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Before Oct. 7, a rabbi and imam at Syracuse were building bridges. After the attacks, more students joined them.
At Syracuse University, Adam Baltaxe held an unlikely role: the Muslim Student Association’s lone Jewish member.
Baltaxe, who graduated last spring, was a fixture at the Muslim group’s events — eating at potlucks, attending religious services, even giving a speech at the group’s Eid celebration — while also serving on Hillel’s executive board.
His interest in interfaith dialogue began while studying abroad in Chile, where conversations with his Palestinian host mother after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel left a lasting impression. Back at Syracuse, Baltaxe set out to recreate those exchanges.
“I started off just talking to individual Muslim or Palestinian students on campus, one-on-one. And there were a lot of times it would start pretty hostile,” he said. “And then, through conversations, actually a lot of those people ended up becoming my friends.”
Baltaxe was also a Jewish representative on Syracuse’s Student Assembly of Interfaith Leaders; an interfaith librarian at Hendricks Chapel, where he assisted students in discovering books on various religions; and a founding member of the Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Fellowship, a group of 10 Jewish students and 10 Muslim students that met weekly starting in spring 2024.
In the two years since Oct. 7, headlines have cast colleges as battlegrounds: places where Zionists are excluded from parts of campus, pro-Palestinian encampments are broken up by police, and ideological “safe spaces” shield students from encountering anyone with whom they disagree. It would be easy to assume most students have grown jaded about communicating across divides.
Yet at Syracuse, students like Baltaxe are bucking that narrative, taking part in a campus culture that embraced interfaith dialogue before Oct. 7.
Baltaxe was “one of the bridges between the Muslim students and the Jewish students. It felt really nice to have his company,” said Mian Muhammad Abdul Hamid, who was a member of the Muslim Student Association and Student Assembly of Interfaith Leaders before graduating last spring. “It just goes to show that we can model the world that we want to live in, rather than mirroring what’s going on with the rest of the world.”
That culture, some students say, began with faculty. Rabbi Ethan Bair, Syracuse Hillel’s former rabbi, and Imam Amir Durić, a Muslim chaplain now serving as assistant dean for religious and spiritual life, became fast friends when Bair arrived at Syracuse in 2022. That year, they organized joint events like an Iftar dinner at Hillel, the evening meal that breaks the daily fast for Muslims during the month of Ramadan. By the summer of 2023, the two envisioned hosting dialogue sessions between Muslim and Jewish students, and they received a grant from Interfaith America to make it happen.
But after the attacks of Oct. 7 and Israel’s ensuing military strikes on Gaza, Durić said he questioned whether it was the right time. During such a tense moment, he wondered who would participate, and could constructive dialogue even happen?
They decided to move forward, guided by their motto to “model rather than mirror” — a choice that proved to be the right one, Durić said.
“That friendship was the key,” Durić said of his relationship with Bair. “What helped, regardless of all the challenges, was us still being friends.”
“Imam Durić sent a strong signal, saying that, ‘Well, this is the most important time for dialogue,’” Bair said. “And of course, I agreed.”
The program began as a way to share culture and religion, not to debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Durić said. The students discussed their faith practices — from Shabbat to Muslim daily prayer — and bonded over the challenges of keeping kosher and halal. But as students got to know one another, conversations naturally shifted to politics.
One evening, after a dinner during which the group heard presentations from experts about antisemitism and Islamophobia, the students stayed behind for over an hour to talk about the conflict in Gaza, Durić said.
“We built this family of Jews and Muslims who could talk about anything. We disagreed a lot,” Baltaxe said. “But we all came together.”
‘A little more understanding’
Syracuse was not immune from the kinds of clashes causing turmoil at other universities. But when events threatened to deepen campus divides, connections between Muslim and Jewish students offered a path to navigate the tensions.
In October 2023, the University cited “safety concerns” in cancelling an event titled “Teach In: The Occupation of Palestine”; students held the gathering off-campus instead. The next month brought the first in a series of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, with a “Shut it Down for Palestine” rally held on Nov. 9.
That spring, pro-Palestinian protesters camped out on the quad for two weeks before voluntarily disbanding, while pro-Israel demonstrators rallied in response.
But while tensions flared, students in the fellowship quietly got to work. They helped serve as liaisons between encampment protesters and administration, contributing to a peaceful resolution, Baltaxe said.
Having connections on both sides, he said, made that work possible.
“The core of this is that people don’t have empathy because they don’t know people on the other side,” he said. “It’s much harder to empathize with people who you don’t know.”
Sadie Meyer, student president of Syracuse Hillel, also credited friendships as helping to ease conflict. As part of Hillel’s programming, she had organized a day of volunteer work with the Muslim Student Association in November 2023 and a Passover seder with the Student Assembly of Interfaith Leaders in spring 2024.
“I actually have really good friends who took part in a lot of different protests,” said Meyer, who did not participate in any. “But I respected their opinions. I heard a lot more — because they were my friends — about what they truly were trying to get out of it, and I had a lot of respect for what they did.”
Still, clashes escalated off campus when an individual unaffiliated with the University reportedly made a Nazi salute toward a group of Syracuse students and punched one. The student who was punched declined to press charges. The next day, Syracuse parent and public relations executive Ronn Torossian was arrested after confronting a pro-Palestinian protester and refusing to leave campus, according to University officials.
“There must be an emergency meeting to discuss the safety of Jews at Syracuse University,” Torossian wrote to the Daily Orange, saying it was “reprehensible” that protesters held signs with slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea.”
Most recently, two Syracuse University students were charged with hate crimes after authorities say one of them tossed a bag of pork into a Jewish fraternity house during this year’s Rosh Hashanah celebration.
“We are heartbroken and outraged by this hateful crime committed against our fraternity,” the fraternity posted to Instagram. “This was an attack on our home, our values, and our safety, as well as every Jewish student on campus.”
At times, Baltaxe also felt campus becoming hostile: He recalled being simultaneously called a “fake Jew” by pro-Israel students and a “violent Zionist” by pro-Palestinian students. Still, he said Syracuse stood out for the students who remained committed to reaching across divides.
“I think we were way ahead of the curve when it came to addressing this stuff,” he said. “Obviously, there’s always going to be individual incidents, but I never felt truly unsafe.”
Duncan Green, a Jewish junior and another member of the Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Fellowship, said interfaith engagement offered him a more nuanced lens through which to process the campus unrest.
On a campus with a large Jewish population — roughly 2,500 students, or 16 percent of the student body — and about 200 students who identify as Muslim, the fellowship helped him step outside his bubble, he said.
“We didn’t solve any geopolitical age-old problems,” Green said. “But I do think that we came away with a little more understanding.”
During one of their final meetings, Green noticed the fellowship was meeting while pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests played out just down the block.
“I thought it was sort of symbolic that while that was all going down, we were together just having a nice lunch,” he said. “We were paving the way for a different way of going about all this.”
Durić echoed that not all 22,000 students at Syracuse were ready for dialogue. But for those who were, the fellowship offered a model. “It did serve as an alternative,” he said. “An alternative to how we can approach things that are uncomfortable, where we may disagree.”
Beyond Syracuse
The Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Fellowship continued on campus for two semesters. Its third cohort, in spring 2025, expanded beyond Syracuse University, meeting at Interfaith Works of Central New York and including students from Hamilton College, Le Moyne College, and several Palestinian American young adults who were not enrolled in college.
A few months ago, Rabbi Bair — eager to dedicate more of his time to interfaith work — left Syracuse to help develop a “bridge building” curriculum for Hillel International, which he said has already been used on several dozen college campuses. His departure means the dialogue fellowship won’t continue at Syracuse this semester.
Even so, Durić, who was promoted to assistant dean, said he expects the new imam and new rabbi to continue fostering connections between Jewish and Muslim students. This fall, they kicked off the semester with a program called “Salaam Shalom,” exploring Arabic and Hebrew words that share similar roots.
Bair also sees the fellowship as an example to be replicated. His long-term vision is an off-campus residential house shared by Muslim and Jewish students — modeled after Moishe House — where student leaders commit to hosting interfaith programming in exchange for subsidized rent.
“Jewish-Muslim bridge dialogue was not the norm in the wake of October 7 on campus,” he said. “My prayer is that this kind of work will continue more and more on college campuses — so that what we did is not an outlier, but is maybe the beginning of a culture shift.”
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When does criticizing Israel become antisemitism? Ask Mark Ruffalo
American actor Mark Ruffalo on Saturday denied that he is antisemitic, one day after Paramount accused the actor of invoking antisemitic tropes in his campaign against the studio’s $111 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
The clash lands as Paramount is trying to clear the last major obstacle to closing the Warner Bros. Discovery deal: a lawsuit filed by California and 11 other state attorneys general seeking to block it on antitrust grounds.
“The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” Ruffalo said on Saturday. “Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people.”
Now, what started as a celebrity spat has turned into a stand-in for a much bigger fight: When does criticizing Israel’s government turn into hating Jews?
Ruffalo and his defenders say targeting a defense contractor’s technology and a media family’s wealth is ordinary corporate criticism. Paramount and its allies say invoking Israel in a business dispute imports old tropes about Jewish power and money into a fight that has nothing to do with Jews. The same argument has played out over campus protests, in Congress and across the globe since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.
The dispute began Friday, when Ruffalo posted a 2024 clip of former Oracle CEO Safra Catz reportedly discussing “profoundly scary technologies” the company built for the Israeli military after Oct. 7. Along with the clip, Ruffalo wrote that the war in Gaza was “a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle and has an estimated net worth of around $200 billion, has personally backstopped $40.4 billion in equity financing for his son David Ellison’s Paramount to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
Ruffalo called the elder Ellison a “classic Oligarch” and warned that the “most destructive and inhuman forces in the world” would soon sit inside an important media company if the merger succeeds. The deal would give the family control of CNN. It already owns CBS News.
Paramount fired back. “We are, as always, troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute,” a company spokesperson told The Wrap, a Hollywood trade publication. “Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong — they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe.” The company added that the episode “exposes the true motivation of some who have advocated opposition to this transaction.”
It’s not the first time Paramount has made that argument. Axios reported in June that company executives believed antisemitism was fueling opposition to the merger more broadly, pointing to the Ellisons’ Jewish identity and Larry Ellison’s friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ruffalo pushed back on social media Saturday refuting the accusation that he is antisemitic and adding: “Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”
An advocate and activist
Ruffalo, 58, is best known for playing the Hulk in the Marvel cinematic universe and has been nominated for four Academy Awards, for his performances in The Kids Are All Right, Foxcatcher, Spotlight and Poor Things.
He has also built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most consistent activists, campaigning for environmental causes and protesting against the Trump administration. This fight is the latest flashpoint in the actor’s history of pro-Palestinian activism.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel, he has frequently called out Israel’s military action in Gaza, notably wearing an Artists4Ceasefire pin to the 2024 Oscars. In September 2024, he was among more than 700 SAG-AFTRA members who signed a letter demanding the actors’ union publicly call for a Gaza ceasefire and protect pro-Palestinian members from what they described as industry blacklisting.
In September 2025, he said he supported efforts to “boycott, divest, sanction, and prosecute” Israel. And just 10 days before the Oracle post, he joined Javier Bardem, Susan Sarandon and other artists in a statement arguing that despite the U.S.-brokered truce in place since October 2025, “there is no ceasefire in Gaza.”
That history is why three prominent voices in the fight against antisemitism sided with Paramount over the weekend.
“Words matter, and so does the willingness to draw a line when legitimate debate gives way to antisemitic tropes,” wrote Jim Berk, CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, praising the studio for “refusing to allow prejudice to masquerade as political or corporate criticism.”
He went on: “Invoking Israel in an issue where it is completely irrelevant is a textbook case of obsession and demonization.”
Creative Community for Peace, a Hollywood group that pushes back on boycotts of Israel, went further, with executive director Ari Ingel accusing Ruffalo of fusing “hostility toward Israel and Zionism with Jewish-associated wealth, media ownership, oligarchic power and ominous warnings about concentrated control into a single narrative.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, called Ruffalo’s posts “cynical and sickening.”
Antisemitism vs. anti-Zionism
The fight lands amid the worst stretch of global antisemitism in decades. Researchers at Tel Aviv University found that 20 Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks worldwide last year, the highest toll in more than 30 years — a count that includes a gunmen who killed more than a dozen people at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December.
As incidents rise, and amidst Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza and its war with Iran, the country’s standing in the world has cratered.
A Pew Research Center survey of 36 countries this spring found a median of 67% hold unfavorable views of Israel, with opinion growing more negative since 2025 in most countries where Pew has trend data. Even in the U.S., Israel’s staunchest ally, Americans no longer clearly side with Israelis over Palestinians for the first time since Gallup began asking in 2001 — a reversal driven largely by independents and voters under 35.
Where the merger stands
Representatives for Paramount and California are expected to meet Monday for preliminary talks, at Paramount’s request, though people briefed on the discussions cautioned there’s no guarantee they will lead anywhere. The Writers Guild has also sued to block the deal.
The stakes of delay are real: if the deal doesn’t close by October, Paramount would owe Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. If there is no resolution, a trial is set for March.
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AIPAC wants to defeat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race. Mike Rogers would rather it stay out.
In the race for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, both candidates are trying to turn a narrow margin into victory.
Republican Mike Rogers is trying to win as the more moderate alternative to Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive and an outspoken critic of Israel. El-Sayed, who narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary, hopes to repeat a strategy that worked for him: campaigning against AIPAC and its political influence.
The pro-Israel lobbying group’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent more than $30 million trying to defeat El-Sayed in the primary. Now, with $60 million in cash on hand, according to the latest FEC filings, it is eager to keep a fierce Israel critic out of the Senate. There is just one problem: Rogers would rather AIPAC stay out of the race.
Allies of the Republican nominee have reportedly asked AIPAC not to run ads to boost him, fearing that the group’s involvement would backfire and give El-Sayed the same political foil that helped him overcome its massive spending in the primary. Axios reported that AIPAC officials didn’t take that rejection easily. However, after Rogers spoke with AIPAC chair Michael Tuchin, the group shelved an ad it had already produced attacking El-Sayed.
AIPAC spokesperson Deryn Sousa told Axios that its members “are highly motivated to be involved in this race and we will be looking at every option to make the case that El-Sayed’s policies are bad for Michigan and bad for America.”
Rogers did not outright reject support from pro-Israel donors. His campaign reportedly suggested ways AIPAC could help without putting its own name front and center. The disagreement is over whether having the group attached to the campaign would help him win or make his job harder.
Michigan’s narrow margins
Recent Michigan elections leave little room for error. Trump carried the swing state in 2024 by about 80,000 votes. In the Senate race that same year, Democrat Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers by fewer than 20,000 votes. Four years earlier, Joe Biden carried Michigan by about 2.8 points.
A recent AARP poll found El-Sayed at 48% and Rogers at 47% among 877 likely voters, well within the poll’s 3.3-point margin of error. El-Sayed leads among independents by six points. To close the gap, Rogers would need more independents and some dissatisfied Democratic primary voters.
For Rogers, that creates an important distinction: He wants to run against El-Sayed’s positions on Israel and his associations with controversial Israel critics without allowing El-Sayed to turn the election into another fight over AIPAC.
AIPAC has already become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who joined President Donald Trump’s crusade to question the 2020 election results. The wars in Gaza and Iran have only intensified that backlash, as Democratic voters have increasingly rejected U.S. policy supporting Israel.
Michigan has one of the largest Arab American populations in the nation, and it is the birthplace of the “uncommitted” movement to protest the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war in the 2024 presidential primary — making the politics of Israel and Gaza particularly complicated. A recent Fox News poll showed that 55% of Michigan voters opposed continuing U.S. aid to Israel.
In addition to the Michigan primary, AIPAC had some setbacks in other midterm races across the country. Last week, progressive candidate Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-backed Melissa Hernandez in the closely watched California special election to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who resigned after allegations of sexual assault. Earlier this year, Analilia Mejia prevailed in a New Jersey special election for a House seat, after an AIPAC-associated super PAC spent more than $2 million targeting another Democratic candidate. Many congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC.
AIPAC has also become increasingly controversial on the right. Prominent America First voices, including Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have attacked AIPAC’s influence over American foreign policy.
Winning over Jewish Democrats
Last week, Rogers launched a “Democrats for Rogers” effort to target voters who are uncomfortable with El-Sayed, in particular Jewish Democrats who remain uneasy with his rhetoric on Israel — including his calling Israel “bloodthirsty.” Jewish voters make up 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan.
Rabbi Asher Lopatin, a Modern Orthodox rabbi in suburban Detroit who backed Stevens in the primary and usually votes Democratic, endorsed Rogers at that event and urged others to do the same. Lopatin focused his criticism not only on El-Sayed’s positions on Israel but on his relationship with Hasan Piker, the popular left-wing pundit who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric and who appeared with El-Sayed on the campaign trail.
El-Sayed “has shown contempt for the Jewish community and, frankly, for American values by making Hasan Piker, a vicious antisemite and racist, his campaign surrogate and someone he buddies up with,” Lopatin said.
The Democratic nominee understands that vulnerability. Since winning the primary, El-Sayed has sought to reassure Jewish voters that his opposition to Israel is not hostility toward Jews. “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said in a recent TV appearance. “They are not the same as AIPAC and Israel.” In that interview, El-Sayed also disavowed some remarks by Piker, though he did not commit to ending campaign appearances with him.
That helps explain why Rogers prefers AIPAC to remain out of the spotlight. The Republican nominee would rather spend the fall forcing El-Sayed to defend his positions on Israel, his relationship with Piker and distrust among Jewish voters than spend it answering attacks over millions of dollars in AIPAC money pouring into his campaign.
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The note Netanyahu would never write
George H.W. Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 1993, after losing his bid for reelection to Bill Clinton. On the desk, he left his successor a handwritten note wishing him well with obvious sincerity and ending with an expression of democratic grace: “Your success now is our country’s success.”
It is hard to imagine a sentence further removed from Benjamin Netanyahu’s conception of political power. When Naftali Bennett replaced him as prime minister in 2021, Bennett arrived at the traditional handover expecting a serious transfer of responsibility for a country facing Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other threats.
In an interview this weekend with Israel’s Channel 12, Bennett said he cleared his day, and was shocked when Netanyahu gave him about 30 minutes, volunteered little, asked to keep living in the prime minister’s residence and for state funding for his wife’s car, and otherwise was eager to end the encounter.
The contrast goes far beyond manners. Netanyahu treats political defeat as something closer to dispossession, and those who threaten his hold on power as enemies whose legitimacy must be destroyed. Bennett said Netanyahu had warned him before the new government was sworn in that if he went ahead with it, he would deploy “all the heavy artillery” to brand him a traitor. Bennett says Netanyahu, whom he called an “anarchist,” kept his word, via a “poison machine” – a sophisticated social media influence operation featuring mass Whatsapp groups and bot accounts amplifying talking points – such as the theory, now popular on the right, that the Shin Bet helped Hamas attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in order to harm Netanyahu.
Five years later, the target has changed: It is former military chief Gadi Eisenkot. The method has not.
Eisenkot is now Netanyahu’s most dangerous electoral challenger, an extraordinary target for such a campaign. Eisenkot spent four decades in the IDF and rose to its chief of staff. After the Hamas attacks, he joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet for a few months, despite their political disagreements. His son Gal was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023, and two nephews were killed during military operations in Gaza. Yet even Israel’s increasingly brutal politics seem unable to leave room for a measure of respect.
Instead, Eisenkot is portrayed as dangerous, weak and somehow beyond the bounds of acceptable government. His military record itself becomes evidence against him. His willingness to construct a governing majority that might depend on an Arab party – something that is essential for the societal health of Israel, whose population is 20 percent Arab – is presented as something inherently disqualifying. The objective is larger than defeating his arguments. It is to make his accession to power appear intolerable.
From smear campaign to security risk
I was reminded of this Sunday while appearing on television with Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who spied for Israel, spent some 30 years in an American prison, and now hopes to enter Israeli politics. Pollard, who over the weekend endorsed a splinter right-wing party and seemingly hopes to parlay that into a Knesset seat or other position, comes at Netanyahu from the ultra-nationalist far-right, but essentially supports him. He explained that he could never support a government headed by Eisenkot because Eisenkot had weakened the IDF as chief of staff.
There is an obvious problem with that argument. Eisenkot served as the IDF chief of staff from 2015 to 2019. Netanyahu was prime minister throughout his tenure. If Eisenkot presided over the degradation of the Israeli military, Netanyahu presided over Eisenkot. It is utter nonsense, but that is how the poison machine works. Responsibility flows away from Netanyahu while culpability attaches itself to whoever threatens him. Institutions that Netanyahu himself headed somehow become the failures of his opponents.
Now this has collided with a matter of security for candidates.
Eisenkot’s campaign says threats against him – from the rabble whipped up by Netanyahu – are increasing as the election approaches, and he has requested state protection. The Shin Bet in recent days declined to provide an armed security detail, although it will provide intelligence assistance.
That decision is astonishing in a country whose domestic security service once failed catastrophically in preventing the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin – after months in which he was called a traitor, a murderer and a Nazi by a campaign of agitation presided over by the young Netanyahu.
The lesson Israel drew was supposed to be permanent: when serious political incitement converges with a credible physical threat, the state errs on the side of protecting its leaders.
The contrast becomes almost grotesque when one considers whom the state does protect. Netanyahu’s son Yair who has lived in Miami for years, receives Shin Bet protection there. Yair, who is 35, avoided military service and has made himself a regular participant in the same poisonous political media ecosystem that serves his father, especially by attacking his opponents on X. The Netanyahu family successfully pressed to have responsibility for his security transferred to the Shin Bet, over the agency’s objections.
And the entitlement extends into the future. Netanyahu, like other former prime ministers, is set to receive lifelong Shin Bet protection. But a ministerial committee has approved extraordinary post-premiership protection for the Netanyahu family: Sara Netanyahu for as long as her husband is alive, and their sons for at least five years. The state can therefore find the resources and justification to protect a prime minister’s adult son living in Miami during a devastating war, and to plan years of protection for the family after Netanyahu leaves office, while the man currently leading many polls to replace Netanyahu is told to make do without an armed state security detail.
Bennett has issued an even more chilling warning. He says the relentless campaign against Eisenkot and other opposition figures could persuade someone that these politicians are monsters who must be stopped by violence. Bennett himself receives protection as a former prime minister.
The man making the decision at the Shin Bet is David Zini, perhaps the most politically controversial director in the agency’s history. He was a senior officer whose reputation as a far-right firebrand stopped his advancement in the military, and his appointment generated fears that Netanyahu was seeking a loyalist to lead an institution that must serve the state rather than the prime minister. That distinction goes to the heart of Israel’s present crisis.
The lesson Netanyahu still hasn’t learned
A democracy depends on people in power understanding that the state and the government are different things. The Shin Bet serves Israel. The IDF serves Israel. The civil service serves Israel. The prime minister serves Israel. Political opponents remain Israelis, and an opposition leader who may soon become prime minister deserves protection based on the threat against him rather than his usefulness to the incumbent.
Of course, Netanyahu’s entire “judicial reform” effort, which tore Israeli society apart in 2023 before the Hamas attack, was animated by the illiberal and fundamentally anti-democratic proposition that the elected government should be largely unchecked.
The Bush note seems almost quaint from Israel today, but its message is anything but sentimental. Bush understood that Clinton’s safety, legitimacy and success had become matters of national interest because America was more important than George Bush. The 30-minute handover to Bennett and the security controversy surrounding Eisenkot belong to the same story because both reveal what happens when a leader has difficulty separating the interests of the country from his own political survival.
There is an irony here that Israelis should appreciate. Netanyahu has always seemed, in some ways, Israel’s most American politician. He spent his formative years in the United States, lived in the Philadelphia area, studied at MIT and speaks beautiful American English. Yet in his behavior, Netanyahu has almost become anti-American; there is nothing in him that the Founding Fathers could admire.
There is, of course, a final irony. It would be misleading in 2026 to pretend that George H.W. Bush’s conception of political succession describes the current occupant of the White House. President Donald Trump and Netanyahu have far more in common with each other on this score than either has with Bush.
Israel, like the United States, desperately needs a return to the standards and ethics of the past, when the leader’s success actually was the country’s success.
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