabs and instead wants to displace and/or permanently repress them is beginning to play a significant role as well.
It’s not an ethnostate because there are more than a dozen ethnicities who are citizens.
But if Israel is an ethnostate could please list which countries in the middle east aren’t?
Lauren, you can’t have it both ways (as a zionist and jewish supremacist, you might disagree, but you’re simply wrong.)
It can’t be “the Jewish state” and not be an ethnostate.
It can’t have as its stated goal, a permanent Jewish majority, and not be an ethnostate.
It can’t do 80 years of blatant ethnic cleansing, and not be an ethnostate.
There are Iranian Jews, American Jews, Polish Jews, anything-you-fucking-want Jews; none of these places are ethnostates.
I am not going to change your mind about anything, but over the next decade you will understand that a genocidal ethnostate is not a cement block you need to chain to your neck.
I hope you make that journey sooner rather than later.
You can’t argue with people like that. They are literally like Nazi level Jew haters. Completely mind warped. No amount of facts or logic can break through their bigotry and hatred.
The reality is that they have no power and because of that their behavior is akin to a toddlers temper tantrum.
Israel isn’t going anywhere.
Israeli and Arab states including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE coordinated directly during Iranian attacks in 2024 and 2026 — Arab militaries intercepted Iranian missiles, shared radar data, and provided airspace access to defend against the strikes. Israel then deployed an Iron Dome battery with Israeli soldiers to operate it on UAE soil during the 2026 Iran war, the first time the system had ever been sent to another country. A senior Emirati official responded by saying “we are not going to forget it — it was a real eye-opening moment to see who our real friends are.”
Israel and its neighbors will likely continue to move toward normalizing relations and developing business and cultural ties between them.
That’s fine, as long as my tax dollars aren’t complicit in the bantustanization / “Indian reservationing” of the OT Palestinian Arab population, nor directed toward any wars in the ME that don’t clearly prioritize the defense of the American homeland.
I’m Israeli - you clearly have never been there and know absolutely nothing about it.
But you also ignored the question- which countries in the middle east don’t fit your definition of ethnostate?
Or don’t you know anything about any countries because you’re singularly obsessed with one?
Let me guess.
There are no other ethnostates in the world, Lauren.
There are a lot of countries with definitely racist laws that functionally privilege some over others in immigration, visitation, etc.
But Israel is an explicit ethnostate.
Apart from nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, we really don’t have any other examples.
You live in the most vehemently racist country in the world, and you’re asking, “why do you think my country, that’s doing a genocide, is racist?”
Gee, I wonder.
This is complete horseshit, Dean. Many states were designed explicitly to provide self-determination to a specific ethnic-cultural group. How do you think Eastern Europe broke off from the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia - just randomly? No, obviously not. The transition from empire to nation-state was the geopolitical process of the twentieth century, and happened all over the world. In places where state lines were drawn randomly - in Africa, for example - it’s been a source of endless conflict, and the consensus of every scholar is that the continent would’ve been better off with state lines that reflected ethno-cultural-linguistic divisions.
Moreover, even if Israel were unique, it would be completely justified. A people who’ve been exiled, enslaved, dispossessed, and slaughtered for thousands of years by many different countries should rule and defend itself.
If you define “ethnostate” so that only Israel fits, then, sure, Israel is the only ethnostate.
But then, given reality on the ground, you have to take it all back, that there are many countries that privilege one group over another. The only question, it would seem, is whether the dominant group is an ethnos. And that, in turn, depends how you define ethnicity.
In Israel, the dominant group are Jews, across a fairly wide spectrum of practice and ancestry. I don’t see how Saudi Arabia, where Wahabi Islam predominates, is less of an ethnostate. Its citizenry is more uniform in religious practice and ancestry, and it, too, discriminates against other gorups, even some other Muslims.
Nor is Israel the only small country to define itself on the basis of an ethnic group. Here is the beginning of the current Constitution of Hungary. The capitals are in Wikipedia’s version of the English translation. I do not see a big difference compared to Israel’s proclamation that it is the state of the Jewish nation. And, I might add, Hungary’s record with respect to ethnic minorities is not great.
WE, THE MEMBERS OF THE HUNGARIAN NATION, at the beginning of the new millennium, with a sense of responsibility for every Hungarian, hereby proclaim the following:
We are proud that our king Saint Stephen built the Hungarian State on solid ground and made our country a part of Christian Europe one thousand years ago.
Hungary is far more genetically and culturally homogeneous than Israel, too.
So, what exactly are you aiming at?
I agree that there are plenty of nations in the world that try to preserve a particular majority group and prevent minority groups from taking over, but in general they do this by preventing the entry of such minority groups into their country. How many nations explicitly state that they intend to maintain a preferred as the majority demographic AND make it clear they intend do so by permanently denying political rights to the threatening minority group? Japan and Hungary are not ruling over territories like the OT, inhabited by millions of people constituting such a threatening minority, while making it clear they intend to ultimately take over those territories whilst leaving those millions of people in a condition of permanent stateless limbo.
Your analogy would work better if Hungary were to take over the government of, say, Transylvania with the obvious intention of denying self-rule to the Romanian minority there because doing so might threaten the demographic Magyar majority within such a larger polity governed from Budapest.
Don’t be so pathetic, really. The ratio of non-Jews in Israel is higher than the ratio of Jews in any of the 56 Muslim countries 21 percent of Israel is Arab.
If you define "ethnostate" as a nation state built around preserving an ethnic or cultural majority, the it's a global norm, not unique to Israel.
In the Middle East, the majority of nations explictly define themselves, in their constitutions, as Arab states, and establish Islam as the state religion.
Egypt - "Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic is its official language. Principles of Islamic Sharia are the principal source of legislation."
Oman - Article 1: "The Sultanate of Oman is an independent, fully sovereign Arab Islamic state..."
Article 2: "The religion of the State is Islam and Islamic Sharia is the basis of legislation."
Qatar - "Qatar is an independent sovereign Arab State. Its religion is Islam and Sharia law shall be the principal source of its legislation..."
Latvia - The preamble to its constitution explicitly states that the Latvian state was created to "guarantee the existence and development of the Latvian nation, its language and culture throughout the centuries," while declaring the right to self-determination belongs to the Latvian nation. Non-ethnic Latvians have civil rights, but the state's fundamental purpose is explicitly exclusive to one group.
Redefining a global political model so it only applies to one country is a party trick.
Worth mentioning that Latvia had to relax its conditions on citizenship for non-Latvians by ethnicity (these were mostly Russians who moved to Latvia during Soviet times) as a condition for joining the EU.
So you know that you Jew haters invented a concept just to describe Israel - even though there are absolutely other countries that fit the definition.
Listen - here’s how confident I am that you’ve been manipulated to believe in antisemitic lies. Come and visit.
Come and see it for yourself.
Talk to people. Come and visit and meet real Israelis - Jews of all ethnicities, Arabs, Druze - just come and see.
I dare you.
And if that idea bothers you - ask yourself why. What would you be if this one thing - that you are so sure of - so utterly convinced of - turns out to be nothing like the real world? Who would you even be? Maybe you need Israel to be this cartoon monster because of something going on with you - not because this one tiny country really makes any difference in your life one way or another.
"It's a literal ethnostate." This sentence just shows you have no idea what you're talking about. Is Japan an ethnostate? What about Latvia, or Hungary, or Bulgaria? Modern nationalism was built around the ethnos. It's America which is the exception to the rule.
To me, his article didn't seem to be advocating a serious policy change. It is vague and aspirational, sort of like a state of the union address. I think his goal is to try to unify his party, and this seems like the kind of thing pollsters are saying Kamala should have said before the last election. Excellent analysis, Eli.
Liberal Zionism, like all centrist positions, is doomed to fail as it refuses to stand on any principle. Liberalism can only campaign, when it comes to ruling it lacks the teeth to accomplish anything more than concession.
His Party didn’t shift around Van Hollen; Van Hollen is among the architects of the shift to appease Antizionist ‘progressives’. He’s the first senator to use Elders of Zion level antisemitic accusations about “AIPAC (Jews) control America”, and those disgusting talking points have spread to liberal democrats from the DSA faction. Van Hollen isn’t confused, he’s intentional with all that Anzi libel he constantly flings. You’re confused about his intent.
The progressive wing have turned the Democrats into the Antizionist Socialist party, and there is no meaningful distinction between Anzis and Nazis - both want a destruction of Israel and a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews.
Let’s stop being loyal sheep and make standing with Israel and the majority of American Jews into the litmus test for any politician. It’s a matter of survival.
Yeah yeah, repeating the word “genocide” or “colony” doesn’t make either true, but it does expose you as a Free Palestine cult retard.
"both want a destruction of Israel and a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews."
Give me one example of a progressive calling for this, you hysterical coward.
"you hysterical coward". I think we all can see who is hysterical. In the real world 40 of 47 Democratic Party senators voted to embargo Israel of defensive and offensive weapons during a war forced on Israel by the IRGC and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies. If you cannot interpret that as trying to get Israelis killed, you have brain damage.
https://outofbabel.substack.com/p/has-chris-van-hollen-blown-a-fuse
Israel is Israel’s problem.
Not a single cent of my tax dollars should go to a genocidal settler colony.
And that opinion is far from fringe, at this point.
I think the US and UK should accept Israeli refugees, and that opinion, unfortunately, is fringe.
But the world is waking up, and it’s not going back to sleep.
Netanyahu agrees with and you and wants to end American aid to Israel Dean.
Van Hollen, like every other formerly “moderate” Democrat, is terrified of being primaried from the left. Therefore, like every other “moderate”, he is moving left. This is his move left. While paying lip service to “free and fair elections”, he doesn’t care about that and has no reasonable expectations that such would ever occur in Hamas-run Gaza. Hamas is a criminal enterprise operating as a religious cult. They will not negotiate in good faith, ever. Further, they have the guns and can terrorize the rest of Gaza and the Progs are fine with that. They are allies and that’s the end of the story.
But here’s where Van Hollen and all of the Progs really get it wrong: Israel isn’t going anywhere and isn’t going to countenance another 10/7. The current hard right in Israel wants to de-Muslim the West Bank and Gaza. Under current semantic rules, that is “genocide”. Wanting to rid Israel of all Jews, however, is not. So, we know the kind of crazy the Progs want us to reason with.
Back Israel into a corner and find out just how shitty things can get for the everyday Palestinian who, more likely than not, doesn’t like Jews or Israel but just wants to make a living and play with their kids. Israel has nukes and isn’t going down without a fight. Van Hollen is playing footsies with the most ruthless party in America, the so-called Progressives who are, most likely, DSA-adjacent if not fully on board. DSA equals stupid on many levels and the inability to think past their ideologically blinkered world view is one of their chief problems. The punch line then is simply this: Van Hollen is trading principle for political survival and, in doing so, is clearly pretending to comprehend the consequences just enough to give himself the fig leaf he thinks he needs to ride the Prog/DSA tiger. Good luck, a-hole.
His parents were in the foreign service, and he was born in Pakistan. I don't think in his case it's a question of moving left. I stand by my point that the Democratic party will be controlled by people who would rather that 🇮🇱 not exist. That's the core truth that we must deal with.