I went to an anti-Israel dinner party. It did not go as planned.

They described it as “a safe space for difficult conversations.” What they really wanted was an Israeli who would sit quietly and confess.

photo: Tristan Sosteric/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I knew the evening was in trouble when the hostess described the table as “a safe space for difficult conversations.”

Nothing good has ever followed such words.

A safe space for difficult conversations is usually a space in which everyone is free to express precisely the same opinion, provided they do so using slightly different therapeutic vocabulary. Disagreement is welcome in the way vegetarians are welcome at a barbecue: theoretically, warmly, and without any intention of accommodating them.

The dinner was being held in an immaculate apartment overlooking the city. The furniture was Scandinavian, the lighting was flattering, and the books had been arranged not alphabetically but morally.

Palestinian-American academic and literary critic Edward Said sat beside French psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon. American philosopher Judith Butler leaned against a large volume on decolonising architecture. There were several books about Israel — none by Israelis, historians, military analysts, Arabic speakers, Hebrew speakers, or anyone who had recently burdened themselves with the region’s chronology.

The apartment belonged to Oliver and Beatrice, who had invited 12 people for what they called “an evening of food, friendship and necessary conversation.” I had been included, I later realised, as the necessary conversation; the one in need of “education.”

Beatrice greeted me at the door with the expression of a person welcoming a recently rehabilitated extremist. “We’re so glad you came,” she said, touching my arm. “We were worried you might feel uncomfortable.”

“I’ve been to family weddings,” I replied. “I’ll survive.”

The other guests had already assembled around a huge island bench. They held champagne flutes and spoke in low, solemn tones about suffering in places they would never visit.

There was Julian, an international lawyer who specialised in commercial leases but had recently developed strong views on the laws of armed conflict. Nadia worked in branding and referred to herself as a storyteller. Marcus was a documentary producer whose documentaries had never been produced. Eleanor taught postcolonial literature and had perfected the academic art of converting adjectives into accusations. Simon was in finance and considered himself politically courageous because he had once criticised capitalism at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

There was also Theo, a surgeon, who knew nothing about Israel but knew it with clinical confidence.

I was introduced around the room. “This is our pro-Israel friend,” Beatrice announced. I gently corrected her that I was not “pro-Israel” but an actual Israeli, which caused a murmur. It was a curious introduction. Nobody else was introduced by the country they were expected to defend. There was no “This is our pro-France friend” or “Meet our controversial supporter of New Zealand.”

Apparently, Israel was no longer a country. It was a personality disorder, and not a borderline one.

“How brave of you to come,” Eleanor said.

“Why?”

“Well,” she replied, glancing around the room, “I suspect you may be in the minority.”

“Minorities are sacred,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll be protected.”

The first course was served on plates that looked handmade because they had been expensively manufactured to resemble imperfection. It was some kind of compressed beetroot construction accompanied by a smear of something apologetic.

Oliver raised his glass: “To honest conversation.” Everyone echoed him. I should have left then.

For the first 10 minutes, the conversation was restrained. We discussed schools, property prices, artificial intelligence, and whether the city had lost its soul. Then Nadia placed her fork carefully beside her plate and sighed: “I just don’t understand how anyone can still defend Israel.”

There it was. Not raised, exactly. Released. The room grew quiet. Heads turned towards me with the benign anticipation of people waiting for a laboratory animal to perform a familiar trick.

“What is it that you don’t understand?” I asked.

“All of it,” she said.

This was at least honest.

“The occupation. The apartheid. The genocide. The colonialism.”

Four accusations, delivered with the rhythmic confidence of a wine list.

“Those are different claims,” I said.

“Are they?”

“Yes. Words retain separate meanings even when discussing Israel.”

Julian smiled and said, “I think what Nadia means is that the entire structure is indefensible.”

“What structure?”

“The structure of oppression.”

“Could you be more specific?”

He leaned back. He had expected moral submission, not follow-up questions.

“The occupation of Palestine.”

“Which territory?”

There was a pause.

“Palestine.”

“Yes, you said that. Which territory?”

“The Palestinian territories.”

“Gaza?”

“Obviously Gaza.”

“Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza in 2005.”

“That doesn’t mean the occupation ended.”

“What would have meant the occupation ended?”

“Freedom.”

It was an excellent answer because it had no content and therefore could not be disproved.

“Israel removed its military, dismantled settlements, expelled its own citizens from their homes, and left Gaza under Palestinian control. Shortly afterwards, Hamas took power, murdered its Palestinian rivals, and converted the territory into an armed base. What part of that sequence is Israel’s colonial occupation?”

Eleanor lowered her wine glass. “You’re framing it in an extremely selective way.”

“I’m using dates.”

“Dates can also be ideological.”

This was new to me. I had not realised the calendar had been colonised.

The beetroot was cleared away. Beatrice intervened with the smoothness of someone preventing an argument over inheritance. “I think there are different truths.”

“There are different perspectives,” I said. “There are not different dates.”

Marcus nodded sympathetically, as though I had made a revealing error. “That sounds very Western.”

“The belief that events happened in an order?”

“The obsession with linearity.”

“History is frequently linear, Marcus. One event happens, and then another event happens. Even documentaries tend to respect this convention.”

He smiled tightly. The second course arrived: sea bass on a bed of something green and politically sustainable. Theo, who had been silent until then, cleared his throat: “Surely the core issue is that Israel was created by Europeans on Arab land.”

I looked at him. “Which part of that sentence would you like to examine first?”

“It’s simply historical fact.”

“No, it’s a slogan wearing a waistcoat.”

He blinked.

“The Jews who established Israel were refugees and indigenous people returning to their ancestral homeland. Many were already living there. Others came from Europe because Europe had spent centuries persecuting them and then attempted to exterminate them. After Israel was established, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled or fled from Arab and Muslim countries. Today, a large proportion of Israeli Jews descend from communities from the Middle East and North Africa.”

Theo frowned. “But Zionism was a European colonial movement.”

“Colonial movements generally have a mother country.”

“Britain.”

“Britain fought the Zionists, restricted Jewish immigration during the Holocaust, and eventually left due to Jewish insurgency. Israel was not established as a British colony.”

“It was enabled by Britain.”

“So was Jordan. You seem less emotionally agitated by Jordan.”

“That’s different.”

Naturally. Everything is different when the Jews are involved.

Simon entered the conversation: “But surely you accept that the Palestinians had their land stolen in 1948.”

“Some Palestinians lost homes during a war. As did some Jews, such as the 850,000 expelled from Arab states.”

“A war started by whom?”

“Israel.”

“No. Israel declared independence after accepting partition. Arab armies invaded. Palestinian and Arab leaders rejected partition and chose war.”

“Because the partition was unjust.”

“That is a position. It does not reverse who started the war.”

“You’re being pedantic.”

“I’m describing the difference between invasion and being invaded. Civilisations have occasionally found that distinction useful.”

Nadia shook her head.

“This is why these conversations are impossible. You keep retreating into facts.”

I stared at her. It remains one of the finest accusations ever made against me. “I apologise,” I said. “I had misunderstood the purpose of the discussion. I thought we were talking about history, not selecting affirmations.”

Beatrice laughed a little too loudly. “More wine?”

“Yes,” I said. “Bring the bottle.”

By now, the evening’s rhythm had become clear. Someone would make a sweeping accusation. I would ask what they meant. They would become offended by the question. I would provide a fact. They would accuse the fact of lacking context. Then they would replace their original claim with another, equally expansive one. It was like fighting fog, except the fog had postgraduate degrees in verbosity.

Eleanor leaned forward. “Do you at least acknowledge the power imbalance?”

“Yes.”

She looked surprised. “Israel is considerably stronger than Hamas.”

“Exactly.”

“That does not tell us which side is morally right.”

“It tells us who has power.”

“Yes, but not whether that power is being used defensively or aggressively.”

“But power is the issue.”

“No, conduct is the issue. A large man attacked by a small man with a knife is not morally required to lose.”

“That metaphor is grotesque.”

“Hamas invaded Israeli communities, murdered civilians, kidnapped families, and fired rockets. You raised the power imbalance. I am explaining why comparative strength does not determine moral status.”

“You’re justifying disproportionate violence.”

“What would proportionate violence look like?”

She opened her mouth, then stopped. Julian rescued her. “International law requires proportionality.”

“It does. But proportionality does not mean matching casualty numbers. It concerns whether anticipated civilian harm is excessive relative to the expected military advantage of a particular action.”

He stiffened. “As an international lawyer, I’m aware of that.” He was not an international lawyer in that sense. He negotiated office leases.

“Then why did you allow Eleanor to use it incorrectly?”

He smiled with the strained patience of a man being contradicted in front of attractive people. “The broader legal consensus is clear.”

“Which legal consensus?”

“The international community.”

“And who is that?”

“The United Nations, human rights organisations, legal scholars.”

“Governments with opposing interests, activists with funding models, dictatorships with votes, scholars who disagree with one another, and institutions that discovered an inexhaustible administrative fascination with one tiny Jewish state.”

“You can’t dismiss the United Nations.”

“I can dismiss Libya judging human rights, Iran lecturing on women, and authoritarian regimes passing moral judgment by numerical majority. Voting blocs do not become ethical authorities through repetition.”

“That is incredibly cynical.”

“No. Cynicism is pretending that an institution’s composition has no effect on its judgments.”

The sea bass had gone cold. So had Beatrice. Oliver attempted a change of subject: “Has anyone seen the new Rothko exhibition?”

“I find Rothko colonial,” Marcus said.

I could not tell whether he was joking. The reprieve lasted less than three minutes. Theo returned to Gaza.

“Even if everything you say is true, which I’m not conceding, how can you possibly justify the number of civilians killed?”

“I don’t celebrate civilian deaths.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“No, the question was framed to imply that civilian deaths prove an absence of justification. They do not. Civilian deaths are tragic. They can result from unlawful conduct, lawful conduct, enemy tactics, military error or some combination of all four.”

“That sounds like evasion.”

“It is the opposite of evasion. It is refusing to treat every death as evidence for the conclusion you arrived at before dinner.”

Nadia’s voice became soft. “I think you’ve lost touch with your humanity.” This was said by a woman who had spent the evening compressing Israelis into a geopolitical abstraction and Palestinians into decorative victims.

“My humanity is intact,” I said. “It is simply not reserved exclusively for the people your social circle has decided are fashionable.”

She recoiled.

“That is so unfair.”

“Yes. Imagine being unfairly characterised by someone who knows nothing about you. How distressing.”

Beatrice placed a hand on Nadia’s arm. The table had divided emotionally, though not intellectually. There was me, and there was a collective organism composed of linen, indignation, and inherited silverware. Dessert arrived. It was a deconstructed tiramisu, which felt apt. The evening had also been deconstructed, though unlike the tiramisu, it had not improved in the process.

Simon took a spoonful and said, “I just think the answer is a ceasefire.”

“Which ceasefire?”

“A permanent ceasefire.”

“With Hamas remaining armed?”

“A ceasefire has to start somewhere.”

“It has started many times. Hamas has broken ceasefires, rearmed under ceasefires, and used pauses to prepare the next attack.”

“So your answer is endless war?”

“No. My answer is that war ends when the aggressor can no longer wage it or decides the cost is unbearable.”

“That is barbaric.”

“That is how wars end.”

“No, wars end through dialogue.”

“Some do. Others end at Berlin, Hiroshima, Appomattox or the collapse of one side’s military capacity. History is not a conflict-resolution workshop.”

Eleanor shook her head slowly. “This language of victory and defeat is deeply dangerous.”

“So is losing wars to people who want to kill you.”

“You reduce everything to security.”

“Because dead people have limited opportunity for moral growth.”

Julian placed both palms on the table. “This is precisely the problem with Zionism. It elevates Jewish safety above Palestinian rights.”

“No. Zionism holds that Jews require political sovereignty in their ancestral homeland because history has repeatedly demonstrated the fatal consequences of outsourcing Jewish safety to other people’s goodwill.”

“That sounds ethnonationalist.”

“So do Palestinian demands for national self-determination. Yet you describe one as liberation and the other as fascism.”

“Palestinians are oppressed.”

“Oppression does not render every political demand legitimate, every tactic permissible, or every historical claim accurate.”

“You always have an answer.”

The complaint was almost childlike.

“Yes,” I said. “I have read about the subject.”

That was when the evening finally abandoned the pretence of discussion.

Nadia accused Israel of pinkwashing. Marcus said hummus had been culturally appropriated. Eleanor said Hebrew had been weaponised. Theo wondered whether Jewish trauma had become “a form of inherited aggression.” Simon said Israel should simply trust the international community. Julian referred to Hamas as “a resistance phenomenon.” Beatrice said both sides needed to listen to women. Oliver opened another bottle.

The stupidity was no longer arriving in individual portions. It had become a tasting menu.

I tried, for perhaps the final time, to restore order. “Hamas is not a weather system,” I said. “It is an organisation with leaders, doctrine, funding, weapons, strategic objectives and agency.”

“Agency under occupation is complicated,” Eleanor replied.

“Everything becomes complicated the moment Palestinians might be held responsible for something.”

“That is racist.”

“No, racism is treating adults as morally incapacitated children because you find accountability aesthetically uncomfortable.”

The table went silent. We had reached the blunt phase. I continued: “You claim to support Palestinians, but you refuse to expect anything from Palestinian leaders. No compromise. No restraint. No democratic standards. No protection of civilians. No abandonment of eliminationist ambitions. Nothing. You reserve all moral agency for Israel and all moral exemption for its enemies, then call this compassion.”

Eleanor’s face hardened. “You are deliberately misrepresenting us.”

“No, I have listened to you for two hours. You know less than nothing about the conflict. You do not know the wars, the borders, the offers, the withdrawals, the ideologies, the internal divisions, the legal terminology, or the chronology. Yet each of you speaks with the serene confidence of a tribunal.”

“That is insulting,” Theo said.

“It is meant to be.”

Beatrice gasped softly. I had broken the central rule of elite dinner conversation: One may be ignorant, malicious, sanctimonious, or absurd, but one must never be impolite enough to notice.

Oliver tried to intervene. “Let’s keep this civil.”

“We have been civil,” I said. “That is the problem. Civility has allowed nonsense to masquerade as seriousness all evening.”

Julian scoffed. “So anyone who disagrees with you is ignorant?”

“No. Plenty of knowledgeable people disagree with me. None of them are at this table.”

The tiramisu suddenly became intensely interesting to everyone.

I turned to Julian. “You invoke international law without correctly explaining proportionality.” To Theo: “You call Israel a European colony while apparently unaware that most Israeli Jews are not descendants of colonial Europeans.” To Simon: “You recommend trusting an international system whose guarantees have repeatedly proved worthless when Jews were under threat.” To Marcus: “You think history is non-linear because you once watched an experimental film.”

He looked genuinely wounded.

To Nadia: “You believe emotional intensity is a substitute for knowledge.” Then to Eleanor: “And you treat every fact that complicates your worldview as a form of violence.”

Beatrice stood. “I think this has gone far enough.”

“So do I.”

I placed my napkin on the table. “But before I go, let us clarify what happened here. You invited one pro-Israel guest into a room of people who share the same politics and called it dialogue. You introduced me by my position, then treated me as morally suspect for holding it. You recited accusations you could not define, cited history you did not know, invoked laws you could not explain and became offended whenever asked for evidence.”

Nobody spoke.

“You are not courageous dissenters. You are the local branch office of an international consensus assembled from newspaper headlines, dinner-party fashion and the intoxicating pleasure of condemning Jews for surviving incorrectly.”

“That is outrageous,” Beatrice said.

“No. Outrageous was Theo suggesting Jewish trauma produces aggression while sitting beneath a painting his family probably bought from a refugee.”

Theo looked towards the painting. I had no idea where it came from, but by then accuracy had become less important to everyone, so I decided to participate. Simon stood as well. “You’re becoming hysterical.”

“Hysterical? I am the calmest person here. I am merely no longer cushioning the information for people who consider contradiction a hate crime.”

“You are proving every stereotype about pro-Israel people,” Nadia said.

“You mean Jews? Which stereotype? That we eventually lose patience after being lectured by people who discovered the Middle East six months ago?”

“You’re impossible.”

“No. I’m inconvenient. There is a difference.”

I picked up my jacket. The room watched me with the shocked resentment of aristocrats who had just discovered the footman could read. At the door, Oliver made one final attempt at magnanimity: “I’m sorry you didn’t feel heard.”

“I was heard perfectly well. That is why everyone is upset.”

“We may simply have to agree to disagree.”

“No. You may have to agree to read.”

He folded his arms. “Do you genuinely believe you’re the only person here who understands the issue?”

“No,” I said. “I believe I’m the only person here who has made the vulgar effort.”

Beatrice opened the door. The conversation, she said, had become unsafe. I thanked her for the meal.

Outside, the night air was cool and gloriously free of moral vocabulary. I walked home reflecting on the strange burden of being “pro-Israel” in polite society. One is expected to arrive with evidence, history, nuance, empathy, military expertise, legal precision, and a detailed alternative strategy for every available course of action. The other side need only arrive with adjectives: colonial, genocidal, apartheid, brutal.

Each word is placed on the table like a royal flush. No definitions required. No chronology necessary. No awareness of competing claims. The accusation itself is treated as evidence, while any response is proof of callousness.

The ignorance would be less irritating if it were accompanied by humility. Yet ignorance among the educated rarely travels alone. It brings status, vocabulary and the confidence of belonging to a moral majority. Its possessors do not merely lack knowledge. They regard knowledge as faintly disreputable, particularly when it interferes with the emotional clarity of their conclusions.

By the following morning, I had received three messages. Beatrice said she was “holding space” for me but needed time to process my aggression. Nadia said she hoped I would one day reconnect with my compassion. Julian sent an article from a newspaper columnist who had never visited Israel.

I replied only to Beatrice, thanking her again for dinner and apologising for my tone. It had been unnecessarily restrained.

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