Last week, Nicholas Kristof published a piece in The New York Times recounting alleged sexual abuse committed by Israeli soldiers, settlers, and prison guards against Palestinian detainees. Maybe you heard about this? It made a tiiiiny little splash in the corner of the world that cares about Israel, AKA…seemingly the entire world.
Kristof shared awful sexual abuse allegations, some of which seem unimaginable, including one involving rape by a dog – an accusation so grotesque and inflammatory that it was guaranteed to set social media on fire the moment it appeared.
Now, I want to tell you where I’m coming from, and exactly what happened in my head when I read this article.
The first thing I felt was nausea.
Then a kind of cold anger.
Then – and this is the part I want to dwell on for a minute – a really difficult, complicated feeling. Part of me wanted to shut the laptop, get off my phone, refuse to engage with any of it. Not because I don’t care about Palestinian prisoners. I do. Not because I don’t think the IDF and the Israeli prison system should be held to the highest possible standard. I do, I really do. But because something in me hardened.
I felt a part of me – a part I am not particularly proud of – saying, I don’t even want to know if this is true. I am not in the mood to ask the question.
And then I caught myself. And I thought about it. And I realized that the feeling I was having was not actually about Kristof. And it was not actually about the piece. It was about something much bigger that has been happening to all of us, on all sides, for a long time now. And I think it’s worth a whole episode.
As you know, this is a history podcast. I study and teach history. I am not an investigative journalist. I hope to God that every single claim in that article is false, but I really couldn’t do that fact-checking, it’s not my training or expertise. Others can and have and will continue to do that.
What I want to do is something else. I want to step back, widen the lens, and talk about history.
Before I start, I want to give serious credit where it’s due. A lot of what I’m about to talk about rests on the work of Daniel Gordis. Gordis is one of the most important thinkers writing about the modern Jewish state, and his book Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn is one I recommend often I should probably be getting a commission. (I am not, for the record.)
Because as I sat with the Kristof article, I realized something.
This is not the first time Israel has faced allegations of wrongdoing. Not the first time Israeli soldiers, leaders, or institutions have been accused of terrible things. Not the first time Israelis themselves have had to confront difficult moral questions in the middle of war, fear, anger, or national trauma.
And I found myself wondering: historically, how has Israeli society actually responded in moments like these?
When accusations emerge, when evidence surfaces, when the country is forced to look at itself, what does Israel tend to do?
And if we trace that history honestly, what does it help us understand about the way Israelis are reacting right now?
Let’s take a step back in time, and I can show you what I mean.
November 1948. Israel is six months old. The country is at war for its survival. Over one percent of the population of the Jewish state will be killed before the year is out. The fighting is brutal. The outcome is by no means certain.
In the middle of all this, on the 19th of November 1948, a man named Natan Alterman published a poem in the newspaper Davar. Alterman is, at this point, the unofficial poet laureate of the Jewish state. His poem is called Al Zot – “For This.” And it describes, in just a few stanzas, a young Israeli soldier in a jeep driving through a captured city, encountering an old Arab man and woman cowering against a wall. The soldier smiles, and he says, in Hebrew: I’ll try out the gun. And then, Alterman writes – “the old man just cradled his face in his hands, and his blood covered the wall.”
A poet. In Davar. In November 1948. With Jerusalem still under siege. Putting into print, in one of the most widely read papers in the country, the suggestion that Israeli soldiers were capable of terrible things.
Now let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine a similar poem published in any country, in any war, at any point in human history. Imagine an American poet, in the middle of World War II, publishing a poem about a GI murdering a defenseless French couple. Imagine a Russian poet, during the Battle of Stalingrad, writing about a Red Army soldier shooting a German grandmother for sport. What happens to that poet?
Best case scenario, the poet is shouted down. More likely, the poet is denounced as a traitor. Quite likely, depending on the country and the war, the poet ends up in jail or worse.
So what did David Ben-Gurion do?
And I want to be precise here about who Ben-Gurion actually was, because in our heads he can sound like some kind of avuncular grandfather of the Jewish state. He was not. Ben-Gurion was a tough guy. Short, yes. Prickly. Autocratic. Sometimes ruthless. The man building a country on the fly in the middle of an existential war. He was not someone with a lot of patience for poetic moral hand-wringing.
And he read Alterman’s poem, and he immediately wrote to him. Let me read you the actual letter, in translation:
“Congratulations on the moral force and the expressive power of your most recent column in Davar. You have become the voice – a pure and loyal voice – for the human conscience. If that conscience is not active and does not beat in our hearts during these days, we will not be worthy of the achievements we have had thus far. I am requesting your permission for the Ministry of Defense to reprint the column – no armed column in our army, even with all its weaponry, has [your poem’s] power – in one hundred thousand copies and to distribute it to every soldier in Israel.”
Sit with that. A hundred thousand copies. Distributed by the Ministry of Defense. To every soldier. In the middle of the war.
I genuinely cannot think of a parallel moment in the entire history of armed conflict. The leader of a country fighting for its existence, instructing his own army to read a poem accusing his own soldiers of being murderers. Let’s be clear: Ben Gurion loved his soldiers. He loved them too much to pretend war could not corrode them. He loved them too much to let a brutal conflict numb their conscience.
This is who Israel was, six months out of the womb.
And something else happened a few months later, in 1949. Something that was maybe even more special. A young Israeli writer named S. Yizhar – his real name was Yizhar Smilansky – published a novella called Khirbet Khizeh.
It is a piece of fiction. There was no actual village called Khirbet Khizeh. But it tells the story of an Israeli unit during the War of Independence that expels the residents of an Arab village. The narrator is one of the soldiers. He watches what happens, and he is overcome with complex emotions.
Toward the end of the book, Moishe, one of the soldiers, tells the narrator:
“Immigrants of ours will come to this Khirbet [Arabic for “destroyed village”] what’s-its-name, you hear me, and they’ll take this land and work it and it’ll be beautiful here! And hooray, we’d house and absorb–and how! We’d open a cooperative store, establish a school, maybe even a synagogue. There would be political parties here. They’d debate all sorts of things. They would plow fields, and sow, and reap and do great things. Long live Hebrew Khizeh! Who, then, would ever imagine that once there had been some Khirbet Khizeh that we emptied out and took for ourselves. We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile.”
Not a pretty picture. Not a feel good novel you’d read at the beach, the airport lounge or anywhere with a tiny umbrella in your drink.
Now. How did the new State of Israel respond to this? How?
First, Khirbet Khizeh became a bestseller. Right out of the gate. The country could not stop buying this book.
Second, the Ministry of Education made it part of the compulsory Israeli high school curriculum. So we are now in the position where the State of Israel is requiring its own teenagers, by law, to read a novel about the moral failings of that state’s founding war. Year after year. Generation after generation. I have friends who went to Israeli high schools in the 1990s and they can still quote lines from this book three decades later. Because they had to memorize them. The State of Israel built into its own civic curriculum a book that asked its own children to wrestle with the price of independence.
Third, Yizhar himself – the author, the man who wrote the most damning Hebrew prose about Israeli soldiers anyone had ever written – was elected to the Knesset. Multiple times. The country he had morally indicted made him one of its lawmakers.
I wonder if any other country has ever done anything quite like that. The closest American parallel I can think of is the way the United States now reveres books like To Kill a Mockingbird or Beloved. But neither of those was written in real time about a war the country was currently fighting. Khirbet Khizeh was published while the smoke was still rising from the battlefield.
But it didn’t end there. Fast forward to June 1967. The Six Day War.
You know the basics. Multiple Arab armies massing on Israel’s borders. Nasser closing the Straits of Tiran. Egyptian radio broadcasting that the Jews are about to be pushed into the sea. Israeli rabbis quietly preparing gravesites in Tel Aviv parks because they were genuinely planning for a second Holocaust. And then, in six days, one of the most stunning military victories in modern history. The Sinai. The Golan. Judea and Samaria aka the West Back. The Old City of Jerusalem.
The mood in Israel after the 6 Day War was euphoric. The kibbutzim were celebrating. The country was singing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav. It was the moment that, more than any other, defined modern Jewish self-confidence.
And then, almost immediately after the shooting stopped, some of those young Israeli soldiers, fresh from a victory that felt almost miraculous, sat down with tape recorders.
And they began recording their own moral discomfort. Their guilt. Their fear of occupation. Their anxiety about what it would mean to rule another people. Those conversations became a book called Siach Lochamim – “The Discourse of Warriors” – translated into English as The Seventh Day. It became one of the bestselling Hebrew books of all time.
There’s a real dynamic here. Victory, followed almost immediately by introspection. Within weeks of the greatest military triumph in modern Jewish history, the soldiers themselves were already asking, in print, whether the price was too high.
Show me another country that does this. Show me one.
And now, we go from 1967 to 1982, to one of the most contentious moments in Israel’s history.
In September of 1982, during the Lebanon War, Israeli forces had surrounded West Beirut. The Israeli military allowed Lebanese Christian Phalange militiamen into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila – supposedly to clean out Palestinian fighters who were holed up there. What the Phalangists did, over two and a half days, was massacre between several hundred and several thousand Palestinian civilians. Women. Children. Old men. The exact death toll is still debated to this day.
We have a whole episode about this, and definitely check it out, but I want to be precise about a few key facts here: No Israeli soldiers entered the camps. No Israeli soldier killed anyone in Sabra and Shatila. The fighting was done entirely by Christian Lebanese against Palestinian Muslims.
Menachem Begin, the prime minister, when he first heard about it, reportedly said the now-infamous line: “Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.”
But that’s not where the story ends. Begin doesn’t get the final say. Here’s what happened next.
On September 26, 1982, somewhere between three and four hundred thousand Israelis poured into Kikar Malchei Yisrael (what is now called Kikar Rabin) in Tel Aviv to demand a formal national inquiry into what their country had been complicit in. Some estimates put the number as high as ten percent of Israel’s entire population. Some of the protesters carried signs that read – and I’m going to read this in Hebrew because the line itself is from Psalm 137 – Im eshkachech Sabra v’Shatila, tishkach yemini. “If I forget Sabra and Shatila, let my right hand wither.” A direct paraphrase of if I forget you, O Jerusalem – applied to Palestinian victims of a massacre Israel did not commit but failed to prevent.
The religious leadership weighed in. Rav Yehuda Amital, the head of one of the most important religious Zionist yeshivas, said that even though Jews had not perpetrated the massacre, Jews were still ultimately responsible for it. He called it “a sin not even Yom Kippur can cleanse.” Rav Joseph Soloveitchik – the towering Modern Orthodox figure of the 20th century – reportedly said, “We need to add another al chet” – another confession of sin – “to the Yom Kippur liturgy” because of what had happened.
Under huge civil pressure, Begin appointed the Kahan Commission. After four months of testimony, the commission ruled. They found that Ariel Sharon, the defense minister – who would later become prime minister, by the way – bore personal responsibility for the massacre. Not direct responsibility. He hadn’t pulled a trigger. But by failing to anticipate what the Phalangists might do, and by failing to stop them once it began, Sharon was found unfit to serve as defense minister, and he was forced to resign that post.
Now I want you to register something here that I think gets lost. Lebanon was a country. There was a Phalangist political party. There was a Palestinian leadership. None of them established a formal commission of inquiry into what had happened at Sabra and Shatila. Only Israel did that. Only the country that had not committed the massacre, but had stood close enough to it to feel implicated, was driven by its own citizens to drag its own leadership into a formal accounting.
This is what Israeli self-critique looks like when it’s working. And it has been working, in some form, since the country was six months old.
So we covered 1948, 1949, 1967, and 1982. Let me bring this closer to the present. 2016. Hebron.
A young IDF medic named Elor Azaria is on patrol. A Palestinian man with a knife has just stabbed an Israeli soldier. The attacker is shot and incapacitated. He is lying on the ground, motionless, unable to fight, no longer a threat. And Azaria, eleven minutes later, walks up to the attacker and shoots him in the head.
The whole thing is captured on video. The video goes viral.
What happens next? Azaria is arrested by his own army. He is tried in an Israeli military court. The court – a panel of three military judges – convicts him unanimously of manslaughter. They reject his self-defense argument. They find that he acted out of revenge.
The Chief of Staff of the IDF at the time, Moshe Ya’alon, defended the verdict in the starkest possible way. This is what he said: “We don’t just shoot people. Not even if he’s a terrorist.”
Now look. Was there backlash inside Israel? Yes. Massive. And some of it was ugly. Politicians try to score points by defending Azaria. Crowds chanted for him. Public pressure on the army and the courts was intense. The case exposed something raw and troubling in Israeli society: the temptation, in a moment of fear and rage, to excuse the inexcusable when it is done by “our side.”
But that is precisely why the institutional response matters. The military justice system did not collapse under the pressure. Azaria was convicted. The verdict was upheld on appeal. He served time. The state, through its legal and military institutions, drew a line.
When was the last time the institutions of any of Israel’s neighbors did anything close to this? When did a Syrian court ever try a Syrian officer for the murder of a civilian? When did an Iranian tribunal ever convict a Revolutionary Guard for shooting a protester? When did a Hamas court ever indict a Hamas commander for killing the wrong person?
So now you have the receipts. 1948, 1949, 1967, 1982, 2016. Five moments stretching across the entire history of the modern Jewish state. Five moments in which Israelis chose to turn the moral microscope on themselves.
And I want to add a caveat here. Is this the totality of Israeli history? Of course not. Of course, there are other moments. Think of the Lavon Affair – which, by the way, we have episodes about coming soon. Or think about the current resistance within the Israeli leadership to hold a commission investigating 10/7 itself.
But I am saying that the pattern, by far, is Israel looking at itself. Saying, what happened, what are we responsible for, and what can we do better? The Alterman poem and Ben Gurion’s choice to distribute it so widely, the Kahan Commission after Sabra and Shatila – these are not outliers. This is a pattern – of introspection, of self-critique, of commitment to change and improvement.
And I want to ask the obvious question. Why? What is it about Israel that so often produces this particular reflex?
I think the answer is older than the State of Israel. Much older.
In the book of Genesis, Jacob is on his deathbed. He is offering parting blessings to each of his twelve sons. When he gets to Shimon and Levi, he does not bless them. He curses them. This is what Jacob says:
“Shimon and Levi are a pair. Their weapons are tools of lawlessness. Let not my person be included in their council. Let not my being be counted in their assembly. Cursed be their anger so fierce, and their wrath so relentless. I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.”
Why is Jacob doing this? Why is one of the founding fathers of the Jewish people cursing two of his own sons on his deathbed?
Because earlier in Genesis, Shimon and Levi had massacred the men of the city of Shechem in retaliation for the rape of their sister Dinah. Their retaliation, by the way, was in some sense justified. The crime against Dinah was real. The brothers were defending their sister’s honor. There was no police force to call. There was no court system. In the moral universe of ancient Canaan, what Shimon and Levi did was an understandable response.
And yet Jacob, on his deathbed – looking back over his life, rendering for the first time a final moral verdict on his sons – refuses to give them a pass. He doesn’t say, well, it was complicated. He doesn’t say, sure, but you have to understand the context. He curses them. Even though the cause was just. Even though their sister had been violated. Jacob curses them.
The great 19th century German rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch comments on this passage, and it’s one of the most beautiful commentaries I have ever read in my life. Let me read it to you in full:
“It is of the most profound importance that here, as the foundation of the Jewish nation is being laid, a curse is placed on a transgression of the laws of morality and justice, even if it is done in the interests of the public and the state. Other states and nations justify themselves by the principle that public and state interests sanctify everything. They reward cunning, trickery, and force. For in politics and diplomacy, the only code recognized is the interest of the party or state. Not so for the Jewish nation. Jacob lays a curse on all trickery and violence even if practiced for the most justified cause. Here, Jacob teaches that in public life and in the public interests, not only the end but the means too must be pure.”
Let me read that line one more time. In public life and in the public interests, not only the end but the means too must be pure.
That is the source code. That is the moral DNA that produces Alterman writing Al Zot in the middle of a war. That is the moral DNA that produces Ben-Gurion sending Alterman’s poem to a hundred thousand soldiers. That is the moral DNA that produces Khirbet Khizeh on the Israeli school curriculum. That is the moral DNA that produces four hundred thousand Israelis on Kikar Malchei Yisrael in 1982. That is the moral DNA that produces the unanimous conviction of Elor Azaria.
It is also the moral DNA that makes this whole thing hard. Because most of the world, for most of history, has operated on the simpler principle that if the cause is just, then the means are by definition justified. Most countries say: we are fighting for our survival, therefore whatever we do is allowed. Jacob, on his deathbed, says: no.
The modern State of Israel inherited that no. Imperfectly. Fitfully. Sometimes failing spectacularly. But it inherited it.
Okay, you say, listening. That’s all beautiful. Buttttt… maybe you’re a little cynical, which you know what, good for you. You’re saying to yourself, if all of this is true – if Israel has built into its DNA a tradition of self-critique that has been working for seventy-seven years – then why does it feel right now like that tradition is breaking?
Why did Elor Azaria, who was unanimously convicted in 2016, become a hero to a sizable share of the Israeli right? Why does the contemporary discourse around the war in Gaza feel so much more defensive, so much more closed, so much more armored, than the discourse around 1982 or even 1948? Why is it harder, right now, in 2025 and 2026, for Israelis to do what they have always done?
I want to offer you an answer. And the answer is not that something has gone fundamentally rotten in the Israeli soul. The answer is that something well-understood in psychology is happening, and it is happening to Israel right now at industrial scale.
Let me introduce you to two ideas.
The first is called psychological reactance. The basic principle is that when human beings feel pressured, cornered, or coerced into accepting a particular conclusion, they push back. The harder they feel pushed, the harder they push back.
And this is not Israeli pathology, by the way. It is true of every human being who has ever lived. You tell your teenage daughter she absolutely cannot date Bill. Wednesday afternoon she is out with Bill. That is psychological reactance. You are trying to force me to think X, therefore I will resist X.
The second concept is called identity-protective cognition. This comes from the work of Dan Kahan at Yale, and it argues that human beings process facts in ways that protect the values and identities of the groups they belong to. Changing your mind isn’t just an intellectual process. It can put your loyalties, your belonging, and your sense of self on the line. At times, it can feel existential.
So when someone levels harsh criticism of your country, your people, your deepest held allegiances, your brain very quickly runs a calculation: what does it mean for who I am if I accept this? And if accepting it means joining the people you feel want to erase you, your brain tends to reject it. Not because the criticism is necessarily wrong. Because the cost of accepting it is unacceptably high.
Now combine these two psychological realities. Layer psychological reactance on top of identity-protective cognition. And then layer on top of those something specific to the Israeli experience – what social psychologists call siege mentality. The accumulated memory of pogroms, of the Holocaust, of repeated wars of survival, of terrorist attacks, of October 7th, of the explosion of global antisemitism since October 7th. Layer all of it together, and you have a population that, when it feels the world has already decided it is monstrous, becomes psychologically unable to self-criticize at the level it would otherwise be capable of.
This is not Israelis becoming worse people. This is what it looks like when human beings, under siege, do what every human being does under siege. The capacity for moral reflection narrows. The hierarchy of priorities changes. The moral field of vision shrinks. Survival moves to the center. Everything else starts to feel secondary. We stop asking what is ideally right and ask instead, who is trying to destroy us.
The Americans did this after 9/11, with Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, and “enhanced interrogation.” The British did this during the Blitz, as survival against Nazi Germany overcame any hesitation about bombing German cities. Ukrainians are doing it now, as invasion and war crimes make survival the overwhelming fact of national life. Every people under existential threat does this.
We Jews, we are not exempt because we are Jewish. We are not exempt because we have a tradition of self-critique. We are subject to the same psychological laws as everyone else on earth.
Which brings us back to where we started. Nicholas Kristof. The New York Times. The piece about Palestinian prisoners.
Here is the paradox I want you to sit with. I invite you to sit with. The international human rights discourse around Israel right now is demanding Israeli self-criticism. Actually, let me say it more strongly. Not just self-criticism, but self-flagellation. It is demanding it loudly, constantly, on the front pages of major newspapers, in UN reports, on every campus, in every comment section. And what that discourse is producing – predictably, inevitably – is less Israeli self-criticism. Not more.
Because the discourse is not arriving in a form Israelis or any group can metabolize. It is arriving with the energy of we have decided you are monsters, and now we would like you to confess.
And, let’s be historically and psychologically sound here. The Jewish people have been traumatized, brutalized, accused of all sorts of libels for centuries. And NO ONE – Jewish, or not, responds to that the way the people writing those pieces seem to imagine. Human beings – all of us – respond to that by closing down. By doubling down. By refusing to confess to things they may actually have done, because the ssion is being demanded by people who, in their perception, want them dead.
Who operate out of bad faith.
The harder you push, the less they introspect.
And Israelis and Jewish people in general do not need that in order to be self-critical. Look at the pattern: the Israel of 1948 – surrounded by armies, fighting for its life – published Al Zot and distributed it to a hundred thousand soldiers, and made Khirbet Khizeh a best seller and mandated it in the national school curriculum. The Israel of 1982 – fighting in Lebanon – put four hundred thousand of its own citizens on the street demanding accountability. The Israel of 2016 – bleeding from a wave of stabbing attacks – unanimously convicted Elor Azaria. And still, today, in 2026; open up a Ha’aretz newspaper any day of the week and you will experience relentless self-critique.
From within Israel. And in every one of those cases, the external environment, however hostile, had not yet reached the level of pure, totalizing, demonological obsession that we are seeing now. The Israel that was self-critical was the Israel that felt, on some level, that its existence was permitted. The Israel that is increasingly closed is the Israel that feels, with reason, that its existence is being put on trial every single day.
This is not an excuse. Let me say that again. This is not an excuse. The fact that the world is being unfair to Israel does not excuse Israeli wrongdoing. If something happened in those prisons that should not have happened, then Israelis should – and historically, would – be the first to demand the investigation.
But it is also true that the conditions under which self-criticism flourishes are being destroyed in front of our eyes. By the very people, in many cases, who keep insisting they want more of it.
If you actually want Israel to do what Israel has always done – to put itself on trial, to publish its own Al Zot, to convene its own Kahan Commission – then the discourse has to make room for that. The criticism has to leave room for repair. It has to feel like “we are holding you to a high standard because we believe in you,” not “we are holding you to a uniquely impossible standard because we want you gone.”
Two very different things. When it lands as the second, the shutters come down. And that is not some uniquely awful Israeli pathology, it’s just human nature. So, Kristof and the NYT failed to be convincing or persuasive of their stated aims.
But, it’s more than that. My friend and Unpacked writer Amir Tsemach made a point worth sitting with: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That’s not a political position, it’s a principle of basic epistemology.
I’ll say it for the millionth time – Israel is not above reproach. Its prison system has documented, serious, problems. None of that is in dispute.
But if you are going to publish a claim that dogs were trained to rape prisoners, you better come with evidence that matches the weight of that accusation. Kristof did not. And what he did instead, and this is my opinion, is put an idea into the world without the scaffolding to support it. In a moment when being Jewish and associated with Israel is already dangerous, that is not a minor editorial failure. That is something closer to reckless.
And this is exactly the psychological trap I’ve been trying to describe throughout this episode. When criticism arrives in a way that feels untethered from fairness, proportion, or evidentiary seriousness, people stop experiencing it as a moral challenge and start experiencing it as a threat. And once that happens, the mind shifts from introspection to defense. Not because Israelis are uniquely incapable of self-critique, but because human beings, almost universally, struggle to examine themselves honestly when they feel accused, cornered, or existentially unsafe.
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That’s the story of the paradox of Nick Kristoff and Israel’s self-criticism, and here are your five fast facts.
- In November 1948, mid-War of Independence, David Ben-Gurion personally requested that the Ministry of Defense print and distribute one hundred thousand copies of Natan Alterman’s poem Al Zot, which accused Israeli soldiers of killing a defenseless Arab couple.
- Khirbet Khizeh, a novella about the moral horror of Arab dispossession during the war, became an Israeli bestseller, then part of the compulsory Israeli high school curriculum, and Yizhar himself was elected to the Knesset multiple times.
- After the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to demand a formal commission of inquiry. The Kahan Commission then forced Ariel Sharon out of his post as defense minister.
- In 2016, Elor Azaria – an IDF medic who shot a disarmed Palestinian attacker – was tried by Israel’s military court, convicted unanimously of manslaughter, and served time. Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon explained: “We don’t just shoot people. Not even if he’s a terrorist.”
- Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, in his 19th century commentary on Jacob’s deathbed curse of Shimon and Levi, identified the principle underlying all of this: “In public life and in the public interests, not only the end but the means too must be pure.” That is the Jewish source code for Israeli self-criticism.
Those are your five fast facts. But here is the one enduring lesson, as I see it.
Israeli self-criticism is not a luxury. It is not a performance. It is, I strongly believe, part of what makes the story of Israel so fascinating and worth exploring and engaging with. Without it, Israel becomes just one more state. With it, Israel becomes something else – the imperfect, fitful, sometimes brilliant attempt to build a sovereign Jewish life that aspires to live by the moral standards of the Hebrew prophets.
That tradition is endangered right now. And it is endangered, paradoxically, by exactly the people who keep claiming they want more of it. The international discourse around Israel has become so totalizing, so one-sided, so untethered from context, that it is doing something I don’t think its authors fully understand. It is making it harder, every single day, for the Israelis who would normally be the first to publish their own Al Zot to find the psychological space to do so.
I find this genuinely heartbreaking. Because I love this tradition. I love the people who produced it. I love the rabbis who articulated it. I love the poets and the soldiers and the judges and the protesters who, in every generation, kept it alive.
But there’s something else here that gets at me. And honestly, as someone who spends his life telling the story of Israel, it may be the thing that troubles me most.
In his book Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, Yossi Klein Halevi offers a warning that I think too many people miss. Almost pleading with his readers to hear Israel through the lens of history, he writes:
“When we feel unfairly stigmatized, we toughen our position. The greatest beneficiary of attempts to isolate and delegitimize Israel is the hard Right.”
Why? Because extremism rarely weakens extremism. More often, it feeds it. Fear hardens people. Isolation hardens societies.
But Halevi says the opposite is also true.
When Israelis feel that their legitimacy is recognized, when they feel seen rather than rejected, they have historically shown a willingness to take enormous risks for peace.
And then he points to one of the most remarkable moments in modern Middle Eastern history. In 1977, Anwar Sadat traveled to Jerusalem and publicly accepted Israel’s existence. For Israelis, that moment mattered profoundly. It changed something psychological. Emotional. Historical.
And in response, the Israeli public supported a full withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, including dismantling every Israeli settlement there.
That doesn’t mean peace is simple. It doesn’t mean criticism of Israel is illegitimate. Democracies should be criticized. Israel should be criticized.
But there is a difference between criticism and negation. Between challenging a country and denying its right to exist. Between pushing a society toward moral growth and pushing it into defensive retreat.
And if history teaches anything, it’s that people who feel permanently condemned rarely become more open, more trusting, or more conciliatory.
Usually, they become harder.
As always, thank you for being here.