What the Changing Narrative Around Israel Reveals About the Fragmentation of the West

I’ve been accused of being Jewish-centric — that is, of seeing the world through the narrow prism of the Jewish narrative I inherited as a birthright. My wife once called me “the Spike Lee of the Jewish world.” Just as he has often viewed America through the lens of his Black experience, I tend to see things through my Jewish one. She was right, as she is about most things, and the charge leveled by others is at least partly true.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, my writing about Israel has been almost incessant. (My hands now know instinctively how to type the date.) And just when it seems I have nothing more to add, I’ll hear a sentence, read an article, or witness something seemingly unrelated that keeps me awake at night. By morning, it has begun arranging itself into words.

This morning’s thought is broader than Israel, though. It began with a simple realization:

Institutions, and institutionally accepted ideas, have their lifespan.

We often mistake what is familiar for what is permanent. Longevity masquerades as inevitability. Yet history reminds us that institutions, alliances, assumptions, and even moral consensus all have expiration dates. Most often they weaken gradually, almost imperceptibly. Then, seemingly overnight, they collapse.

For my entire life, one assumption felt like solid ground: that America’s relationship with Israel — and more broadly, the West’s commitment to Israel’s security — was durable enough to survive almost anything. Political disagreements came and went. Governments changed. But the foundation itself appeared immovable.

I no longer believe that.

This isn’t simply because of a particular Israeli government, nor because of a single American administration. Those things matter, but they’re not the deeper story. The deeper story is cultural. Long before politics changes, culture changes. Long before legislation changes, people’s instincts change. Eventually politics codifies what culture has already accepted.

I’m in Seattle as I write this. In many parts of the city I see signs calling attention to homelessness, unaffordable housing and economic inequality. These are real problems deserving serious attention. Yet on many of those same signs appears a keffiyeh, or the words “Globalize the Intifada.”

One issue has nothing to do with the other. And yet, somehow, they have become inseparable. That, I think, is the point.

For a plurality of Americans, left and right, the Jewish state has become a pariah, a symbol — not merely of a nation thousands of miles away, but of an entire moral narrative. Increasingly, whether the issue is housing, colonialism, policing, capitalism, climate change or immigration, Israel finds itself cast as the universal defendant.

Seattle is hardly unique. New York. Minneapolis. Ann Arbor. Denver. Much of academia. Publishing. Cultural institutions. What begins in these places rarely stays there. Culture has a way of flowing downstream until politics eventually discovers it has been standing in a different river altogether.

Some point to Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, or Smotrich as explanations for this shift. Certainly those polarizing figures influence perceptions. But I suspect that for many people who have come to see Israel as a pariah state, those names are almost incidental. They didn’t arrive at their conclusions through years of studying Israeli politics. They absorbed them through culture. Culture almost always precedes analysis.

Ask how many of the loudest voices can explain Israel’s electoral system, its coalition politics, the history of the Mandate, or the repeated rejection of partition by Arab leadership. You will find that many cannot. Their conclusions arrived first. The supporting arguments came later.

A recent Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll asked respondents: “In the Israel-Hamas conflict, do you support more Israel or more Hamas?” Among 18–24-year-olds, one survey found support split at 52% for Israel and 48% for Hamas. A later Harvard/Harris survey reported that 60% of Gen Z respondents supported Hamas over Israel.

We tend to view historical collapses as sudden shocks. But as the fall of the Soviet Union proved, institutions usually decay from the inside out for decades before the final façade crumbles. A house of cards doesn’t wobble dramatically before it falls; it simply reaches the point where one more card is enough to bring it crashing down. I believe we are approaching a similar moment in the bipartisan American consensus surrounding Israel. The indicators, if I’m reading them correctly, are already visible — in the signage, on college campuses and in the reflexive absorption of Israel into a kind of universal grievance.

Israel isn’t the cause of that strain. Yet it’s one of the places where the strain is most visible. Anti-Israelism has become a kind of cultural and political loyalty test that has almost nothing to do with the actual policy questions at stake. If the postwar liberal order is fragmenting, the story of Israel is a symptom of that fragmentation, not its cause.

But there’s a larger question underneath that one. Classical liberalism — pluralism, open debate and the presumption that people who disagree with you are still owed a hearing — is itself under strain, and not only from one side of the political spectrum. It’s being tested by a culture increasingly impatient with dissent itself. And when societies grow impatient with dissent, Jews have rarely remained untouched by the change.

The Jewish people have often been the canary in the coal mine. History knows this story well.

Perhaps I’m wrong about all of this. I hope I am. But if I’m right, then wishing for the old consensus to return won’t be enough. So what do we do? Retreat? Stop speaking? Become quieter about our Judaism? Less public in our support for Israel? Hardly.

If anything, just the opposite.

It means becoming more serious and less sanguine. It means becoming more deeply and observably Jewish, not less. It means mastering not just the history that validates our convictions, but the narratives others use to challenge them. We must know our own story so deeply that we can discuss its imperfections honestly without ever surrendering its legitimacy.

Above all, it means recognizing that we are living through the end of assumptions many of us believed were permanent.

A well-known songwriter once reminded us that “the times they are a-changin’.” The line has been true for 60 years, which is exactly why it’s so easy to stop hearing it. What’s different now isn’t the truth of it. It’s the pace.

Institutions rarely announce their ending. They simply reach the moment when what once seemed unimaginable becomes ordinary.

I leave you with this: Am Yisrael Chai. The People of Israel live.

It is more than a slogan. It is a declaration that the Jewish people have endured for nearly 4,000 years, endure today, and, God willing, will continue to endure — from strength to strength, into the future.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.