No, I Don't Hate Israel, I Hate What Their Government Is Doing

[July 2026]

One of the many reasons why I stay off Reddit is because of the subreddit r/jewish. It is supposed to be a community space, but it operates like an echo chamber on steroids. Offer even the mildest criticism of Israeli policy and you get labeled a kapo, a traitor, or a fake Jew. Those of us who are converts and critical of Israel are called "fake converts" and accused of converting just so we can be "as a Jew" pick-mes. I honestly think half the place is hasbara bots at this point. But the bots are not the whole problem. Both online and in meatspace, a lot of American Jews really are extremely sensitive to any critique of Israel. They hear it as antisemitism, full stop. That reflex is understandable after centuries of persecution, but it shuts down honest conversation and it does the Jewish people no favors.

Yes, I have spent a lot of time here calling out the occupation, the settlements, and the horrifying body count in Gaza. Yes, I am a convert. No, I did not convert so I could make "as a Jew" statements. Let me be as clear as I can: I do not hate Israel. I hate what their government is doing. There is a difference, and it is a fucking big one.

As I keep saying, I call myself a post-Zionist. That label fits better than anything else. I share some ground with anti-Zionists. Yes, Israel currently functions as an apartheid state. The separate roads, the checkpoints, the different legal systems for Jews and Palestinians in the occupied territories make that plain. And the response to the October 7th attacks has been disproportionate to the point that it meets every serious criterion for genocide: mass killing of civilians, destruction of infrastructure, forced displacement, and statements from top officials that sound like they are quoting old scripts about erasing a people. Dead kids are dead kids. Hospitals turned to rubble are hospitals turned to rubble. You do not get to wave it away because Hamas is monstrous too. Both things can be true and both deserve condemnation.

At the same time, my issue is not with Israeli Jews as people. I am not against the existence of the state of Israel. I do not want it dismantled or wiped off the map. I am agnostic about whether a one-state solution or a two-state solution offers the best shot at long-term peace. If it is one state, I am thinking of something closer to what A Land for All proposes: equal rights, shared land, mutual recognition, an end to supremacy on either side. Not some fantasy of Jews vanishing or being subjugated.

All of this is not criticism from someone who wants Israel gone. It is criticism from someone who wants Israel to be better.

The reason I hammer on this so hard is simple. I am a Jew. This is family. Israeli Jews are part of the larger Jewish people, bound by Ahavas Yisrael, that deep love and solidarity that has kept us going through every exile and pogrom. Watching your own family make terrible choices over and over again hurts in a special way. You see the potential. You see the brains, the resilience, the culture that produced everything from Maimonides to Einstein to the kibbutz movement to some of the best comedy on earth. And then you watch the government keep doubling down on a path that leads to more death, more isolation, and more pain for everyone involved.

It is an endless cycle: the Israeli government commits war crimes. Those crimes get broadcast around the world, often with extra antisemitic seasoning from people who already hated Jews anyway. That fuels real antisemitism, attacks on synagogues, harassment in the streets. More Jews, understandably terrified, make aliyah and head to Israel. Israel ends up with more traumatized people operating in survival mode. The government leans harder into aggression against neighbors, builds more settlements, tightens the blockade. Rinse and repeat. It is exhausting. It is self-defeating.

And it is not inevitable.

Criticism from inside the house always stings. I get why some Israeli Jews and their defenders react with fury. It feels like betrayal when your own people call you out. But that is exactly why it matters. Outsiders yelling "apartheid" can be dismissed as Jew-haters. When it comes from someone who actually cares about the Jewish future, it lands differently. Or at least it should. I am not some rootless cosmopolitan taking potshots. I am in this with you. I want the Jewish people to thrive, not just survive in a permanent state of siege. I want Israel to be what Torah says it is, not the mockery of Torah that Bibi and Ben-Gvir are pushing right now.

This is the same way I approach my American identity. I am a third-generation American on both sides. My maternal grandparents came from Canada and Norway, my paternal ones from Germany. I call myself a patriot without any MAGA baggage attached. I was very loudly critical of the Bush administration on the Iraq War disaster. It was a fucking catastrophe built on lies that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. I liked Obama a lot, but his foreign policy had plenty of shit stains too: drone strikes, Libya, the expansion of surveillance. And Trump? I have been loud about how dangerous and clownish his whole project is. None of that makes me anti-American. It makes me someone who believes America can do better and who loves it enough to say so when it fucks up.

I bring the same energy to the left. I check a whole bunch of intersectional boxes. I am a trans man. I am a gay man. I am disabled. I am mixed-race (racialized as white). You would think that would make me a perfect foot soldier for modern woke politics. Instead I hate the excesses of identity politics, which ended up backfiring by alienating a lot of people on our side and handing ammunition to the right.

Internal criticism is how you keep your own side honest.

Being a proud Jew means exactly that. I am proud enough of our history, our ethics, our survival that I refuse to accept "this is just how it has to be" when it comes to the Israeli government. We are capable of more. Jewish tradition has always had room for prophets who yelled at the kings and priests when they went off the rails. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they did not coddle power. They told uncomfortable truths because they loved their people. I am not comparing myself to them, I'm just this guy, you know? I am merely saying the tradition exists. Loving your family does not mean pretending they never do wrong. It means wanting them to stop.

The people who scream "self-hating Jew" at every critic miss this entirely. Self-hatred would be denying any connection, turning away from Jewishness altogether, or internalizing antisemitic garbage about Jews being inherently bad. That is not me. I converted because I was drawn to the tradition, the humor, the intellectual restlessness, the way we wrestle with G-d and history. I am still drawn to it. I just refuse to outsource my brain to any government, even one that claims to speak for all Jews. Israel does not get a blank check because it is the Jewish state. No country does.

Look at the human cost. Palestinians living under occupation for generations. Israeli families who have lost kids to rockets or stabbings. Gaza reduced to ruins with thousands of children dead. Antisemitic incidents spiking globally. This is not a sustainable way to live. It is not a moral way to live. And it is not the only way. There are Israelis and Palestinians working for real coexistence. There are groups like A Land for All pushing practical models of shared society. There are Jews in the diaspora and inside Israel who refuse the binary of "my side right or wrong." We need more of them, not fewer.

I know this essay will not convince the true believers on either extreme. The people who think any criticism is blood libel will call me a kapo again. The people who think Israel should not exist at all will say I am not radical enough. That is fine. I am not writing for them. I am writing for the Jews and non-Jews in the middle who feel the same unease I do: sick of the violence, sick of the bad faith, sick of being forced to pick a team instead of demanding better from everyone.

At the end of the day, this comes down to a simple question. Do we want the Jewish people to be defined by endless conflict and moral compromise, or by the best of what we have always been? I choose the latter. That is why I criticize. Not out of hate. Out of love that refuses to stay silent.