The Israeli Left learned nothing from October 7th.
October 7th exposed the dangers of illusion, yet much of Israel’s Left still clings to a wildly outdated worldview.
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There is something seriously revealing about who the international media chooses to platform when it wants to obsessively criticize Israel.
Again and again, outlets like The New York Times turn not to Israelis who reflect the country as it actually exists, but to members of a shrinking, culturally influential Left-wing elite that still believes it speaks for the nation.
This week, The New York Times chose Israeli historian and public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The choice was not accidental. Harari represents a particular ideological class in Israel: secular, globalized, highly educated, deeply embedded in international intellectual culture, and increasingly disconnected from the instincts, fears, experiences, and identity of the average Israeli.
We are talking about people who still believe the central story of Israel is about saving it from nationalism, religion, and “extremism,” rather than saving it from the Jewish state’s self-proclaimed enemies who openly seek our destruction.
And nowhere was that disconnect clearer than in Harari’s ongoing attacks on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Harari claimed that “no one in the history of Israel has divided the nation more within itself than Netanyahu.”
This is one of those statements that sounds profound in an elite conference room, but collapses under even mild scrutiny. Netanyahu did not invent Israel’s internal divide. Instead, the real divide in Israel is about two fundamentally different visions of what Israelis want our country to be, not about one man who wins democratic election after democratic election where voter turnout is regularly above 70 percent.
One vision sees Israel primarily as a liberal, post-national state that happens to contain Jews. Jewish identity is secondary to universalism. National distinctiveness is viewed with suspicion. Judaism is acceptable mainly as culture, cuisine, and historical memory, but not as a defining civilizational force.
The other vision sees Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish People — unapologetically Jewish, historically rooted, security-conscious, and unwilling to subordinate Jewish survival to the approval of international institutions, elite newspapers, or Western academic trends.
Harari belongs firmly to the first camp. A healthy majority of Israelis do not.
That reality became even more obvious after October 7th.
Before the massacre and resulting wars, the judicial reform debate dominated parts of Israeli society. But October 7th shattered the illusion that Israel’s primary problem was internal constitutional theory. Israelis were violently reminded that we live in a region where weakness is not admired as moral sophistication. It is exploited.
One version of events is that October 7th suddenly radicalized Israelis out of nowhere. Reality is vastly different: October 7th clarified things we already suspected.
It clarified that many of Israel’s enemies are not interested in coexistence, compromise, or “ending the occupation.” They are interested in ending Israel as a Jewish state. It clarified that military strength is not optional. It clarified that slogans imported from Western streets and universities collapse upon contact with Middle Eastern reality.
And yet Harari emerged from October 7th apparently having learned nothing. Like much of the Israeli Left, he simply returned to factory settings — back to “peace with the Palestinians,” back to blaming Netanyahu, back to treating Israeli nationalism as the greater threat than jihadist barbarism.
At one point, Harari said it is better to have “both a strong army and a peace agreement.” Fine. Every Israeli I know would prefer peace. Israelis are not allergic to peace. Israelis have repeatedly shown willingness to trade land, autonomy, convicted criminals (including mass murderers), and diplomatic concessions for peace.
The problem is that peace requires a partner, which one would expect a “highly educated” individual like Harari to know by now. He is old enough to remember that the Second Intifada destroyed enormous portions of the Israeli Left’s credibility because Israelis watched suicide bombings explode buses, restaurants, and cafes after years of peace-process optimism.
October 7th was even worse. It was not merely terrorism. It was medieval sadism broadcast in real time.
And yet Harari speaks as though the primary obstacle remains Israeli unwillingness. Even more astonishingly, he spent part of the New York Times interview effectively strategizing how Hamas could have achieved a greater public relations victory. He argued that Hamas achieved an “amazing military victory” and humiliated Israel, but could have won an even larger geopolitical triumph had it spared civilians and treated hostages humanely in front of international cameras.
Think about how detached from reality this sounds to actual Israelis.
On October 7th, Hamas terrorists invaded Israeli communities, murdered entire families, raped women, kidnapped children and elderly people, burned civilians alive, slaughtered music festival attendees, and live-streamed atrocities with visible pride. And Harari’s contribution is to discuss the alternative strategy Hamas should have used.
This is the kind of intellectualization that makes ordinary Israelis increasingly distrust our own cultural elites. There is something morally disfiguring about watching Israeli “intellectuals” analyze genocidal massacres through the lens of branding optimization and geopolitical management.
Harari also claimed that many Israelis struggle to acknowledge Palestinian suffering. This is patently false. Israelis acknowledge suffering perfectly well. Israelis are not blind. We know war is horrific. We know Gaza has endured plenty of hardship. What Israelis reject is the demand that our sympathy supersede our survival instinct. No country on Earth would absorb October 7th and respond with restraint acceptable to Western “activists” on social media.
No country — not America, not Canada, not Australia, not any European state, not anyone.
There is also something profoundly manipulative about the way critics frame this issue. Israelis are constantly asked whether they care about Palestinian suffering. Rarely are Palestinians, their leadership, or their global supporters asked whether they care about Jewish suffering. The moral burden somehow always flows one direction.
Harari then claimed that, although Israel won militarily, it lost the story that gave it “legitimacy” in the world. But this assumes something fundamentally untrue: that global hostility toward Israel began because of this war. It did not.
Israel was being accused of colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and illegitimacy long before October 7th. “Anti-Zionist” movements were openly celebrating violence against Israelis on October 7th itself, before Israel even launched its military response.
The idea that Israel merely suffered a temporary public relations collapse is naïve at best. What actually happened is that October 7th exposed how much anti-Jewish hatred already existed beneath the surface of Western society. As Holocaust memory fades, older antisemitic instincts are re-emerging in updated moral language. Jews are no longer accused of poisoning wells; now they are accused of “white colonialism.” The vocabulary changes, but the obsession remains.
And then came perhaps the most absurd part of Harari’s argument: his claim that modern Israel is destroying the allegedly tolerant Judaism that emerged during 2,000 years of diaspora existence. According to Harari, biblical Judaism was uniquely violent and intolerant, while diaspora Judaism evolved into something morally superior precisely because Jews lived as powerless minorities under foreign rule.
This interpretation is historically shallow and philosophically confused.
First, every ancient civilization was violent by modern standards. Singling out biblical Judaism as uniquely barbaric is historically illiterate. The ancient world was filled with conquest, tribal warfare, slavery, massacres, and religious coercion. Assyrians skinned enemies alive. Romans crucified thousands. Empires exterminated populations routinely.
The Hebrew Bible reflects an ancient Near Eastern world, not a modern university seminar.
Second, Judaism’s ethical development did not emerge merely because Jews became weak. That argument is almost offensive in its implications. Jewish moral tradition evolved through an extraordinary intellectual and spiritual civilization: rabbinic debate, legal reasoning, prophetic ethics, communal responsibility, textual scholarship, and centuries of philosophical reflection.
The Jewish emphasis on justice, learning, argumentation, and human dignity was not simply the byproduct of exile-induced helplessness. It was civilizational achievement.
Third, Harari romanticizes Jewish powerlessness as morally purifying while treating Jewish sovereignty as morally corrupting. This is one of the most dangerous pathologies inside parts of modern Jewish intellectual culture: the belief that Jews are morally admirable only when defenseless. Apparently Jews wandering stateless through history are enlightened, but Jews defending themselves with military power are primitive.
That is not morality. That is diaspora trauma masquerading as philosophy.
And finally, Harari completely ignores the obvious reason Israel became more security-oriented and nationalistic: reality. Israelis did not wake up one morning and randomly decide to become more skeptical, harder, or more nationalist. Decades of terrorism, failed peace processes, rocket attacks, suicide bombings, regional hostility, and now October 7th shaped these attitudes.
History shaped them. Experience shaped them. Reality shaped them.
The Israeli Left continues to misdiagnose the country because it refuses to confront the central lesson Israelis learned long ago: Survival is not guaranteed.
October 7th did not create that lesson. It merely removed the luxury of pretending otherwise.
Joshua, this is an excellent article, and honestly the more I read pieces like this after October 7th, the more frustrated and disturbed I become by how many people still refuse to confront reality.
At some point, if people still cannot recognize that we are dealing with ideological movements that openly reject compromise, openly glorify violence, openly celebrate massacres, and openly seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, then I honestly do not know what evidence would ever be sufficient for them.
And I say this not only about parts of the Israeli Left, but increasingly about segments of the Western world generally. It reminds me of the same kind of delusional thinking that allows someone like Mamdani to gain major support in New York, including from many Jews themselves. At a certain point it stops being naïveté and starts becoming something genuinely dangerous.
October 7th should have shattered these illusions permanently. Instead, many people simply reset themselves back to old ideological factory settings as though nothing happened.
That is what I find so incomprehensible.
And honestly, for some people, if they still have not woken up by now, I increasingly suspect no argument, no evidence, and no atrocity will ever be enough to wake them up.
Lack of ability to learn from the past and the guarantee of repeated blunders are identifying features of the left.