For the past 50 years, in capacities both official and voluntary, before the American press, on campuses, and in a corpus of op-eds, I have spent most of my time defending the state of Israel. Though not always keen to justify its policies, I never lost faith in the justness of the Zionist project and the public’s openness to its case.
Challenging even in the quietest of times, standing up for Israel became especially daunting after October 7, when the victims of a verifiable genocide were baselessly accused of perpetrating one. Still, there remained my bedrock belief that most Americans, when presented with the facts, would come down on Israel’s side. But while the hostility in much of the media was nothing new, the open-minded audiences I usually addressed had changed. Conspiracy theories once considered fringe had become mainstream, and age-old antisemitic tropes had resurfaced in a not-so-subliminal presumption of Jewish wickedness. Inexorably, I came to understand that the cogent nation I once knew and appealed to, where a basic rationality could always be assumed, had fallen into lunacy.
