What happens when the state dedicated to safeguarding Jewish existence pursues policies that endanger it—not only from Palestinians whose national and even physical presence has become ever more fragile as a consequence of the bloody, if unequal, contest between them—but also from large segments of the international community, for whom Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza disqualifies Zionism.

Israel was meant to solve the historical problem of the Jewish people, establishing a territorial basis for a Jewish national existence—the State of Israel—denied to the Jewish people for millennia.

The State of Israel would take its rightful place in a world dominated by nation-states, and in so doing normalize the always-precarious existence of Jews. Jewish nationalism would end the diaspora, or at least protect and represent it. As a consequence, antisemitism, the bane of Jewish existence through the millennia, would be vanquished.

But today, thanks to policies embraced by Israel, one does not need to be an antisemite to hate Israel. 

Let there be no mistake. It is the unprecedented policies pursued by the Netanyahu government against Palestinians, not the baseless hatred of Jews manifested through the ages and suddenly unleashed, that are the source of Israel’s growing isolation in the international community and the metastasizing antipathy towards it.

It didn’t have to be like this. For all its faults and shortcomings, the architecture of diplomatic engagement pursued since Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 was greeted warmly and enthusiastically by most segments of the international community. Antisemitic violence in Europe was the limited province of jihadi terror and far-right extremism. 

The same communities now vowing to arrest Israel’s prime minister for war crimes cheered the Madrid and Oslo engagements.

Notwithstanding such sentiments, foremost among the glaring inadequacies of these efforts at a diplomatic resolution of the conflict was the assumption that there was no cost to failure. An interminable “peace process”  became an acceptable substitute for substantive achievements aimed not only at resolving the territorial dispute at the heart of the conflict but also securing the well-being of Israelis and Palestinians alike.

The shortcomings and serial failures of the Oslo process were rarely viewed with sufficient alarm until the slaughter of innocents on October 7, 2023.

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“Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path, for the day when we will heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms.” These prescient words of warning were spoken at the Gaza frontier by Moshe Dayan, then chief of staff of the Israeli military, seven decades ago. 

With a passion that resonates through the generations, Dayan issued a call to arms: Israel was engaged in a brutal process of nation-building, necessarily and justifiably undertaken at the expense of the Palestinians. Israelis, if they were to establish a state out of the ashes of the Holocaust, must be prepared to wage an unwavering, generational national conflict against Palestine.

Dayan’s moving eulogy continues to define both Israeli and Palestinian views of the conflict. Yet if Palestinian national and even personal existence is threatened by the escalating battle, so too is Israel and those it was established to protect.