The Tension of Betrayal

There is a particular kind of betrayal that only diaspora Jews can feel, and it is not easily explained to people who treat Israel as just another state with a flag, an army and a foreign office.

This is a follow-on to my blog post of a few days ago regarding Jewish institutional silence on Gaza and the West Bank violence and, in a way, explains it.

For many Jews outside Israel, Israel is not a political identity but an insurance policy. The place you hope never to need. The place that exists because history taught a brutal lesson about relying on civilisation, progress, or good manners. When things go very wrong, there is meant to be somewhere left to go.

That is what makes the present moment so corrosive. To oppose Israel’s actions on moral, legal or humanitarian grounds, while knowing that this same state is the final refuge if antisemitism elsewhere turns murderous again, forces an impossible double vision. You are asked to criticise the lifeboat while still needing it to float.

This tension is all over diaspora Jewish writing. Hannah Arendt warned that a refuge built on permanent coercion would rot from the inside, turning Jewish survival into something indistinguishable from the brutal nationalisms that once threatened it. She was dismissed as naive, even traitorous. In retrospect, she looks painfully clear-eyed.

Primo Levi never argued that Jewish suffering conferred moral exemption. Quite the opposite. Survival, for him, imposed obligations. Memory was meant to restrain cruelty, not license it. Many diaspora Jews feel that this has been inverted, with trauma now used as a political solvent that dissolves ethical limits rather than reinforcing them.

Tony Judt put it more bluntly. Israel, he argued, had become the wrong answer to the right question. A refuge had hardened into an identity, and identity into a permanent state of siege. For Jews who never wanted Israel to be the centre of their lives, only the backstop, this felt like a quiet theft of purpose.

More recently, writers like Peter Beinart describe a generation raised to love Israel uncritically, now discovering that love is conditional on silence. Criticism is recast as betrayal. Moral concern as disloyalty. The refuge demands applause, not scrutiny. That is not how insurance works.

And here is the cruelest part. When Israel acts in ways that many Jews cannot defend, it does not just damage Palestinians or regional stability. It makes Jews elsewhere less safe. It erodes the moral authority that once underpinned the idea of Israel as sanctuary. It hands antisemites a narrative they were always eager to abuse, while insisting that any discomfort this causes is the fault of the critic, not the conduct.

Diaspora Jews are then trapped between two bad choices. Defend actions they believe are wrong, and betray their own ethical inheritance. Or speak out, and be told they are endangering the very refuge they may one day need. Either way, the bargain feels extortionate.

This is not self hatred. It is grief. Grief that the one place meant to stand outside ordinary political failure now behaves like any other hard-edged state, but insists on exceptional immunity from judgement. Grief that Jews are once again asked to trade ethics for safety, as if history had not already shown where that road leads.

A refuge that requires moral amputation to remain viable is not a refuge. It is a warning. And for diaspora Jews who still need Israel to exist as a last place of safety, that is the betrayal that cuts deepest of all.