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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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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.
The post In upcoming Israeli election, Netanyahu is preparing to blame a loss on conspiracy appeared first on The Forward.
