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The fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s White House records is producing one of the most contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings in a generation. Thursday’s session began with Republican senators warning their Democratic counterparts that they could be expelled from the Senate for releasing documents marked “committee classified.” Their Democratic colleagues welcomed the confrontation.

“Bring it,” Democrat Cory Booker told Republican John Cornyn after one such reproach. Booker then spent the day releasing small batches of the 189,000 pages of Kavanaugh documents only available to senators. Republicans claimed the releases were a political stunt, and that the committee had already approved their publication overnight. Since the Senate hasn’t expelled a member since the Civil War, the entire clash had an air of theatricality.

Democratic senators said the documents shined new light on Kavanaugh’s views and actions, especially on abortion and the heated judicial wars of the George W. Bush administration. While the documents did offer some new insights, some of the Democrats’ claims and insinuations missed the mark. What they did prove is how badly the Republicans have mishandled Kavanaugh’s records. They also raise new questions about the rest of the documents that haven’t been made available.

The most widely discussed document was published on Thursday morning by The New York Times just as Kavanaugh’s hearing was about to begin. In an email from 2003, he weighed in on a draft op-ed written by supporters of Priscilla Owen, one of Bush’s judicial nominees who received fierce opposition from Senate Democrats. The op-ed included a section that downplayed concerns about Owen’s potential views on Roe v. Wade and abortion rights in general.

“First of all, it is widely understood accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land,” the op-ed draft read. “Moreover, federal courts of appeals, which are inferior to the Supreme Court, have no power to overturn Supreme Court precedents like Roe v. Wade.” Kavanaugh took issue with that assertion. “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court [sic] can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so,” he wrote in response.

Democrats pounced on the comment as evidence that Kavanaugh does not think that Roe is settled precedent, as he attested multiple times throughout his confirmation hearing. That reading is strained. Kavanaugh’s three assertions are factual; There are more than a few legal scholars who don’t think Roe v. Wade is good or settled precedent; the Supreme Court can always overrule its previous decisions, though it often acts cautiously before doing so; and it’s no secret that three of the sitting justices in 2003—William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas—had indicated they would vote to overturn the landmark ruling in the early 1990s.

In the context of editing a colleague’s op-ed, Kavanaugh’s email reads as a description of events, not an expression of his desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. That doesn’t mean he won’t be hostile to abortion rights. As I noted on Wednesday, it’s likely that, at minimum, Kavanaugh will be more favorable towards state laws that restrict abortion than Anthony Kennedy was. Advocacy groups on both sides of the issue are assuming he’ll vote to either curtail abortion rights or overturn Roe entirely, no matter what he says during this week’s confirmation hearings.

Other emails suggest that Kavanaugh wasn’t completely accurate in testimony before the Senate, but they fall short of proof that he lied. During Kavanaugh’s 2004 confirmation hearing, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy questioned him extensively about his role in the nomination of William Pryor to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Kennedy and other Democrats took issue with some of Pryor’s remarks, including his assertion that Roe v. Wade was the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law” and referred to the Supreme Court as “nine octogenarian lawyers.” The Senate narrowly voted to confirm Pryor to the Eleventh Circuit in 2005 after a lengthy impasse.

“You are involved in the vetting process,” Kennedy told Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing in 2004, referring to Pryor’s nomination. “Whether you did anything at all about it, I gather you did not.” Kavanaugh’s response appeared to be unequivocal. “No, I was not involved in handling his nomination,” he told Kennedy. “I do know that he explained [his remarks] in his [confirmation] hearing, and I will leave it at that.”

Bush-era White House emails released on Thursday suggest that Kavanaugh may have had a deeper involvement than he told the committee. “How did the Pryor interview go?” Kyle Sampson, another staffer in the White House counsel’s office at the time, wrote in a December 2003 email. “Call me,” Kavanaugh cryptically replied. Democratic senators quickly highlighted what they saw as an inconsistency in Kavanaugh’s testimony.

BREAKING: Brett Kavanaugh was asked in 2004 about whether he was involved in the nomination of Bill Pryor. He said “I was not involved in handling his nomination"

Newly released emails show that's not true. Asked about how Pryor's interview went, he replied "CALL ME." pic.twitter.com/63Wb5uY95G

Grassley took a moment between two senators’ questioning to lend the judge a hand. “I have colleagues trying to insinuate that you interviewed Judge Pryor,” he told Kavanaugh. Grassley then suggested that it was more likely that Kavanaugh’s email only meant to suggest that he knew the people who interviewed Pryor. The email doesn’t actually indicate that, but Kavanaugh agreed with it. “That sounds correct,” he replied.

Some emails released on Thursday describe invitations for Kavanaugh to participate in phone calls and meetings related to Pryor’s nomination. It’s unclear whether Kavanaugh took part. Other emails indicate that Kavanaugh took at least some interest in his elevation to the federal bench. In a December 2002 email to a White House colleague, Kavanaugh wrote that “we should perhaps think about recommending Pryor to CA11,” the common legal shorthand for the Eleventh Circuit.

"In particular, we should perhaps think about recommending Bill Pryor for CA11" - Brett Kavanaugh pic.twitter.com/LKtoxFgFjG

Another big clash came over emails related to the Manny Miranda saga. Miranda, a former Republican aide on the Judiciary Committee in the early 2000s, resigned in 2004 for his role in a plot to hack Democratic senators’ emails and learn more about their strategy for opposing Bush judicial nominees. Some of the stolen contents made their way back to the Bush White House while Kavanaugh worked in the White House counsel’s office. Kavanaugh denied on Wednesday that he knew he was dealing with stolen materials.

On Thursday, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy posted copies of emails marked “committee confidential” on Twitter that he said called Kavanaugh’s account into question. The March 2003 email from Miranda to Kavanaugh includes multiple pages of talking points. While the email indicates that Kavanaugh received some of the stolen materials, it doesn’t prove that he knew they were stolen. Miranda’s sole reference to “Dem staffers” in the email doesn’t indicate that the emails were hacked.

BREAKING: Kavanaugh testified he never received any docs that even “appeared to … have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff.” Well, he got 8 pages of material taken VERBATIM from my files, obviously written by Dem staff, LABELED “not [for] distribution”. pic.twitter.com/eFlIBZ0Z1W

The biggest question raised by the documents is why many of them were kept from the public in the first place. One heavily redacted chain of emails released on Thursday evening spans from August to September 2001. It appears to focus on a weekend social outing of some kind that took place on a boat. Other than Kavanaugh himself, the participants and the exact circumstances aren’t readily discernible from what’s been redacted. Some of the comments left unredacted, however, are phrased in a manner not usually associated with Supreme Court justices.

“Boys,” one email from an unidentified sender begins, “Although you may be hoping that I’ve lined up a hostess for a rub-n-tug massage session, ‘Su Ching’ actually is the sailboat (a Tayana 55) we’ve got for Friday, Sept. 7 to Sunday, Sept. 9 out of Annapolis.” There are no national-security implications or executive-privilege issues with this comment, which suggests it may have been marked as “committee confidential” because it was somewhat embarrassing.

That raises questions not only about why Republicans kept Thursday’s documents from the public, but also what else is being held back by the committee and by Bush Presidential Library lawyer Bill Burck, who oversees the document review process on the ex-president’s behalf. It’s especially troubling that these documents became public on the last day of questions, which deprives senators of the ability to question Kavanaugh about them and denies Kavanaugh the opportunity to clarify them.

The prospective justice is familiar with the need for keeping things under wraps. In the “Su Ching” email chain, Kavanaugh thanks an unidentified acquaintance for a great time over the weekend. “Apologies to all for missing Friday (good excuse), arriving late Saturday (weak excuse), and growing aggressive after blowing still another game of dice (don’t recall),” he wrote in jest. “Reminders to everyone to be very, very vigilant w/r/t confidentiality on all issues and all fronts, including with spouses.”

I am exhausted by Israel. My exhaustion isn’t much compared to the humiliation and oppression of the Palestinians, who have withstood the forced conversion of the occupied West Bank into a skein of Bantustans and of Gaza into an internment camp—or an “open-air prison,” as it is sometimes called, because to call it anything harsher is to invite an apoplectic response, even from those liberal Jews who view Israel with disapproval. Exhaustion is insufficient, but it is difficult to escape when every conversation about what it is to be a Jew, regardless of your faithful observance or lack thereof, whether you keep the Sabbath or barbeque pork in the backyard on a bright Saturday afternoon, returns to the question of Israel, this distant, foreign country, a lodestar to some of us and a millstone to others, but either way a central and immediate concern to our Jewish lives.

This spring and summer, Israel engaged in the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border. The victims included journalists and at least one medic. This is not the first time that Israel has engaged in indiscriminate killing, and it is unlikely to be the last. I do not believe we are going to convince this Israel government that Palestine is a place, let alone a nation.

The relentlessness of Israel’s brutality has become impossible to ignore, and even many American Jews reflexively inclined to support Israel have at least come to admit, however reluctantly, that its actions are, in the weakly clinical turn of phrase, “disproportionate.” In the Jewish press in both America and Israel, there’s been an outpouring of worry about the growing disaffection of American Jews, especially younger American Jews, when it comes to Israel. Young Jewish voices are prominent in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which seeks to isolate Israel. Over the past year there have been several well-publicized incidents of Jews on “Birthright” trips, long a cornerstone of pro-Zionist education for non-Israeli Jewish youth, walking off their carefully curated tours to meet with Palestinians and to see how they struggle to live.

These developments are salutary, and there is no doubt that American Jews in particular have a moral obligation to speak out, since so much Israeli policy is ultimately undergirded by American dollars and American arms. But I also worry about the powerful gravitational pull that this Jewish outpost exerts on our lives in the Jewish Diaspora, the harmful influence that this pull has on our conception of Judaism as a culture, as a religion, and as a people.

Modern Judaism is a religion of the Diaspora. Our customs, our prayers, our architecture, our cuisines, our nearly-lost European languages, and our many literatures were all born far away from Palestine. We became a European people and an American people, despite the many centuries of bigots who tried to say otherwise. When I consider my own Judaism, I think of my Russian and Lithuanian and Ukranian and German (and Spanish, even!) ancestors, who came at various times and places to the United States. I never consider with regret whatever imaginary forbearer of mine, two millennia ago, who perhaps pulled a cart and a mule out of some old Roman province toward the Central Asian steppes.

The central question of Jewish life in America ought to be Jewish life in America, and I resent the moral necessity of endlessly calculating my position vis-à-vis the right-wing politics of a foreign government. I resent the necessity of even feeling anger and disdain, born of both American national policies and the centrality of Israel in Jewish-American life.

How do we create an authentic and enduring Jewish community in America? This is a far more existential question to American Jewry than the question of whether the Hamas charter recognizes Israel’s “right to exist.” The decline of a communitarian Jewish identity in the United States is inextricably tied to a sense of ossification, a sense that the same murmured prayers are insufficient to the present moment, a sense that endless apologia for Israel have eclipsed our commitments to equity, justice, and community in our own country. These are the reasons so many young Jews have found themselves drawn into leftist politics, which address spiritual and communal longings to which their parents’ and grandparents’ Judaism no longer speaks.

In the immediate future, American national policy toward Israel is unlikely to change. Ours is a reactionary right-wing government as well, and the convergent commitments of the GOP base and a staunchly pro-Israel Democratic establishment form a bulwark against any major shift away from the status quo support for the Israeli state and its policies of apartheid in all but name. The incipient challenges to entrenched Democratic Party leadership suggest the possibility of an alternate approach to Israel, but for the time being they represent only that: a possibility.

Meanwhile, even as right-wing support for Israel has grown even more extreme, we see the return of an older, open anti-Semitism in the political coalition of the American right, a rebirth of the old calumny that Jews represent something foreign and subversive in the American body politic—long after Jews were admitted to the country clubs, after we became convinced that we were well and fully white. This, too, calls us back from our old, unquestioning views. We cannot depend on a foreign refuge, a refuge that is, ironically, walled against another people’s legitimate claims to freedom. To some extent, this is our real obligation—not to carve out a Jewish home abroad, but to defend the home that we’ve built right here.

In 1967, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) published a two-page spread in its Newsletter on “The Palestine Problem.” The group was in the midst of transitioning from being an American civil rights group to a “human rights” organization with an international outlook. SNCC wanted to show the connection between injustices everywhere—but their soon-to-be estranged American-Jewish allies had no such inclination, at least with regards to the newly occupied Palestinian territories.

The contents of “The Palestine Problem” were indisputably antagonistic towards Israel. “Did you know,” it read, “that Israel has remained a total stranger in the Afro-Asian world?” But what really smacked of anti-Semitism was the cartoon on the second page—an illustration depicted a black man and a Palestinian man side by side in a double noose held by a disembodied hand featuring a Star of David. A sword behind them, about to cut the ropes, was framed with the words “Third World—Liberation Movement.”

This was just after the Six-Day War, when many American Jews felt that Israel had just averted a second Holocaust. Most American Jews, including those on the left, were not prepared to see Israel as an example of racial injustice. Not to mention that Israel was, in 1967, far less deserving of that label. Faced with an opportunity to link injustices in Israel to those in the United States, most of them fled.

Historians read “The Palestine Problem” as a nail in the coffin of the relationship between black and Jewish civil-rights activists. It had already grown strained, partly because of SNCC’s institution of a black-only leadership policy. In response, the Jewish Labor Committee, which helped organize and staff civil rights marches, announced that SNCC had “irrevocably joined the anti-Semitic American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan as an apostle of racism in the United States.” SNCC did not despair at the loss of their Jewish allies. For SNCC, “liberal” Jews just weren’t willing to embrace the global aspect of the fight against injustice. An SNCC Newsletter the following fall reacted to the Jewish outcry this way: “Perhaps we have taken the liberal Jewish community or certain segments of it as far as it can go. If so, this is tragic, not for us but for the liberal Jewish community. For the world is in a revolutionary ferment. ... Our message to conscious people everywhere is ‘Don’t get caught on the wrong side of the revolution.’”

If, back in the 1960s, the American Jewish left refused to get on board with a global justice agenda, today’s situation is different. Nadia Ben-Youssef, who is the director of New York’s Adalah Justice Project, names two recent moments that have changed the face of Israel-Palestine advocacy. The first was in 2014, when the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, over Michael Brown’s killing coincided with an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, where eventually more than 2,000 Palestinians were killed, including 500 children.

That overlap, said Ben-Youssef, generated a “resurgence of black-Palestinian solidarity.” In each country, the tactics of the militarized state felt the same and looked the same. The connection was begging to be made.

The second moment was the election of Donald Trump. He furnished the left with an indispensable resource: a common enemy whose racism was the defining trait of his presidential campaign.

Now, we can potentially add a third moment.

In July, Netanyahu’s government passed Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. The law, which has quasi-constitutional status, places Israel’s Jewish identity over and above democracy. Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Arab parties in Israel’s Parliament, said the law enshrined “Jewish supremacy.”

Despite American Jewry’s tendency to romanticize Israel’s democracy, the American Jewish left was unambiguous in its condemnation of the law. Across the board, the Jewish left—from Liberal Zionists to supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement—blasted the law and demanded equality for all of Israel’s citizens. J Street, a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization, said that the law effectively gave “primacy of Jews and Jewish rights” and sent a message to Israel’s non-Jewish citizens that they were “at best, second-class citizens.” Towards the end of its statement, J Street slipped in a radical statement: “We can fight by standing in solidarity with the immigrants, refugees, and minority groups that have been targeted here at home by the Trump administration’s bigoted and inhumane policies.”

The message: All injustice is linked. Fight for immigrant rights in America—fight the Israeli occupation. Fight Trump—fight Netanyahu. The Jewish left is no longer afraid of seeing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the context of global racism.

That struggles are intersectional has become a basic conviction of the American left. But that the conviction has become dogma for the American Jewish left marks a serious shift. When the Movement for Black Lives put out a platform that pronounced Israel guilty of a “genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” it reminded some of SNCC’s publication of “The Palestine Problem.” But this time the Jewish left didn’t flee. While criticizing its platform, this contingent, as a rule, supports the Movement for Black Lives.

Tru’ah, a Rabbinic human rights organization, and J Street both released statements that expressed a deep respect for and desire to cooperate with the Movement for Black Lives. Others, like the young Jewish activists of IfNotNow, have said they wanted to “develop deeper relationships” with activists outside the Jewish community, including “with Palestinians and Palestinian-led movements, and with Black-led movements.” And Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-BDS organization, endorsed the platform “entirely and without reservation.” This incarnation of the American Jewish left has no plans to leave “the movement.” For them, too, black rights are Palestinian rights are human rights.

It is possible that this moment of solidarity will be a short-lived product of the anti-Trump, anti-Bibi coalition. Even if simultaneous resistance to Trump’s separation of immigrant families and to Bibi’s demolition of Bedouin villages makes the ideology of the American Jewish left more or less indistinguishable from its Gentile allies, Jewish resistance tactics can look very different. Like activists from all backgrounds, Jewish leftists have found power in their traditions. This has led to projects like Freedom Seders in Hebron, Sukkot against Demolitions, and the recitation of Kaddish, the Jewish mourners prayer, for Gaza’s victims. These kinds of protest actions are reminders, too, that Jews have particular language and tools that they bring to bear. It is also possible that these inward-looking expressions will lead to a more effective anti-occupation activism.

Jewish activists leaning into their traditions in their activism is also a reminder that the American Jewish left still cares deeply about being Jewish, and that certain ways of pillorying Israel are likely to remain beyond the pale. There is unlikely to be a wholesale embrace, for example, of the BDS movement that seeks to isolate Israel. But it is not going to be rejected en masse either.

Still, even actions that foreground identity are unlikely to derail the Jewish left’s full participation in the projects of the American and global left. It will still see injustices in the United States—mass incarceration, separation of immigrant families, the stripping of black voters from voter rolls—and immediately make the link to Israel’s military occupation, its separation barrier, and the new Nation-State law. And these parallels are already being used to battle other kinds of racial injustice in Israel—the type long leveled against Mizrahi Jews (Jews from North Africa and the Middle East) and East African asylum-seekers. The Jewish left has gotten on the freedom train. Just a few stops later than the leaders of SNCC might have wanted.

The politics of Israel often produce unintended consequences in the Diaspora. Take the Nation-State law that was recently pushed by the government and narrowly approved in the Knesset. It is a law that calls Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people—something that is a reality. But because it makes no mention of democracy and equality, and reduces the status of the Arabic language, it has produced a backlash in Israel among the Druze and Arab citizens, and an outcry in the Diaspora that Israel seems to be adopting increasingly illiberal laws.

Why did the government push it? Some will argue that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition is made up largely of right-wing parties that are highly nationalistic and that the law plays to their national-religious base. Perhaps, but that is too narrow an interpretation. Israel faces a de-legitimization movement internationally that seeks to undermine its right to self-defense, and the law is meant to put on the record the enduring nature and character of the state. The law sends the message that Israel will not become a binational state, that it will retain its national anthem (“Hatikvah”) and its flag.

It is easy to misrepresent a law that does not include the terms “democracy” and “equality.” But both have been enshrined in Basic Laws. Lacking a constitution, Israel has adopted 14 basic laws, including the Nation-State law, which cannot contradict its predecessors. From that standpoint, one could argue that the new law need not include the terms “democracy” and “equality,” because they are embedded in other laws.

Still, while true legally, there is a need politically. If Diaspora Jews feel that Israel is moving away from its liberal core values with a law like this, why not amend the law and insert a commitment to democracy and equality? Or even simply insert words from the Declaration of Independence, which stated that Israel “will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice, and peace envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture...”

In other words, there is a way to politically fix the Nation-State law. Certainly, the backlash in the Diaspora is a reminder of a broader need: The Israeli government must pay more attention to the sensitivities in the outside Jewish world, particularly when the state declares itself to be the nation-state of the Jewish people. That requires its leaders to see themselves as representing the Jewish communities outside of Israel as well, and not only narrow constituencies in Israel.

Ironically, in seeking to protect Israel from those trying to delegitimize it, the law’s backers have inadvertently played into the hands of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which, along with other critics, has claimed that Israel has relegated minorities to second-class status. But consider another irony: Here is Israel, the one country in the Middle East that has an independent judiciary, a separation of powers, regularly and unregularly held elections that are fiercely combatted, a critical press corps, a lively civil society, and an unmistakable rule of law—and it is being challenged for being undemocratic and discriminatory.

It is neither. But obviously the Israeli government needs to be aware of how its actions are taken and interpreted outside Israel. This gets at a larger question that must also be addressed. It is right to call on Israelis to take account of Diaspora needs and concerns as well as their own. But Diaspora Jewry should also acknowledge a basic reality: When it comes to security, it is Israelis who live in a region where threats are commonplace and peace is not. Today, Israel faces a complicated, dangerous reality. In Syria, Iran is embedding Shia militias, some of which come from as far away as Pakistan. They are not doing it for defensive reasons. Why does Iran, when it is facing increasing domestic discontent over its foreign adventures, need to build a land-bridge that goes through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast? Why is it seeking to create in Syria what it has produced in Lebanon with Hezbollah, which has a stranglehold on the government and its thousands of rockets? The short answer is to have a forward military platform and infrastructure to threaten Israel.

But Israel does not just face the prospect of a new northern front. It is also contending with ISIS-affiliated groups in the Sinai and ongoing threats from Hamas in Gaza. When it comes to dealing with regional threats, Israel’s government needs the flexibility to do what is necessary; this is especially important at a time when the Trump administration backs Israel rhetorically and diplomatically but has left it largely on its own when it comes to countering the Iranians in Syria. And, also largely on its own when it comes to dealing with Russia in Syria. Why else would Netanyahu meet with Vladimir Putin nine times in the last three years? It reflects the need for constant management of the Russians.

True, Diaspora communities may sometimes feel unsettled by Israeli military actions. Israel, however, must live with and counter threats in the area. The one unmistakable lesson of Middle Eastern realities is that being weak invites catastrophe. In short, when it comes to security issues, the Diaspora’s considerations must be secondary to Israel’s.

On the non-security issues, however, the Diaspora not only has a right to raise its voice and concerns, it has a duty. If Israel’s government is adopting illiberal policies that seem to challenge basic core Jewish values, voices in the Diaspora must be heard. One way of preserving Jewish identity is for Diaspora leaders to stand as a bulwark against the growth of populism, extreme nationalism, and rejection of the “other.” Here they will be standing for the essence of Jewish values of tolerance and justice. For younger Jews who may question their Judaism, the more they see that there is such a thing as Jewish civilization—with humanistic values that represent the answer to growing intolerance and xenophobia internationally—the more they are likely to retain their identity.

Diaspora Jews should be willing to question Israeli government’s policies on non-security issues that go against the grain of traditional Jewish values or even increase division among different strains of Judaism. When it comes to security, however, Diaspora Jews need to recognize what Israel is facing in the region—and its right to act.

Jewish time deals in sevens. Think of the biblical account of Creation and its seven days that end with the Sabbath, when God rested. Think of the Bible’s Sabbatical Year, every seventh year when all fields lay fallow and all debts are forgiven. Think of the Bible’s Jubilee Year, the year after every seventh Sabbatical Year when the shofar is blown for the manumission of slaves. Think of the Bible itself: Ptolemy II, who hoped to undermine the divine authority of the Hebrew original, commissioned 72 Jewish scholars to translate it into Greek, but forced each to work independently; according to legend, however, each scholar miraculously produced the same identical Greek text, which was subsequently rounded down and given the Latin name Septuagint, meaning 70. That number is of especial importance to Judaism’s relationship to mortality. Traditionally, 70 years is taken to mean “the length of one generation,” and the prophetic writings invoke that length exactly seven times. According to the Psalms, 70 years is the average lifespan, yet that span is but “labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

Seventy, then, is a deathly sum. It follows that Israel’s 70th birthday should be a reckoning.

And yet Israel has two birthdays, because of its dual calendar: the Hebrew lunar (used by religious Jews), and the Gregorian solar (used by everyone in Israel, including the religious). The modern state of Israel was founded on 5 Iyar 5708, which was May 14, 1948. If you do some basic calculations, or just search online, you’ll find that Israel’s 70th, 5 Iyar 5778, corresponded to April 20, 2018, which just happened to be the eve of the Sabbath (in calendars that count by the moon, the days begin and end with sunset). This means that Israel marked the septuagenary “platinum” anniversary of its independence a full 24 days before America and its other allies paid their respects, on May 14, 2018, the eve of the date memorialized by Palestinians as Nakba Day: the day that brought the destruction (Al Nakba) of their homeland.

This 24-day period is just about the longest drift that’s possible between anniversaries of the same event in the lunar and solar calendars. The fields of horology (the study of time) and chronology (the study of historical records to determine the dates of past events) have a term for this divergence: “secular difference.”

The term suggests a schism, a split; cycles out of sync, spheres obstinate in their incongruence. This is because it defines as a technical time-discrepancy what is better understood as a religio-political discrepancy, or as the artifact of immemorial attempts by solar-calendared empires to subjugate the lunar-calendared Jews and absorb them into their time frames, attempts which date back to at least the reign of Ptolemy III, the eldest son of Ptolemy II, who introduced the leap day to Egypt.

Today, that “secular difference” not only still exists, it’s become greater than ever. This might be the one fact that everyone, even Jews, can agree on.

In 5778/2018, another word for this period was spring.

The major official event of every Israeli Independence Day (Yom Haatzmaut) is the public lighting of a menorah, which is conducted up by the military cemetery on Mount Herzl. Though the biblical menorah was a seven-branched candelabra, modern Israel prefers to use the twelve-branched version, which dedicates a flame to each of the ancient Israelite tribes and gives the event’s organizers—a committee that includes Knesset members—more honors to distribute.

Each year, the committee invites twelve Israelis to perform an act that, to many American Jews, and even to many Israeli Jews, resembles nothing so much as a supersize bar-or-bat-mitzvah-candle-lighting-ceremony, in which F-16 flyovers have been substituted for cake. The honorees were called up, one at a time, to kindle a wick—in this case, to touch a torch to a gas jet—and, as they fumbled, their lives were described (the emcees for the occasion were Channel 2 news anchor Danny Kushmaro and movie actress Yaël Abecassis). As to be expected of state ceremonies in any democracy, even one exclusively made of, by, and for Jews, the cast of citizens chosen to participate keeps getting more diverse, and in this transformative year for global feminism (in which so many of the famous men accused of wrongdoing are Jews), there was a particular emphasis on women: the young, ultra-Orthodox tech mogul; the director general for the Asia-Pacific region in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Poland-born “First Lady” of the Israeli stage; the Morocco-born pioneer of the “nano-ghost,” which is a type of gene therapy, apparently. The aim, per Israeli custom, was to produce an event reflective of the country’s multiculturalism and respect for human rights (which is to say reflective of Jewish multiculturalism and respect for Jewish rights), and, above all, to keep the event apolitical.

Most politicians, regardless of nationality or party, still understand the “apolitical” not as an attainable mandate, but as an aspirational principle: a standard of decorum, an affirmation of norms. But then most politicians aren’t Benjamin Netanyahu—the Israeli prime minister who, like all masters of authoritarian-ish populism, takes an almost sinister pleasure in mocking genteel civic fictions, even while refusing to admit his own lies. Netanyahu entered this ostensibly joyous season not merely emboldened by Donald Trump but seemingly intent on matching the porn-star-struck, justice-obstructing American president scandal for ludicrous scandal. Israeli police had been investigating him for over a year, trying to figure out whether he and/or his family had traded favors for nearly one million shekels’ worth of ritzy gifts, including champagne (which Netanyahu’s team requested using the code word “pinks”), cigars (code word: “leaves”), and jewelry (Netanyahu’s team requested a necklace and bracelet set, and then complained when they only received the necklace), all of which were provided by Arnon Milchan, a former Israeli intelligence operative and Hollywood producer whose credits include The Big Short and 12 Years a Slave. Another case in which Netanyahu was implicated involved two Israeli newspapers, Yediot Ahronot and Israel Hayom. Prior to this investigation, Yediot Ahronot was generally regarded as a dependably independent “moderate” voice, with a habit of criticizing Netanyahu. Meanwhile, Israel Hayom was, and remains, a generally Netanyahu-friendly freebie tabloid, as trashy and garish as its owner, GOP-donor and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Recorded conversations were leaked to the Israeli press, however, in which Netanyahu can be heard telling financially embattled Yediot Ahronot publisher Arnon Mozes that he’d be willing to back legislation that would harm Israel Hayom (in the form of a bill that would limit the circulation of freebie tabloids), in exchange for Yediot Ahronot giving him and his party, Likud, more favorable coverage in advance of the 2015 elections. Here’s a choice excerpt of those recordings, in my translation:

Netanyahu: We’re just talking about moderation, about the media becoming more reasonable. The hostility level toward me has to be lowered from, say, a 9.5 to a 7.5.

Mozes: Sure. But the important thing is to make you prime minister.

Netanyahu: We have to consider what’s best for the country.

Mozes: If you want to put it that way, suit yourself. You’re the whackjob who wants to be prime minister.

Three other cases have entangled Netanyahu, but hadn’t yet implicated him personally that spring—one involving his cousin and personal lawyer David Shimron, in a convoluted scheme to bribe executives of the German company ThyssenKrupp, in order to profit off Israel’s purchase from them of three Dolphin-class submarines and four Sa’ar 6-class corvettes (warships); another pertaining to whether Netanyahu and/or his staff and/or his associates ensured a preferential regulatory environment for the Israeli telecommunications company Bezeq in exchange for profit and/or positive reporting about Netanyahu on the popular Bezeq-owned news site Walla!; and then yet another pertaining to Netanyahu’s former communications adviser offering the attorney generalship of Israel to a judge in return for the judge dismissing charges against Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, who lately has been struggling with some problems of her own. (She’s accused of misuse of state funds, for her swanky catering budget at the prime minister’s residence inter alia.)

The investigation and litigation of all this will continue well past the conclusion of Netanyahu’s present term, which, despite the wishes of some Knesset members of his own coalition, he insists won’t be his last—but the point is: spring. Just before the start of Israel’s birthday season, investigators gave Netanyahu’s opposition a shiny present when they recommended that the prime minister be indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, in the booze/cigars/jewelry and newspaper cases, which the Ministry of Justice calls Cases 1000 and 2000, though I myself call them “Bibigate,” an inclusive term that spelled in Hebrew characters reads like Yiddish: “Bibi-Geyt,” meaning “Bibi Goes.”

And, indeed, Bibi went: With his political fortunes in peril, Netanyahu wasn’t going to skip the Yom Haatzmaut party, which, after all, would be broadcast live on Israel’s state-owned TV channels, and streamed online. Instead, he put on a happy face and a blue-and-white-striped tie and demanded to address the nation—something that no sitting prime minister had ever done, in accordance with the “apoliticality” of the occasion. Netanyahu’s attempt to break precedent and bask in menorah-light was met with resistance by the organizers and scorn on the Israeli street, but Netanyahu called in reinforcements in the form of that most formidable of global powers, Honduras.

This was preposterous. After Trump announced his plan to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem at the end of his first year in office, other countries fell in line: Guatemala, Paraguay (Romania and the Czech Republic are still considering). Honduras, though, was one of the first of the second-string to declare its intention to relocate, and Netanyahu decided to honor its president, Juan Orlando Hernández, a 1992 graduate of a diplomatic course held by Israel’s Foreign Ministry who in spring 2018 had just begun his second term in office, after he’d appointed Supreme Court judges who changed his country’s constitution to allow two-term presidencies, and he’d won what was almost certainly a fraudulent election.

Netanyahu’s thinking went like this: It’s established diplomatic protocol in Israel, as it is in most countries, that when the sitting head of another state visits as an official guest and makes a public appearance, the sitting head of state of the host country must join him. Ergo, if Netanyahu invited the Honduran president to ignite a menorah-branch, then Netanyahu himself would have to be there, and, as long as he was there, why not give a speech, too? Wouldn’t that only be polite? The Israeli press was dumbstruck: It was business as usual for Netanyahu to manufacture a controversy, but it was novel and almost un-Israeli of him to argue his position by invoking proper etiquette and statecraft. Meanwhile, the Honduran invitation had already been extended. Negotiations among Netanyahu, Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein, Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev—whose nicknames include “the Israeli Trump” and “Trump in high heels”—and Honduran officials resulted in a compromise: Hernández would cancel his visit (he cited scheduling conflicts), and Netanyahu would be permitted to address the ceremony for no more than five minutes, though his remarks had to remain—again, whatever this means—“apolitical.”

He ended up speaking for about 14 minutes—opening with a dubious anecdote about a trip he’d once taken to Rome, where he’d toured the Arch of Titus, whose entablature contains a relief depicting the looting of the original menorah from the Second Temple during Titus’s re-conquest of Jerusalem in, yes, 70 C.E. According to Netanyahu’s account—which, as it went on, took on the grizzled repetitiousness of a Jewish joke—he visited the site (presumably with aides and a gargantuan security contingent) only to find himself beset by groups of “Japanese and Scandinavian tourists,” who, apparently, kept pointing at the Arch’s menorah and suddenly erupted into a chant, “Israel, Israel, Israel.” This spontaneous clamor, Netanyahu said, served as proof that the menorah was, is, and will always be universally recognized as a Jewish symbol, which is an assertion that, unlike Netanyahu’s sanity, no one has ever seriously doubted. “In the year 70, the menorah’s light went out,” he said. “But today, in Israel’s 70th year since Independence, the menorah is the symbol of our nation, and its light is stronger than ever.” Rallied by the applause, Netanyahu took the opportunity to exceed his remit: “Even today some seek to extinguish the menorah, to extinguish the light that erupts from Zion.” He then half-turned at the podium, as if issuing a threat to Tehran: “I assure you, this will not happen. It will not happen because our light will always overcome their darkness.” At that moment of the state broadcast, the chyron flashed: NETANYAHU: NOBODY WILL TURN OUR LIGHTS OFF AGAIN.

When Netanyahu finished his speech, it was still 26 days until the May 14 dedication of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, but only 24 days until the May 12 deadline for the United States’ recertification of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly referred to as the Iran Deal, which—contrary to every statement ever made by Netanyahu and Trump both—made the Ayatollah’s regime accountable to international atomic energy inspections and prevented it from developing a nuclear arsenal. Netanyahu had spent much of Barack Obama’s second term campaigning against the agreement—remember that obnoxious, GOP-sponsored address to a joint session of Congress in 2015?—but from the moment Trump arrived in the Oval Office, his lobbying for America’s withdrawal had been relentless, with rhetoric that grew more ominous even as his domestic scandals grew more gross. Iran couldn’t be trusted, he insisted; the U.N. Security Council, whose permanent members had authorized the pact, would be complicit, and were colluding, in Israel’s destruction. Nonetheless, what Netanyahu certainly knew at the time of his Yom Haatzmaut speech, but didn’t mention, was that the issue of recertification had been rendered at least temporarily moot by Iran’s interference in Syria, alongside Russia. As Russia busied itself mobilizing its largest military presence in the region since the Cold War, Israelis came to fear that the Islamic Republic wouldn’t have to develop any nukes of its own: My Israeli social-media feeds were rife with warnings of Russian nuclear material falling into Iranian hands, through negligence, or theft, or on purpose.

This impasse was the backdrop for the Israeli actions of the next three-weeks-and-change; not that many Americans were cognizant of it, given that most of the U.S. media coverage of “The Middle East” was preoccupied with Trump’s latest reality show—The Apprentice: Recertified? “Will the president tell the mullahs ‘you’re fired’?”—and the fact that, on April 26, the gutted U.S. State Department finally got a replacement secretary, Mike Pompeo, who three days after being sworn in made his first official trip, to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and yes, Israel.

On April 30, Netanyahu took his anti-Iran appeal online, in a clumsily stage-managed English-language press conference, in which he stood alongside a utilitarian metal bookcase full of bindered documents that he claimed the Mossad had exfiltrated from Iran. According to Netanyahu, these documents demonstrated that Iran’s pursuit of nuclearization had not merely been for energy purposes, as Iranian officials had insisted, but rather for the purposes of obtaining a bomb. This was a fact that everyone was already aware of—a fact that even Trump was already aware of—but that only Netanyahu was desperate enough to repeat as if new and act shocked by (along with Fox News and about half of CNN).

Later that same day came the explanation of the press-conference charade, though hardly any U.S. news outlets carried it prominently: Israel bombed a storage base in Syria where Iran was keeping munitions, in an attack that killed at least 16. On May 1, a law was passed by the Knesset that allowed the prime minister and defense minister to declare war without cabinet approval; on May 7, Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz issued a warning that if Iran attacked Israel from Syria, Israel would assassinate Syrian President Assad; on May 8, Netanyahu ordered a missile-strike against a weapons depot south of Damascus in an attack that caused the deaths of at least eight members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and other foreign pro-regime fighters; that same day, Trump formally withdrew the United States from the Iran Deal, four days in advance of its deadline, and that evening U.S.-time, the next morning Israel-time, Netanyahu flew to Moscow to meet President Putin to discuss the future of Russia’s involvement in Syria, in particular Russia’s reported plan to equip the Assad regime with S-300 surface-to-air missiles, which might significantly degrade Israel’s air superiority in the region.

Within his first year, Trump didn’t just set in motion the fulfillment of his campaign promise to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he also officially recognized Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the Jewish State. He did so, it must be said, not merely to please Israelis, and not merely to please American Jews, but mostly to please American evangelical Christians for whom Jerusalem is not a city but an eschaton. Now, like Trump, and like Netanyahu, I’m all for cutting through bullshit—Jerusalem is Israel’s capital if only because Israel says it is and won’t give it up and isn’t about to move the Knesset—but there’s no point in cutting through bullshit if, in the next moment, you’re just going to go and step in it. Which, of course, is precisely what Trump did. It was the pomp-and-circumstantial grotesquerie of the doing that was maddening. What transpired on May 14 wasn’t an embassy opening—it wasn’t even the opening of a Trump casino—it was more like the opening of a semifinished block of shoddy time-share condos backed onto the side of a for-profit Baptist church (discounts available for members). Stars of David and the Stars and Stripes were projected against the forbearant stones of the Old City’s walls, as the notables of the day assembled: Trump’s former bankruptcy attorney/U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, former Goldman Sachs stooge/U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Jared Kushner (who was smirking throughout, perhaps enjoying his day-off from preparing his oft-touted, but, as of this writing, yet-to-be-presented “Peace Plan”), and Ivanka Trump (who appeared so nervous that when the curtain was tugged to reveal the embassy’s seal, she welcomed everybody to the newest outpost of “the United States on America”).

The two men who sermonized at the embassy dedication are rich and famous and thoroughly odious, and yet, they might be the only Christian figures in America more familiar to Israelis than to American Jews. Dr. Robert Jeffress heads the 13,000-member First Baptist Dallas, and hosts a weekly TV ministry that reaches 28 countries, and a daily radio ministry that reaches 195 countries. He’s also had a lot to say over the years about homosexuality, and Mormonism, and Islam, but let’s skip over all of that and, because he was in Israel, get straight to Jews, whom he believes are destined for damnation: “You can’t be saved being a Jew; you know who said that by the way, the three greatest Jews in the New Testament, Peter, Paul, and Jesus Christ, they all said Judaism won’t do it, it’s faith in Jesus Christ.” The other ecclesiast who spoke—the more dangerous member of the cute couple, in my opinion—was Pastor John Hagee, another televangelist/radio-evangelist, the leader of the San Antonio-based Cornerstone Church, and the founder and leader of the Christian-Zionist organization Christians United for Israel. Pastor Hagee, like Dr. Jeffress, has many beliefs, but perhaps most salient to his pilgrimage to Jerusalem was his assertion that God let the Holocaust happen to ensure that “the Jews” returned to Israel (whenever a pastor, or anyone, opens his mouth, note whether he says “Jews” or “the Jews”—old-school Marxist anti-Semites and new-school evangelical Christian philo-Semites always choose the latter).

Both men praised Christ, God, and Trump, roughly in that order, and Dr. Jeffress even did so on behalf of the audience, the bulk of which was presumably security personnel and journalists: “I believe, Father, I speak for every one of us when we say we thank you every day that you have given us a president who boldly stands on the right side of history, but more importantly, stands on the right side of you, oh God, when it comes to Israel [Izzz-real].” Pastor Hagee, in his homily, showed that though he knew his “Old Testament” chapter and verse, he didn’t seem to know that the mighty cadences of his modified King James aren’t quite impressive—are, in fact, quite confusing—to those who speak the language of the original: “Let the word go forth from Jerusalem today that Israel lives—shout it from the housetops that Israel lives. Let every Islamic terrorist hear this message—Israel lives. Let it be heard in the halls of the United Nations—Israel lives. Let it echo down the marble halls of the Presidential Palace in Iran—Israel lives.” The cowboy cleric doth protest too much, I thought. And the more he did, the more I worried: Was “Izzz-real” dying?

To understand what these hucksters were up to, you’d have to understand their faith, and so, Yahweh forgive me, here’s a summary: Both Dr. Jeffress and Pastor Hagee subscribe to versions of “Dispensationalism,” which maintains that the history of the world is divided into—wouldn’t you know it?—seven “dispensations,” each of which is another epoch or stage of existence that brings “the Jews” closer to their ultimate conversion to Christianity, and so brings all of humanity closer to Armageddon’s End of Time. (It should be said that Armageddon, an archaeological site that Israelis call Megiddo, is about an hour and 30-minute ride in a tourist van due north from Jerusalem, adjacent to the site of some of the country’s most notorious prisons.) The First Dispensation was that of innocence, which covered the age before Adam’s Fall; the Second was the dispensation of conscience, when humanity was tested and found wanting and punished with the Flood, from which only Noah’s family survived; the Third was the Dispensation of governance, which covered Noah’s rule through Abraham’s founding of monotheism; the Fourth and middle Dispensation was that of patriarchy, which culminated with the creation of “the Jews,” through Moses receiving the commandments at Mount Sinai; the Fifth was that of the Mosaic Law, which consolidated “the Jews” as a people; the Sixth—the one we’re all currently dragging through and paying taxes in—is that of the church, which began with Christ’s martyrdom and will end, in the Seventh Dispensation, with his return to earth to establish the Eternal Kingdom, whose capital will be Jerusalem. Don’t take my word for it; take Pastor Hagee’s, from a May 11 interview with Breitbart News in promotion of his embassy appearance:

“Christians believe that Jerusalem will be the capital city in the Eternal Kingdom, ruled by Jesus Christ.… Outside the city of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ was crucified, resurrected from the dead, and when he returns the second time, is going to put his foot on the Mount of Olives in the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the future of the world.”

I want to be clear that whatever animus I have for these two unctuous philo-Semites is nothing compared to the contempt I have for the Jewish anti-Semites who invited them: The deeper hatred is always for one’s own. The evangelical presence in Jerusalem only confirmed what, over the course of the spring, I had been sensing as a conscious shift or pivot—a political realignment that I’m going to call “the Dispensation of the Jews,” by which I mean Israel’s dispensing with, or betraying, its own people. The ingathering of that people was the prime mission of the Zionist movement generations before the existence of modern Israel. The country was conceived as a refuge for the resettlement of persecuted Jews from throughout Christendom and the Ummah, and each wave of emigration to crash upon its shores brought with it with its own character. European aliyah peaked, obviously, with the Holocaust generation, after which Mizrahim, or Jews from Arab lands, began arriving, fleeing a perennial anti-Semitism exacerbated by Israeli Independence. Jews from Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and elsewhere—the victims of anti-Jewish legislation, property seizures, and pogroms—came throughout the 1950s and 1960s; Jews were expelled from Egypt in 1956; Iranian Jews came throughout the ’50s, and then in another onslaught during the Islamic Revolution in 1979; Ethiopian Jews, whose religion was banned by the Communist Derg government, arrived in the 1980s, and finally Soviet Jews arrived after the collapse of the USSR, which, in terms of Israel’s Jewish demography, might as well be considered the end of history: There are not that many exiles left to ingather, and fewer than ever after a recent influx of Jews escaping the ruin of the Venezuelan economy, and a trickle of Europeans who—spooked by a rise in Islamic and neo-Nazi anti-Semitism— haven’t surrendered their EU passports, but merely purchased second homes on the Mediterranean. It seems, then, that the last major Jewish Diaspora that remains for Israel’s absorption is America’s: a Diaspora far too entrenched and unendangered to trade L.A. for Haifa just yet.

There’s no need for me, or for anyone, to describe the out-size influence that American Jewry has had on American foreign policy: The Israeli government has already spent decades exaggerating that influence for me, and vain American Jewry has never challenged that assertion. It’s perhaps due to this hyperbole-campaign, not to mention America’s formal Soviet-containment and informal anti-Arab stances, that U.S. politicians found it expedient to enshrine American Jewry’s support of Israel (mostly individual and community philanthropy) as American policy (alliances, arms agreements, aid packages, and loans). During Israel’s War of Independence, official U.S. support was lackluster, but flash-forward 20 or so years to the Six-Day War, and especially the Yom Kippur War, and America was already becoming what it remains: Israel’s stalwart defender. To Jewish boomers, who were born into Zionism, Israel was a multiethnic/multiracial democracy that respected women’s rights; a self-made paradise that realized the socialist dreams that’d been deferred at home, and a righteous victim perpetually called upon to defend itself from Arab aggressors; whereas America was a capitalist behemoth that fought not for its existence, but in Vietnam, and persecuted the citizens whose ancestors it had once enslaved. Jewish millennials, by contrast, take their parents’ youthful critique of America for granted but treat Israel with ambivalence if not disdain. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement has found considerable support on U.S. campuses, where prevailing “discourse” dictates that a Jew cannot, for example, condemn American racial discrimination and also be a Zionist.

Netanyahu is mindful of this and has done some simple math—even simpler than the math that converts the calendars: There are about six million Jews in America, but, given the 56 percent intermarriage rate, that number is expected to shrink, in what ultra-Orthodox Knesset member Israel Eichler has called “a silent Holocaust”; millennials earn less money than boomers, and so also give less to charity, and those who brand Israel a rogue state and apartheid regime will give nothing. There are, however, approximately 83 million evangelical Christians in America, well more than half of whom claim to support Israel, and well more than three-quarters of whom claim to give money to charity. The evangelicals are obviously the stronger bloc—so why not bring them into the tent? Why not break bread with them and make them allies? Netanyahu’s maneuvering would make unimpeachable sense were he the prime minister of any other country. Instead, he’s the prime minister of a country whose people his new allies want to convert, and whose capital they want to repurpose into the throne and footstool of immortal Christendom. I can only wonder whether Netanyahu would’ve made the same bargain were the evangelical movement to come into possession of a multibranched military with a nuclear program.

To be sure, Netanyahu feels as betrayed by American Jewry as American Jewry feels betrayed by him, and it’s difficult to tell to what degree these feelings have been motivated by disgust and spite (Netanyahu hating American Jewish naivete, American Jews hating Netanyahu’s cronyism and violence), and to what degree they’ve been motivated by opportunism and self-interest (Netanyahu wanting the evangelical money and political cover, American Jews wanting to shore up their credentials on the identitarian left).

American Jews affiliated with the Reform and Conservative movements tend to experience their current rejection by Israel as merely the politicization, or nationalization, of an Orthodoxy-privileging process that originated with Israel’s rabbinates, in their refusal to recognize non-Orthodox Jews as Jews and their prohibition of women from full participation in Jewish ritual life. This, however, is a misperception, a classically liberal American failure to understand how Israel has elevated national loyalty into an acceptable substitute for religious observance. For evidence of this, American Jews—or the roughly 13 percent of whom who can read Hebrew—would do well to peruse the report released this spring by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs (which is headed by Naftali Bennett, who is also minister of education, head of the archconservative Jewish Home party, and the son of Israeli olim—immigrants—from San Francisco). This outstandingly cynical and hypocritical document—which is perhaps the defining document of Israel’s rejection of American Jewry—forgoes the political reckoning that would encourage aliyah from the United States, and instead purports to identify approximately 60 million people from around the world (many of them the white descendants of Inquisition-era forced converts in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Latin America) who have what are characterized as “affinities” for Judaism and Israel, and who might profitably be brought to Israel and converted, so as to provide an ideologically reliable bulwark against the higher population numbers of Palestinians.

Zionism’s primal achievement was not the Israeli state, but rather the fact that it created, or re-created, a people out of an almost baffling array of humanity. It was only as a by-product of this miraculous act that “the Jewish people” could lay claim to their biblical antecedents, and so could lay claim to their biblical lands. This idea of peoplehood didn’t merely come from ancient texts—it came from the reading of ancient texts by the newly liberated Jews of Ashkenaz, or Jewish Europe. Ashkenazim dominated early Zionist discourse as they dominated early Israeli society: They comprised the governmental and economic and cultural elite, while at the opposite extreme of the caste system were Mizrahim, Jews from Arab lands who were tasked with putting Ashkenazi theories into practice through labor. Mizrahim rightfully came to resent this discrimination, along with their impoverishment and lack of political representation, and, as Israel’s survivalist wars gave way to ongoing conflict with Palestinians, they voiced their dissent through accusing their Ashkenazi leaders of weakness: Ashkenazim were liberal humanists unwilling, or unable, to protect them. Leaders of Shas, the main Mizrahi party now in a coalition with Likud, have given hard-line speeches about how Ashkenazim don’t understand Palestinians, having never lived among Arabs themselves. Mizrahim had—they had extensive experience with Arabs, and so knew how harshly they had to be dealt with. If Israel continued to engage Palestinians in the Ashkenazi way, it would be driven into the sea: Ashkenazi became a metonymy for compromise, concession, impotence. Mizrahi antipathy for Israel’s neighbors, informed by cruel acculturation to Arab rule, but fomented by resentment of Ashkenazi power, was transmuted into policy in proportion with the changing demographics of the country: It was only in this generation that Mizrahim were due to have supplanted Ashkenazim as the majority Jewish ethnicity in Israel. (Israel does not collect comprehensive statistics on this aspect of Jewish ethnicity.)

Some Mizrahim might be put off by my articulation of their attitudes, and some Ashkenazim might find my conclusions shameful or out of date. But then I don’t take my cues from Israeli sensitivities. Besides, I’m an American Jew, and so regardless of my level of Jewish education, or of Jewish observance, whatever I come up with can be discounted. Nevertheless: It is my opinion that Israeli mistrust of the Ashkenazi spirit is intensifying, due both to the increased influence of Mizrahim in Israeli life and to Ashkenazim’s own—fairly well-chronicled— inclinations toward self-hatred. I take this phenomenon of mistrust as indicative of a revisionist desire—namely, the desire to forget the fact that the construction of Israeli identity was an Ashkenazi ideal and so that the biblical lands promised by God were only obtained through the dreaming, or the will, of assimilated Jews from nation-state Europe. To press my argument even further into European territory, I will say that this desire to eradicate origins is an unconscious desire, a Freudian compulsion to rid the country of its Ashkenazi “father.” After all, how can “we,” Israelis, expect Ashkenazim to defend “us,” when so many of “them” so complacently went off to “their” slaughter in the Holocaust? How can “we” ever trust “them” with “our” survival? Israel is now trying to purge “itself” of this Ashkenazi “them”—this puny desexualized sect that delegitimates the country by reminding it of its paternity. To complete the purge, however, Israel must rid itself of its Ashkenazi legacy not just from within, but also from without, and wherever this legacy is found—and it just so happens that, today, the most prominent embodiment of this Ashkenazi “them” is American Jewry, whose population is roughly equivalent to that of Israeli Jewry but is of overwhelmingly European descent and still believes in peace and the rule of law. As long as this secular humanist spirit continues to exist in the world’s last major Jewish Diaspora, Israel must work against it. Only once it ceases to exist can Israel be definitively Israeli.

Perhaps the most contentious and unabating debate within “the Arab world” concerns “the Arab spring”—rather, it concerns whether most Arab countries even have four seasons, and not three (flooding, growing, and harvesting), or two (flood and drought). The only consensus might be that April and May are the months of the khamsin—not a Western wind of change, but an Eastern wind of heat and dust, which the Koran explains as a “scorching fire”; it’s no wonder that the phrase, “the Arab Spring,” was coined by American academics. That non-season lasted from 2010 to 2012, in the middle of which, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest a lack of affordable housing. It took about five minutes before the Israeli press called the protests a movement, and perhaps another five minutes before they dubbed it, with varying degrees of crassness, “the Israeli Spring.” This was the largest protest movement in Israeli history, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with Palestinians.

Seven springs later, Palestinians in Gaza prepared for the approach of the 70th anniversary of their statelessness by erecting a tent city near the border-fence. The usual protests succumbed to the unusual—to the desperate—call, for Gazans to storm the fence, and enter Israel, and reclaim the land that’d been seized from them by force. More than 100 were killed, and thousands were wounded, in what can only be described as an act of mass-martyrdom. Over the period of “secular difference” alone: April 20, four killed; April 27, four killed; April 29, three killed; May 5, six killed; May 6, three killed; May 11, one killed; then May 14, when 59 were killed and at least 2,700 wounded only 60 or so miles as the dove flies from where Jared, Ivanka, and the messianists from Texas were preaching in Jerusalem.

The official Israeli government spin was especially halfhearted: It began and ended with the insistence that Israel must defend its borders. If Gazans attempted to breach the border, with and even without the stated intent to do harm to citizens and/or property, Israel had no choice but to stop them. From there, the arguments turned to pointing out how all, or most, Palestinians killed had been members of Hamas (not true), before switching to non-sequitur claims about how few protests there’d been in the West Bank (Palestine), and assertions that this putatively muted response was because a significant faction of Palestinians in the West Bank (Palestine), and in Israel, supported the embassy move: Those who had families in the United States now had easier access to applying for a visa (not true).

A less parochial spin technique followed from this fragmentation of Palestinians into good Palestinians (West Bank/Palestine) and bad Palestinians (Gaza). It involved the partitioning of Palestinians, as a whole, from every other Arab nation and cause. Israeli government officials, and journalists, kept mentioning how friendly Israel had become with its neighbors since the advent of the Islamic State and its spread to Syria and the Sinai. Israel was buddies with the House of Saud! Israel had never been cozier with Jordan and Egypt! Everyone gets together and shares intelligence! We even have mutual flyover rights—sometimes!

The implication in all this was that even Israel’s former adversaries were in agreement: Palestinians were the exception. They were the holdouts, recalcitrant and irremediable. If they wanted to be left rotting atop history’s dung heap, so be it.

Underlying this propaganda was the sense that Israel was exasperated: It was inevitable that Gazans would charge the fence, and inevitable that Israel would shoot them. It was inevitable that videos and photos of the carnage would go online, and inevitable that the world would be outraged. But only Gazans are trapped in this life of no-choice, alternately neglected and manipulated by fellow Arabs, and prey to the death-drives provoked by total deprivation. Israel, however, had a season’s warning to prepare for all this, and to develop a plan to avoid or mitigate its traumas. Instead, it decided not to. Worse, it decided that it did not have to. Trump and his evangelicals would raise no cry, and it was their America, not Jewish America, that counted. This spring brought with it new definitions of “dispensation”: “exemption,” “immunity,” “impunity”—inaugurating a sort of shameless Sabbatical or Jubilee Year, as free of hope as it is of moral action.

I grew up with a Disneyland version of Israel: It was a country that had truly been a land without people waiting for a people without a land. It was immaculately conceived after Zionist leaders accepted the U.N.’s partition plan in 1947, and then fended off massive Arab attacks while demonstrating nothing but goodwill to the Palestinians living in what would become the new Jewish state. By the age of 18, I had been to Israel five times with my family and three times on my own, and went on to spend a gap year there before college, but I was unaware that Israel’s official borders did not encompass all of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The space between what I thought I knew and what I actually knew was a canyon. And when that space began to narrow, it presented a challenge to my identity, values, and worldview.

Much of the churn taking place in the American Jewish community over Israel reflects a struggle over how best to deal with just such a fallout. For many older American Jews, social media and widely available English-language Israeli news have created a daily wealth of information about Israel unavailable to them before, challenging the milk-and-honey version they espoused. For others, the low esteem with which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government holds American Jewry—and in particular the 90 percent of American Jews who do not identify as Orthodox—has undermined the emotional attachment they have to the Jewish state. Many younger American Jews either disassociate themselves from Israel due to its policies toward the Palestinians, or direct their anger at the Israeli government and American Jewish institutions that they believe actively misled them about Israel’s true nature.

Yet just as the deification of Israel as a country that does no wrong was substantively wrong and tactically erroneous, so too is the demonization of Israel as a country that does no right. Like any country, Israel is a varied and complex place, and a real understanding of it will never come from an absolutist portrayal. More importantly, simply shedding all American Jewish identification with Israel—if that is even possible—will come at a high cost. Israel has played a central role in American Jewish practice and identity for too long to excise it without real ramifications. While a debate can be had as to whether it was healthy to make love for Israel such a central feature of American Jewish life, their mutual dependence is not something that can be reversed.

The key to establishing a more stable American Jewish relationship with Israel lies in acknowledging both that American Jews and Israel are deeply connected and that they travel different paths. This is a reflection of thousands of years of Jewish history and tradition. The last two millennia of Jewish practice were shaped by its Diaspora status, while at the same time Jewish belief never wavered in its connection to and memory of Zion. American Jewish practice and identity have developed in response to being a minority group without a homegrown political nationalist movement, living in a world power at peace with its immediate neighbors and with no established state religion. Nothing about this basic structure pertains to Israel, so there is nothing shocking about American Jews having difficulty understanding what drives their Israeli cousins and vice versa.

Disappointments and disapprovals on both sides will abound, and the appropriate response is neither to pretend that they don’t exist nor to cut ties entirely. It is to nod to these differences, and to figure out how to manage them in a way that both sides can live with.

American Jews who are struggling with Israel’s expressions of exclusionary nationalism and its occupation of the West Bank want Israel to be remade in their own image and adopt policies that reflect their own values. But this is not a reasonable expectation. Israelis live with threats that American Jews do not even dream about facing, and in the wider scope of history are still in the process of negotiating the proper balance between democracy and security and the role of various state institutions. When the United States turned 70, as Israel just did, it had experienced multiple constitutional crises and had not yet gotten to the Civil War. American Jews rightly feel a stake in Israel, but they want it to heed their directives even though they do not live, pay taxes, or perform mandatory military service there.

On the other side, Israel wants American Jews to support it uncritically and subsume their negative opinions to the larger project of a Jewish state. This is also not a reasonable expectation. There was a decades-long Israeli assumption that American Jews would support Israel no matter what, and that if they even bothered to express their concerns, they could be largely ignored. Israel has no obligation to conform its policies to the wishes of American Jewry—but the other side of that coin is that it should not depend on the old dynamic still reigning supreme. As a new generation of American Jews becomes more active and vocal, one that has no firsthand memory of large-scale Jewish persecution or of the euphoria that marked Israel’s founding, the difficulty that Israel now faces in maintaining its support is only going to increase.

The relationship between American Jews and Israel has been marked by tension from the outset, but the new tensions will override all unless both sides recalibrate their expectations, establish that their differences are not extraordinary but reasonable, and work harder to understand why it is that they will never travel in absolute lockstep.

My relationship with Israel started before I can remember. Growing up Orthodox, I started learning to read Hebrew at roughly the same time I started learning to read English, although my Hebrew had a decidedly Biblical vocabulary. Gamal (camel), ohel (tent), and elohim (God) are among the first words I learned to read in that curvaceous, inky print. Zionism was inextricable from the Jewish studies curriculum that took up half my school day. We learned the story of God promising Abraham a land and we prayed facing Jerusalem, for the preservation of Israel against its enemies.

Every year, I tramped up Fifth Avenue with my schoolmates in the Salute to Israel parade, carrying homespun, glitter-adorned banners. My awareness of the Holocaust—the great cataclysm that had bit branches off so many of our family trees—was from my earliest school days wrapped in the story of the establishment of the Jewish state. My school hewed to the Israeli calendar, which ties the agony of genocide to the ecstasy of self-rule by placing Holocaust Memorial Day and Israeli Independence Day in close proximity. Solemn slide shows of emaciated bodies, and then, days later, joyous, gender-segregated hora dancing in the gym, punctuated every spring. In August we mourned the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. I went to a summer camp so ardently Zionist we lined up each Friday and stood at ease or attention when camp officials barked IDF commands in Hebrew. One year, counselors created a mini-golf course decorated with papier-mâché Israeli landmarks.

Israel wasn’t just a story in Genesis or a lovingly evoked and distant land; my family visited frequently, nearly every year, most often for Passover. Our visits didn’t resemble the sterile, highly coordinated theater of Birthright trips, but they were gentle on us children. I remember the bright colors of the souk in Jerusalem, running my hands over hot limestone, scribbling notes in childish script to insert in the mossy cracks of the Wailing Wall. I moved through the end of high school in this cocoon, a Zionist and politically conservative milieu so comprehensive and homogenous it lulled me into complacency. I grew up thinking The New York Times was, for reasons I couldn’t understand, far too rough on Israel.

It’s only in retrospect that I see the glimmers of violence that managed to pierce even the thick carapace of this idealized Zion. At the Salute to Israel parade, one year, a wild-eyed man with our group shouted: “Shechem—is Israel! Hebron—is Israel! Ramallah—is Israel!” We echoed his chants. I don’t recall how old I was, who he was, but I remember my shiver of discomfort: Even then, I knew Ramallah was where Palestinians lived. In school “the conflict” was occasionally referenced; once, we watched a propaganda film commemorating the death of an Israeli infant, ten-month-old Shalhevet Pass, whose family had been part of a militant settler enclave in Hebron. Accompanied by a swelling orchestral score, the film condemned Palestinian terrorism. One year my family had an unusually luxurious suite in Jerusalem for Passover: Even the grand foreigner-friendly hotels were mostly empty, at the height of the intifada in 2003.

But generally what I knew were ripe pomegranates and chopped salad, shawarma wrapped in warm lafa, a whole country that—just like me— ritualistically avoided bread for eight days in spring.

Then I moved there.

Like many Orthodox teenagers, I went to Israel for a year between high school and college; we were sent to the Holy Land in droves, with the hopes of shoring up our religious educations against the coming erosive forces of secular colleges. I went to a small, primarily Israeli seminary in the dry and searing Beit Shean Valley, two hours north of Jerusalem; it occupied a few modest dormitories and trailers on a religious kibbutz. I was meant to learn Torah for twelve hours a day, with brief breaks to eat. In practice, I found my zeal for religious study rapidly exhausted, and spent considerable time in bed.

But living in Israel afforded me more than the quick glimpses I could gain on family vacations. I rode Egged buses with Uzi-toting soldiers, and hitchhiked through checkpoints on my own. The Palestinian cars were checked thoroughly; the young soldiers waved through the Jews I rode with without a second glance. The boys I met at the kibbutz’s watering hole were studying Torah as a brief reprieve before donning the same uniform.

The most important experience I had was participating in a program called Encounter, which seeks to connect young Jews and future clergy with Palestinian citizens and activists. It took me up close to the border barrier between Israel and the West Bank—and across it. I saw the graffiti—calls for peace in a Babel of languages—and met Palestinian activists who were willing to lecture a group of sheepish, nerdy Jews; I saw a humble backyard bisected by the cruel gray expanse of the wall. Most significantly, I stayed overnight with a Palestinian family. Somehow, we wound up watching Seinfeld—my host liked George Costanza best—and laughing together. In the morning I had spiced labne and jam with their toddler Hassan. And when the bus took us back over, I saw a seemingly endless line of Palestinian workers, travel documents in hand, ready to pass through a checkpoint bristling with guns.

There are very few moments in life when a whole mesh of illusions is stripped from you at once. I remember this one very clearly. I realized all of a sudden that the word “Palestinian” had been wrapped very deliberately in layers of hatred all my life. I remembered the racial slurs I’d heard uttered about Arabs in high school, all before I met a single one. I realized I had been taught to view all Palestinians as violent—that it was a shock to find them human, to sit beside them on a couch, to watch TV, break bread and play with their child. I had been taught to see all Palestinians as willing to murder me, to murder a baby, with no provocation, an inferior race of fire-eyed zealots. I had been taught that what was theirs was mine by right. I had not been taught about the violence of the occupation, and that omission was as deliberate as anything else. I had been taught a sequence of beautiful myths, the swelling myths of nationalism, but they were lies—lies of omission, pretty stories with venom at the heart.

It felt like being stabbed, to know the people who taught me had deceived me so thoroughly, and had kept me ignorant, on purpose, of so much history.

I wish I could say that since then I have evolved significantly, or joined some of my Jewish brethren on the knife’s edge of pro-Palestinian activism. I wish I could tell you I am no longer complacent, that I’ve left all nationalist sentiment behind.

But it’s not that simple. For one thing, my twin sister, who joined me in that dusty seminary, moved to Israel six years ago. She lives there with her baby and husband and in-laws; my other sister’s husband is Israeli, too, and his parents live just around the corner from my twin. I still remember the taste of pomegranates, schawarma, lafa from the souk on Ben Yehuda Street. I still speak Hebrew, even if I don’t pray in it any longer. In America, to be a Jew is always to be an “other”; in Israel, it’s thrillingly unremarkable. I’m still steeped in the culture that taught me Palestinian history wasn’t worth learning; I love my family, and the rosy stones of Jerusalem, and I remember the clear pool on the kibbutz where the figs hung low on the water.

All I can tell you is that I live uneasily now where Israel is concerned. That I watch Bibi Netanyahu speak in his smooth baritone and I hear the same hate I was raised with; it doesn’t surprise me that he has found kinship with Orban, and with Trump, whose supremacy is based on historical elision and present brutality. I feel compelled to speak out when Israeli strikes murder Gazan civilians. I try to see clearly when just criticism of Israel and Zionism veers into something murkier and more sinister, the ugly rhetoric of anti-Semitism. I wince when the white supremacists I study for a living bring up the Israeli “ethnostate” as proof that their own desires are healthy. And in the face of the new nation-state law in Israel—which limits the “right to national-self determination” in Israel to “the Jewish people,” encourages “Jewish settlement,” and demotes the status of Arabic from an official language—I struggle to refute this argument completely.

Life in this seam of unease isn’t simple; I avoid discussion of “the conflict” with my family too often, and with my leftist friends I omit discussions of my Zionist past and my present ambiguities as often as possible. But I have found it is better to live in the pain of not-knowing than to live in a certainty held together by zealous self-righteousness. It is better to live gasping, in my own fretful inadequacy, than sealed off forever in an airless myth.

This spring, in the brief, bruising epoch of Roseanne Barr’s resurrection and collapse as a network TV star, a vile photo emerged on the internet. It showed Barr, a red apron tied around her waist, wearing a Hitler toothbrush mustache and a dark brown wig severely parted across her forehead. Her brown uniform shirt was emblazoned with a blood-red armband and black swastika. She was holding a tray of sugar cookies cut in human shapes, each one burned to an anguished, presumably Semitic crisp.

Roseanne, which set ratings records during its debut in late March, fell apart due to a spate of racist tweets Barr directed at Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. Angry Twitter commenters pointed to the photo, which it soon transpired was nearly a decade old, as longstanding evidence of her bigotry. “I can’t believe Roseanne is an unhinged racist. If only there were signs,” wrote one woman. The photo was turned into a meme, accompanied by the text: “WHAT, ME? RACIST?!?” Barr eventually apologized for the tweets and the show was abruptly cancelled, but not before she accused “the party of inclusion, diversity, understanding, and acceptance”—Democrats, maybe?—of “lyinch[ing] a Jew.”

It turned out the image was part of a photo shoot Barr had participated in as a “Nazi domestic goddess” for a Jewish-American magazine called Heeb. Heeb, which shut down its print edition in 2010, was a satirical and, at times, inflammatory glossy magazine. Note that title, for instance, or the cover image of Sarah Silverman, posed behind a white sheet with an ultra-Orthodox-wedding-night hole in it. Barr did the shoot in 2009, a time that might loosely be considered the pre-problematic era in humor. Yet even in that still-rude age, the joke, for those who were in on it, was considered a bit too “edgy.”

The photo shoot was, as now, widely seen as anti-Semitic, despite featuring a Jew and being published by Jews in a Jewish magazine that was largely read by and definitely marketed to Jews. The uproar at the time was of such volume that Heeb publisher Joshua Neuman published an explanation of just what he was thinking. The idea of Heeb, he wrote, was to “interrogate” stereotypes and ideas about contemporary Judaism and identity. Barr and her “Jew cookies” (article title: “That Oven Feelin’”), then, were a way to broach the “the taboo against joking about the Holocaust and the Nazis,” and to test what could or could not be said by Jews about the Shoah. “Jews have been joking about the Holocaust since the Holocaust (I believe it was the Warsaw Ghetto where the Jewish inhabitants referred to Hitler regularly as ‘Horowitz’),” Neuman wrote. “But these jokes have largely been uttered in private or underground. In recent years, they have been finding themselves in the most public of conversations.”

The lesson of this episode, which is really about the tolerable limits of criticism within and beyond Jewish communities, has only grown more relevant. It is starkly reflected in the young, mostly female, activist Jews from a group called IfNotNow who recently walked off a Birthright tour in Israel. Birthright, for those unfamiliar with it, offers a free, “life-changing” journey to Israel for Jews from the ages of 18 to 26, with the purpose of “transforming the Jewish future.” In a book on Judaism I wrote, I described it as a “hard-sweat timeshare tour of the Promised Land,” designed to strengthen ties to Israel, or, and this is probably more important, to convince the participants someday to make Jewish babies. Founded in 1999 by Jewish philanthropists Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, today Birthright’s largest funder is the controversial GOP mega-donor and Zionist Sheldon Adelson.

One protester, 25-year-old Katie Fenster, a secular Jew from South Dakota, had livestreamed the protest on Facebook, making international news. (There have been two other walkouts since then, by a different group of IfNotNow activists and other protesters.) New York magazine published a long feature on the protest, which included protesters holding up a sign that read “END THE OCCUPATION” during a camel ride in the desert, and pointed questioning of their hosts about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

IfNotNow is far from the only Jewish activist group that is publicly critical of Israel. There are the Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, Jewish Voice for Peace, and T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, among others. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which seeks to isolate Israel financially and culturally, includes many Jews in its ranks and as supporters. But this particular protest captured a broader moment in the public imagination, one in which popular liberal sentiment had seemingly moved permanently against Israel. In addition to the Birthright walkouts, there were high-profile moments like the release of the Black Lives Matter platform, which included opposition to Zionism, and the barring of a group of Jewish marchers carrying a Star of David flag from a pride parade in Chicago. Jews, in Israel and the Diaspora, have always expressed criticism, reservations, ambivalence, and at times hostility to the country, but largely, as Neuman put it, in private or underground. Now, it seemed that Jews were not just bringing those critiques into the public eye, but were expected, or perhaps even obligated, to do so.

Did Fenster and the other Birthright protesters think about these issues—public and private criticism, the distinctions between in-group and out-group censure—before staging their walkout? She told me that they had. Birthright, despite its claims of being “apolitical,” was in her view an exercise in Zionist propaganda—one of Fenster’s tour guides told her “no matter what, man or woman, make sure you marry a Jew”—that had to be countered. Besides, with some 650,000 Jews having availed themselves of Birthright’s largesse, and accepted its pro-Zionist slant, it “was already public.”

Fenster told me she had decided to go on Birthright as a way to connect with her Jewish identity, particularly its ethical responsibilities and modern-day contradictions. Her desire, as a Jew trying to grasp the concept of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world,” and to “reconcile the violence I see on the news in Gaza and elsewhere,” seems to me, if not uniquely Jewish, then definitely so. It is also very brave—it’s no small thing for an American Jew to criticize Israel in Israel, on a trip that is the standard-bearer experience for many American Jews interested in their religion and ethnic identity.

The tour, and its operators, she said, were unwilling to engage with her and her fellow activists about the dilemma of occupation and exile, deeply Jewish subjects. “It’s important for our Judaism to stand up and say the occupation is not representative of Judaism or Jewish values,” she said. “It was the most Jewish thing I’ve ever done.”

Who is entitled to levy criticism about a people is both a contemporary and ages-old preoccupation. This is the reason some Jews recoil from IfNotNow or from Heeb. A joke or a protest, among Jews, could be a validation of murderous beliefs when heard or seen by anti-Semites. But every group must speak of itself with honesty, always, and anger, when merited, without fear of hatred from outsiders already biased against them.

Does that mean no more jokes about the Holocaust—or more jokes about the Holocaust? (I vote for the latter.) Neuman, for his part, told me that IfNotNow’s protests were perhaps not so different from Heeb’s earlier provocations. “We’re coming at this thing from a different place tonally,” he said. “But what is humor worth anymore? Where did the jokes get us? Today, we might be doing what they’re doing.”

For decades now, the Jewish communities in Israel and the U.S. have been drifting apart. While almost three-quarters of American Jews continue to vote Democratic and a majority identify as liberal, the center in Israel has shifted to the right—in part organically, thanks to immigration and the experience of living in a state surrounded by hostile neighbors, and in part driven by a disciplined right-wing campaign to increase religiosity and nationalism.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies seem unconcerned about losing support from large swaths of American Jewry, content to rely on politically conservative Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians. In enacting a law that chips away at Israel’s democratic foundations, and in embracing President Donald Trump, Netanyahu has further alienated American Jews. As the Israeli journalist Ben Caspit observed, Netanyahu views this cohort, with its predilection for assimilation, as being on the verge of extinction: “Soon they will be at the threshold of the abyss and will simply collapse from within and disappear,” Caspit writes. “They will not remain Jews. So it is a shame to waste our time. They are no longer part of us.”

The obvious question then for non-Orthodox, liberal Jewish Americans is why engage at all with an Israel led by people who are disowning us? Why not simply wash our hands of the state and walk away? Is the struggle to secure a liberal, Jewish, and democratic Israel really worth the heartache and frustration?

To the latter, my answer is a resounding “yes.” The fight over Israel’s future is a battle over what it means to be Jewish—a struggle for the very soul of the Jewish community globally. Opting out of that struggle, as many Jewish Americans exasperated with Israeli illiberalism seem inclined to do, means forfeiting that soul. The better response is to engage, countering the right-wing Israeli-American alliance with an equally strong alliance of American and Israeli liberals, fighting both in the United States and in the Middle East for states that accurately reflect deeply held Jewish values of tolerance.

In Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the state’s founders wrote that the new country “will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture …”

These were promises grounded in the Jewish experience of living in the lands of others for centuries and knowing too well what it means to be a minority and to face discrimination and worse.

Like many countries—including the United States—Israel has fallen short of its aspirations. But for 70 years, large numbers of Israelis have fought to promote the values enshrined by Israel’s founders. In their fight to shape Israel’s direction and future, Israel’s liberals urgently need the support and engagement—rather than the anger and apathy—of like-minded Jewish people around the world.

The Israeli right wing, as Netanyahu has made clear, wishes nothing more than to see the liberal majority of Jews worldwide walk away from the fight. As Jewish liberals abandon the battlefield, Israeli hardliners have paired with their ideological soulmates in the U.S. and elsewhere to support their own institutions, educational foundations, think tanks, and politicians.

And while American Jewish leftists may think campaigns to “boycott” Israel put pressure on the state, the reality is that every time another liberal Jew decides to boycott or divest from Israel, that’s one less activist, one less dollar, actively engaging in Israeli politics from within and weighing in on the side of democracy and justice. It’s also one more talking point to rev up the Israeli right wing, which has managed to convince its base that the relatively marginal Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement somehow constitutes an existential threat to the one of the world’s strongest economies.

Liberal Jews around the world need to understand that a key reason Israel’s pro-peace, pro-democracy camp is so weak today is its inability to match the assistance the right receives from Jewish Americans in terms of funding, infrastructure, strategy, and messaging aid.

Of course, Israelis ultimately bear responsibility for shaping their own future. But American Jews who despair about Israel’s current course should acknowledge that if liberals supported their Israeli counterparts at levels comparable to their right-wing American cousins, the situation on the ground in Israel today would be starkly different.

Meanwhile, liberal Jews in institutional leadership roles in the American community have continued to buy into the anachronistic argument that those who don’t live in Israel have no right to speak or criticize. This institutional position has served the right well, as they rode to power in Israel on the strength of funds raised in America. It is also, by the way, a posture that helps explain the large numbers of young Jewish Americans disconnecting not only from Israel but from the organized Jewish community.

These days, as I speak across the country, I am asked with increasing frequency to give people hope about Israel’s future in the face of ever more troubling developments. My reply is that our people should have learned through the centuries that we can’t sit back waiting for hope and change. It’s on us to make it.

Perhaps that’s the upside of the stomach-churning political era we’re living through. The Trump presidency has unleashed an energetic opposition in the United States that understands the importance of fighting to realign national politics with our values. Perhaps those who are now marching in the streets and campaigning for change here will recognize that change in Israel also demands similar energy, engagement, and activism.

Rather than wash our hands of Israel, America’s liberal Jews should reach out to and support our natural political allies in the fight for Israel’s future. This is the fight of our generation to define the future of the Jewish people. The only people who benefit if liberals walk away are the anti-democratic and ethno-nationalist forces who threaten liberalism and democracy in the United States, in Israel, and all across the globe.

The growing divergence of American Jews from Israel is actually composed of two different phenomena: on the one hand, there is anger towards Israel among a set of American Jewish elites, especially young, highly engaged, and educated progressive activists; on the other, an apathy among the broader American Jewish population as it drifts from the demands of particularistic Jewish identity, in which for many decades reflexive attachment to Israel played a significant role. Conflating these two issues—anger and apathy—makes the predicament seem larger, hopelessly tangled, and insurmountable.

Political interests shape this problem as it is presented in media, punditry, and agenda-driven social science. Progressives characterize their disenchantment with Israel as shared by an entire generation, and believe that campaigning against the alliance of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu will push the American Jewish political consensus (which is already overwhelmingly anti-Trump) towards a harder line on Israel; and, also, that this process can help advance leftist domestic political goals. They portray the alienation of American Jews from Israel as more than a fringe phenomenon, and as the cause for this divide they tend to blame exclusively Israel’s policies and its government.

Conservatives, meanwhile, see the liberal American Jewish divide from Israel as leverage to get “serious” Jews—Jews who care about Jewish survival, Jewish peoplehood, and the state of Israel—to abandon their historic loyalties to the Democratic Party and effectively to choose Zionism over liberalism. This effort, too, requires a narrative that “distancing” is not a minor problem among highly engaged Jews but a major problem that can tilt the balance in the broader American relationship to Israel; and they attribute this distancing to ideological shifts in political liberalism that make it intolerant to Israel.

These simplistic narratives, and the political desires to exploit them, make it more difficult to see and address the longer-term and structural factors driving the communities apart. They also turn a complicated story into an inevitability, even as the silent majority of engaged American Jews, and virtually all of the centers of American Jewish power, are trying desperately to prevent the process of distancing from taking hold. We should instead understand this phenomenon as irreducible to single-issue explanations; the harder work, and the attendant opportunity, lie in mapping out the problem in its fullest.

First, these two communities increasingly have different ideas about what it means to be ethnically Jewish. American Jewish identity has radically transformed over the past two generations through intermarriage, shifts in standards and practices of conversion, and  the changing way Americans think about family and ancestry as drivers of identity. Family heritage now may play a role in one’s Jewish identity, but is certainly not universally determinative—a phenomenon that American Jewish sociologists describe as the emergence of “voluntary affiliational Jewish identity.” Controversies in different American Jewish denominations about the acceptance of intermarriage, the universality of conversion, the nature of membership, and how or whether Jewishness is transmitted from parent to child all attest to a culture in flux.

Accordingly, the mid-20th century notions of “Jewish peoplehood” that fueled attachment and loyalty to Israel—predicated on the idea of the Jewish people as a ‘family’ and reinforced by familial lines that remained intact through post-war dislocations—seem artificial to growing numbers of otherwise proudly identified and even affiliated Jews. In Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation, Noam Pianko argues that 20th century American Jews invented the rhetoric of “Jewish Peoplehood” as an ideological and political system to respond to their needs. As those needs have changed dramatically in the past two generations, commitment to this ideology that they generated has declined as well.

Israeli Jews have been facilitating their own transformations of ethnicity, especially through multicultural Jewish hybrids between Jews of diverse ethnic backgrounds, as well as through tinkering with the rules of Jewish belonging with its Law of Return. Israel’s prioritizing of immigration, and its need for demographic growth, make for an ethnic makeup and definitions of Jewishness in Israel that are largely unfamiliar to American Jews. And the cultural norms and practices of both Jewish civilizations make the two often unrecognizable to one another.

These active and passive processes of evolution in Jewish ethnicity in America and Israel eliminate the shortcuts to sustaining the relationships between Jewish communities separated by 7,000 miles. American Jews and Israeli Jews do not share a language, and they do not share most elements of culture. Now, if American Jews and Israeli Jews increasingly do not see themselves as part of the same peoplehood, it may be because they do not actually share the same people.

Political environments and attitudes are also pushing the communities apart. The right has held power in Israel for most of the past generation, and their policies on a wide set of issues—religious pluralism, the occupation, the status and treatment of Palestinians, and international alliances and allegiances—contribute to American Jewish alienation and anger. But it is also likely true that radical changes in Israeli policy on any of these fronts would do very little to stem the estrangement. Regime change in Israel would be welcomed by the small number of American Jews who are deeply engaged with Israel but hostile to its policies. Yet it offers little hope in bridging the divide with the majority of American Jews, who do not know enough about Israel to have their opinions of it shaped by its government’s policies.

American Jews act and behave politically like the broader American public. Research from Pew demonstrates that partisanship and polarization are at heights not seen in the past century, and that the biggest shift in American political attitudes has been in pushing the American left even further left. American Jewish voting patterns have remained largely consistently pro-Democrat, which now means something different than it used to; and Israel’s place as a core feature of American conservatism makes it susceptible to partisan rancor, especially during this divisive administration.

So as Israel pulls (or stays) right and American Jews pull left, then alienation and the anger are merely natural consequences of larger trends exhibited in the two societies. Blaming Bibi or the Israeli electorate for this divide is folly, as is the recurring neo-conservative attack on “liberal American Jewish values.” There are different prevailing Jewish political positions in the world, both authentic products of their environments, and both independent and viable reflections of sincere historical, theological, and intellectual processes. That the majority of Israeli Jews chose Netanyahu in a spat with Barack Obama, and the majority of American Jews chose Obama, is not because one of these communities or the other is causing the divide: it is that different political realities have produced different—and maybe incompatible—political ideologies. In this climate, the bipartisanship that defined late-20th century American Jewish consensus attitudes to Israel is starting to come across to Jews on both sides of the political divide as bad politics, the abandonment of moral principles in a climate of urgency, and a bourgeois relic of a different era.

It is not just ethnicity and politics. The Jewish people relish in their history, and in the stories that shape their collective consciousness. The lived experience of the 20th century fueled world Jewry’s loyalties to Israel. Mass dislocations detached Jews from their particular political loyalties and led them to prioritize belonging to the Jewish nation instead. The birth of a nascent state in a hostile region—desperate for philanthropic, political, and human capital—created clear obligations. The American Jewish community built an institutional infrastructure that was big on resources and low on meaning, and Israel proved a valuable totem at the center. And Jews came to believe that the Jewish people both needed a place to run to in crisis and the support of each other in hard times. These narratives thrived when the lived experience of American and Israeli Jewry bore them out. Less so today. No one doubts that Israel faces existential threats, but in facing those threats today Israel seems far less dependent on American Jews’ philanthropic or political resources. The “story” of Israel that shaped American Jewish identity for a long time does not match the reality of Israel, and this discovery is hard to ignore, and it is taking place awkwardly in public. The collective memory of the meaning of Israel for the Jewish people today is at best contested, and at worst absent.

And let’s be honest: Those very narratives that may have “worked”—what American Jews told themselves about Israel for a long time—were not always true. We are experiencing a reckoning with realities about Israel, Israelis, and Israeli society that many American Jews never fully understood to begin with.

American Jews grow distant from Israel and from Israeli Jews sometimes just because of the passage of time, and because of the actual distance between us. Jews longed for home for generations, and then suddenly by the end of the 20th century found that home in two separate hospitable cultures and idioms that have allowed them to flourish independently. Flourishing is good; flourishing independently is more complicated. Real needs drove the relationship between these communities. But the passage of time, and the realities of geography, are mitigating those needs and offering an equally compelling alternative—the possibility of going at it alone, without the hassle of the judgmental, incomprehensible, semi-relatives across the water.

As of now, no educational approach seems capable of bridging the divide. American Jewish educational institutions do not adequately prepare students to either withstand the pressures facing the Israeli narrative, or to competently understand Israel and its challenges, or to sustain a relationship with a place and a people undergoing such significant changes, and for which they do not have any obvious and continuing need. Jewish education about Israel innovates more in the realm of how to teach Israel than in why, and often uses nostalgia, language education, dated culture, and the study of history as its primary commodities even though none of these address or close the growing gap, and even though it is increasingly difficult for a student today to reach the independent conclusion as to why Israel should matter to them and to their Jewish life.

And there is so much fear in the field. We know that real education requires some amount of faith in uncertain outcomes and trust in students to handle complicated subjects; and uncertain outcomes are viewed as politically threatening to consensus Jewish communal politics when they relate to Israel. The anxiety in the field makes it impossible to teach much-needed confidence.

The most effective large-scale program that teaches anything about Israel to young American Jews is Birthright Israel, whose mission is to strengthen Jewish identity using the instrument of Israeli travel, not to educate about Israel for its own sake. There is very little reason to believe that a short Israel trip will create a lifelong relationship with the Jewish civilization on the other side of the globe. Neither Birthright alone, nor a struggling educational system, have met the challenge of cultivating communities of curiosity, nuance, and knowledge, which could be the Jewish community’s best bet to rethink and make secure the meaning of this relationship.

Israeli Jews do not engage seriously with the needs and wants of American Jews in part because they know very little about them, or even about why they should. Even if a formal ideology of “negation of the exile” disappeared over time from Israeli polite company, the Zionism that still defines Israeli Judaism remains premised on the idea that there is but one home and homeland for the Jewish people. Absent formal responsibilities for continued philanthropy and support from afar, the continued presence and thriving of Jews outside the Land of Israel is broadly incomprehensible. Efforts are now underway to remedy this gap, but it is enormous: if a group’s very self-identity is defined by an ideology, and that ideology is critical to a group’s collective consciousness in the midst of prolonged conflict, tinkering with and supplementing that ideology with countercultural ideas is sensitive work. Ideas and initiatives in Israeli society that sound “Diasporic” can be doomed at the outset, and sometimes even seem seditious.

And anyway: Have we come up with really good reasons—comprehensible not just to elites, but to the general public—about why Diaspora Jewry and their idiosyncrasies and vicissitudes should really matter to Israeli Jews?

In the meantime, paradoxically, the business of Israel among American Jews is robust and growing. The AIPAC Policy Conference is easily the largest annual gathering of American Jews in in America, and locally it is far easier to attract a significant crowd for a lecture on Israel and Jewish politics than any other topic of Jewish concern. Multiple new or resurgent Israel-Palestine organizations are thriving—IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, Israel Policy Forum, Encounter, The Israel Project, and our own iEngage Project. Israel-related topics constitute the continued drumbeat of content in most Jewish media. If Israel is failing as an American Jewish cause, it seems to be failing up.

Where does this leave us?

One path forward is through reinvesting in ideas and ideologies that can weather these changes and divergences and can tolerate the diversity of the Jewish people, and that also have a political plausibility to define Israel’s character. Forcing these communities together inorganically or trying to homogenize across difference won’t work, and neither will dishonest education or making one community subordinate to the other. But what if we told a big enough and concrete enough story about what it means to live at this moment at Jewish history, and a story that could translate into a program for the Jewish people? Can narrative once again save Jewish peoplehood?

I identify as a liberal Zionist. The critics of this ideology believe it can no longer exist, perhaps because they measure the integrity of an ideology based on whether it is winning. Liberal Zionism is optimistic in spite of contemporary political trends, in part because it is rooted in a Zionist history of ideas that was always far more ambitious and optimistic than it should have been in light of its early implausibility and lack of popularity. Liberal Zionism advocates for liberal democracy and liberal values to define the character of the Jewish nation-state. This idea may not be winning right now, but to be a Jew in Jewish history is to work things out with rigor, and not to be distracted by short-term thinking.

Liberal Zionism offers both the most pragmatic and most morally serious grappling with the historical legacy of Jewish deterritorialization and its catastrophic consequences. It is also the political ideology best capable of grappling with the moral costs of the nationalism into which the Jewish people have been thrust and into which the Jewish people must opt. A serious American Jewish Zionism would also articulate twin meanings of home for American Jews (here) and homeland (there), unconvinced by the arguments that the one invalidates the other. The contemporary moment offers unparalleled possibilities for a rich Jewish future offered by two thriving Jewish civilizations, as well as the unique opportunity to improve on the legacy of the Jewish past. Neither abandoning the project of Israel, nor slavish loyalty to it, does service to who we are as morally, historically, or politically serious Jews.

Such an American Jewish liberal Zionism – and a corresponding movement among Israelis to connect with the American Jewish project – is not inevitable, and not intuitive, but it is necessary; and it is worth fighting for. The simultaneous births of the state of Israel and a thriving Diaspora may be the most interesting, possibly the most valuable transformation in Jewish history. Israel changes the very meaning of Judaism, for better or worse, and presents an opportunity to the Jewish people, not to be squandered, to shape that meaning.