Defending Israel in an Age of Madness

For the past 50 years, in capacities both official and voluntary, before the American press, on campuses and in a corpus of op-eds, I have spent most of my time defending the state of Israel. Though not always keen to justify its policies, I never lost faith in the justness of the Zionist project and the public’s openness to its case.

Challenging even in the quietest of times, standing up for Israel became especially daunting after Oct. 7, 2023, when the victims of a verifiable genocide were baselessly accused of perpetrating one. Still, there remained my bedrock belief that most Americans, when presented with the facts, would come down on Israel’s side. But while the hostility in much of the media was nothing new, the open-minded audiences I usually addressed had changed. Conspiracy theories once considered fringe had become mainstream, and age-old antisemitic tropes had resurfaced in a not-so-subliminal presumption of Jewish wickedness. Inexorably, I came to understand that the cogent nation I once knew and appealed to, where a basic rationality could always be assumed, had fallen into lunacy.

Proof of that descent can be seen in this year’s most celebrated movies — “One Battle After Another,” “Marty Supreme” and “Bugonia” — which are similarly about obsessiveness, radicalism and paranoia. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is entirely about a woman losing her mind. Even the breathtaking “Sinners,” which begins as an elegy to the blues and a vivid retrospective on the Jim Crow South, sinks into blood-sodden insanity. Quality films are often reflective of their times, and these productions are no exceptions. The America they depict, whether in the future, past or present, is unhinged.

Much of that madness is hardwired into a country founded largely by outcasts, a society detached from Old World concepts of normality. “He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville of the typical American he met in 1831. “[He] soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.” The cavalcade of American craziness — clairvoyants, snake-handlers, geeks and gurus, Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown — has since proved prodigious.

Yet what was marginal in past generations has moved into the center. A mere 15 years of social media sufficed to transform America’s built-in propensity for mania into a new national reality. Not only in Hollywood but permeating throughout society is a sense that delirium now reigns. In politics especially, those on the other side of the aisle are no longer merely wrong but psychotic, not misguided but deranged. Was it really so long ago that a presidential election could pit a Barack Obama against a John McCain or a Mitt Romney? Would such a matchup even be conceivable today?

America’s national derangement poses myriad challenges to those not yet caught up in it. The anomie is daunting enough for the general public — if that term still makes sense in this fragmented age — and it is virtually insurmountable for the defenders of Israel. To refute the accusation that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, one can marshal facts such as the nearly one-to-one civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio or the millions of leaflets and text messages dispensed by the IDF warning of impending operations, but it’ll be like firing ping-pong balls at a tank. Though readily disproven, Israel’s guilt for annihilating an entire people is today accepted by more than half of that general public. An even larger majority favors the Palestinians — even the misogynist, homophobic, anti-American terrorists — over America’s only dependable, democratic, military ally. Rational?

For many decades, advocates for Israel — and before its birth, for Zionism — wielded the weapon of truth. We produced volumes of “myths and facts” about the conflict. Our world was fundamentally distinct from the Middle East, where a ruler’s word, spoken or echoed in the press, immediately became reality. Iraq could have its Baghdad Bob, the Ba’athist propagandist who, during the First Gulf War, insisted that the U.S. Marines had been decimated even as they raided his office. Israel, by contrast, would have its Rabins and Shamirs, paragons of veracity. But what should we do today when Israel’s leaders are no longer taken on their word, even by a sizable share of Israelis? What should we do when much of the world — and America, most maddeningly — is populated by Baghdad Bobs?

How should we react, moreover, when rampant unreason is infused with antisemitism, history’s longest-lived lunacy? Jews — and their metonym, Israel — are today not only targeted by the madness but also stand accused of causing it. Consider, for example, the viral five-minute video that employs vivid AI to show how a triumvirate of Benjamin Netanyahu, Henry Kissinger and David Ben-Gurion orchestrated 9/11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, poverty, drugs, pedophilia rings, the Manson murders and Operation Epic Fury. “Everybody knows the good guys lost / Everybody knows the fight was fixed,” thrums the soundtrack sung by Leonard Cohen, a Zionist Jew. More than a million people have viewed the clip and countless others like it are proliferating.

In this new, twisted American universe, Oct. 7 was a false flag operation in which Israel massacred and kidnapped its own people as a pretext for occupying Gaza, ZAKA volunteers staged the rape scenes at the Nova Festival and, most recently, Netanyahu is dead. Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, the terrorist who drove his car into a Michigan synagogue, was portrayed by NPR as a gentle, otherwise law-abiding citizen with genuine grievances. The New York Times eulogized Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who butchered his own people, denied the Holocaust, and tried to perpetrate another, as “the hardline cleric who made Iran a regional power.”

The Iran war further deepened America’s delirium. Amid such bedlam, try to advance a logical argument about why Israelis, threatened by a regime sworn to annihilate us and industriously producing the means of doing so, might not want to sit passively until it strikes. Try to explain how, given Israel’s urgent need to preempt and Iran’s pledge to retaliate for any Israeli attack by bombing U.S. bases, President Trump didn’t need a reason to go to war — the war was coming to America. Advance those clear-eyed arguments and hear, in reply, that Netanyahu wanted war with Iran to deflect attention from his annexation of the West Bank. You might also hear how a cabal of pro-Israel donors, media moguls and Chabad pushed America into war to destroy al-Aqsa and rebuild the Third Temple. The classic antisemitic canard of the cunning Jew winding the unwitting gentile around his crooked finger has been embraced whole hog by most of the American press, with Bibi in the role of Fagin and Trump, however improbably, as Oliver.

Even if the Iran war ends today, the inanity will surely continue. Many of my veteran Israel-defending friends, meanwhile, are simply willing to give up. Why gird yourself with logic, they reasonably ask, only to battle an army of absurdities? Yet my answer remains unchanged: We must continue to fight. Armed with those same weapons of truth — sharper now, more piercing — we must continue to battle the madness. Even if we can only dent it here and there, even if it sometimes feels like firing ping-pong balls at a tank. Cutting through, we can reach those who, like the clandestine book readers in “Fahrenheit 451,” still cling to sanity. We can reinforce those who remain moored in morality and believe in the need to defeat evil in the world. Most crucially, we can bolster the many who, despite any differences with its government, continue to believe in Israel’s justness.

Michael Oren, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Knesset Member and Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, is the author of the Substack, Clarity and the founder of the Israel Advocacy Group.