Don't disgrace Israel with politics.
To define the Jewish state by its current government or any of its governments or politicians is to misunderstand what Israel is, and worse, to pollute its very essence.
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There’s an unfortunate trend in conversations about Israel: reducing an entire nation (our history, our values, our existential struggle) to the fleeting drama of politics.
At a recent event in the U.S. featuring an Israeli speaker, the audience was invited to ask a few questions at the end. Out of five questions, two focused on Israeli politics, yet not a single attendee asked, “How are ordinary Israelis coping after nearly two years of unrelenting war?” or “How are Israeli children doing?”
It is truly bewildering why people are so obsessed with Israeli politics, and so uninterested in the everyday Israeli people who, more or less, are just like the rest of us.
In politics, one coalition rises, another collapses. One prime minister dominates the headlines; the next becomes a footnote. And in the process, the world begins to see Israel not as a country, but as a collection of talking points, policy disputes, and partisan divides.
That is a profound mistake. No country is the sum of its politics and politicians — not America, not France, not Japan, and certainly not Israel. To define Israel by its current government or any of its governments or politicians is to misunderstand what Israel is, and worse, to degrade its very essence.
Israel is not Benjamin Netanyahu or Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben-Gvir. It’s not the Likud or Labor parties, or the patchwork of parties that form fragile coalitions. Israel is a living miracle — the return of an exiled people to their ancestral homeland after 2,000 years of dispersion, persecution, and genocide. It is the culmination of a story that stretches from the Bible to the ashes of Auschwitz.
When the State of Israel was declared in 1948, it wasn’t an act of politics; it was an act of survival. A nation of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Arab lands came together to say: “Never again will Jewish life depend on the mercy of others.”
Governments in Israel come and go as power shifts between the Left and the Right. For decades, the Left-wing Labor party built the foundations of the state and pursued every imaginable peace initiative. Later, the Right-wing Likud party negotiated with Egypt and signed the first peace treaty with an Arab state. Centrist parties have risen and fallen. Unity governments have bridged ideological divides. Through it all, Israel has remained a vibrant, noisy democracy — arguably the most tested democracy on earth.
But none of that defines the essence of Israel. Because the essence of Israel is not who sits in the Prime Minister’s Office; it is why Israel exists at all.
Strip away the political noise and you’re left with a handful of truths that rarely make the headlines but explain everything:
Every war Israel has fought has been defensive. In 1948, five Arab armies invaded mere hours after Israel declared independence. In 1967, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan massed forces to annihilate Israel; Israel struck first because survival demanded it. In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on the Jews’ holiest day, Yom Kippur. The story repeats: Israelis fight not because we want to, but because we must.
Israel has made peace with 100 percent of the countries that want peace with it. Egypt in 1979. Jordan in 1994. The Oslo Accords in the 1990s. The more recent Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Every outstretched hand has been met with an Israeli handshake, and Israel has never broken a peace pact with any country, ever.
Jews are safer today precisely because of Israel. Before 1948, Jews were slaughtered without recourse — in Kishinev, in Warsaw, in many corners of a hostile world. Today, when Jews are threatened, there is a sovereign state ready to defend them. Israel is the ultimate guarantee that “Never Again” is not just a slogan; it’s a strategy.
Critics like to pretend the Israeli-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about settlements or borders. Sorry to spoil it for you, but it isn’t. It has never been about a few settlements in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) or the exact width of a demilitarized zone.
It’s about existence, about whether the world’s only Jewish state should live or die.
Before Hamas, there was the Palestine Liberation Organization, a global terrorist enterprise wrapped in the garb of “national liberation.” Its founding charter didn’t call for two states; it called for Israel’s eradication.
Today, Hamas takes that same poison and broadcasts it in neon lights. Its charter does not mince words: Israel must be annihilated. Hezbollah’s leaders speak just as plainly, vowing the Jewish state’s destruction. And Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, doesn’t hide its intent. Its supreme leader brands Israel “a cancer to be removed,” a phrase echoed in propaganda, sermons, and state television.
Then there are the crowds that chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” It sounds poetic until you remember what it means: Every inch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea (every Israeli city, every home) emptied of Jews. That is not a slogan for coexistence; it is a call for ethnic cleansing.
I wish Israelis were simply being paranoid. We’re not. It is written into charters, broadcast on official airwaves, and indoctrinated into children from Gaza to Tehran. Textbooks glorify martyrdom, songs celebrate the killing of Jews, and maps erase Israel entirely. Less than 100 years after the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, the Jewish People face enemies who openly dream of finishing the job.
That is the reality in which Israeli politics operates, a reality most of the world ignores because acknowledging it would shatter the convenient illusions of “simple solutions.” It is easier to blame Israeli politics than to confront the truth: This is not a dispute over particular policies; it is a never-ending war against genocide, for survival.
Every democratic nation elects “controversial” leaders, or leaders whose politics we don’t agree with. But there’s a second side of this coin: No one claims that Argentina or Canada or Thailand is illegitimate because of who governs them.
Why, then, do critics hold Israel to this absurd standard: If they dislike an Israeli prime minister, they question the state’s right to exist. Only a historically illiterate fool would fail to understand that the State of Israel has been governed by a wide variety of Left-wing and Right-wing politicians, yet the Palestinian goal has remained the same since at least the 1930s: to destroy the Jewish state for purely antisemitic reasons.
That’s why, when detractors demonize Israel for its politics, what they’re really saying is that Jewish self-determination is conditional — that Jews can have a state only if they behave according to someone else’s political compass. That is not criticism; that is prejudice in moral disguise.
Israel is defined first and foremost by its people — a mosaic unlike any other in the world. It’s gay pride parades in Tel Aviv and ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem. It’s Druze officers serving in the IDF and Arab doctors saving lives in Haifa hospitals. It’s Ukrainian immigrants building new lives and tech startups shaping the global economy.
Israel is Nobel Prize-winning scientists and farmers who made the desert bloom. It’s Hebrew poets, symphony orchestras, and open debates in a free press. It is not a perfect country, but it is a remarkable one.
The world forgets too quickly. Less than 100 years ago, Jews were slaughtered while the “civilized” world watched. Today, when Jews insist on defending themselves, the same world lectures them on morality.
But Israelis cannot live in theory. For us, bad policy doesn’t mean bad press. It means funerals for children killed in their beds. Thanks, but no thanks.
Ultimately, you can dislike Israel’s leaders. Israelis themselves do — loudly, passionately, and often. That is the essence of democracy: the ability to argue, protest, and hold those in power accountable. In Israel, that freedom is exercised with unrivaled intensity, because this is a society that values debate as much as it values life.
But don’t degrade Israel by reducing it to politics. A nation is not its politicians, and certainly not its latest headlines. Israel is the homeland of a people who endured exile, persecution, and genocide, only to return and rebuild against every conceivable odd. It is the safeguard of Jewish life in a world that has repeatedly shown what happens when Jews lack sovereignty.
Don’t confuse the flaws of governance with the moral right of a people to live free in their ancestral land. That right does not expire with an election. It is not contingent on who sits in the Prime Minister’s Office or which party controls the Knesset (the Israeli parliament). It is rooted in 4,000 years of history and sanctified by rivers of Jewish blood spilled for the crime of existing.
If your support for Israel depends on who won the last election, it was never support; it was a trend, a fashion statement, a pose. True solidarity is not conditional. True solidarity recognizes that Israel’s legitimacy does not rest on perfection but on principle: the principle that the Jewish People, like any people, have the right to self-determination and security in their own land.
And if that principle can be compromised or even canceled by politics, then it was never a principle at all.
Brilliant analysis of the present situation.
Your principal, of The State of Israel being more than her politics, is true here in the UK. Here we have the King and The Royal Family, who are certainly above mere politics. The Royal Family, and their close friendship with Winston Churchill, was part of the reason the British beat Hitler and The Nazis. So Israel is not alone in this regard, and also too is the fact that both countries have no written Constitution, but a very strong practical application of The Rule of Law, through the Courts and the Supreme Court.