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Diaspora alarm over Israel: Your guide to what the critics are saying
(JTA) — I started reporting on North American Jews and Israel in the last century, and for years covered the debate over whether Jews in the Diaspora had a right to criticize the Israeli government in public. The debate sort of petered out in the early-1990s, when Israel itself began talking about a Palestinian state, and when right-wing groups then decided criticizing Israel was a mitzvah.
Nevertheless, while left-wing groups like J Street and T’ruah have long been comfortable criticizing the Israeli government or defending Palestinian rights, many in the centrist “mainstream” — pulpit clergy, leaders of federations and Hillels, average Jews nervous about spoiling a family get-together — have preferred to keep their concerns to themselves. Partly this is tactical: Few rabbis want to alienate any of their members over so divisive a topic, and in the face of an aggressive left, organizational leaders did not want to give fuel to Israel’s ideological enemies. (The glaring exception has been about Israeli policy toward non-Orthodox Judaism, which is seen as very much the Disapora’s business.)
In recent weeks, there has been an emerging literature of what I have come to think of as “reluctant dissent.” What these essays and sermons have in common, despite the different political persuasions of the authors, is a deep concern over Israel’s “democratic character.” They cite judicial reforms that would weaken checks and balances at the top, expansion of Jewish settlements that would make it impossible to separate from the Palestinians, and the Orthodox parties that want to strengthen their hold on religious affairs. As Abe Foxman, who as former director of the Anti-Defamation League rarely criticized Israel, told an interviewer, “If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.”
I read through the various ways Jewish leaders and writers here and in Israel are not just justifying Diaspora Jews who are protesting what is happening in Israel, but providing public permission for others to do the same. Here is what a few of them are saying (with a word from a defender of the government):
‘I didn’t sleep much last night’
Yehuda Kurtzer: Facebook, Feb. 8
Kurtzer is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, the New York-based branch of the Israeli think tank that promotes a diverse, engaged relationship with Israel. In a recent blog post, he neatly describes the dilemma of Diaspora Zionists who aren’t sure what to do with their deep concerns about the direction of the Israel government, especially the concentration of power in a far-right legislative branch.
Centrist American Jews who care about Israel are caught between “those to our right who would see any expression of even uncertainty about Israel’s democratic character as disloyalty, [and] those on the other side who think that a conversation about Israeli democracy is already past its prime,” he writes. He is also concerned about the “widespread disengagement that we can expect among American Jews, what I fear will become the absent majority — those who decide that however the current crisis is resolved, all of this is just ‘not for them.’”
Kurtzer likens Israel to a palace, and Diaspora Jews as “passersby” who live beyond its walls. Nonetheless, he feels responsible for what happens there. “The palace is burning and the best we can do is to tell you,” he writes. “It is also how we will show you we love you, and how much we cherish the palace.”
An open letter to Israel’s friends in North America
Matti Friedman, Yossi Klein Halevi and Daniel Gordis: Times of Israel, Feb. 7
Three high-profile writers who moved to Israel from North America and who often defend Israel against its critics in the United States — Gordis, for one, has written a book arguing that American Jewish liberalism is incompatible with Israel’s “ethnic democracy” — now urge Diaspora Jews to speak out against the current Israeli government. They don’t mention the territories or religious pluralism. Instead, their trigger is the proposed effort to reform the Supreme Court, which they say will “eviscerate the independence of our judiciary and remake the country’s democratic identity.” Such a move will “threaten Israeli-American relations, and it will do grave damage to our relations with you, our sisters and brothers in the Diaspora,” concluding, “We need your voice to help us preserve Israel as a state both Jewish and democratic.”
All Israel Is Responsible for Each Other
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Sermon, Jan. 27
Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of New York City’s Reform Central Synagogue, isn’t looking to Israeli writers for permission to weigh in on Israel’s political scene. In a sermon that takes its name from a rabbinic statement of Jewish interdependence, she asserts without question that Jews everywhere have a stake in the future of Israel and have a right to speak up for “civil society and democracy and religious pluralism and human rights” there. She focuses on the religious parties who are convinced that “Reform Jews are ruining Israel,” as you might expect, but ends the sermon with a call to recognize the rights of all Israeli citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish, “and also those living under Israel’s military control.” Of those Palestinians, she says, “We can’t feel comfortable sitting in the light of sovereignty next to a community living in darkness and expect to have peace.”
And like Kurtzer, she worries that concerned American Jews will simply turn away from Israel in despair or embarrassment, and urges congregants to support the Israeli and American organizations that share their pluralistic vision for Israel.
On That Distant Day
Hillel Halkin: Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2023
In his 1977 book “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic,” the translator and author Hillel Halkin made a distinction similar to Kurtzer’s image of Israel as a palace and the Diaspora as passersby: Jews who don’t emigrate to Israel are dooming themselves to irrelevance, while immigrants like him are living on the stage where the Jewish future would play out. His mournful essay doesn’t address the Diaspora, per se, although it creates a permission structure for Zionists abroad to criticize the government. Halkin sees the new government as a coalition of two types of religious zealots: the haredi Orthodox who want to consolidate their control of religious life (and funding) in Israel, and a “knit-skullcap electorate [that] is hypernationalist and Jewish supremacist in its attitude toward Arabs.” (A knit skullcap is a symbol for what an American might call the “Modern Orthodox.”) Together, these growing and powerful constituents represent “the end of an Israeli consensus about what is and is not permissible in a democracy — and once the rules are no longer agreed on, political chaos is not far away. Israel has never been in such a place before.”
Halkin does talk about Israeli expansion in the West Bank, saying he long favored Jewish settlement in the territories, while believing that the “only feasible solution” would be a two-state solution with Arabs living in the Jewish state and Jews living in the Arab one. Instead, Israel has reached a point where there is “too much recrimination, too much distrust, too much hatred, too much blind conviction, too much disdain for the notion of a shared humanity, for such a solution to be possible… We’re over the cliff and falling, and no one knows how far down the ground is.”
Method to Our Madness: A Response to Hillel Halkin
Ze’ev Maghen: Jewish Review of Books, Jan. 10, 2023
Ze’ev Maghen, chair of the department of Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University, is hardly a dissenter; instead, his response to Halkin helpfully represents the views of those who voted for the current government. Maghen says the new coalition represents a more honest expression of Zionism than those who support a “liberal, democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, individualist, environmentally conscious, economically prosperous, globally connected, etc., etc., society.” The new government he writes, will defend Israel’s “Jewish nationalist raison d’être, and keep at bay those universalist, Western-based notions that are geared by definition to undermine nationalism in all its forms.” As for the Palestinian issue, he writes, “I’d rather have a fierce, hawkish Zionist in the cockpit than a progressive, Westernized wimp for whom this land, and the people who have returned to it after two millennia of incomparable suffering, don’t mean all that much.”
The Tears of Zion
Rabbi Sharon Brous: Sermon, Feb. 4, 2023
Brous, rabbi of the liberal Ikar community in Los Angeles, doesn’t just defend the right of Diaspora Jews to speak out in defense of Israeli democracy and Palestinian rights, but castigates Jewish leaders and communities who have been reluctant to criticize Israel in the past. “No, this government is not an electoral accident, and it is not an anomaly,” she says. “This moment of extremism has been a long time in the making and our silence has made us complicit.”
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Courage to Name Evil
Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the UN Security Council. Photo: Wiki Commons
On Nov. 10, 1975 — almost 50 years ago to the day — Daniel Patrick Moynihan did something that few diplomats or public figures would dare attempt today: he told the truth in public, when the world preferred a lie.
As the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Moynihan rose before the General Assembly to condemn Resolution 3379 — the infamous measure that declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
Moynihan saw, with prophetic clarity, that this was no ordinary resolution. It was a calculated attempt to turn antisemitism into international law and an effort to delegitimize the Jewish people’s right to self-determination under the guise of anti-racism.
Moynihan warned plainly, “The United Nations is about to make antisemitism international law.”
And then, in words that still thunder half a century later, he declared: “[The United States] does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act … A great evil has been loosed upon the world.”
I frequently open lectures with that story. I tell my students and audiences that if they remember nothing else from my remarks, they should remember this: courage begins with naming things truthfully. It’s why Moynihan remains one of my heroes. At a time when global institutions and elite opinion had succumbed to moral cowardice, he reminded the world — and America — that truth is not negotiable.
The Corruption of Language
Moynihan once wrote, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
That line, often repeated but rarely understood, expressed his deepest conviction: that words must map to reality, not be twisted to serve ideology. When the United Nations turned Zionism — a movement of liberation — into a synonym for racism, it wasn’t merely lying about Israel. It was corrupting the moral language on which civilization depends.
That corruption of language is what Moynihan fought so fiercely against. His 1975 speech was not only about defending Israel; it was about defending truth. He understood that words matter; that they are the means by which we give order to the world around us, and that once institutions redefine words to suit politics, they lose moral legitimacy.
In Jewish terms, what Moynihan did that day was Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying the divine name by standing for truth before the nations. He refused to let a lie pass unchallenged, even when doing so made him unpopular among diplomats and intellectuals. For him, the duty to speak truth outweighed the instinct to please.
Echoes in Our Time
Half a century later, his words feel hauntingly relevant. The same moral inversion that he condemned at the UN now reappears across Western institutions.
On elite campuses, students chant that “Zionists don’t belong.” Faculty resolutions describe the murder of civilians as “resistance.” Jewish students are told that their identity is oppression and their longing for homeland a form of violence. The language of “decolonization” has become the new euphemism through which antisemitism cloaks itself in moral respectability.
Moynihan foresaw this. He understood that the battle for truth is never merely political; it is cultural and linguistic. His stand in 1975 was not only a defense of Israel but of liberal civilization itself.
As he argued, culture, not politics, determines the success of a society — yet politics can change a culture and save it from itself. At the UN, he embodied both truths and proved that culture and politics alike can be redeemed when courage and clarity converge.
Many in the diplomatic corps thought him reckless; others accused him of inflaming tensions. But Moynihan knew that civility without conviction is just another form of surrender.
In refusing to “tone down” his words, he restored to American diplomacy something that had been fading for years: moral seriousness.
On Dec. 16, 1991 — 16 years after his speech and in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse — the United Nations repealed that infamous resolution. The reversal did not erase the damage, but it vindicated his courage and exposed the Soviet motives he had identified all along.
Geopolitical Tensions Today
Today, Moynihan’s moral framework faces new tests as the Abraham Accords expand into uncharted territory. As debates swirl over bringing Kazakhstan into the Abraham Accords, commentators like Amit Segal argue the move has little to do with Israel and everything to do with containing Iran and Russia.
Kazakhstan, a Muslim-majority state and the world’s largest uranium producer, accounting for about 40% of global supply, sits in a crucial corridor between Moscow’s weakening sphere and Tehran’s growing ambitions. For Washington, its inclusion symbolizes an attempt to expand the US-Israel-Arab alliance into Eurasia — a rebuke to authoritarian revisionism.
But others, like Shay Gal, warn that such moves may blur the moral map Moynihan fought to preserve. By tethering Israel’s normalization efforts to a bloc still tied to Moscow and influenced by Ankara — a government that has positioned itself as Hamas’ diplomatic advocate — the United States risks trading moral clarity for geopolitical convenience.
Moynihan would have understood this tension. He knew that alliances built without a moral spine eventually fracture under pressure. As historian Gil Troy recently wrote, Moynihan “backed Israel for reasons that had almost nothing to do with it.” He was defending the West’s moral vocabulary from Soviet distortion — the same “totalitarian mind” that “reeked of the totalitarian state.”
That distortion is visible today when democracies hesitate to call terrorism by its name or confuse appeasement with diplomacy. Whether in the UN, universities, or Washington’s corridors of power, the temptation to “tone down” the truth — to be “polite” in the face of lies — remains.
Moynihan mocked that instinct in 1975: “What is this word ‘toning down’; when you are faced with an out-right lie about the United States and we go in and say this is not true. Now, how do you tone that down? Do you say it is only half untrue?” he asked. “What kind of people are we? What kind of people do they think we are?”
He asked that question then. We should ask it again now.
The Lesson for Us
In my lectures, I tell students and audiences that moral courage isn’t about volume or virality. It’s about standing for something when every incentive points the other way. Moynihan didn’t posture. He told the truth in an unfriendly room — and did it with moral gravity. His example reminds us that education and citizenship alike begin with facts, not feelings, and that democracy cannot endure if we lose the courage to call things by their right names.
When Moynihan declared that “a great evil has been loosed upon the world,” he wasn’t speaking only of 1975. He was naming a permanent temptation: to believe that truth is negotiable, to mistake moral complexity for moral cowardice.
Moynihan’s life proves that civic courage and Jewish moral witness are inseparable. The fight against the world’s oldest hatred is not only Israel’s fight — it is the test of whether the West still believes in truth itself.
When the powerful grow timid and relativism reigns, we must remember Moynihan’s example: a man who refused to be silent while the world applauded a lie.
Because when a great evil is loosed upon the world, truth must be spoken aloud. Daniel Patrick Moynihan did just that. And that is why, half a century later, I begin my classes with his words and count him among my heroes.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Iran Built Nuclear Weapons Instead of Desalinization Plants — Now There Is a Water Shortage
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks in a televised message, after the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, in Tehran, Iran, June 26, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
“Water water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink” — from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner — is a suitable motto for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
With the Persian Gulf in the southwest, the Sea of Oman in the south, and the Caspian Sea (an inland brackish water lake) in the north, Iran is surrounded by water — yet there is very little to drink. Iran’s experts, of course, blame Israel and the US for manipulating the weather and causing a drought so severe that the Islamic Republic’s president says he may “have to evacuate Tehran.”
If only Iran’s Mullahs had spent their money on desalination plants instead of nuclear facilities, the people of Iran would not be facing death from dehydration.
According to a new report by the Middle East Forum, Iran is at the precipice of “water bankruptcy” stemming from “the regime’s profound failure to adapt in a region where other arid states have successfully implemented sustainable water management strategies.” Whereas its neighbors have long planned for the absence of rainy days, investing in the infrastructure to provide water for its subjects, the Islamic Republic has wasted all its resources foolishly pursuing nuclear weapons.
Kuwait built eight desalination plants that provide 93% of the necessary drinking water to its 5 million people. Qatar built 109 desalination plants that provide 48% of the drinking water to its 3 million people, and the UAE built 70 plants that provide 42% of its drinking water for 11 million people. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer of desalinated water, built 30 “super plants” that provide more than half of drinking water to its 34 million subjects.
Iran’s desalination plants, however, provide a mere 3% of the potable water for its 92 million thirsty people. It was one of the last nations in the Middle East to begin installing desalination plants, and they are small and inefficient, mostly relying on old technology and antiquated methods. In spite of Iran’s efforts to ramp up its desalination capabilities, the situation is dire.
Blinded by its nuclear ambition and hatred of Israel and the US, Iran has unwisely spent its money on expensive nuclear reactors and even more expensive nuclear bombmaking.
In the US, where environmental and regulatory fees inflate the prices, a nuclear reactor costs billions of dollars. The newest one in the US is the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, which has cost approximately $30 billion. In Iran, we can assume that the total price tag is lower, but the added expenses of burying facilities deep underground probably make the total roughly the same.
On top of the money Iran has spent on nuclear reactors, it has also spent untold billions on enrichment facilities, many of them also subterranean. It has spent liberally on research and development into trigger systems and the ballistic missiles to deliver bombs.
By contrast, a desalination plant costs in the millions of dollars. In 2010, Texas put the price tag at $658 million for a 100 MGD desalination plant. Today, a desalination plant might run $1 billion. That means that for every $20 billion-dollar nuclear site it built, Iran might have built 20 state-of-the-art desalination plants.
Without a steady supply of desalinated sea water, Iran has resorted to unsound policies to provide potable water, causing great harm to the land. These policies have led to drastic groundwater depletion, according to the Middle East Forum report, causing Iran’s cities to literally sink into the ground due to “aquifer compaction,” putting the nation well along the path to “aquifer death.”
Of course, the Islamic Republic will never acknowledge the folly of its ways. Instead, it will continue to blame the US and Israel, where five major desalination plants provide 80% of the nation’s drinking water.
The irony of Iran’s situation is that the entire world would step up to help the people of Iran avoid impending disaster were their nation not run by a bellicose government motivated by hatred. And Israel — the object of that hatred — would be among the nations most willing to help.
Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published by IPT.
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Jews Across the World Are Repeating the Mistakes of the 1930s
A shop damaged in Magdeburg, Germany, during Kristallnacht. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In August 1933, only months after Hitler rose to power, a chilling article appeared in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Dr. Max Naumann, a proud German patriot and the founder of the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden — the Association of National German Jews — declared his unwavering loyalty to the Nazi government. Even as Jewish livelihoods were being dismantled and the beginnings of the Holocaust were in place, this group of proper, fancy German Jews insisted that Jews had nothing to fear if they behaved correctly, shed their national identity, rejected Zionism, and embedded themselves wholly within German society.
But history was about to deliver its verdict.
This is the story of a worldview that has reappeared across Jewish history again and again: the belief that if Jews abandon their nationalism, and appease their oppressors, they will be spared. They condemned the very concept of Jewish self-defense.
The existence in Germany of Betar, a Zionist movement founded in 1923, presented an ideological threat to this worldview.
Betar youths sang Hebrew songs, carried themselves with discipline, and insisted the Jewish people were a nation with a destiny. In the eyes of people like Naumann, Betar represented a dangerous idea: that Jews could survive only by standing as a proud, independent people — not by pleading for acceptance. History proved Betar right.
At first glance, one could treat Naumann as a figure locked in the past, but his story remains painfully relevant today. Across the Diaspora, Jewish communities are living through a renewed wave of open antisemitism not seen in generations. And how does a certain segment of world Jewry respond?
With fear. With appeasement. With approximately 33 percent of New York City’s Jews voting for Zohran Mamdani. They repeat the same delusions Naumann preached: that appeasement will earn respect, that silence will earn safety, that bowing one’s head will spare us.
We know where that path leads.
One of the most important lessons of the Holocaust — and indeed of all Jewish history — is that Jews need to fight back. This truth remains unchanged today. And just like in 1933, the Jews most desperate to blend in, the ones who insist “We’re not like those other Jews,” will end up being persecuted and targeted by those they try to appease.
This is the moment when we must remember the Zionist leader who founded Betar, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky believed that every Jewish person must stand tall, walk with pride, and never bow their head. Jabotinsky taught that Jewish dignity must never be surrendered, and that Jewish self-defense and a Jewish state is the only real guarantee of Jewish safety.
In the 1930s, Jabotinsky warned that Europe was becoming unsafe for Jews. Most of world Jewry dismissed his most dire warnings of death as hysteria.
Today, not a single one of the mainstream Jewish leaders of the Diaspora is talking about aliyah, the process of Jews immigrating to Israel.
Across the Diaspora, Jewish communities cling to institutions that no longer protect them, governments that no longer defend them, and illusions that no longer serve them. They dedicate themselves to endless dialogues with activists who openly seek their destruction. They send letters, petitions, pleas, and polite condemnations, all while their enemies march in the streets and terrorize their children on campus.
This is a Naumann mindset reborn. And just like in 1933, it is a deadly delusion.
World Jewry has failed to learn the most basic lessons of Jewish history. The lesson that no society, not even the most enlightened, guarantees Jewish safety. The lesson that Jewish security cannot depend on the goodwill of others.
And the only difference between then and now is the Jewish State.
At a time when New York, London, Toronto, Paris, Melbourne, and Johannesburg are becoming unsafe for Jews, Israel is thriving. Our cities — Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Raanana, Herzliya, Haifa — are full of innovation, culture, Jewish life, and Jewish safety. Hebrew is spoken without fear. Soldiers protect us. Our national institutions — flawed as they may be — defend us. The Diaspora is in deep trouble, in part because many Jewish leaders abroad, like Naumann in his time, are enemies of the Jewish people.
Ronn Torossian is an Israeli-American Jewish communal leader and entrepreneur who lives in Israel.