There was a time when getting into a nightclub involved a small ritual. First, you bought a ticket. That gave you the right to stand in line, but it did not guarantee that you would be admitted… Of course, there was also a VIP line for those who did not have to wait with everyone else… And once inside, sometimes you received a stamp that entitled you to a drink.
Watching Congressman Ro Khanna describe his recent visit to Israel and the West Bank, I could not escape the impression that he wanted the entire package, and that he needed it quickly.
He wanted the ticket, the expedited line, the stamp, and the drink waiting once he was inside.
Khanna already possessed the ordinary ticket of admission into that growing political club: a record of increasingly categorical condemnation of Israel. But apparently that was no longer sufficient. He wanted to impress that crowd going through the VIP line as someone who could claim not only to have criticized Israel, but to have personally experienced its malice.
He wanted to be able to say: I did not merely read about Israeli oppression; I was there, threatened and detained, witnessing the IDF side with violent settlers against Americans.
That is the VIP stamp in today’s marketplace of moral legitimacy. Tell me how frustrated you are with the State of Israel, and I’ll tell you how moral you are!
There was, unquestionably, a real incident. Noar HaGvaot – the group commonly called the Hilltop Youth – blocked the road and prevented Khanna’s delegation from proceeding. Their conduct was lawless, dangerous and unacceptable. The State of Israel has too often failed to restrain violent groups of settlers and, at times, members of the present government have encouraged their sense that the law does not fully apply to them.
But I am not writing about the Hilltop Youth. I am writing about Khanna and what his performance represents.
Khanna did not simply describe an encounter with a lawless group. He constructed a much larger drama: that the IDF had effectively detained him, that Israeli soldiers had sided with those who stopped him, that his life had been placed in danger, and that the treatment of his delegation demonstrated Israel’s contempt even for American citizens and American power.
The IDF directly denied his account. The American Embassy also challenged central elements of the story he presented, including the suggestion that his visit had been properly coordinated. Khanna nevertheless spoke as though there was no factual dispute and no uncertainty whatsoever.
At moments, the way in which he presented the story was close to ridiculous. His indignation that people carrying American passports could be detained was particularly revealing. An American passport does not make someone immune from being stopped, questioned or delayed, especially when entering a volatile area without the standard security coordination.
But the ridiculousness of the argument ultimately did not matter.
Khanna’s discourse could well have been pre-drafted. It was sealed against facts or nuance and entirely subjected to the story he wanted to use to cultivate that crowd as his political constituency.
Everything his intended audience already believed about Israel had now been authenticated by his personal experience of victimhood. By then, the stamp had already been placed on his wrist. He gained admission—and with it, the warm applause of a crowd whose beliefs he had just confirmed.
When convenient righteousness dresses up as moral outrage, it has real consequences. It becomes a vehicle for harm, and makes it harder to confront what is actually wrong in Israel.
There are violent and lawless settlers. There are groups whose behavior has bordered on terrorism. The police, the army and the government have too often failed to hold them accountable. And there are ministers—Ben-Gvir most obviously—who have given them more than a wink and less than a warning.
These are real problems. They demand attention, accountability and political change.
But when every incident is turned into evidence of the essential malice of the State of Israel, those of us who should be fighting those problems are once again pushed into defending Israel against a false account.
Instead of talking about what the army did or how a democratic country can do better, we argue over whether the army is, in its essence, an instrument of evil.Instead of demanding that violent groups be prosecuted, we are forced to explain that they do not represent the settlers, the Israelis or Zionism itself. Instead of focusing on what must change, we are dragged into another argument over whether Israel deserves to exist.
The distortion consumes the conversation, and the wrongdoing survives it.
That is the first harm.
The second is that this rhetoric feeds the very people whose power depends on the conflict never being resolved.
The far left needs Israel to remain irredeemable. It needs Zionism to mean only colonialism, supremacy and oppression. If Israel can change, if Zionism contains more than one political vision, or if Israelis are allowed to be human beings rather than symbols, the entire structure becomes less useful.
The extreme right in Israel needs the opposite story, but for the same reason. It needs Israelis to believe that there is no point in changing, because the world is not responding to what Israel does. It is responding to the fact that Israel exists.
Each side supplies the other with evidence: the anti-Zionist left says Israel’s actions prove Zionism was always rotten; the Israeli extreme right answers that their hatred proves nothing will ever matter.
This dynamic is often illustrated as a horseshoe, though I think it is becoming: a pact between two extremes that need one another far more than either would admit.
Only a month ago, Candace Owens and Ana Kasparian sat together and demonstrated this perfectly. One comes from the conspiracist right, the other from an increasingly conspiratorial anti-establishment left. In both cases, convenient righteousness let them find an easy intimacy in their condemnation of Israel.
It was striking to watch how naturally they completed one another’s sentences. Not because they had discovered a serious path toward peace, or a way to protect Palestinians while preserving Israeli security, or even a coherent political program.
They had discovered each other through a shared object of contempt.
And that is the point. Their agreement did not move Israelis and Palestinians one inch closer to anything. It did, however, strengthen both of them. It gave each one a larger audience, a new ally and another opportunity to present hostility toward Israel as evidence of their moral courage. It is pure gain for them. The only question is who pays for it.
For many Jews, especially younger Jews or those whose relationship with Israel is limited, fragmented or mostly mediated through social media, the message is increasingly clear: moral legitimacy comes with conditions.
You may remain Jewish, but your Jewishness must behave.
You may talk about Jewish values, Jewish history and Jewish suffering, but your attachment to Jewish power must be approached with suspicion. You may mourn October 7, but not for too long. You may fear antisemitism, but only after proving that you understand how easily such fear can be “weaponized.” You may retain a relationship with Israel, but only if the relationship is sufficiently embarrassed, apologetic and publicly conditional.
The acceptable Jew is often the Jew who has first demonstrated distance from other Jews.
This is not always imposed consciously, and it is not always experienced as coercion. Often, it feels like the natural language of the room. People learn what receives affirmation and what produces discomfort. They notice which declarations are rewarded and which questions make them suspect. They understand that one kind of Jewish expression grants admission, while another requires explanation.
The marketplace of moral legitimacy reaches inside the Jewish community.
The test is no longer simply: What do you believe about Israel?
It becomes: What are you willing to say about Israel in order to prove what kind of person you are?
This is where the ordering of identity begins to matter. For many politically progressive Jews, progressiveness is becoming a stronger organizing identity than progressive Jewishness. The adjective begins to govern the noun. Jewish commitments are welcomed when they reinforce the political framework and become inconvenient when they complicate it.
The question is not whether Jews should be progressive. Jewish life has always contained radical arguments about dignity, power, responsibility and justice. The question is whether Jewish experience is permitted to challenge progressive assumptions—or whether Jewishness is valuable only when it serves conclusions already reached elsewhere.
A Jewish moral tradition that cannot question the politics of the moment is not functioning as a tradition. It has become decoration.
And the pressure does not come only from the left.
On the right, Jews are offered a different bargain. We are told that support for Israel requires silence about the Israeli government, that concern for Palestinian dignity is naïve, that restraint is weakness and that Jewish safety depends on aligning ourselves with people who may admire Israel while remaining deeply suspicious of Jews.
One side asks Jews to uproot their Zionism.
The other asks them to uproot their conscience.
This is how people become homeless.
They may still have a synagogue, a family, a political party and a place to vote. But they no longer have a language in which the different parts of themselves are allowed to remain together.
Some respond by retreating. They stop talking about Israel outside Jewish spaces, or stop talking about their doubts inside Jewish spaces. Others quietly abandon Zionism altogether, having only encountered it as a demand for obedience.
The marketplace of distorted moral legitimacy grows its trading price by blocking the currency of nuance, complexity and intersectionality. It tells one Jew: renounce your attachment to Israel if you want to remain accepted. It tells another: swallow your criticism of Israel if you want to remain loyal. It tells both that there is no room large enough for the whole of who they are.
That is why reclaiming Zionism matters.
Not because Zionism should be protected from criticism, and not because every Jew must hold the same relationship with Israel. Zionism must be reclaimed because Jewish collective life cannot be surrendered to its most illiberal defenders or its most hostile opponents.
Zionism cannot remain defined only by those who treat Jewish sovereignty as a license for permanent domination. Nor can it be defined by those who treat Jewish sovereignty as the original sin.
There must be another home.
A home in which Jewish self-determination and Palestinian dignity are not mutually exclusive.
A home in which criticizing an Israeli government is understood as participation rather than betrayal.
A home in which Jewish safety is not dismissed as paranoia, but also does not become an excuse for ignoring the safety of others.
A home in which Zionism can be liberal, progressive, conservative, religious, secular and still remain accountable to the basic question: What kind of Jewish society are we trying to build?
Zionism should not function as another ideological club with a guard at the door. It should be a home large enough to hold both our yearning for connection and the diversity of our convictions—a home that gives us the strength to break through the confining chains of fear and confirmation bias, and to think from within the full complexity of our values and identities. Not so that we may choose one half of ourselves over the other, but so that the whole of who we are can belong.