Michel Benchimol
By Marcywinograd – Own work, CC0, Wikipedia
Israel faces a multi-front siege. Iran and its proxies glorify the murder of Jews and openly call for the eradication of the Jewish state. International bodies created to prevent genocide and uphold human rights have been turned into arenas where Israel is singled out and threatened with law-fare. On Western campuses and in NGOs, Israel is branded apartheid and genocidal while terrorist organizations are rebranded as “resistance.”
What is new today is how central some Jews have become in legitimizing and amplifying this campaign.
A growing class of highly visible Jews has made a vocation out of attacking Israel from Western universities, media, politics, and NGOs. Their presence gives cover to those who hate Israel: “It can’t be antisemitic if Jews say it.” The language of Jewish conscience is repurposed to portray Jewish self-defense as a moral offence.
Writers such as Naomi Klein urge boycotts of Israel and promote BDS, describing it as an apartheid, colonial project that must be isolated economically and culturally. Intellectuals like Noam Chomsky frame Zionism as settler-colonialism and Israel as an outpost of Western imperialism, a framing now standard in activist discourse. Norman Finkelstein’s “Holocaust industry” thesis depicts Jews as exploiting the Shoah to shield Israel and gain power, a theme quickly adopted by those who want to dismiss any appeal to antisemitism as manipulation.
Politicians like Bernie Sanders add a parliamentary megaphone. A Jewish senator declaring that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza and calling to cut or condition U.S. aid turns a blood libel into an apparently respectable verdict replayed around the world. Though he is routinely presented as a Jewish moral voice on Israel, his immediate family life is largely Christian—his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, is Catholic, and his stepchildren are not Jewish—yet media treat him as a stand-in for Jewish conscience precisely when he denounces the Jewish state. Commentators such as Peter Beinart go further, openly rejecting the idea of a Jewish state and advocating a single binational entity “from the river to the sea,” a blueprint for ending Jewish sovereignty altogether.
It would be bad enough if Israel were attacked only by the usual non-Jewish suspects on the extremes of left and right: Tucker Carlson calling Israel a strategic burden, Candace Owens raving about a “terrorist” Jewish state with “genocidal ambitions,” Megyn Kelly suddenly discovering that the core problem in U.S. foreign policy is the “Israel lobby.” What makes the current moment uniquely dangerous is that we now have Jews validating those narratives. When a Carlson calls Israel a burden and a Jewish intellectual calls it a colonial mistake, the messages reinforce each other. When Owens screams “genocide” and a Jewish senator uses the same word, the conspiracy theorist and the “conscience of the Senate” end up on the same side. When fringe pundits mutter about dark Jewish influence and Jewish writers talk about a “Holocaust industry,” old antisemitic suspicions of Jewish power suddenly sound like sophisticated critique.
South Africa’s now-concluded genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice showed how this ecosystem feeds global lawfare. Pretoria accused Israel of genocide in Gaza and tried to fold decades of history into a single charge. The court imposed provisional measures but did not order Israel to halt operations or endorse a sweeping genocide narrative; the most extreme claims failed to win the decisive legal stamp Israel’s enemies had promised. Politically, however, the damage was done: for months, “Israel on trial for genocide” dominated headlines and protests. In many minds, accusation and guilt fused into one—especially after Jewish intellectuals and politicians had already normalized that vocabulary.
If one layer of betrayal is rhetorical, the next is political. Many Jews continue to vote for and fund parties that empower anti-Israel forces. In the United States, large numbers of Jewish voters remain loyal to a Democratic Party in which calls to cut or condition aid, flirtations with BDS, and casual “genocide” language have migrated from the fringe to influential caucuses. In Britain, Labour’s antisemitism scandal exposed a deep hostility to Zionism and Jewish concerns, yet some Jews stayed, defended the leadership, or prioritized ideological comfort over communal safety. In New York, Zohran Mamdani built a career accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide, embracing BDS, and promising to honor international arrest warrants for Israeli leaders; once in office, he swiftly revoked protections against anti-Israel boycotts and scrapped definitions of antisemitism that included denial of Israel’s right to exist—changes he did not make without Jewish ballots and donors.
These are not Judenräte or Kapos acting under Nazi guns. They are free citizens in democracies, choosing to empower parties and politicians whose explicit policies—boycotts, sanctions, legal harassment, diplomatic abandonment—aim at stripping Israel of legitimacy and defenses.
Jewish history gives this pattern a darker resonance. The Torah records about 600,000 Israelite men leaving Egypt with Moses; with women and children, perhaps two to three million souls. Rabbinic tradition adds a stark gloss: only a fifth left, while four-fifths perished during the plague of darkness because they refused to go. In that reading, “chamushim” hints at one-fifth, implying a pre-Exodus population of perhaps 10–15 million Israelites, most of whom never made it out. They had become too assimilated, too comfortable, too skeptical of Moses and his mission. The Midrash calls them resha’im sheb’Yisrael—“the wicked among Israel”: Jews who, when the moment of decision came, chose Egypt over their own people, comfort over covenant, the familiar chains over the uncertainty of destiny.
Centuries later, in Germany, almost no Jews voted for the Nazis, but many believed that being German for two or three generations—their language, culture, and medals from the Kaiser’s army—would protect them. It did not. Their assimilation did not save them. The regime that rose around them did not ask how many Wagner operas they loved; to the Nazis, they were simply Jews.
Today, Jews in the West are not being asked to walk into a desert. But they are being asked, once again, whether they stand with the Jewish people and the Jewish state, or with those who seek to see that state cut down, isolated, or erased. Some are choosing, quite consciously, the comfort of Egypt: the approval of fashionable movements, the applause of elite institutions, the belonging that comes from denouncing their own. In Torah language, they are perilously close to joining the ranks of the “wicked among Israel”—Jews who, at the critical hour, turn their backs on their own people.
Criticism of any government—including Israel’s—is legitimate and necessary. Crossing the line into collaboration with those who seek the end of the Jewish state is not. When Jews declare that Israel is genocidal and colonial, endorse boycotts designed to cripple it, support legal campaigns to handcuff its self-defense, or vote for parties and politicians whose platforms aim to weaken and delegitimize it, they are not acting as prophets calling their people higher. They are enablers of a project whose logical conclusion is a world without a Jewish state.
Jewish survival has never depended on unanimity. It has always depended on clarity: clarity about where danger comes from, who seeks our safety and who seeks our downfall, and what distinguishes internal debate from external assault. Today, that clarity demands we say openly what many whisper in private: some Jews—intellectuals, politicians, activists, and voters—have chosen to stand with those who would dismantle the Jewish state and have worked to dress that project up as “human rights” and “international law.” In the language of our own tradition, they are behaving as resha’im sheb’Yisrael. That is not bravery. It is betrayal.
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