Haviv Rettig Gur has had it. So, has Michael Oren.
By "it", I mean they are fed up with uninformed, moral preening about Israel.
Needless to say, a lot of us have had it. I single out Haviv Rettig Gur, perhaps the most articulate voice in English explaining Israel to a Western audience, and Michael Oren, historian and former ambassador to the United States, precisely because they are normally so unflappable.
Recently, I wrote to Rettig Gur expressing admiration for his mellifluous voice and a measure of jealousy that I am not possessed of the same. He replied that there is nothing exceptional about his voice. What I admired was nothing more than his ability to remain calm and thoughtful no matter how contentious the subject. When I pressed him as to the source of that calm, he replied simply, "I'm a believer."
Oren has been a regular interviewee on TV for more than twenty years, and not all of those interviewers have been respectful and/or predisposed to his defenses of Israel. Yet I have never seen him anything but composed. His patience, however, is clearly wearing thin. A recent column was titled, "Defending Israel in an Age of Madness."
I should add that in neither of the two brief clips I viewed – 14 minutes for Rettig Gur and less than five for Oren – did either man cease to be highly articulate or effective. What surprised me was not the content but the edge in their voices.
For his part, Oren was responding to non-stop press and TV reports focusing on the suffering of the 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon forced to flee their homes due to Israel's determination to once and for all to evict Hezbollah from their perch on Israel's northern border and to establish a security zone along the Lebanese-Israel border. He noted that those news reports had consistently neglected to mention that Israel's north had been hit by over 200 Hezbollah rockets in preceding days.
And to go back a bit further in time, that 60-70,000 Israelis had to flee their homes in the North, when Hezbollah began firing rockets from its huge stockpiles, estimated to be as high as 200,000, the day following October 7. The choice facing Israel is thus stark: Either destroy Hezbollah and its stockpile of rockets and missiles, or cede a large section of a country no bigger than New Jersey.
For his part, Rettig Gur's podcast was in response to widespread requests from listeners to address a podcast by the New York Times' Ezra Klein, in which the latter interviewed two American professors on "Israel's One-State Reality." As the professors put it, in the heady post-Oslo days, following the handshake between Yasir Arafat and Yitzchak Rabin on the White House lawn, there was a feeling of a Palestinian state coming into existence. That no longer exists.
Rettig Gur's pronounced himself ready to speak to anyone who showed a basic understanding of the Palestinians and Israelis, and why they think as they do about one another. That means, inter alia, taking the goals and desires of real Palestinians seriously, and not just viewing them through the prism of oppressed brown people, without any agency.
If one wants to know why so few Israelis any longer harbor hopes for a two-state solution, with the Palestinians in control of a large part of the West Bank, he began, consider the fact that if elections were held in areas under Palestinian Authority governance today Hamas would win overwhelmingly. Support for the Palestinian Authority is in the single digits today.
And that is not because the Palestinian Authority is corrupt; Hamas is no less corrupt. Its senior officials live in villas on the Gaza coast, or, until recently, in luxury accommodations in Qatar. Rather, the Palestinian Authority is despised because it is viewed as insufficiently committed to killing Israelis, in as brutal a fashion as possible. And that is true even though the PA continues its "pay-for-slay" policy of providing generous pensions to family members of terrorists who succeed in killing Israeli citizens – the more killed the higher the stipend.
Hamas, for its part, is a product of Muslim Brotherhood ideology, which is virulently anti-Semitic and rejects a Jewish presence in any part of the Land of Israel. A Hamas-controlled Palestinian state overlooking an Israel nine miles wide at its narrowest point, from a land area sixteen times larger than that controlled by Hamas in Gaza, is simply not a reality with which even the Israeli left is willing to live.
Rettig Gur points out that he has recently published sharp criticism of the growing violence on the settler movement in conservative media spaces. But nonetheless the ideas of those extremists have little or nothing to do with why almost all Israelis have come to believe that there is no peace partner. Without knowing Palestinian political culture, Haviv argues, it is simply impossible to understand Israeli attitudes.
That political culture is precisely what Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz, two enthusiastic early supporters of the Oslo process, attempt to lay out in The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of Palestinians Dreams Has Obstructed the Path to Peach, as they investigate why Yasir Arafat walked away from the 2000 Camp David negotiations, without so much as a counteroffer, and Mahmoud Abbas rejected out of hand an even more generous offer from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008.
The reason, they conclude, is that the Palestinians have never reconciled themselves to Jewish sovereignty in any part of the Holy Land, since long before the creation of the modern state of Israel. That rejection is captured visually in the depiction of the entirety of Israel in black and marked as Palestine in UNRWA textbooks (see "No Right of Return," Mishpacha, January 22, 2026).
Rettig Gur began his podcast by noting that the phrase chanted at all anti-Israel gatherings, "From the River to the Free, Palestine Will be Free," is really, "Palestine will be Arab," in Arabic. Without an acceptance of Jewish sovereignty in some part of Eretz Yisrael, all talk of a two-state solution is blather.
RETTIG GUR PRONOUNCED himself even more "flummoxed" by Klein and his academic interviewees discussion of Israel's entry into southern Lebanon without context, as if Israel had suddenly developed a deep desire to control Tyre. No mention of the thousands of rockets fired at Israel since October 7, or of the tens of thousands fired over the past forty years, or of Hezbollah's massive stockpiles of missiles and rockets to be deployed whenever Iran gives it the word.
Israelis' ideal would be to be to live in peace in Lebanon and to be able to go skiing there. And failing that, to simply never hear of Lebanon again. Thus far Israel has succeeded in pushing Hezbollah back from the border so that its operatives can no longer look out their windows and fire RPGs into Israeli homes and at farmers working in the fields. Doing so necessitated pushing the civilian population away from the border as well, for their own good, so that they will not be in the line of fire.
Before pronouncing on the morality of Israel, says Rettig Gur, the New York literati should first learn a little something about the doctrine of muquwama that animates Iran and its Hezbollah and Hamas proxies, and which makes it necessary not to just defeat them but to completely remove their capabilities to kill Israelis. Muquwama is an ethos of mass martyrdom, as Rettig Gur explained in a very long podcast, to which he refers Klein. (See "A Long Way from Over," Mishpacha, March 3, 2026)
It begins with "a sustained, never-ending campaign of violence accompanied by a willingness to absorb catastrophic levels of damage." Muquwama is the sacralization of sacrifice as a means of obtaining divine favor and thereby allowing the pious weak to overcome the arrogant strong. In this view, "damage inflicted on the resistance is validation, and destruction is not defeat, but devotion." It is Hezbollah, not Israel, which is "committed to the destruction of Lebanon on the altar of the destruction of Israel, for the greater glory of Islam," Rettig Gur explains.
LET'S SEE if we can break down precisely why almost all Israelis, for whom Rettig Gur and Oren speak, are fed up with the ahistorical focus on Palestinian suffering, and the moral condemnations of Israel that follow. First, is the failure to ask what role the Palestinians have played in their own suffering. Life in Gaza is miserable today. But it did not have to be that way. More international humanitarian aid has been showered on Gaza than any area of the world since 2005. But that aid was either siphoned off by the Hamas leadership for its own villas or dedicated to the building of a vast tunnel network to be used for attacking Israel.
That tunnel network was built to strike at Israel. But it had a second purpose as well: to anathematize Israel in the eyes of the world. Those tunnels were deliberately dug under civilian infrastructure, with thousands of shafts descending from civilian buildings into the tunnels. Yahye Sinwar knew that to uproot Hamas from its tunnels, Israel would need to destroy vast numbers of civilian structures, and that there would inevitably be civilian casualties. He viewed those casualties as assets in the propaganda war against Israel. Not by accident did Hamas never build a single underground shelter for Hamas's civilian population.
Second, there is the question that is never asked by those morally condemning Israel: What should Israel have done after October 7? Could it live with Hamas on its southern border or Hezbollah on its northern border, at the cost of evacuating more than 100,000 Israelis from their homes? Obviously not.
Could Israel have uprooted Hamas or Hezbollah (which used most homes in southern Lebanon to house its missiles), while inflicting less damage of civilian populations? No one has suggested how that could have been achieved. In fact, in Gaza, Israel achieved lower ratios of civilian to military casualties than in any previous comparable warfare, even though Hamas's tunnel network posed an unprecedented military challenge.
Finally, far from Israel seeking the immiseration of the Palestinian population. Quite the opposite is the case. From 1967 to 1992, when Israel exclusively administered the West Bank, Palestinian infant mortality dropped 75 percent, while life expectancy increased fifty percent. The West Bank economy was the fourth fastest growing in the world, and Israel built seven universities where none had existed. Upon its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel left behind highly lucrative hothouses – which the Palestinians stripped and destroyed the day after withdrawal.
Meanwhile the Arab population of Israel has a standard of living many multiples of those of its Arab neighbors, apart from the oil rich Gulf states, and enjoys political rights and freedoms unimaginable elsewhere in the Arab world.
Is in any wonder, then, that Israeli Jews have grown increasingly embittered by the moralizing at their expense and sickened by the enormous academic complex devoted to somehow proving that Israel is the worst, most dangerous country in the world. And apparently with great success.
A recent Echelon Insights survey of over one thousand voters, found that young Democrats feel more negatively about Israel than Iran or China. Iran? You mean the country where we have just witnessed the regime mow down over 30,000 unarmed protestors and throw thousands more into jail to be tortured. China? You mean the country which has been credibly charged with harvesting organs from live members of unapproved religious groups and which holds over a million Moslem Uyghurs in camps.
Is it any wonder that Israeli Jews have chosen to ignore the condemnations of Israel? We have not forgotten that within days of October 7, before Israel had even responded, that tens of thousands gathered to celebrate on campuses and in city centers around the world the death and rape of over one thousand Israeli Jews.
And that makes us angry.