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The historian who uncovered the ADL’s secret plot against the far-right John Birch Society
(JTA) — A historian leafing through files in an archive discovered how a Jewish organization helped bring down an influential far-right extremist movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s by going undercover and acting as self-appointed spies.
The discovery of the Anti-Defamation League’s covert operation targeting the John Birch Society is the basis of a chapter in a new book by political historian Matthew Dallek of George Washington University. Published in March, “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right” is Dallek’s fourth book. It examines the roots of today’s emboldened conservative movement in the United States.
“Birchers” is a history of a group that at its height numbered as many as 100,000 members and “mobilized a loyal army of activists” in a campaign against what it saw as a vast communist conspiracy. He also examines how the Birchers’ mission to defend Christianity and capitalism morphed into a radical anti-civil rights agenda that groups like the ADL saw as an existential threat.
Dallek, who grew up in a Reform Jewish household in Los Angeles, recently sat with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to discuss the rise of the Birchers, how the ADL infiltrated their ranks and whether such tactics are justified in the name of fighting extremism.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
JTA: Before we get into the Jewish aspect of the book, meaning the chapter on the Anti-Defamation League’s relationship with the John Birch Society, let’s take a step back. Who are so-called Birchers? Why do they matter?
Mathew Dallek: The John Birch Society was a household name in the 1960s, becoming the emblem of far-right extremism. It didn’t have huge numbers, but it did penetrate the culture and the national consciousness. Its leader, Robert Welch, had argued at one point that President Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of a communist conspiracy taking over the United States. Welch formed the John Birch Society to educate the American people about the nature of the communist threat.
In its heyday, the group had about 60,000 to 100,000 members, organized into small chapters. They sent out literature trying to give members roadmaps or ideas for what they could do. They believed a mass education of the public was needed because traditional two-party politics was not going to be very effective at exposing the communist threat. They would form front groups such as Impeach Earl Warren [the Supreme Court’s chief justice] or Support Your Local Police. They tried to ban certain books that they viewed as socialistic from being used in schools. Some Birchers ran for school board seats and protested at libraries.
Critics feared that the Birchers were a growing fascist or authoritarian group and that if they were not sidelined politically and culturally then the country could be overrun. The Nation magazine wrote that Birchers essentially had given their followers an invitation to engage in civil war, guerrilla-style. Those fears sparked a big debate about democracy. How does one sustain democracy and, at the height of the Cold War and in the shadow of World War II, Nazi fascist Germany, and the Holocaust?
As you were researching, you came across a trove of historical internal documents from the ADL in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Why did you devote a chapter to what you found in those documents? What did those files reveal to you about the John Birch Society?
These papers are a goldmine. They’re this incredible and often detailed window into the far-right and, in particular, the John Birch Society. They show the ADL had an extensive, multi-dimensional counterintelligence operation that they were running against the Birch Society.
People knew at the time that the ADL was attending events where Birchers were speaking. But the ADL also had undercover agents with code names, who were able to infiltrate the society’s headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, and various chapter officers. They dug up financial and employment information about individual Birchers. And they not only used the material for their own newsletters and press releases, but they also fed information to the media.
Another layer is about a debate that’s been going on: Were the Birchers racist and antisemitic? The Birch Society always insisted that they did not tolerate white supremacy and didn’t want any KKK members. They said they accepted people of all faiths and races. And it’s true that they did have a handful of Jewish and Black members.
But what the ADL found was that a lot of hate was bubbling up from the grassroots and also leaking out from the top. The ADL was able to document this in a systematic way.
Some critics of the ADL today say the organization has strayed from its mission by focusing not just on antisemitism but on a wider array of causes. But from reading your work, it sounds like the ADL even then took an expansive view of its role, examining not just direct attacks on Jews but also how the political environment can jeopardize Jews. Am I getting that right, and why did the ADL devote so many resources to a group like the John Birch Society?
So, a few things: It’s the late ’50s and ’60s, and a civil rights coalition is emerging. Benjamin Epstein, the national director of the ADL, was friendly with Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court justice, and Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy went to an ADL event and praised the ADL for speaking out very strongly in defense of democracy and pushing for the equal treatment of all Americans.
Isadore Zack, who helped lead the spy operation, at one point wrote to his colleagues that it was only in a democracy that the Jewish community has been allowed to flourish and so, if you want to defend Jewish Americans, you also have to defend democracy.
There certainly were other threats at the time, but the Birch Society was seen by liberal critics, including the ADL, as a very secretive group that promoted conspiracy theories about communists who often became conflated with Jews.
Would you consider the ADL successful in its campaign against the Birchers?
They were successful. They used surreptitious and in some cases underhanded means to expose the antisemitism and the racism and also interest in violence or the violent rhetoric of the Birch Society in the 1960s.
The ADL was at the tip of the spear of a liberal coalition that included the White House, sometimes the Department of Justice, depending on the issue, the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, labor unions, the union-backed Group Research Inc., which was tracking the far-right as well. The ADL was one of the most, if not the most effective at constraining and discrediting the society.
Clearly, however, the Birchers’ ideas never died. They lived on and made a comeback.
It’s somewhat ironic that you reveal the existence of this spying apparatus devoted to targeting an extremist and antisemitic group in the 1960s given the infamy the ADL would earn in a later era, the 1990s, for allegations that they colluded with police agencies in San Francisco to spy on and harass political activists. They eventually settled with the Arab American, Black and American Indian groups that brought a federal civil suit. I know you didn’t study these revelations, which are outside the scope of your book, but could you perhaps reflect on why undercover tactics were seen as necessary or justified?
It’s important to remember that in the mid-20th century, law enforcement in the United States was often led by antisemites or people who were much more concerned with alleged internal communist threats — the threat from the left.
From the ADL’s vantage point, one could not rely on the government entities that were by law and by design supposed to protect Jewish Americans. There was a sense that this work had to be done, at least in part, outside of the parameters of the government.
When I first discovered the ADL’s spying, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But I realized they weren’t just spying to spy, they exposed a lot of scary things, with echoes in our own times — like easy access to firearms, a hatred of the government, a denigration and defamation of minority groups. And this was all happening in the shadow of the Holocaust and World War II. I became much more sympathetic; they were very effective, and they had a vision of equality of treatment for all Americans.
It’s obviously controversial. I try not to shy away from it. But they had a lot of good reasons to fight back right and to fight back in this nonviolent way.
That last thought brings to mind another, right-wing Jewish group that existed in this era of taking things into our own hands, that did use violence, explosives even.
You mean the Jewish Defense League, led by Meir Kahane.
Yes, exactly.
He was a Bircher. Toward the end of my book, I mention that he was a member for a while, under his alias Michael King.
Antisemitism is on the rise, and lots of initiatives are being organized to address it, both by existing groups like the ADL and new ones. The ADL’s budget has almost doubled over the past seven years. I am seeing Jews talk of fighting back and taking things into their own hands. And we are in this politically precarious movement in American history, all of which suggests parallels to the era you examined. What kind of wisdom can we glean from examining the ADL’s secret and public fight against the John Birch Society as people who care about the issues affecting Jews today?
A lot of liberals in the 1960s and a lot of the leadership at the ADL grasped the axiom that things can always get worse.
In 2015-2016, you’ll recall, there was Trump’s demonization of Mexican immigrants, and the so-called “alt-right” around him and his campaign and expressions of vitriol by people like Steve Bannon.
There was an assumption among a lot of Americans and among a lot of Jewish Americans that the fringe right — the antisemites, the explicit racists, the white supremacists — that there’s not a majority for them and they can never achieve power.
If you go back and you look at Trump’s closing 2016 campaign ad, it’s textbook antisemitism. He flashes on screen these wealthy Jewish international bankers, and he argues that basically, there’s a conspiracy of these global elites who are stealing the wealth of honest Americans. There’s also 2017, the white supremacists in Charlottesville, who said “Jews will not replace us” and Trump saying there are fine people on both sides.
The sense that democracy is incredibly fragile is not just a theory or a concept: It’s an actuality, the sense as well, that the United States has only been a multiracial democracy for not very long and a haven for Jews for not that long either.
The work that the ADL and the NAACP and other groups did to try to constrain and discredit as fringe and extremist still goes on today. It’s harder to do for all sorts of reasons today including social media and the loss of faith in institutions. But it still goes on. You see the importance of institutional guardrails including the Department of Justice that is prosecuting 1,000 Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
The last thing I’ll say is that one of the admirable things in the 1960s about the ADL and the liberal coalition it belonged to is that it built support for landmark legislation like the Immigration Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of ’65. And a coalition eventually fell apart, but it was powerful, reminding us why Jewish American groups should care about or focus on issues that don’t directly affect Jewish people.
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Why is JD Vance talking about the Antichrist?
JD Vance said he might be bringing about the End Times, adding that he would not be “shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us.”
Vance was speaking on the Christian YouTube show The Bryce Crawford Podcast about his memoir, Communion, which covers his conversion to Catholicism from Protestantism.
Numerous Catholics online reacted to his statements with confusion and frustration, saying that the ideas about the apocalypse Vance voiced are not central parts of Catholicism. While Catholicism does discuss the idea of the Second Coming, a time in which Christians believe Jesus will return to Earth, the Catholic Church Catechism — the Vatican’s official statements and teachings about the fundamentals of the religion — says that “we are already at ‘the last hour’” ever since Jesus died; the Antichrist is mentioned only briefly as a “a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God,” not as a specific person who will come to the world.
The Antichrist and Armageddon, however, take center stage in many Evangelical churches, where these concepts often drive other extremist ideas, such as labeling politicians the Antichrist — at one point during the Obama administration, a poll found that one in four Americans thought the president might be the Antichrist — as well as Christian Zionism, an attempt to get all Jews to return to Jerusalem to hasten the apocalypse, when many believe Jews will be sent to Hell.
As one snarky Catholic commenter put it, Vance’s apocalypse-heavy discussion of his Catholicism sounded like “three evangelicals in a trench coat.”
It also sounded a lot like Peter Thiel, the billionaire Palantir founder and Vance’s mentor, donor and former employer. Thiel has a famed obsession with the Antichrist; earlier this year, several Catholic institutions distanced themselves from a series of lectures Thiel gave in Rome on the topic. Vance cited Thiel as an influence on his conversion in an essay about why he chose Catholicism, despite the fact that Thiel is not Catholic.
Thiel’s thinking on the Antichrist is esoteric and rambling, but it borrows heavily from that of Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist who also wrote at length about the apocalypse. Schmitt, a lapsed Catholic, argued that a “satanic unification of the world” would be brought about by a globalist Antichrist, and supported Hitler because he believed that he would keep the world safely fragmented. Thiel’s own discussion of the Antichrist largely equates the figure with those fearful about climate change, AI and other ideas usually associated with progressive politics.
Vance, who grew up in an Evangelical Christian household in which his “Meemaw” read the bible daily and watched televangelist Billy Graham, has upset Catholics in the past, particularly when he implied that Pope Leo XIV’s theological interpretations were incorrect after the pope made a statement against the U.S. war with Iran.
“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said at a Turning Point USA event in April, responding to Pope Leo’s comments. “You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things that I try to do and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.”
In the Catholic Church, the pope’s word is infallible when it comes to official church teachings, and Vance’s boldness was offensive to many Catholics.
Vance’s version of Catholicism — one in which he pushes back against the head of the Church and brings in theological ideas foreign to most Catholics — is notable because it represents an increasingly visible ideological schism in the Church. On one side are Catholics committed to the Vatican, and who have been influenced by the liberalism of recent papal teachings. On the other is a growing movement of traditionalist Catholics, who are increasingly skeptical of the institution of the Church and its recent — and not so recent — theological changes, and are looking to other sources for inspiration.
Those changes have included Vatican II, a groundbreaking set of updates to Church teachings made in the 1960s that famously mandated increased tolerance and respect for other religions, particularly Judaism; the church repudiated antisemitism, Christian nationalism and coercive proselytizing. These were controversial moves, however, which led some Catholic movements to reject the document.
Voices suspicious of the Vatican’s more liberal ideas are getting bolder, and louder. The founder of the Society of Saint Pius X, Marcel Lefebvre, rejected Vatican II in large part based on its espousal of religious liberty; just this summer, the group was excommunicated after it ordained four bishops without the Vatican’s permission. In parallel, highly visible Catholic influencers are increasingly becoming the face of the Church for many young people, yet their theology is often only loosely based on the Vatican’s current teachings, and often reaches back to older, more antisemitic ideas the church has since disavowed.
Vance’s stated breaks with the Vatican and Catholic teaching are not overtly about religious tolerance or liberty. But they are a sign of the increasing acceptability of rejecting, or simply ignoring, the teachings of the Vatican and the pope — and, perhaps, of looking to other sources, like Thiel, for theology. The Catholic church is far from perfect, but the more acceptable it becomes to ignore the Vatican, the easier it becomes to declare almost anything — opposing progressive politics, endorsing Christian nationalism or spreading antisemitism — to be part of Catholicism, no matter what the pope says.
The post Why is JD Vance talking about the Antichrist? appeared first on The Forward.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love my Jewish curls
When I was a kid, my hair was a constant battle. By the time I was in elementary school, my hair went past my waist, and every time my parents decided it was time for a trim — which my dad performed — I resisted strenuously, and after just a few inches were removed, I often cried that it was too short. Every day, one of my parents fought through my hair’s snarls with an old, wooden-handled boar-bristle brush. At least every day until the handle snapped off mid-yank. Then we used a newer, but just-as-fine-bristled version.
But even after I started doing my own hair, and eventually cut it to a more reasonable length, the battle about presentability continued. My mom nagged me constantly, before every event, every dinner party and every time I left the house, to brush my hair. She carried around a purse-sized brush that folded up for her own mid-day hair-brushing needs, and for a while, I did the same. At some point in high school, I got a flat iron to better tame the frizz and messiness that I was constantly trying to brush out, and wound it into a tight, coiled bun while it was still soaking wet to let it dry ruthlessly contained. (This worked, but meant it took about 12 hours to dry.)
My mother treats her hair with the same frustration she had towards mine. She still regularly pulls out that purse brush and frowns at herself in a compact mirror as she pulls it through her hair. My entire life, she has complained that her hair is too big, too frizzy. She reminisced about her year clerking for a judge in Los Angeles, where there wasn’t so much humidity and her hair would finally stay flat.
I thought we both had straight hair that, frustratingly, never acted straight. Or, perhaps more accurately, I had internalized that it would be better if I had straight hair, so much better that the idea it might not be straight never even crossed my mind. This was the ‘90s and early 2000s, and there was an obvious ideal we were both striving for: the kind of straight, glossy hair in TV ads for shampoo. The hair of Jennifer Aniston in Friends. (I got “the Rachel” at one point. Unsurprisingly, it never looked quite right.)
But as I came to realize — in what, looking back, was an astonishingly slow process given the evidence at hand — my hair is not straight. It’s curly! Brushing it never tamed it or helped with frizz, because if you brush out curls, they simply grow larger and frizzier.
In retrospect, this shouldn’t have been so surprising. While there’s no one way to look Jewish and plenty of Jews don’t fit the stereotypes — I’m blonde! — curly hair is a common part of the profile, hence longstanding stereotypes about Jewfros and big, curly Jewish hair are there for a reason. Those negative stereotypes are part of why Jewish women have attempted for decades to fight their hair with keratin treatments or flat irons so that they could look more “American,” more professional, more groomed, more “normal.” Much in the same way that, for several generations, nose jobs have been de rigueur for many Jewish women.
Slowly, I started to realize that maybe my hair wasn’t actually straight, and would look better if I started trying to enhance my curls instead of working against them. I started getting compliments. In college, for her art major thesis project, one of my friends asked if she could draw my hair, sketching out each individual strand.
I wish that I’d figured my hair out earlier; it would have saved me some awkward phases and, more importantly, some resentment about why my hair never looked like it was “supposed” to. I don’t purport to have the same kind of hair trauma as Black girls, some of whom grew up getting burned by hot combs and chemical straightening treatments, or who have been forbidden from wearing their natural hair in schools or workplaces. Nevertheless, the underlying idea is the same: that curlier hair is not neutral. It’s messier or, as my mom put it when I called her to fact check this piece, “less polished.”
These ideas are nothing new; they’ve been passed down through the generations. My grandmother certainly always wanted to seem sophisticated, and she didn’t associate that aesthetic with Jewishness; though her mother spoke Yiddish, she exorcised it from her own vocabulary to such an extent that she used to joke that I knew more Yiddish than she did. She got rid of her Jewish nose, too, and got her hair professionally washed and blown out every week with such devotion that I have no idea what its natural state was. She passed the same ideas down to my mom, who still uses that flat iron I bought in high school.
Today, there’s a whole world of videos online of products and routines meant to deal with various types of curls. I get served videos about different types of curls I am pretty sure were invented in the last two years — “Irish curls” and “Appalachian curls” — and how to perfect the Curly Girl Method to define your exact pattern of waves or coils. Society seems to be more willing to embrace different hair textures (and, not unrelatedly, unique facial features like arched noses too).
These days, I find curly hair beautiful; if anything, I wish my curls were curlier. I use a curl serum. I scrunch my hair up to help my curls take shape instead of trying to stretch them down and flatten them. Now my hair is a mix of ringlets and waves, and my hair stylist always asks me if I want her to blow it out straight or style it curly and natural; I always choose the latter. I don’t even own a brush anymore — I just detangle my curls with my fingers.
Every time I see my mom, though, she still tells me to brush it.
The post How I learned to stop worrying and love my Jewish curls appeared first on The Forward.
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In upcoming Israeli election, Netanyahu is preparing to blame a loss on conspiracy
On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, retired Maj. Gen. Yair Golan woke to sirens and reports of something terrible happening in southern Israel. At around 8 a.m., as the scale of the Hamas invasion was becoming clear, the former deputy chief of staff told his wife he had to go back to the army, found his old military gear, got dressed and left home. He first drove to the Home Front Command headquarters where he grasped the dimensions of the catastrophe, obtained a weapon, vest and helmet, and continued south in his private car.
Eventually Golan began receiving the locations of young people hiding from Hamas gunmen around the Nova music festival and drove into the fields looking for them. Oz Davidian, the farmer who became one of the civilian heroes of Oct. 7, encountered Golan in a tiny Toyota Yaris that could not cross a ravine. Davidian helped him across in his truck; Golan covered him with his rifle, and together they went looking for three young people hiding from terrorist fire. Golan would ultimately rescue six survivors in three trips.
His actions became one of the day’s extraordinary stories of individual initiative amid the collapse of the Israeli state: a 61-year-old retired general – who currently heads the Democrats, a liberal opposition party dedicated to peace with the Arabs – put on his uniform, climbed into a Toyota and went looking for kids who needed saving. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on that dark Saturday, was not heard from until the evening.
Almost three years later, Sara Netanyahu has discovered something sinister in this story.
“When you’re a military man of such high rank,” the prime minister’s wife said in an interview Monday on the fiercely pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, “already early in the morning you were there, already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know, such as the prime minister?”
She followed this with a sarcastic question: “Who is the prime minister anyway to know that a war is breaking out? Why let him know?”
Asked directly about the increasingly popular theory that there had been “treason” from within Israel on Oct. 7, she left the possibility hanging, saying she wanted a genuine commission of inquiry to establish what happened.
It is the prime minister, of course, who has blocked an inquiry commission. It’s also Netanyahu who in the months preceding the attack refused to meet with the heads of the military, the Mossad and the Shin Bet, who were desperate to warn him that the uproar created by his authoritarian reforms was projecting weakness and inviting attack. Netanyahu is the author of the theory that there is value in Hamas ruling Gaza, since it undermines the West-Bank-based Palestinian Authority. It was his far-right political allies who were planning provocations against Palestinians in the West Bank on Oct. 7, causing the military to divert massive resources there, leaving the Gaza border catastrophically under-guarded.
With the Oct. 27 election fast approaching, Sara Netanyahu’s interview has become the talk of Israeli politics. In the strange calculus of the Netanyahu machine, it hardly matters that the claims make no sense – since there is no dispute about Golan’s aim that day: to fight Hamas and not assist it. There is a bizarre value in the very incoherence – the more confusion, somehow, the better (even if the cost is undermining public faith in the security establishment, in a country facing existential security threats).
Golan threatened to sue Netanyahu for 2.5 million shekels (about $800,000) for defamation and demanded an apology. Netanyahu responded with a demand that Golan apologize to her and threatened a million-shekel countersuit. Opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman, the former defense minister, congratulated Golan for fighting back and described people who spread such conspiracy theories as “psychopaths.”
The uproar reflects a common understanding of the insinuation: Sara Netanyahu was invoking a conspiratorial universe that has been expanding on the Israeli right since the massacre. According to this conspiracy, Oct. 7 represented something more sinister than a catastrophic intelligence and military failure. In this universe, somebody inside Israel betrayed the country.
The theory comes in many variations. Senior officers knew what was coming. The Shin Bet knew. The generals deliberately kept Netanyahu in the dark. Leaders of the anti-government protest movement were somehow involved. Elements of a hostile “deep state” wanted Hamas to humiliate Netanyahu and bring down his government. The genuine mysteries, warnings and failures preceding the massacre supply endless material from which insinuations can be fashioned, transforming the most devastating security failure in Israeli history into a story of deliberate betrayal by Netanyahu’s domestic enemies.
The betrayal theory has steadily traveled from social media and fringe broadcasters toward the political mainstream. A Reichman University survey previously found that almost a third of Israelis believed to some degree that elements within Israel assisted Hamas in order to harm Netanyahu. Likud Knesset member Tally Gotliv has accused security officials, protest leaders and other political enemies of varieties of treachery, while the prime minister’s son Yair has repeatedly promoted suspicions about the security establishment’s conduct surrounding the attack.
From conspiracy to campaign
This week brought the conspiracy theory directly into the election campaign. Channel 12 political correspondent Daphna Liel reported, citing a Likud source, that an intentional campaign is underway to promote Oct. 7 conspiracy theories in order to distance Netanyahu from responsibility for the massacre “at all costs.”
Golan himself described the same pattern after Sara Netanyahu’s interview, arguing that the remarks represented a planned effort in which Netanyahu’s political opponents are branded as traitors and conspiracy theories supply the evidence.
This fits neatly into Netanyahu’s fixation with avoiding the blame for Oct. 7 – and it comes amid a wider context: The Netanyahu political machine has spent years cultivating distrust of the police, prosecutors, judges, journalists, civil servants and military commanders who come into conflict with the prime minister. The Oct. 7 betrayal narrative folds the greatest catastrophe in Israeli history into this already familiar worldview.
The episode fits an election campaign already distinguished by extraordinary personal ugliness. Netanyahu has circulated an AI-generated video depicting his principal challenger, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, running toward a young man wearing a shirt bearing the words “Israeli unity,” only to run past him and embrace Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab Ra’am party. The young man in the commercial bore sufficient resemblance to Eisenkot’s son Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023, provoking outrage over what many Israelis saw as an exploitation of Eisenkot’s bereavement. The underlying message of the video was that Eisenkot’s willingness – very much felicitous in a country whose population is one-fifth Arab – to cooperate politically with Arab Israelis amounted to treason.
The same campaign has returned repeatedly to the proposition that Netanyahu’s opponents depend upon hostile or alien forces. A Likud billboard displayed New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani alongside the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Turkey beneath the slogan: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win.”
Former Netanyahu allies from the right increasingly describe a political culture in which ordinary democratic rivalry has been replaced by a language of enemies, traitors and conspirators amid an obsession to cling to power.
Naftali Bennett, another former leader of the Israeli right, has warned that the “poison machine” surrounding Netanyahu has grown sufficiently toxic to create the possibility of physical violence against political opponents.
Lieberman’s furious response to the Golan affair comes from the same place. The strategy presents an obvious electoral paradox. Netanyahu enters this campaign needing precisely the voters this rhetoric is likely to repel. Polls have repeatedly given the parties opposed to him a substantial advantage, with most surveys forecasting the broader anti-Netanyahu bloc above 70 of the Knesset’s 120 seats – a landslide by Israeli standards.
The route back to 61 – the number of seats Netanyahu needs to stay in power – therefore runs through Israelis outside Netanyahu’s committed base, with voters who in many cases are security-minded, suspicious of the Palestinians, uncomfortable with the traditional left and deeply critical of the military and intelligence leadership for the failures of Oct. 7.
Netanyahu’s campaign increasingly appears designed to intensify the worldview of the committed rather than soften it for the persuadable. Persuadable voters can readily believe that generals failed catastrophically, that intelligence officials succumbed to groupthink, that the protest movement behaved irresponsibly or that Netanyahu’s opponents have pursued him obsessively. A claim that Yair Golan’s rescue missions indicate advance knowledge of the Hamas attack asks them to enter a considerably stranger universe.
Netanyahu has spent years turning political conflict into an existential contest in which his supporters defend their democratic choice against hostile “elites” and institutions. The betrayal theory takes this to its logical destination by placing the catastrophe of Oct. 7 itself inside the conspiracy.
Striking similarities
Here the comparison with Donald Trump goes considerably deeper than the familiar spectacle of a populist leader attacking judges, prosecutors or unfavorable election results. In both the United States and Israel, something profound has happened to the traditional conservative relationship with the state. Institutions once revered because they embodied national continuity — the military, intelligence services, law enforcement, the courts and the permanent civil service — increasingly become suspect whenever they demonstrate that their loyalty runs to the country and its laws rather than to the political leader who temporarily governs it.
For generations, the right in both countries occupied almost the opposite position. American conservatives wrapped themselves in the FBI, the armed forces and the authority of the state, while Israeli conservatives placed enormous cultural weight on the IDF and the security services as guardians of the Jewish state. The populist transformation has turned this on its head, producing a peculiar new mutation in which loyalty to the state becomes subordinate to loyalty to a leader who claims to embody the state.
Thus, a general who has devoted his life to Israel but challenges Netanyahu can become the target of a sinister conspiracy theory vehiculated by the prime minister’s wife on a propaganda channel.
The Oct. 7 conspiracy theories represent an especially extreme version of this logic. Israel’s military and intelligence establishment can be accused of having tolerated or even facilitated the greatest massacre in the country’s history because such a theory shifts responsibility away from Netanyahu and toward the institutions whose independence has become a political problem for him. Once such a proposition enters ordinary political discourse, distrust of judges, civil servants and election administrators requires a comparatively modest leap of imagination.
The connection to the coming election follows directly from this inversion. A public taught that generals and intelligence chiefs were capable of concealing an impending invasion from the prime minister has already been asked to believe in a conspiracy vastly more elaborate than anything required to manipulate an election.
A public taught that judges, prosecutors, police, journalists, civil servants and opposition politicians have joined a campaign to overthrow its chosen leader has been supplied with an explanation for almost any future defeat. Victory can be presented as the triumph of the people over the establishment; defeat can be interpreted as further evidence of the establishment’s power.
Israel already entered this campaign amid extraordinary anxiety about the integrity of the coming election. Earlier this summer, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak publicly warned that Netanyahu might attempt to sabotage it. Supreme Court Justice Noam Solberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, has discussed the narrow legal circumstances under which a genuine national emergency could justify postponing a vote. Golan has warned about attempts to alter election rules and announced plans for extensive monitoring of the vote. Scenarios that would have sounded fantastical during most of Israel’s history have entered ordinary political discussion as Netanyahu approaches an election that threatens to end his extraordinarily long political career.
Oct. 7 vs. Oct. 27
Trump’s experience shows how this political logic can operate when an election finally produces the wrong answer. His campaign against the legitimacy of American elections began years before Jan. 6, 2021, through the repeated proposition that an election system capable of producing his defeat must itself be fraudulent. By the time the 2020 election arrived, millions of supporters already possessed an explanation for a Trump loss. The epistemological groundwork had been laid. Victory demonstrated the people’s will, while defeat demonstrated the conspiracy.
Netanyahu operates in a different political system and national culture, but his increasingly conspiratorial campaign is constructing a comparable political logic in Israel. The institutions capable of declaring that he has lost overlap increasingly with the institutions his supporters are being taught to distrust. The judges belong to the hostile legal establishment; the civil servants belong to the bureaucracy; the media cannot be believed; the security establishment might have betrayed the country on Oct. 7; political opponents may themselves have participated in the conspiracy. A movement immersed in this worldview enters Election Day with an explanation already available should the voters remove its leader.
The transformation of Yair Golan’s Oct. 7 story captures where these politics lead. On the worst morning in Israel’s history, thousands of citizens waited desperately for a state that had disappeared. Reservists, retired officers, farmers, police officers and ordinary people rushed south to fill the vacuum. Golan put on his uniform, found a weapon, climbed into his little Toyota and drove toward the massacre, eventually helping rescue young Israelis hiding from Hamas gunmen in the fields.
Three years later, the prime minister’s wife points to the speed with which he responded as grounds for suspicion, turning evidence of initiative into an insinuation of foreknowledge. The same political method turns military failure into treason, institutional independence into disloyalty and political opposition into subversion. Carried through an election campaign, the logic has one further destination: electoral defeat itself can become another suspicious event requiring explanation.
Much of the Israeli center recoiled from Sara Netanyahu’s interview because the innuendo seemed grotesque. The larger danger lies in the political culture being constructed around precisely such innuendo, one in which patriotism is measured by loyalty to a leader and every person or institution standing between Benjamin Netanyahu and continued power can be cast as part of the plot.
In this sense, Oct. 27 is emerging as a perhaps ever more fateful date than Oct. 7. If the Netanyahu machine is not decisively routed, it is not at all clear that the country can recover as a democracy where the discourse is sane.
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