When the Alibi Breaks |
This war has awakened not only a dispute over Israel’s right to defend itself. It has awakened something darker: the question of whether Israel has the right to exist at all as a place of Jewish life on earth. Once debate shifts from criticism of actions to doubt about existence itself, the issue is no longer policy, strategy, or proportionality. It becomes, once again, the older question Jews know too well: whether they may exist not only in the memory of others, but also in a place of their own.
When the Alibi Breaks
The Fracture in America
Earlier this month, in “Dragged in: America’s alibi politics,” I argued that the most dangerous lie in Washington was never simply the claim that America might be pulled into war by Israel. The deeper lie was procedural and moral at once: act first, then narrate the act as pressure from somewhere else. That was never analysis. It was a technique of deferred responsibility. What has changed now is that this alibi is no longer confined to commentary. It is entering the bloodstream of American politics itself.
The numbers are already severe. Support for Israel in the United States has eroded sharply, above all among Democrats and independents. The ground was already shifting before the present war with Iran had fully imposed its political cost. The war did not create the fracture. It exposed it, accelerated it, and gave it a sharper language.
Then came the more explosive signal: the resignation of Joe Kent from the National Counterterrorism Center in the Trump administration. Kent wrote that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States and that “we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful lobby.” One may accept that judgment or reject it. Either way, its significance is unmistakable. The language of displacement has crossed from polemics into the security apparatus itself. The alibi has become administrative speech.
This should alarm Israel. A state can survive criticism. It can survive hostile editorials, campus slogans, and diplomatic scolding. What it cannot easily survive is a mutation in the grammar of alliance. Once support for Israel is narrated inside the United States not as a strategic choice but as evidence of captured decision-making, the problem is no longer ordinary disagreement. It becomes a problem of legitimacy. And legitimacy, once punctured, rarely leaks in only one direction.
The war with Iran is now exposing something larger than a dispute over one campaign or one administration. In many societies it is reactivating anti-American feeling under the cover of strategic commentary. The fantasy being sold is almost embarrassingly abstract: that somewhere there exists a pure “Iranian society” waiting to awaken, as if bombardment were a civic alarm clock rather than a machinery of fear, fragmentation, coercion, and proxy escalation. That fantasy is wearing thin. More and more people understand that bombs do not produce political adulthood. They produce wreckage, dependency, and narratives of retroactive justification.
Europe Remembers Badly
But the more dangerous development may be European. This war is stirring spirits Europe never truly buried, only redressed in newer vocabularies. On parts of the left, anti-imperial critique slides too easily into a ritual in which America becomes the only actor, Iran a passive screen, and Israel the moral condenser for every Western crime. On parts of the right, the fracture takes a different but equally ugly form: nationalism begins speaking in the language of betrayal, foreign capture, and civilizational exhaustion. Different idioms, same temptation.
That is why Europe matters here. Its old ghosts do not return wearing the uniforms of the archive. They return as habits of explanation. On the left: the pleasure of reducing complexity to empire alone. On the right: the pleasure of translating every crisis into dispossession, decadence, and manipulation. In both cases, Jews and Israel risk becoming once again the preferred syntax through which a deeper civilizational panic is spoken aloud. This does not exempt Israel from criticism. It means criticism is now entering a field already seeded with older pathologies. Europe is not merely divided. Europe is remembering badly.
And this war has awakened something else as well. It has not only intensified the dispute over Israel’s right to defend itself. It has reopened a more dangerous question: whether Israel has the right to exist at all as a place of Jewish political life on earth. That is the darkest threshold in the present moment. Once criticism of Israel begins to slide into doubt about the legitimacy of Israel’s existence, the argument is no longer about governments, borders, tactics, or military conduct. It becomes something older and more poisonous: the suggestion that Jews may be tolerated as memory, as victims, as conscience, even as citizens of other states, but not as a people with a place, a border, a force of self-defense, and a right to remain.
I write this also as a Jew for whom Israel is not an abstraction, not a prop in someone else’s theory of empire, and not an ornament of moral performance. Israel remains a concrete form of Jewish continuity, a real insurance against history, and a standing answer to a lesson Jews learned too many times: dependence on the mercy of others is not a strategy. Precisely for that reason, loyalty cannot mean blindness. To defend Israel does not require one to infantilize the Jewish state, nor to pretend that every policy is beyond criticism. On the contrary. Those who are genuinely close to Israel have a particular obligation to reject both hostile demonization and cheap apologetics. Israel does not need liturgies of excuse. It needs the language of seriousness, responsibility, and sobriety, because what is at stake is not image but the continued possibility of Jewish life in a world that quickly rediscovers its older reflexes.
That same seriousness requires saying something else plainly. For Israel, removing Hezbollah and Hamas as effective military and political forces is not rhetorical excess. It is a condition of normal life. No serious state can be expected to accept, as a permanent arrangement, neighboring armed formations whose reason for existence lies in terror, rockets, kidnappings, attrition, and the cyclical manufacture of war. In that sense Isaac Herzog is right. Support for Israel cannot mean asking it to manage an endless threat while forbidding it to end one. Deterrence without conclusion becomes merely an organized pause between attacks. The Jewish state was not established in order to administer its own vulnerability forever.
At this point one more element has to be named plainly: AIPAC. Not as conspiracy. Not as a shorthand for older anti-Jewish fantasies. Not as a mystical explanation for every American decision. But as a real apparatus of pressure within democratic politics. For years, AIPAC and the broader pro-Israel lobbying ecosystem helped raise the political cost of dissent from the dominant line on Israel. That cost was not only rhetorical. It was institutional, electoral, and financial. The issue was never “control” of Congress in some vulgar sense. The issue was the disciplining effect produced by lobbying networks, donor infrastructures, and campaign spending.
For a long time, that machinery helped stabilize bipartisan support for Israel. Now it risks producing the opposite effect. The more visible the mechanism becomes, the easier it becomes for critics to redescribe support for Israel as something produced not by persuasion or shared strategy, but by fear, money, and electoral punishment. That perception may be exaggerated, unfair, or opportunistic. But once it hardens, it becomes politically toxic. A mechanism designed to protect the alliance begins to damage the legitimacy of the alliance by making support appear compelled rather than chosen.
This is dangerous not only for America, but for Israel as well. A state whose long-term security depends in part on being understood as a strategic ally cannot afford to have that support recoded as evidence of political capture. The danger is not that AIPAC is omnipotent. The danger is that too many Americans are beginning to believe that without such an apparatus, the underlying consensus would look very different. That is precisely how a protective structure becomes a liability in the field of perception.
The American problem, however, remains primary. Washington wanted the advantages of force without the burden of authorship. If the operation succeeded, America would call it leadership. If it became costly, America would call it pressure. If the region began to burn, the story would shift to reluctant entanglement. That has always been the deeper obscenity of the alibi: not that it protected Israel, but that it infantilized the United States itself, allowing a superpower to behave like a hostage to its own choices.
Now that arrangement is cracking. Democrats have moved sharply away from Israel. Independents are moving as well. Republicans remain more favorable, but even there the field is no longer seamless. This is not yet a full Republican break with Israel. It is something more volatile: the breakdown of interpretive monopoly. Once that monopoly breaks, every new escalation reopens the question not only of what America is doing, but on whose behalf Americans are being told they are doing it.
That is why this threshold should not be misread. The issue is no longer simply whether Israel is losing the left, whether Trump can hold his coalition together, or whether one resignation will alter policy. The issue is that the war with Iran has become a mirror in which several societies are seeing something uglier than policy error. Americans are seeing the hollowness of decision without ownership. Europeans are seeing how quickly anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, nationalist resentment, and civilizational fatigue begin to speak through one another. And Israel is seeing that an alliance built for decades on ritual affirmations can suddenly be redescribed as a scene of contamination.
I wrote earlier that the real question was never whether America was being dragged in, but whether that story could be made to hold. We now have the beginning of an answer. It can hold for a while, but only at the cost of making the United States look less like a sovereign power and more like a state permanently in search of excuses.
When an alibi collapses, what returns is not innocence.
What returns is authorship.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig