Jew

I oppose a Palestinian state. I support Jewish sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. If that sentence makes you reach for the block button, try reaching for a history book first.

I am a Jew.

This is not a confession. I have nothing to confess.

It is not an apology. Jews have apologized enough. It only encourages people.

It is not an application for inclusion. I have seen what passes for inclusion lately, and I would rather wait outside with the smokers, the heretics and the one professor who still believes facts are not violence.

I am a Jew.

That means I belong to a people expelled from more countries than most activists can locate on a map—and who are now lectured about displacement by people who discovered the Middle East shortly after downloading TikTok.

We are too white for the campus revolutionaries, too foreign for the white supremacists, too religious for the secular fanatics, too secular for the religious fanatics, too successful for the socialists and too communal for the capitalists.

We were condemned for being rootless cosmopolitans. Then we returned to our ancestral homeland and were condemned for having roots.

We were despised when we were stateless. Now we are despised because we have a state.

We were mocked for going like sheep to the slaughter. Now we are condemned because the sheep bought fighter jets.

Pick a conspiracy and stick with it. This constant ideological wardrobe change is exhausting.

I am a Jew, and yes, there is arrogance in that sentence.

Magnificent, unreasonable, civilization-annoying arrogance.

The arrogance of slaves who looked at Pharaoh—the most powerful man on earth—and said, “No.”

The arrogance of a desert tribe that told kings they were beneath the law, told the rich they owed something to the poor, told farmers the land itself required rest, and told humanity that even servants were entitled to a day off.

That was not meek spirituality.

That was a theological brick through the palace window.

We then had the astonishing chutzpah to record our own failures.

The Torah does not portray Jews as flawless superheroes. We lie. We panic. We complain about food. We build a golden calf approximately seventeen minutes after witnessing divine revelation. Moses loses his temper. David sins. Jonah runs away. Our kings fail, our priests fail, our judges fail, and our prophets spend most of their careers screaming at us.

If God wanted Jewish propaganda, the Bible was a terrible first draft.

We preserved our failures because Judaism was never founded upon the claim that Jews are perfect. It rests upon the more demanding claim that human beings are responsible.

Modern politics cannot process this. It requires one immaculate victim, one cartoon villain, twelve infographics and an idiot typing “educate yourself” beneath information he learned that morning.

So let me make my position offensively clear.

I oppose the creation of a Palestinian state.

Not reluctantly.

Not temporarily.

Not until the next “peace process.”

I oppose it categorically.

I support permanent Jewish sovereignty throughout the Land of Israel west of the Jordan River—from the river to the sea.

Yes, I said it.

You have heard that phrase screamed at Jews by masked mobs demanding the destruction of Israel. Apparently, it only becomes frightening when a Jew announces that he intends to remain alive within it.

I support Greater Israel.

I do not support a Palestinian army overlooking Tel Aviv.

I do not support a Palestinian air force.

I do not support another sovereign government capable of importing Iranian weapons, signing military agreements with Israel’s enemies and converting the hills above Israel’s population centers into one enormous rocket platform.

I do not support turning Judea and Samaria—the geographical and historical heartland of the Jewish people—into the twenty-third Arab state because European diplomats need another signing ceremony and somebody in Oslo has already ordered the miniature flags.

There will be no sovereign Palestine between Israel and Jordan.

There is already an Arab Palestinian state carved from the territory of the original British Mandate.

It is called Jordan.

You may have heard of it. It is the large country immediately to Israel’s east that everyone discussing the “tiny remaining territory for Palestinian self-determination” mysteriously forgets to print on the map.

Britain severed the territory east of the Jordan River from the Jewish national home and handed it to the Hashemite dynasty. That territory comprised most of Mandatory Palestine. It is now overwhelmingly Arab and home to millions of people of Palestinian origin.

Call it the Hashemite Kingdom if royal stationery makes you feel sophisticated.

Geography is not fooled by letterhead.

Demanding another Palestinian state west of the river is not a “two-state solution.” It is demanding that Palestinian Arab nationalism receive another state while the Jewish people surrender half of their only one.

That is not compromise.

That is partition with a public-relations department.

And before some morally constipated academic begins hyperventilating, saying Jordan is the Palestinian state is not a call to load civilians onto buses. It is not permission to attack Arab families, seize private property or treat peaceful neighbors as enemies.

An Arab who wants to raise his children, earn a living and live without violence is not my enemy.

A terrorist is.

A terrorist’s recruiter is.

A government that names streets after murderers is.

A political culture that pays salaries for slaughter is.

A propaganda machine that transforms every Jewish victim into “context” and every Jewish act of self-defense into a war crime is.

I refuse the idiotic binary that says I must either surrender my homeland or hate every Arab.

I will do neither.

Greater Israel means one sovereign power west of the Jordan: Israel.

It means Israeli military control, Israeli borders and Israeli security.

It means individual civil dignity without granting a collective national veto over Jewish existence.

It means freedom of religion and protection under law—not another hostile sovereignty established nine miles from Israel’s economic heart.

Local government can be negotiated. Administrative arrangements can be negotiated. Residency, citizenship and regional cooperation can be debated by serious people dealing with real conditions.

Jewish sovereignty is not negotiable.

Jewish survival is not a confidence-building measure.

And statehood is not a participation trophy handed out because the international community feels guilty.

A state is a military, diplomatic and territorial weapon. Handing one to a movement that has repeatedly glorified Jewish murder is not compassion. It is strategic malpractice with a peace dove printed on the cover.

The Palestinian national movement has been offered partition repeatedly.

Its leaders rejected partition because the objection was never merely to Israel’s borders.

The objection was to Israel.

The PLO was established in 1964—three years before Israel controlled Gaza, Judea or Samaria. Jordan then controlled Judea and Samaria. Egypt controlled Gaza.

What “occupation” was the PLO founded to eliminate?

Tel Aviv.

Haifa.

Ashkelon.

West Jerusalem.

Israel itself.

The Palestinian national movement was not born demanding a state alongside Israel. It was organized to replace Israel.

That is the inconvenient historical turd sitting in the middle of every elegant two-state-policy dinner party.

Then Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005.

No settlements. No permanent Israeli military presence. No Jewish civilians.

Gaza could have become a Mediterranean commercial center.

Instead, Hamas took over and converted withdrawal into proof that terrorism worked. Greenhouses were destroyed. Rockets multiplied. Tunnels were dug. Children were trained to inherit a war their leaders had no intention of ending.

Then came October 7.

That was the Palestinian-state pilot program.

It did not produce Singapore.

It produced a slaughterhouse.

And now the same geniuses who promised that leaving Gaza would bring peace insist that doing it again—this time above Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport—is the only imaginable path to peace.

Nothing says geopolitical wisdom like repeating a catastrophe on a much larger hilltop.

No.

You do not get to invade Jewish homes, murder families, kidnap babies, rape women, drag bodies through the streets and then have Western diplomats reward the political cause under whose banners it was done.

That is not peacemaking.

That is incentive compensation for barbarism.

Hamas is not a liberation movement. It is an Islamist death cult.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is not a human-rights organization with unfortunate branding.

The Popular Front is not progressive because it learned to speak Marxist.

The Palestinian Authority is not moderate because it wears suits while paying stipends connected to imprisoned terrorists and dead attackers.

And UNRWA is not solving a refugee crisis by turning refugee status into a hereditary political identity passed from great-grandparents to great-grandchildren.

This entire machinery survives by preserving the conflict it claims to alleviate.

It teaches the world that every refugee population must eventually resettle—except Palestinians, who must remain refugees until Israel disappears.

It teaches that millions of Jews expelled or driven from Arab and Muslim countries were absorbed and rebuilt their lives, while Palestinians must be kept in permanent historical suspension as weapons against Jewish sovereignty.

It teaches that Jewish refugees are history, but Palestinian refugees are foreign policy.

Bullshit.

I will not pretend this is about a tiny Palestinian state peacefully tending olive trees beside Israel.

A genuinely peaceful Palestinian polity could have been discussed decades ago. What developed instead was an international movement whose sacred vocabulary includes “resistance,” “return” and “liberation”—terms routinely understood to mean the elimination of Jewish sovereignty.

Ask a campus protester whether Tel Aviv belongs to Israel.

Watch the software crash.

The demand for Palestinian statehood is sold to gullible Westerners as a border dispute. Yet the maps at rallies erase Israel completely. The chants do not demand “two states for two peoples.” The keys displayed at demonstrations are not keys to imaginary houses in Ramallah. They symbolize Jaffa, Haifa, Ashkelon and Jerusalem.

They do not want a Palestinian state beside Israel.

They want a Palestinian state instead of Israel.

I believe them.

That apparently makes me an extremist.

Fine.

After thousands of years of Jewish history, I have developed the radical habit of believing people when they announce their intention to kill me.

Israel exists because Jews finally stopped allowing foreign diplomats to explain why the latest threat should not be taken literally.

The world adores dead Jews.

Dead Jews are wonderfully cooperative. They do not build homes. They do not patrol borders. They do not vote for inconvenient governments. They do not interrupt university seminars by producing historical evidence.

Dead Jews can be mourned without being respected.

Auschwitz is safe for polite society because Auschwitz asks nothing of anyone except a sad face and perhaps a wreath.

Israel asks something much harder.

Israel asks whether you still love Jews when they refuse to enter the cattle car.

There is no moral achievement in loving powerless Jews.

The test begins when the Jew survives.

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

Or, to use the fashionable vocabulary, Zionism is an indigenous decolonization movement that everyone supports in theory until the indigenous people are Jews, the ancestral language is Hebrew and the decolonization succeeds.

Apparently, indigeneity expires.

I would love to see the policy.

After how many centuries of forced exile does a people lose its homeland? Five hundred years? One thousand? Does the countdown continue during pogroms? Do language, archaeology, prayer, literature and uninterrupted physical presence count?

Please publish the official regulations before the next Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

For two thousand years, Jews prayed facing Jerusalem.

We mourned Jerusalem at weddings. We remembered it after meals. We ended Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.” We buried our dead with soil from the Land of Israel.

Entire empires invaded, renamed, occupied, taxed and divided our country. Those empires collapsed. We kept saying the same names.

Jerusalem.

Hebron.

Bethlehem.

Shiloh.

Judea.

Yes, Judea—the place from which the word Jew comes.

That is terribly inconvenient for people who believe Jews materialized in the Middle East in 1948 after being fired from a Polish real-estate agency.

I live in Judea.

You may call it the West Bank, as though a brief Jordanian occupation possessed the magical authority to erase three thousand years of Jewish geography.

I call it the land where Abraham walked, David fled, prophets thundered and Jewish children now miss the school bus.

History here is not preserved behind museum glass.

It is stuck in traffic.

I support Jews living in Judea for the same reason I support Jews living in Jerusalem: it is our homeland.

Calling a Jew a “settler” in Judea is like calling an Englishman a settler in England and then expecting applause for your anti-colonial sophistication.

That does not mean Jews are perfect.

We are not.

Israel has politicians who could turn manna from heaven into a procurement scandal. Our parliament occasionally resembles a family WhatsApp group after somebody mentions inheritance. Israeli bureaucracy can transform a one-page form into a multigenerational biblical ordeal.

The secular Israeli says he does not believe in God, then shouts “Baruch Hashem” when he finds parking.

The religious Zionist arrives carrying a rifle, a volume of Talmud and forty-seven unsolicited opinions about the government.

The American Jewish progressive explains Israel from a brunch table in Manhattan.

The Israeli taxi driver explains America, Iran, military strategy, central banking and your own marriage before the next traffic light.

And I, an oleh living in Efrat, have become an expert on the entire Middle East after mastering eleven Hebrew verbs and discovering that Israeli customer service was designed to test whether redemption can survive being placed on hold.

We are impossible.

Put three Jews in a room and you will get four opinions, five political parties, six dietary restrictions and one furious disagreement about a synagogue none of them attends.

We survived Babylon, Rome, crusades, inquisitions, pogroms and genocide, yet we remain vulnerable to one synagogue member moving another synagogue member’s chair.

The miracle is not only that Jews survived our enemies.

It is that we survived one another.

But our internal chaos does not invalidate our national rights.

Israel does not need to be perfect to exist.

No other country is required to demonstrate moral perfection before being permitted another sunrise.

Nobody responds to French misconduct by demanding the abolition of France. Nobody places Spain on existential probation. Nobody proposes returning the United States to Britain whenever Congress embarrasses itself.

Only Israel is treated as a temporary political experiment whose license can be revoked by the international community.

Criticize Israel.

Israelis do it before breakfast, during breakfast and while blocking the road after breakfast.

Criticize ministers. Debate laws. Challenge budgets. Argue about courts, settlements and military tactics.

That is democracy.

But if your proposed remedy for Israel’s imperfections is the abolition or mutilation of Israel—and only Israel—your problem is not policy.

Your problem is Jewish power.

The far right hates Jews for being foreign.

The far left hates Jews for being indigenous.

One accuses us of secretly controlling countries. The other demands that we surrender ours.

One wants Jews back in exile. The other wants us permanently defined by it.

Both become strangely emotional when Jews decline the invitation.

Meanwhile, the United Nations can locate Israel with supernatural speed.

Iran hangs dissidents. Syria becomes a cemetery. China erases cultures. Women are treated as furniture across half the planet.

But somewhere in Geneva, an intern is preparing Resolution 94,372 concerning a Jewish balcony in Jerusalem.

That is not international law.

It is obsession wearing a lanyard.

I will not participate.

I will not apologize for Jewish power.

I will not apologize for Jewish soldiers protecting Jewish grandmothers.

I will not apologize for Jewish farmers planting vineyards in Judea.

I will not apologize for Hebrew being spoken by children in Jerusalem.

I will not apologize for a Jewish state rescuing Jews.

That is what a Jewish state is for.

I am a Jew, which means I remember.

Memory is our most dangerous weapon.

We remember Egypt when every empire expects its slaves to forget. We remember Jerusalem when conquerors rename it. We remember Spain, Kishinev, Hebron, Baghdad, Auschwitz and October 7.

We remember who sheltered us.

We remember who betrayed us.

We remember what happened every time someone promised that Jewish surrender would produce Jewish safety.

Antisemitism survives by changing costumes. It can wear a cross, a swastika, a keffiyeh, a suit, a lab coat or a faculty badge. Its vocabulary changes. Its appetite does not.

The Jew is accused of whatever a society fears most.

Capitalist and communist.

Tribal and cosmopolitan.

Weak and omnipotent.

Inferior and secretly superior.

Cowardly when defenseless. Bloodthirsty when armed.

Antisemitism is not a coherent argument.

It is a conspiracy theory with a costume department.

I am finished pretending incoherence deserves respectful silence.

I am a Jew.

I support Greater Israel.

I oppose a Palestinian state west of Jordan.

Jordan is the Arab Palestinian state. Israel is the Jewish state.

No amount of diplomatic theater, academic jargon or synchronized campus screaming will make me exchange the security of Jewish children for another failed experiment in Palestinian statehood.

Block me.

Unsubscribe.

Call me an extremist, a supremacist, a colonialist, a fascist and whatever other word you learned without understanding this week.

I have been insulted by people far more intelligent than you.

I am not asking permission to exist.

I am not auditioning for your empathy.

I am not submitting my indigenous identity to a committee chaired by people who discovered colonialism last semester.

I carry a covenant older than Christianity, Islam, Europe and every flag currently flapping outside the United Nations.

I belong to a people who returned to the language, land and capital engraved into our prayers while sophisticated people explained that history could not run backward.

They were right.

We did not run backward.

We came home.

We came home argumentative, traumatized, brilliant, neurotic, armed and approximately six minutes late.

We came home with Torah scrolls, startup companies, family recipes, terrible drivers, magnificent children and enough political parties to frighten a mathematician.

We came home because exile was never our identity.

Exile was something done to us.

So yes, I am arrogant.

I am arrogant enough to believe a Jew does not need to die to deserve compassion.

Arrogant enough to believe power can be moral.

Arrogant enough to believe memory can be revolutionary.

Arrogant enough to believe Jewish children should inherit more than memorial candles.

They should inherit mornings in Jerusalem.

They should inherit vineyards in Judea.

They should inherit Hebrew jokes, Jewish arguments, Jewish weddings and the exquisite luxury of being ordinary.

They should inherit a country stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, strong enough that nobody ever again gets to decide whether Jews are permitted to live.

I am a Jew.

I am a Zionist.

I support Greater Israel.

I oppose the creation of a Palestinian state.

I do not give a damn whether that ruins your carefully curated opinion of me.

If these words comfort you, stand beside me.

If they confuse you, open a history book.

If they enrage you, excellent. Perhaps the heat will restart whatever portion of your brain surrendered to slogans.

And if none of that helps, you are entirely free to block me, denounce me and go straight to hell.

We will still be here when you arrive.