A European Jew who grew up loving Israel without question finds himself standing at a strange distance from it now, watching a government spend seventy years of diaspora trust as if it could never run out.
I am writing this from a desk in Europe, and I want to start by admitting something that frightens me more than anything happening in the news. I am afraid of falling out of love with Israel. Not out of hatred, not out of some ideological conversion, but out of sheer accumulated grief at watching a country I grew up loving become, year by year, a little less recognizable to me.
That sentence took me a long time to be able to write. I am writing it anyway because I think silence is its own kind of abandonment, and I refuse to abandon this country by simply going quiet on it.
Let me tell you what it looks like from here, because I do not think you can see it from there.
When Israelis tell me their society is self critical, that the newspapers are full of dissent, that the protests are enormous, that democracy is loud and alive, I believe every word of it and I still want to weep, because none of that is what I mean, and none of it resembles what self criticism looks like from the outside. What passes for the edge of acceptable critique inside Israel would barely register as a starting position in a normal European political conversation about occupation, annexation, or the conduct of a war. I watch Israeli friends congratulate themselves on how fiercely they argue with each other while remaining almost entirely unable to hear a single word from outside the room. There is a wall, and Israelis mostly do not know it is there, because from inside a wall just looks like the horizon. I stand on the other side of that wall, holding a lifetime of loyalty to a country I love and a newspaper full of things that country has done, and I promise you the distance between what Israelis believe is searching self examination and what the rest of the democratic world considers a basic accounting of facts has become vast.
This is not the world turning antisemitic, though some of it is that too. Most of it is simply Israel drifting out of the register that democracies use to speak to each other, and mistaking the resulting isolation for principle.
A country does not get to declare itself a full member of the family of nations and then act as though the family’s opinion is irrelevant the moment it becomes inconvenient. I did not grow up loving Israel because it promised to be the most powerful state in the neighborhood. I grew up loving the idea that Jews had finally built something answerable to a conscience, something that could survive scrutiny because it deserved to.
Watching that idea get treated as a naive relic by the very people meant to embody it is its own form of heartbreak.
Then there is the government now in power, and I want to be direct about this because diplomacy has stopped serving anyone. This coalition is, in my lifetime, the single worst thing that could have happened to Israelis in the aftermath of October 7th. A nation in trauma needed steadiness, moral clarity, leadership capable of channeling grief into something other than vengeance without end. Instead it got a government stitched together from personal survival and messianic fantasy, populated by ministers who treat Palestinian suffering as a rounding error and Jewish tradition as a weapon rather than an inheritance. I watch settler violence in the West Bank go functionally unpunished while the language used to describe it grows softer every year, and I watch the people responsible for that softness sit in the security cabinet. This is not strength. This is a country handing its most sacred emergency, the emergency of October 7th, to people less equipped to honor it than almost anyone else available. Israelis are living with the daily cost of that decision, and I grieve for them, genuinely, because they deserved so much better in their darkest hour than what they got.
But I need Israelis to understand something else, something I do not think gets said enough. This government is not only failing Israelis. It is toxic to us too, out here, in the diaspora. Every time a minister says something monstrous and it goes unanswered, I am the one standing at a dinner table trying to explain why that is not who we are, and finding the sentence harder to finish than it used to be. Every young Jew I know who is drifting away from Israel is not drifting toward antisemitism. They are drifting away from a government that makes love of Israel feel like an act of self betrayal. This government spends our inheritance too. It borrows against the goodwill diaspora communities spent seventy years building, brick by brick, funeral by funeral, and it spends that goodwill as if it were infinite. It is not infinite. I watch it disappear in real time, in the eyes of all of our children, who ask us questions about Israel we no longer have easy answers for.
I want to say something about force too, because this is where the trauma of October 7th and the instincts of this government have combined into something I find almost impossible to watch. There is a reflex now, in Israeli public life, to answer every threat, every setback, every unresolved fear, with more force, and then, when that does not resolve it, with more force again. I understand where the reflex comes from. I do not excuse it. A country can be entitled to defend itself and still be wrong to believe defense is the only vocabulary it has left. Not every enemy can be killed into submission. Not every insecurity can be flattened by another operation. Somewhere in the last years Israel seems to have lost its fluency in anything other than the language of force, and a country that only speaks one language eventually forgets how to listen in any other, including to itself.
And underneath everything sits the occupation, which by now is older than most of the soldiers enforcing it. I understand its origins. I understand the wars, the buses, the terror that made retreat feel impossible at different moments across five decades. I am not asking anyone to pretend that history away. But I no longer believe origin excuses duration. An occupation that has outlived the childhoods of the people living under it, and the people enforcing it, is no longer a temporary security measure by any honest definition of the word temporary. It has become a condition. It shapes the ethical instincts of eighteen year old soldiers before they have had the chance to form any others. It has taught an entire generation that control over another people’s daily life is simply the texture of being Israeli, unremarkable, background noise. This corrodes something, slowly, the way rust does, invisible until the structure gives. I believe it is corroding Israel from the inside, morally and practically, and I believe continuing to defer the reckoning does not delay the cost. It only compounds it.
None of this comes from someone who has stopped caring what happens to Israel. It comes from the opposite. Our fear for Israel’s survival is not manufactured, and I will not pretend otherwise to make this essay easier to accept. October 7th was real. Hezbollah is real. Iran is real. Nobody serious among Israel’s genuine friends is asking for naivety dressed up as peace, some fantasy where enemies dissolve because Israel wished hard enough. That is not what I am asking for and it is not what most of the diaspora is asking for either. We are asking for something much smaller and much harder to dismiss. A tone that does not require us to apologize for loving this country. A policy that leaves room, even a sliver, for a future that looks different from an endless present. A government that treats both Palestinian lives and diaspora trust as things with actual weight, rather than costs to be absorbed.
I do not know how this essay is supposed to end, because I do not know how the story ends either. What I know is that love which cannot survive honesty is not love, it is nostalgia, and I am not ready to let this become nostalgia. I am still here, still holding on, still arguing instead of walking away, because walking away would be so much easier and I have decided, for now, that I am not willing to make it easy. Enough of assuming our love is unconditional. Enough of spending trust as if it renews itself. It does not. We are not a bottomless reserve, and neither is Israel’s standing in the world it insists on rejoining only on its own terms. Something has to change radically, and it has to change soon, because I do not know how many more years like this one my love can absorb before it becomes something else.
Raphael Wahl, 42, is a system engineer, incorrigible bookworm, music and computer geek, and and an enthusiastic researcher of the quirky and profound. He is also an editor for Galut, a diasporic Medium publication. Among the many things he loves, he has a special fondness for spiritual and cultural Judaism. Rejecting zero-sum thinking, he writes with a passion for nuance, empathy, and the belief that understanding is key in complex realities.