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Tony nominee Mark Rosenblatt’s ‘Giant’ journey began with Menachem Begin
The seed for Giant was planted almost 35 years ago when a 14-year old Mark Rosenblatt and his friend were tasked with presenting the week’s news to a school assembly.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had just died and Rosenblatt assumed that they should mark the passing of a hero. His friend, a Muslim, equally assumed that everyone would understand that Begin was a terrorist. Fast forward from London’s St. Paul’s School in March 1992 to May 2026 in New York, and Rosenblatt is nominated for a Tony for best new play for his run of Giant on Broadway. The play, which he wrote about an episode in the life of children’s book author Roald Dahl when he criticized Israel and espoused a pernicious antisemitism, deals with differences in perspectives on the Jewish state, and the limits of reasonable opinions.
When I spoke to him on Zoom from London, Rosenblatt and I negotiated our own small differences before we discussed the larger geopolitical issues that the play raises. Soup (Rosenblatt) or tea? Leeds (me) or London? Masorti or Conservative (is there a difference)? But the very ease of triangulating our positions within U.K. Jewry and finding out the first tranche of mutual friends, is just proof of the minuscule size of the community. At barely more than quarter of a million, the Jews of Britain are a minority comprising only about 0.5% of the population and while we don’t all know each other, there’s only ever small pools of people the same rough age and prepared to publicly avow their Jewishness.
That’s why when Dahl (John Lithgow, nominated for a Tony for lead actor) complains that he never saw any Jews fighting for Britain with him in the war, it’s a smack-my-head moment for British Jews. Rosenblatt is giving voice to Dahl’s own quote to reporter Michael Coren, where he rehearses a well-trodden slander. British Jews disproportionately served in the war — actually doubly disproportionately in the RAF where Dahl did his military service — but because there are fewer Jews in the world than residents of Tokyo City (and fewer in England than the population of Bournemouth), it’s still statistically highly unlikely that Dahl would have served with one. And, if he did, Rosenblatt pointed out to me, why would that person have revealed his ethnicity to Dahl or others in a society so riddled with antisemitism?
Rosenblatt grew up, like many British Jews of our generation — he’s 48 years old, I’m 55 — with Israel as a potential holiday destination and a promise of ultimate safety: an odd amalgam of Mediterranean resort and escape from the return of the Nazis. The promise of safe refuge in a hostile world was especially meaningful for him growing up as a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor — many family members of his maternal grandmother were murdered by the Nazis.
“That narrative of sanctuary was strong,” he told me. Thinking about Israel as an alternative homeland from the home of his birth sounded unthinkable at the time, but stabbings in Manchester and London, fire-bombed synagogues, and destroyed Jewish ambulances have shaken British Jews since Giant began its run at the Music Box Theatre in March. And, of course, Israel was a topic upon which otherwise similar folks’ worldviews could diverge.
“It didn’t transform me overnight,” Rosenblatt said of his school assembly moment. “But I became aware very quickly that other people thought very, very differently.”
From small beginnings, giant things
The play, Rosenblatt’s first as playwright, didn’t begin with Israel, nor did it begin with Dahl. It began, Rosenblatt said, with the British Labour Party’s antisemitism crisis in the late 2010s — specifically, with the way that conversations about Israel within the party would turn into older, darker and more conspiratorial accusations about Jews.
“I found the medieval nature of some of those stereotypes shocking,” he said of the racist comments that were commonplace and tolerated under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. “The grouping together of millions of people as if we all have innate characteristics.”
But Rosenblatt wasn’t interested in writing a documentary play about the Labour Party. He was a director — indeed, in 1999 he had won the JMK Award for Young Directors, a prestigious early career award whose patrons include Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted to write at all, initially asking one of Britain’s preeminent directors Sir Nicholas Hytner for advice about who he might approach to write the play he was looking for. Rosenblatt wanted a proxy — something that could dramatize the distinction between legitimate political criticism and antisemitic tropes.
That’s when he came across clippings about Dahl, the beloved childhood author who had, in a generally forgotten episode, made and then doubled down on inflammatory remarks about Jews in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, in the form of a book review and later comments to the press. Perhaps the most egregious quotation, after he suggested Jews as a “race” were responsible for loss of life in Beirut, was the remark that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on [Jews] for no reason.”
The material clicked immediately. Here was a “perfect premise”: a globally-adored writer, in his own home, under pressure to account for what he’d said. The domestic setting allowed Rosenblatt to layer the political with the personal — Dahl’s family life, his grief, his acerbic personality, his ego — until the play, though deeply specific, became less about a single scandal than about the conditions that produce hate speech from people who should know better.
Rosenblatt wrote the play he was looking for. Hytner directed, earning an Olivier nomination and now a nod for a Tony.
Enter the American
One of Rosenblatt’s most consequential decisions about the play was also, in a sense, a mistake. In early drafts, he imagined Dahl’s American publisher, the legendary Robert Gottlieb visiting him alongside his British editor Tom Maschler. It turned out that this would have been anachronistic, since Gottlieb had left Farrar, Straus and Giroux years earlier. But the American presence remained an important intervention. The result is Jessie Stone, an invented Jewish American FSG sales director who arrives in Dahl’s English country house as both emissary and antagonist. She triangulates the discussion, disrupting, by her Americanness, Jewishness, lack of seniority and femininity (she is importantly, too, a mother) what might otherwise have been a locking of antlers between three eminent men. But she is also something more interesting: Rosenblatt’s attempt to imagine the confidence of American Jewishness.
“If you come from the U.K.,” he said, “you’re part of a tiny minority in a culture that doesn’t really know what you are.” Britain has, at most, a few hundred thousand Jews. New York has millions. The difference is not just demographic; it’s psychological.
“In America,” he said, “Jewish life is part of the mainstream fabric. You can speak with confidence about your identity and expect to be understood…. In England, you are thankful if anyone knows anything”
Jessie Stone, played In London and on Broadway by Aya Cash, a Tony nominee for featured actress, embodies that confidence. Where Maschler (Elliot Levey) “dances” — deflecting, accommodating, surviving — Stone confronts. Where he reads the room, she pulps it. The antagonism between Dahl and Stone is explicit and central, but the tension between Stone and Maschler goes beyond the personal and becomes cultural. British Jewish caution meets American Jewish assertion, and they despair of one other.
History rhymes
If Giant has not changed since its West End premiere, its audience certainly has. The play was greenlit on October 5, 2023. Two days later, Hamas attacked Israel. By the time the production opened at the Royal Court a year later, Israel had returned to Lebanon — echoing the very history the play dramatizes. (The past March, which saw an IDF ground invasion of Southern Lebanon, has only made its Broadway tenure more timely.)
“We were concerned the theatre might pull it,” Rosenblatt said of the Royal Court. “They didn’t. They said, ‘We want this play.’”
(The Court was just under new leadership, following a troubled recent history of dubious characterization of Jews.)
What followed was a kind of unintended experiment. Audiences arrived “incredibly genned up,” as Rosenblatt put it — immersed in a contemporary conflict that made the play’s historical argument feel immediate, even urgent. Lines from Dahl that might once have seemed shocking began to sound, in some cases, familiar.
“The more hostility there is towards Israel,” he said, “the more some of those tropes get repeated as if they’re acceptable truths.”
On Broadway, the play has undergone another subtle transformation. In London, the audience encountered Stone as an outsider — an American “alien landing” in a room full of English eccentricity. In New York, the sense of what is familiar totally flips.
“We’re on weird planet England,” Rosenblatt said of the opening scenes, “waiting for the arrival of one of our own.”
That shift of perspective matters because it changes where the audience’s sympathies lie, and what they notice. British viewers, raised with the nuances of class, recognize the delicate choreography of Maschler’s interactions with Dahl — the way he absorbs insult to maintain access and influence. They understand how he treats the insecure public schoolboy that lies behind the arrogant, bigoted celebrity. For Maschler it’s more important to lead this overgrown child to his better self than to mouth some form of banal pseudo-integrity. Better for Dahl to make and sell books successfully while explaining publicly that criticism should be separate from racism, than for Maschler to protect his own ego. American audiences, less attuned to those codes, sometimes read the same behavior as weakness.
Rosenblatt doesn’t dispute the reading; he contextualizes it. “I see it as survival,” he said. Maschler is not failing to stand up for himself; he is choosing when and how to do so. It’s a distinction that may be more legible in a culture where minority status has historically required a certain kind of strategic accommodation.
For all its topical resonance, Giant is not a play about the news cycle. It is, instead, a play about what happens when private prejudice collides with public responsibility — and about how communities argue, internally, about where that line lies.
Rosenblatt resists the idea that he is delivering a message to any particular audience, including the American Jewish readers of the Forward. The play, he suggests, does its work not by instructing but by staging contradiction.
“There are no neat messages,” he said. “Other than that antisemitism is a terrible thing. Beyond that, it’s about complexity and nuance — and inviting people to think.”
That invitation feels at once both modest and radical. In an era of algorithmic certainty and ideological sorting, Giant insists on something messier: that people can be wrong in ways that are revealing, that arguments can be both necessary and insufficient, and that identity — British or American, Jewish or otherwise — is less a fixed position than a set of pressures, constantly negotiated.
The post Tony nominee Mark Rosenblatt’s ‘Giant’ journey began with Menachem Begin appeared first on The Forward.
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Why is JD Vance talking about the Antichrist?
JD Vance said he might be bringing about the End Times, adding that he would not be “shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us.”
Vance was speaking on the Christian YouTube show The Bryce Crawford Podcast about his memoir, Communion, which covers his conversion to Catholicism from Protestantism.
Numerous Catholics online reacted to his statements with confusion and frustration, saying that the ideas about the apocalypse Vance voiced are not central parts of Catholicism. While Catholicism does discuss the idea of the Second Coming, a time in which Christians believe Jesus will return to Earth, the Catholic Church Catechism — the Vatican’s official statements and teachings about the fundamentals of the religion — says that “we are already at ‘the last hour’” ever since Jesus died; the Antichrist is mentioned only briefly as a “a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God,” not as a specific person who will come to the world.
The Antichrist and Armageddon, however, take center stage in many Evangelical churches, where these concepts often drive other extremist ideas, such as labeling politicians the Antichrist — at one point during the Obama administration, a poll found that one in four Americans thought the president might be the Antichrist — as well as Christian Zionism, an attempt to get all Jews to return to Jerusalem to hasten the apocalypse, when many believe Jews will be sent to Hell.
As one snarky Catholic commenter put it, Vance’s apocalypse-heavy discussion of his Catholicism sounded like “three evangelicals in a trench coat.”
It also sounded a lot like Peter Thiel, the billionaire Palantir founder and Vance’s mentor, donor and former employer. Thiel has a famed obsession with the Antichrist; earlier this year, several Catholic institutions distanced themselves from a series of lectures Thiel gave in Rome on the topic. Vance cited Thiel as an influence on his conversion in an essay about why he chose Catholicism, despite the fact that Thiel is not Catholic.
Thiel’s thinking on the Antichrist is esoteric and rambling, but it borrows heavily from that of Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist who also wrote at length about the apocalypse. Schmitt, a lapsed Catholic, argued that a “satanic unification of the world” would be brought about by a globalist Antichrist, and supported Hitler because he believed that he would keep the world safely fragmented. Thiel’s own discussion of the Antichrist largely equates the figure with those fearful about climate change, AI and other ideas usually associated with progressive politics.
Vance, who grew up in an Evangelical Christian household in which his “Meemaw” read the bible daily and watched televangelist Billy Graham, has upset Catholics in the past, particularly when he implied that Pope Leo XIV’s theological interpretations were incorrect after the pope made a statement against the U.S. war with Iran.
“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said at a Turning Point USA event in April, responding to Pope Leo’s comments. “You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things that I try to do and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.”
In the Catholic Church, the pope’s word is infallible when it comes to official church teachings, and Vance’s boldness was offensive to many Catholics.
Vance’s version of Catholicism — one in which he pushes back against the head of the Church and brings in theological ideas foreign to most Catholics — is notable because it represents an increasingly visible ideological schism in the Church. On one side are Catholics committed to the Vatican, and who have been influenced by the liberalism of recent papal teachings. On the other is a growing movement of traditionalist Catholics, who are increasingly skeptical of the institution of the Church and its recent — and not so recent — theological changes, and are looking to other sources for inspiration.
Those changes have included Vatican II, a groundbreaking set of updates to Church teachings made in the 1960s that famously mandated increased tolerance and respect for other religions, particularly Judaism; the church repudiated antisemitism, Christian nationalism and coercive proselytizing. These were controversial moves, however, which led some Catholic movements to reject the document.
Voices suspicious of the Vatican’s more liberal ideas are getting bolder, and louder. The founder of the Society of Saint Pius X, Marcel Lefebvre, rejected Vatican II in large part based on its espousal of religious liberty; just this summer, the group was excommunicated after it ordained four bishops without the Vatican’s permission. In parallel, highly visible Catholic influencers are increasingly becoming the face of the Church for many young people, yet their theology is often only loosely based on the Vatican’s current teachings, and often reaches back to older, more antisemitic ideas the church has since disavowed.
Vance’s stated breaks with the Vatican and Catholic teaching are not overtly about religious tolerance or liberty. But they are a sign of the increasing acceptability of rejecting, or simply ignoring, the teachings of the Vatican and the pope — and, perhaps, of looking to other sources, like Thiel, for theology. The Catholic church is far from perfect, but the more acceptable it becomes to ignore the Vatican, the easier it becomes to declare almost anything — opposing progressive politics, endorsing Christian nationalism or spreading antisemitism — to be part of Catholicism, no matter what the pope says.
The post Why is JD Vance talking about the Antichrist? appeared first on The Forward.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love my Jewish curls
When I was a kid, my hair was a constant battle. By the time I was in elementary school, my hair went past my waist, and every time my parents decided it was time for a trim — which my dad performed — I resisted strenuously, and after just a few inches were removed, I often cried that it was too short. Every day, one of my parents fought through my hair’s snarls with an old, wooden-handled boar-bristle brush. At least every day until the handle snapped off mid-yank. Then we used a newer, but just-as-fine-bristled version.
But even after I started doing my own hair, and eventually cut it to a more reasonable length, the battle about presentability continued. My mom nagged me constantly, before every event, every dinner party and every time I left the house, to brush my hair. She carried around a purse-sized brush that folded up for her own mid-day hair-brushing needs, and for a while, I did the same. At some point in high school, I got a flat iron to better tame the frizz and messiness that I was constantly trying to brush out, and wound it into a tight, coiled bun while it was still soaking wet to let it dry ruthlessly contained. (This worked, but meant it took about 12 hours to dry.)
My mother treats her hair with the same frustration she had towards mine. She still regularly pulls out that purse brush and frowns at herself in a compact mirror as she pulls it through her hair. My entire life, she has complained that her hair is too big, too frizzy. She reminisced about her year clerking for a judge in Los Angeles, where there wasn’t so much humidity and her hair would finally stay flat.
I thought we both had straight hair that, frustratingly, never acted straight. Or, perhaps more accurately, I had internalized that it would be better if I had straight hair, so much better that the idea it might not be straight never even crossed my mind. This was the ‘90s and early 2000s, and there was an obvious ideal we were both striving for: the kind of straight, glossy hair in TV ads for shampoo. The hair of Jennifer Aniston in Friends. (I got “the Rachel” at one point. Unsurprisingly, it never looked quite right.)
But as I came to realize — in what, looking back, was an astonishingly slow process given the evidence at hand — my hair is not straight. It’s curly! Brushing it never tamed it or helped with frizz, because if you brush out curls, they simply grow larger and frizzier.
In retrospect, this shouldn’t have been so surprising. While there’s no one way to look Jewish and plenty of Jews don’t fit the stereotypes — I’m blonde! — curly hair is a common part of the profile, hence longstanding stereotypes about Jewfros and big, curly Jewish hair are there for a reason. Those negative stereotypes are part of why Jewish women have attempted for decades to fight their hair with keratin treatments or flat irons so that they could look more “American,” more professional, more groomed, more “normal.” Much in the same way that, for several generations, nose jobs have been de rigueur for many Jewish women.
Slowly, I started to realize that maybe my hair wasn’t actually straight, and would look better if I started trying to enhance my curls instead of working against them. I started getting compliments. In college, for her art major thesis project, one of my friends asked if she could draw my hair, sketching out each individual strand.
I wish that I’d figured my hair out earlier; it would have saved me some awkward phases and, more importantly, some resentment about why my hair never looked like it was “supposed” to. I don’t purport to have the same kind of hair trauma as Black girls, some of whom grew up getting burned by hot combs and chemical straightening treatments, or who have been forbidden from wearing their natural hair in schools or workplaces. Nevertheless, the underlying idea is the same: that curlier hair is not neutral. It’s messier or, as my mom put it when I called her to fact check this piece, “less polished.”
These ideas are nothing new; they’ve been passed down through the generations. My grandmother certainly always wanted to seem sophisticated, and she didn’t associate that aesthetic with Jewishness; though her mother spoke Yiddish, she exorcised it from her own vocabulary to such an extent that she used to joke that I knew more Yiddish than she did. She got rid of her Jewish nose, too, and got her hair professionally washed and blown out every week with such devotion that I have no idea what its natural state was. She passed the same ideas down to my mom, who still uses that flat iron I bought in high school.
Today, there’s a whole world of videos online of products and routines meant to deal with various types of curls. I get served videos about different types of curls I am pretty sure were invented in the last two years — “Irish curls” and “Appalachian curls” — and how to perfect the Curly Girl Method to define your exact pattern of waves or coils. Society seems to be more willing to embrace different hair textures (and, not unrelatedly, unique facial features like arched noses too).
These days, I find curly hair beautiful; if anything, I wish my curls were curlier. I use a curl serum. I scrunch my hair up to help my curls take shape instead of trying to stretch them down and flatten them. Now my hair is a mix of ringlets and waves, and my hair stylist always asks me if I want her to blow it out straight or style it curly and natural; I always choose the latter. I don’t even own a brush anymore — I just detangle my curls with my fingers.
Every time I see my mom, though, she still tells me to brush it.
The post How I learned to stop worrying and love my Jewish curls appeared first on The Forward.
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In upcoming Israeli election, Netanyahu is preparing to blame a loss on conspiracy
On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, retired Maj. Gen. Yair Golan woke to sirens and reports of something terrible happening in southern Israel. At around 8 a.m., as the scale of the Hamas invasion was becoming clear, the former deputy chief of staff told his wife he had to go back to the army, found his old military gear, got dressed and left home. He first drove to the Home Front Command headquarters where he grasped the dimensions of the catastrophe, obtained a weapon, vest and helmet, and continued south in his private car.
Eventually Golan began receiving the locations of young people hiding from Hamas gunmen around the Nova music festival and drove into the fields looking for them. Oz Davidian, the farmer who became one of the civilian heroes of Oct. 7, encountered Golan in a tiny Toyota Yaris that could not cross a ravine. Davidian helped him across in his truck; Golan covered him with his rifle, and together they went looking for three young people hiding from terrorist fire. Golan would ultimately rescue six survivors in three trips.
His actions became one of the day’s extraordinary stories of individual initiative amid the collapse of the Israeli state: a 61-year-old retired general – who currently heads the Democrats, a liberal opposition party dedicated to peace with the Arabs – put on his uniform, climbed into a Toyota and went looking for kids who needed saving. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on that dark Saturday, was not heard from until the evening.
Almost three years later, Sara Netanyahu has discovered something sinister in this story.
“When you’re a military man of such high rank,” the prime minister’s wife said in an interview Monday on the fiercely pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, “already early in the morning you were there, already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know, such as the prime minister?”
She followed this with a sarcastic question: “Who is the prime minister anyway to know that a war is breaking out? Why let him know?”
Asked directly about the increasingly popular theory that there had been “treason” from within Israel on Oct. 7, she left the possibility hanging, saying she wanted a genuine commission of inquiry to establish what happened.
It is the prime minister, of course, who has blocked an inquiry commission. It’s also Netanyahu who in the months preceding the attack refused to meet with the heads of the military, the Mossad and the Shin Bet, who were desperate to warn him that the uproar created by his authoritarian reforms was projecting weakness and inviting attack. Netanyahu is the author of the theory that there is value in Hamas ruling Gaza, since it undermines the West-Bank-based Palestinian Authority. It was his far-right political allies who were planning provocations against Palestinians in the West Bank on Oct. 7, causing the military to divert massive resources there, leaving the Gaza border catastrophically under-guarded.
With the Oct. 27 election fast approaching, Sara Netanyahu’s interview has become the talk of Israeli politics. In the strange calculus of the Netanyahu machine, it hardly matters that the claims make no sense – since there is no dispute about Golan’s aim that day: to fight Hamas and not assist it. There is a bizarre value in the very incoherence – the more confusion, somehow, the better (even if the cost is undermining public faith in the security establishment, in a country facing existential security threats).
Golan threatened to sue Netanyahu for 2.5 million shekels (about $800,000) for defamation and demanded an apology. Netanyahu responded with a demand that Golan apologize to her and threatened a million-shekel countersuit. Opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman, the former defense minister, congratulated Golan for fighting back and described people who spread such conspiracy theories as “psychopaths.”
The uproar reflects a common understanding of the insinuation: Sara Netanyahu was invoking a conspiratorial universe that has been expanding on the Israeli right since the massacre. According to this conspiracy, Oct. 7 represented something more sinister than a catastrophic intelligence and military failure. In this universe, somebody inside Israel betrayed the country.
The theory comes in many variations. Senior officers knew what was coming. The Shin Bet knew. The generals deliberately kept Netanyahu in the dark. Leaders of the anti-government protest movement were somehow involved. Elements of a hostile “deep state” wanted Hamas to humiliate Netanyahu and bring down his government. The genuine mysteries, warnings and failures preceding the massacre supply endless material from which insinuations can be fashioned, transforming the most devastating security failure in Israeli history into a story of deliberate betrayal by Netanyahu’s domestic enemies.
The betrayal theory has steadily traveled from social media and fringe broadcasters toward the political mainstream. A Reichman University survey previously found that almost a third of Israelis believed to some degree that elements within Israel assisted Hamas in order to harm Netanyahu. Likud Knesset member Tally Gotliv has accused security officials, protest leaders and other political enemies of varieties of treachery, while the prime minister’s son Yair has repeatedly promoted suspicions about the security establishment’s conduct surrounding the attack.
From conspiracy to campaign
This week brought the conspiracy theory directly into the election campaign. Channel 12 political correspondent Daphna Liel reported, citing a Likud source, that an intentional campaign is underway to promote Oct. 7 conspiracy theories in order to distance Netanyahu from responsibility for the massacre “at all costs.”
Golan himself described the same pattern after Sara Netanyahu’s interview, arguing that the remarks represented a planned effort in which Netanyahu’s political opponents are branded as traitors and conspiracy theories supply the evidence.
This fits neatly into Netanyahu’s fixation with avoiding the blame for Oct. 7 – and it comes amid a wider context: The Netanyahu political machine has spent years cultivating distrust of the police, prosecutors, judges, journalists, civil servants and military commanders who come into conflict with the prime minister. The Oct. 7 betrayal narrative folds the greatest catastrophe in Israeli history into this already familiar worldview.
The episode fits an election campaign already distinguished by extraordinary personal ugliness. Netanyahu has circulated an AI-generated video depicting his principal challenger, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, running toward a young man wearing a shirt bearing the words “Israeli unity,” only to run past him and embrace Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab Ra’am party. The young man in the commercial bore sufficient resemblance to Eisenkot’s son Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023, provoking outrage over what many Israelis saw as an exploitation of Eisenkot’s bereavement. The underlying message of the video was that Eisenkot’s willingness – very much felicitous in a country whose population is one-fifth Arab – to cooperate politically with Arab Israelis amounted to treason.
The same campaign has returned repeatedly to the proposition that Netanyahu’s opponents depend upon hostile or alien forces. A Likud billboard displayed New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani alongside the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Turkey beneath the slogan: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win.”
Former Netanyahu allies from the right increasingly describe a political culture in which ordinary democratic rivalry has been replaced by a language of enemies, traitors and conspirators amid an obsession to cling to power.
Naftali Bennett, another former leader of the Israeli right, has warned that the “poison machine” surrounding Netanyahu has grown sufficiently toxic to create the possibility of physical violence against political opponents.
Lieberman’s furious response to the Golan affair comes from the same place. The strategy presents an obvious electoral paradox. Netanyahu enters this campaign needing precisely the voters this rhetoric is likely to repel. Polls have repeatedly given the parties opposed to him a substantial advantage, with most surveys forecasting the broader anti-Netanyahu bloc above 70 of the Knesset’s 120 seats – a landslide by Israeli standards.
The route back to 61 – the number of seats Netanyahu needs to stay in power – therefore runs through Israelis outside Netanyahu’s committed base, with voters who in many cases are security-minded, suspicious of the Palestinians, uncomfortable with the traditional left and deeply critical of the military and intelligence leadership for the failures of Oct. 7.
Netanyahu’s campaign increasingly appears designed to intensify the worldview of the committed rather than soften it for the persuadable. Persuadable voters can readily believe that generals failed catastrophically, that intelligence officials succumbed to groupthink, that the protest movement behaved irresponsibly or that Netanyahu’s opponents have pursued him obsessively. A claim that Yair Golan’s rescue missions indicate advance knowledge of the Hamas attack asks them to enter a considerably stranger universe.
Netanyahu has spent years turning political conflict into an existential contest in which his supporters defend their democratic choice against hostile “elites” and institutions. The betrayal theory takes this to its logical destination by placing the catastrophe of Oct. 7 itself inside the conspiracy.
Striking similarities
Here the comparison with Donald Trump goes considerably deeper than the familiar spectacle of a populist leader attacking judges, prosecutors or unfavorable election results. In both the United States and Israel, something profound has happened to the traditional conservative relationship with the state. Institutions once revered because they embodied national continuity — the military, intelligence services, law enforcement, the courts and the permanent civil service — increasingly become suspect whenever they demonstrate that their loyalty runs to the country and its laws rather than to the political leader who temporarily governs it.
For generations, the right in both countries occupied almost the opposite position. American conservatives wrapped themselves in the FBI, the armed forces and the authority of the state, while Israeli conservatives placed enormous cultural weight on the IDF and the security services as guardians of the Jewish state. The populist transformation has turned this on its head, producing a peculiar new mutation in which loyalty to the state becomes subordinate to loyalty to a leader who claims to embody the state.
Thus, a general who has devoted his life to Israel but challenges Netanyahu can become the target of a sinister conspiracy theory vehiculated by the prime minister’s wife on a propaganda channel.
The Oct. 7 conspiracy theories represent an especially extreme version of this logic. Israel’s military and intelligence establishment can be accused of having tolerated or even facilitated the greatest massacre in the country’s history because such a theory shifts responsibility away from Netanyahu and toward the institutions whose independence has become a political problem for him. Once such a proposition enters ordinary political discourse, distrust of judges, civil servants and election administrators requires a comparatively modest leap of imagination.
The connection to the coming election follows directly from this inversion. A public taught that generals and intelligence chiefs were capable of concealing an impending invasion from the prime minister has already been asked to believe in a conspiracy vastly more elaborate than anything required to manipulate an election.
A public taught that judges, prosecutors, police, journalists, civil servants and opposition politicians have joined a campaign to overthrow its chosen leader has been supplied with an explanation for almost any future defeat. Victory can be presented as the triumph of the people over the establishment; defeat can be interpreted as further evidence of the establishment’s power.
Israel already entered this campaign amid extraordinary anxiety about the integrity of the coming election. Earlier this summer, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak publicly warned that Netanyahu might attempt to sabotage it. Supreme Court Justice Noam Solberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, has discussed the narrow legal circumstances under which a genuine national emergency could justify postponing a vote. Golan has warned about attempts to alter election rules and announced plans for extensive monitoring of the vote. Scenarios that would have sounded fantastical during most of Israel’s history have entered ordinary political discussion as Netanyahu approaches an election that threatens to end his extraordinarily long political career.
Oct. 7 vs. Oct. 27
Trump’s experience shows how this political logic can operate when an election finally produces the wrong answer. His campaign against the legitimacy of American elections began years before Jan. 6, 2021, through the repeated proposition that an election system capable of producing his defeat must itself be fraudulent. By the time the 2020 election arrived, millions of supporters already possessed an explanation for a Trump loss. The epistemological groundwork had been laid. Victory demonstrated the people’s will, while defeat demonstrated the conspiracy.
Netanyahu operates in a different political system and national culture, but his increasingly conspiratorial campaign is constructing a comparable political logic in Israel. The institutions capable of declaring that he has lost overlap increasingly with the institutions his supporters are being taught to distrust. The judges belong to the hostile legal establishment; the civil servants belong to the bureaucracy; the media cannot be believed; the security establishment might have betrayed the country on Oct. 7; political opponents may themselves have participated in the conspiracy. A movement immersed in this worldview enters Election Day with an explanation already available should the voters remove its leader.
The transformation of Yair Golan’s Oct. 7 story captures where these politics lead. On the worst morning in Israel’s history, thousands of citizens waited desperately for a state that had disappeared. Reservists, retired officers, farmers, police officers and ordinary people rushed south to fill the vacuum. Golan put on his uniform, found a weapon, climbed into his little Toyota and drove toward the massacre, eventually helping rescue young Israelis hiding from Hamas gunmen in the fields.
Three years later, the prime minister’s wife points to the speed with which he responded as grounds for suspicion, turning evidence of initiative into an insinuation of foreknowledge. The same political method turns military failure into treason, institutional independence into disloyalty and political opposition into subversion. Carried through an election campaign, the logic has one further destination: electoral defeat itself can become another suspicious event requiring explanation.
Much of the Israeli center recoiled from Sara Netanyahu’s interview because the innuendo seemed grotesque. The larger danger lies in the political culture being constructed around precisely such innuendo, one in which patriotism is measured by loyalty to a leader and every person or institution standing between Benjamin Netanyahu and continued power can be cast as part of the plot.
In this sense, Oct. 27 is emerging as a perhaps ever more fateful date than Oct. 7. If the Netanyahu machine is not decisively routed, it is not at all clear that the country can recover as a democracy where the discourse is sane.
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