Israeli public intellectual Paul Gross was clearly right when he wrote in Fathom, last November, that the latest electoral defeat for the center-left in Israel “feels different” to the losers. It feels that way, as well, to many of his sympathizers in the United States, self-described “American liberals and liberal Zionists,” for whom this crisis is “a crisis for us, too, and for people like us.” People like them view what’s happening here now, in the Jewish state, as in their own words, “by definition a threat to stability.”
And why is that? Because, understandably, the liberals feel their monopoly on power, exercised through the deep state—or Israeli “deep shtetl”—slipping from their grasp, after decades of Ashkenormative rule by judicial fiat. As John Goodman sang in David Byrne’s 1996 film True Stories, “We don’t want freedom, we don’t want justice, we just want someone to love.” And that someone is themselves—in their ideal, Platonic form as moderate managers with correct opinions about everything.
