Tucker Carlson. Photo: By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Tucker Carlson, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=192870430

In the early 20th century, there was a flourishing Jewish community in Harbin in the far northeast of China. The community, like the city of Harbin itself, owed its origin to the construction at the turn of the century of the Chinese Eastern Railway, a Russian project that extended the Trans-Siberian Railway eastward toward Vladivostok. As a primarily Russian city, Harbin offered Russian Jews cultural familiarity without the deadly pogroms that plagued Jewish life in Russia proper. Jewish businesses and religious and cultural institutions sprang up.¹

After 1917 thousands of anti-Communist White Russians fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution came to Harbin; many of them were virulently antisemitic. In 1931 the Japanese conquered the region and allied with the Russian Fascists. Jews were kidnapped and murdered.² The Japanese were driven out in 1945, but the Maoist revolutionaries who took over four years later confiscated Jewish businesses. The last Jewish family left Harbin in 1962; one persistent elderly woman refused to leave and remained until her death in 1985. “Harbin was great for the Jews,” writes novelist and essayist Dara Horn, “until it wasn’t.”³

The story of Harbin is a kind of time-lapse photography version of a cycle that has manifested itself in many parts of the world. What took place in Harbin in a few decades has more commonly unfolded over centuries. In some instances, Jews enjoyed long periods of peace and prosperity. Still, place after place – Iraq, Spain, Lithuania, Germany – was great for the Jews until it wasn’t.

A new dimension was added to this complicated story with the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, which raised the question of the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. This dimension plays into recent developments in the United States – once celebrated as die goldene medine, the golden land. Does American “exceptionalism” exempt Jews in the United States from the pitiless Harbin cycle? Or are the first signs of the cycle entering its negative phase already beginning to show?

Left, right and at the barrel of a gun

To be sure, Jews have experienced – and continue to experience – a level of freedom, security and success in the United States that is rare if not unique in Jewish history. In the United States, Jews have been full citizens, not a tolerated minority. Forms of discrimination – restricted neighbourhoods, university quotas – were mild compared to what Jews were used to in Europe, and even those forms faded after World War II. There are Jewish governors, senators, Supreme Court justices; Joe Biden’s cabinet and inner circle had enough Jewish members to constitute a minyan – a prayer quorum of ten Jews. American Jews have won many Nobel Prizes, in fields ranging from physics to literature. There are Jewish billionaires, every bit as arrogant and obnoxious as goyish ones.

But in recent years, some dark spots have begun to appear in this bright picture. First, there have been major violent incidents in which Jews or Jewish institutions have been targeted, from the murder of 11 congregants during Saturday morning services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 to the vehicle ramming and shooting at Temple Israel in a suburb of Detroit this past March. Second, there has been increasing hostility to Israel on the left side of the political spectrum, associated with the war in Gaza that followed Hamas’s attack on Israeli border communities on October 7, 2023. Third, since late 2025 there have been open expressions of antisemitism on the right, in part associated with Israel but also reflecting Christian nationalism and classic antisemitic tropes.

Before proceeding, I need to make some distinctions. Criticism of Israel is precisely that – criticism of Israel. It is not, in itself, anti-Zionism. All states are open to criticism, and Israel has certainly done things that deserve to be criticized. It is not anti-Zionist to condemn Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza or to call for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. Anti-Zionism is opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Zionism, as it took shape in the early 20th century, proposed a Jewish state in at least some part of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea; such a state came into being in 1948. To be anti-Zionist is to maintain that the state should cease to exist in anything like its present form. And anti-Zionism spills over into antisemitism only if it manifests as hostility not only to a Jewish state but to Jews as such.

Criticism of Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism are distinct phenomena, but the distinctions are fuzzy. When Israel is criticized, Jews often think that the critics are not seeing the full context or are unfairly singling Israel out. And anti-Zionists feel threatening because they seem not to be concerned with the question of how the more than seven million Jews currently living between the river and the sea will be served by any alternative arrangement. Nevertheless, criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism are generally regarded as legitimate elements in the political conversation, while antisemitism is not.

Anti-Jewish violence – which has occurred in many parts of the Jewish diaspora, including Canada⁴ – is disturbing and frightening, but it has so far not gone beyond isolated incidents, qualitatively different from the organized, state-sponsored anti-Jewish legislation and violence that occurred in Tsarist Russia in the early 20th century or Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The most prominent left-wing anti-Zionists, such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, stay within the bounds of anti-Zionism. Even the popular lef-wing podcaster and influencer Hasan Piker, who expresses his anti-Zionism in what he freely acknowledges is “embellished language,” does not generally stray from attacking Israel into attacking Jews.

If there are signs that the United States is becoming a less favoured country for Jews, they are to be found primarily on the right. Even if some offices such as the New York City mayoralty are in the hands of the left, the right is in power in the United States, and it could remain in power after Donald Trump’s current presidential term ends in 2029. Hence, what happens on the right matters, and needs to be brought to light.

Young Republicans and Groypers

It is perhaps a coincidence, but a suggestive one, that controversy over Israel and Jews on the right erupted a few weeks after the murder of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025. For Jews, Kirk was an ambiguous figure. He was – among other retrograde views that he held – a proponent of the Great Replacement Theory. (“They are trying to replace us demographically. They’re trying to make the country less White.”) His vision of America was very much bound up with Christianity. But he was also a firm supporter of Israel, and he apparently had a philosemitic streak. His final, posthumously published book, Stop, in the Name of God, was a plea for sabbath observance. Even though the Presbyterian denomination in which Kirk was raised has particularly strong traditions of Sunday observance, the sabbath Kirk promoted was the Jewish sabbath, sunset Friday to sunset Saturday, albeit with a Christian spin.

While Kirk managed to hold these contradictions in tension, after his death the glue that held the MAGA movement together seemed to weaken. The first indication of trouble came with the revelation by Politico on October 14 that a group chat among leaders of the Young Republicans, including staffers in Washington offices, was riddled with racist, misogynist, homophobic and antisemitic comments. “I love Hitler,” posted one participant. Others spoke favourably of gas chambers.

If the culture prevailing among Young Republicans that Politico exposed was disturbing, the reaction of some senior Republicans, most notably Vice President JD Vance, was no less so. “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke – telling a very offensive, stupid joke – is cause to ruin their lives.” Some of the “kids” were only a few years younger than Vance himself, who is 41.

The dust was just settling from the Young Republicans revelations when another controversy broke out. Vance’s friend Tucker Carlson, credited with helping to persuade Donald Trump to choose Vance as his running mate, hosted the 27-year-old influencer Nick Fuentes on The Tucker Carlson Show, one of the most popular podcasts in the United States. Fuentes, who has his own livestreamed show and an army of followers known as “Groypers,” is given to statements like “Hitler is awesome” and blames “organized Jewry” for many of the problems facing the United States. He and his followers are disappointed by what they see as Donald Trump’s failure to carry out the thorough “America First” transformation they were hoping for and regard Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA (now headed by his widow Erika Kirk) as too mainstream. In the interview, Carlson, himself no stranger to conspiracy theories and antisemitic innuendo, gave Fuentes largely sympathetic treatment.

Carlson drew a storm of criticism, including from the right, for giving Fuentes a platform that conferred right-wing respectability. But there were exceptions. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank whose Project 2025 provided a policy framework for the second Trump administration’s assault on the federal government, defended Carlson and called his critics a “venomous coalition.” Many Heritage staffers were appalled, some resigned, and Roberts partially walked back his comments.

At war at Israel’s side

These controversies and tensions were continuing on a low boil when a new chapter opened with the American-Israeli attack on Iran that began on February 28. The war was unpopular in the United States from the beginning, and was criticized from many quarters and on many grounds. There was the failure to consult Congress (as required by law) and to provide any convincing rationale for the war to the American people. The absence of strategic planning. The failure to anticipate that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz and cut off a significant portion of the world’s oil supply, with an immediate and substantial impact on gasoline prices. But for some on the American right, the worst feature of the attack was that it was carried out in conjunction with Israel. Once again Tucker Carlson was a key figure.

An April 7 New York Times article by White House reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman would be extensively cited in support of the proposition that Israel, and specifically Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, talked Trump into participating in the attack. The article began with a vivid description of a February 11 meeting in the White House Situation Room at which Netanyahu made his case for the attack to Trump and his team. Opening with “The black S.U.V. carrying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the White House just before 11 a.m. on Feb. 11,” Swan and Haberman went on to specify where each participant sat at the Situation Room’s mahogany conference table. They described Netanyahu’s presentation as a “hard sell” that was “pivotal in setting the United States and Israel on the path” toward attacking Iran.

They noted the hesitancy of some members of Trump’s team. CIA Director John Ratcliffe characterized Netanyahu’s assertion that the attack would bring down the Iranian regime as “farcical,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “bullshit.” Vice President Vance, a longtime sceptic regarding U.S. intervention abroad (he was not at the Situation Room meeting because he was in Azerbaijan at the time), was opposed to the attack.

However, nowhere did Swan and Haberman suggest that Trump was anything but a fully willing participant. They reported that “Mr. Trump’s hawkish thinking aligned with Mr. Netanyahu’s over many months.” Indeed, that Netanyahu’s

view of the situation was far closer to Mr. Trump’s opinion than the anti-interventionists on the Trump team or in the broader “America First” movement liked to admit … had been true for many years. Of all the foreign policy challenges Mr. Trump had confronted across two presidencies, Iran stood apart. He regarded it as a uniquely dangerous adversary and was willing to take great risks to hinder the regime’s ability to wage war or to acquire a nuclear weapon.

In other words, if Netanyahu persuaded Trump to go to war with Iran, Trump was ripe for being persuaded. But that’s not the way Tucker Carlson saw it.

The musings of Tucker Carlson

Carlson supported Trump in his 2024 presidential campaign, but the war in Iran was more than he could tolerate. The breaking point was the infamous message Trump posted to Truth Social on April 5, Easter Sunday, in which he threatened to destroy Iranian infrastructure and said that the “crazy bastards” in Iran would be “living in Hell” if they didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz.

Carlson announced his break with Trump in an episode of The Tucker Carlson Show on April 20 in which he appeared with his brother Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter. He described himself as “tormented” by his past support for the President. Carlson followed up by giving a long interview to New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro. In Carlson’s view, Trump betrayed the interests of the United States by acting first and foremost in the interests of Israel. And furthermore, he didn’t do this voluntarily. Rather, he “was more a hostage than a sovereign decision-maker.”

Garcia-Navarro pressed him to “be explicit. Trump is being held hostage by whom?”

“By Benjamin Netanyahu and by his many advocates in the United States,” Carlson replied.

Elsewhere, Carlson referred to Trump as a “slave,” and described Netanyahu’s hold over him as “total control of one man by another … And he is looking out for Israel first. That’s outrageous.”

While Carlson was somewhat on the defensive in the New York Times interview, he was more relaxed in his conversation with Buckley. The two brothers were open in their machismo, misogyny, homophobia and anti-Black racism. The antisemitism was more by innuendo.

One sequence began with criticism that could be construed as legitimate.⁵ Buckley pointed out that Miriam Adelson, heir to her late husband Sheldon Adelson’s vast casino fortune and a strong advocate of pro-Israel policies, was one of the largest donors to Trump’s 2024 campaign. Tucker insinuated that Trump’s loyalty to Miriam Adelson was strange in light of “his demonstrated disloyalty and viciousness to previous supporters.” And then the conversation veered into more questionable territory, with Tucker in the lead.

Tucker had previously concocted a conspiracy theory blaming the Chabad chasidic sect for the attack on Iran, citing (among other things) the conviction of some Chabad members that their longtime leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–94), was the messiah and the belief in a future Third Temple to be constructed in the messianic age. In his conversation with Buckley, he returned to the subject of Rabbi Schneerson.

His entry point was the widely ridiculed image Trump posted of himself as a Jesus-like figure, which Tucker interpreted as an “attack” on Jesus – on a Sunday, no less. “But the one person he’s never going to attack,” Tucker went on, “is Rabbi Schneerson.” He made it clear that he believed it was wrong to attack any religiom and he was not suggesting that Trump should attack Rabbi Schneerson: “He should not. But he never would. He’d die first.”

Buckley then brought up another sore point, Trump’s failure to place his hand on the Bible when he took the oath of office at his 2025 inauguration, which Buckley saw as evidence that he’s “a totally secular human being.” Tucker disagreed: “I don’t think it means he’s a secular person. I think it means he’s got a different religion.” Which religion would that be, Tucker?

What happens next?

I’ve focused on Tucker Carlson because of his unmatched influence and reach, but there are others. Candace Owens is another podcaster with a large audience and a penchant for conspiracy theories. Formerly the host of a show on the Daily Wire, the media outlet led by Jewish conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, she was fired in 2024 as a result of her growing antisemitism. After leaving the Daily Wire, she blamed Jews for the transatlantic slave trade and denied that Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele carried out medical experiments on concentration camp inmates. She attributed the murder of Charlie Kirk to a conspiracy and pointed to texts suggesting that Kirk might have been about to withdraw his support of Israel, hinting that the conspiracy might have had Israeli origins.

Meanwhile, Nick Fuentes’s army of Groypers marches on. In November 2025, the conservative writer Rod Dreher estimated that up to 40 per cent of Generation Z (roughly, born after 1997 – the generation that has never known a world without the internet) staffers in Republican politics were Groypers. When New Yorker staff writer Antonia Hitchens asked a Trump administration official about Dreher’s estimate, the official said that the proportion of staffers who would come across to most people as Groypers was closer to 75 per cent.

Over at the Pentagon the self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, mixes Christian prayer into the warrior spirit with which he wants to imbue the American military. He sports tattoos evoking the Crusades, in which tens of thousands of Jews as well as Muslims were killed. Hegseth accused the media of acting like “Pharisees” in their criticism of the war in Iran: “Even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn’t matter. They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda.” The Pharisees, portrayed as nitpickers in the New Testament, were instrumental in developing the Jewish tradition based on prayer and study that replaced the biblical practice of animal sacrifice and that has endured into modern times.

Of course, this is not all there is to the American right. Jewish right-wing influencers such as Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer call out antiesmitism and dcfend Israel. Shapiro, whose talent for invective rivals Donald Trump’s, has called Tucker Carlson a “super spreader of vile ideas,” Candace Owens “the ranting bag lady of the internet” and Nick Fuentes “a confirmed Nazi.” Israel still has conservative Republican supporters in Congress, such as Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee continues to carry the torch of Christian Zionism, a theological formulation that once kept millions of evangelical Christians in Israel’s column.

But, as the Washington Post reported in early May, Shapiro’s Daily Wire, once a dominant force in right-wing media, has been losing money and laying off staff; its website traffic in March 2026 was half of what it was a year earlier. And while there are still more Christian Zionists in the world than Jewish ones, Christian Zionism holds little appeal for younger American evangelicals. The energy is on the other side.

American antisemites have occupied positions of influence and commanded large audiences before: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Father Charles Coughlin. Father Coughlin, a silver-tongued, Canadian-born Catholic priest whose message combined Christianity, anti-Communism, antisemitism and economic populism, reached an audience of tens of millions with his Detroit-based weekly radio show in the 1930s.⁶ Still, none of these figures attained majority support and the country eventually moved on.

So where is the United States heading now? The whole Trump era could turn out to be an aberration. A moderate Democrat or old-style “normie” Republican could succeed Trump in the White House, with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and the Groypers retreating to the margins. But that is only one scenario. Trump could also be the prelude to something worse, the dumbshow before the real tragedy.

At this early stage, the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination is Vice President Vance – who is close to Carlson and who refused to repudiate the racist, misogynist, antisemitic Young Republicans. Would these people be influential in a Vance administration? Another possibility is that Tucker Carlson himself could be the nominee. If this seems farfetched, think how farfetched it would have seemed in mid-2014 that Donald Trump would be a serious GOP presidential candidate two years later, let alone a successful one. Whatever else may be said about Carlson, he is a highly skilled communicator with millions of followers. Like Father Coughlin, he mixes his antisemitism with economic populism: “The idea that you could have a global financial crisis and no one responsible for it goes to jail, and the only people who suffer are the people who took the loans, not the ones who issued the loans? I felt like that’s just not fair.” Haven’t we heard this before?

Considered in historical perspective, the United States, for the moment, is still good for the Jews. But they can’t be blamed for looking over their shoulders.

Continue reading “MAGA and the Jews” →

Exit polls are notoriously unreliable, but one set of figures from the 2024 U.S. presidential election was too stark to be easily dismissed. According to exit polls cited in the Washington Post, voters who were not White evangelical Christians favoured Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by a margin of 58 per cent to 40 per cent. Had evangelicals voted in similar proportions, the election would have resulted in a landslide for Harris. However, White evangelical voters – 23 per cent of the voting population, according to the poll¹ – favoured Trump over Harris by 82 per cent to 17 per cent. New York Times columnist David French wrote bluntly, “Trump owes his election to white evangelical voters.”

French was an exception. Most commentators paid more attention to other divides and demographic shifts: the gender gap, especially among young voters; the urban-rural divide; the higher proportion of Black and Hispanic voters, compared to previous elections, who voted for Trump. Yet the exit polls showed that one of the best predictors of voting for Trump was being a White evangelical Christian.

French, who has frequently devoted his column to the relationship between Trump’s MAGA movement and evangelical Christianity, comes by his interest honestly. He is himself a conservative and an evangelical Christian, and he lives among other conservatives and evangelical Christians in rural Tennessee. But unlike most of his neighbours, he finds the close ties between MAGA and evangelical Christianity highly disturbing – indeed, a betrayal of deep evangelical values: “The religious right has divorced itself from historical Christian theology but still holds its partisan beliefs with religious intensity. The religious fervor is there. Christian virtues are not.”

In other words, evangelical Christianity has become less a religious movement than a political movement with religious overtones. What primarily distinguishes evangelical Christians is their apparently unshakable loyalty to the Republican Party – led by Donald Trump, perhaps as far from a model of Christian virtue as any president in U.S. history.

Evangelical Christianity goes political

At its root, the word evangelical simply means “of the gospel,” so in this sense all Christianity is evangelical. However, the term has come to be applied to a particular flavour of Protestant Christianity. There is no one evangelical denomination: evangelicalism is spread across a number of denominations and many nondenominational churches. The term has theological, sociological and political dimensions. It overlaps with other labels such as fundamentalist and born-again, but is not interchangeable with them.

British historian David Bebbington has identified four central tenets of evangelical theology, which have become known collectively as the “Bebbington quadrilateral”:

• The Bible has full authority as the sole and supreme rule of faith and practice.
• People need to be converted, that is, experience a new birth by the Holy Spirit.
• People are reconciled with God through the atoning work of Christ on the cross, not through their own good works.
• Christians have a responsibility to spread the gospel, both through words and through actions.

Beyond these four basic theological tenets, evangelicals have other distinguishing characteristics. They have a strong focus on individual salvation and acceptance of Jesus as one’s “personal Lord and Saviour.” They tend to see the world in Manichean, good-vs.-evil terms. They often have very traditional views on gender and sexual issues. The End Times and the Second Coming of Jesus loom large in their consciousness. In the United States, evangelicals tend to blend Christianity with American patriotism, popular culture and a rosy view of American history. It could be argued that if there is such a thing as American exceptionalism, it has to do with the exceptionally large number of evangelicals in the United States.

It should be noted that these attitudes, while more prevalent among evangelicals, are by no means limited to them. Similar attitudes can be found among other Christians and, in some cases, among Orthodox Jews, devout Muslims and others. It was not an evangelical but a Roman Catholic, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who said recently, “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.”²

Nor are all evangelicals politically conservative. Jimmy Carter was a serious evangelical Christian. Sojourners, a community founded in 1971 by Jim Wallis and others, remains active today as an organization combining evangelical religious beliefs with a commitment to peace and social justice. But the links between evangelical Christianity and political conservatism have been getting tighter. Led by Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979, evangelicals played a large role in electing Ronald Reagan president the next year. Evangelical political involvement expanded from there.

The journey of Diana Butler Bass, now a liberal Christian historian,  writer and speaker, is perhaps emblematic of the change. Butler Bass became an evangelical as a teenager in the 1970s. Despite some negative elements even then, she writes,

There was fun stuff as well – the early years of Christian rock ’n roll (there was a surprising amount of really good music) and a Jesus-y cultural post-hippie hangover with radical movements like Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, and evangelical feminism. And there was an extraordinary crossover in theological worlds with liberation theology. In other words, I was under the impression that evangelicalism was a deep personal commitment to love Jesus for the sake of making the world a more just and beautiful place for all of God’s children. Lol.

Then came the eighties and the rise of the Christian right: “To a recent convert (and one living in California to boot), the Moral Majority didn’t make any sense. I thought that Jim Wallis was the norm and Jerry Falwell was the aberration.” By the early nineties Butler Bass was teaching religious studies at Westmont College, a Christian institution in Montecito, California. She describes what followed:

As a historian, I should have understood that spiritual renewal movements rarely transform entrenched ideologies and dislodge injustices that benefit the powerful … The evangelicals who ran the institution wanted me to “fit,” but I didn’t want to fit. I wanted them to change. I guess I wanted to be their savior. I wanted them to be more like Jesus. To love with greater compassion. To embrace the radical implications of grace.

In the end, Butler Bass was dismissed from her job and was no longer welcome in the evangelical movement. She now speaks for a form of Christianity that resists empire instead of serving it. In a November interview with her historian colleague Heather Cox Richardson, she noted a video that Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense (or of War, as he prefers), posted to Tik Tok in which he recited the Lord’s Prayer over images of bombers and people being killed by American soldiers. “That is imperial Christianity run amok,” Butler Bass said. “That is what the Church through all of its history has called heresy, if not blasphemy.”

From the party of values to the party of MAGA

But even after evangelical Christianity had made it clear that it had no room for people like Diana Butler Bass, even after groups like the Sojourners Community had been marginalized, evangelicals still should have been insulated against the appeal of someone like Donald Trump. As Christians, they believed that leaders should be individuals of upright personal character. In 1998, when the sinner in the White House was Bill Clinton, the largest American evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, declared at its annual meeting, “We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”

Like so many other guardrails in American political life, this one, when tested, would not hold. The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) released its latest American Values Survey on October 22. In an interview, PRRI founder and president Robert P. Jones noted that in the era of George W. Bush, values were the Republican brand:

One of the great U-turns I’ve seen in my career is to go from the party that was literally branding itself the party of values to the party of MAGA … The hermeneutical key for me is whether a public official could commit immoral acts in their private life and still behave ethically in their public life. Back in the values voter era, White evangelicals and Republicans would say no, they can’t do that. If they behave immorally in their private life they’re going to behave immorally in their public life.

But once Trump ran for president in 2016, all that changed. In previous polls, 72 per cent of White evangelicals and Republicans had agreed that someone who behaves immorally privately would also behave immorally publicly. In 2016, only 30 per cent agreed with that statement. Jones believes that this change came about because there was “a realization that they’re going to need antidemocratic means to achieve the ends of power”:

Once you make that turn it really does mean that what you need is someone who’s going to wield raw power. And there’s a way of thinking about this where Trump is going to lead them to a place where they want to go. But it’s all about having a White Christian country. It’s not democracy. That’s where he’s going to lead them … White evangelicals, Republicans, have moved away from this political ethic of principle, which if you take them at their word is what the values voters platform would be, and just moved to a political ethic of expediency.

The messiah of Mar-a-Lago

There is another dimension to this as well. American Values Survey respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “God saved Donald Trump from being assassinated so that he could lead America into a glorious future.” Overall, a majority of Americans disagreed. However, 54 per cent of Republicans agreed with the statement and only 41 per cent disagreed. Results were similar among White evangelical Protestants: 53 per cent agreed with the statement. They were the only religious group in which a majority agreed.

The power of the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024 has not been lost on MAGA. On October 3 the United States Treasurer, Brandon Beach, released the draft design of a one-dollar coin to be issued in 2026 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. While the obverse has a bust of Trump comparable to those of Lincoln on the penny and Washington on the quarter, the reverse evokes the scene in Butler. It shows Trump with fist raised in front of an American flag, surrounded by the words “Fight Fight Fight.” The coin may never see the light of day, but that the Treasurer would choose this among all possible scenes involving Trump is telling.

However, the idea of Trump as a quasi-messianic figure long preceded that afternoon in Butler. Late in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term, an elaborate conspiracy theory began to circulate online in right-wing discussion forums. Because the theory had its origins in the posts of an anonymous writer called Q, it became known as QAnon. The central QAnon belief was that the world was run by a cabal of pedophiles who sexually abused and murdered children and drank their blood. And the person who was going to break the power of the cabal was Donald Trump. QAnon was not, in itself, Christian, but its tenets resonated with some evangelical beliefs: a good-vs.-evil view of the world and a coming End Time. Will Sommer, a journalist who has written a book about QAnon, told Ezra Klein of the New York Times in July,

The utopian or messianic aspects of QAnon, I think, were often underplayed at the time. In QAnon, they thought there would be a moment called “the storm,” where Trump would arrest and presumably execute everyone conservatives didn’t like. It would be people in the Democratic Party, in Hollywood, in banking – people like Tom Hanks and Oprah would be sent to Guantánamo Bay for military tribunals. Then after that, for everyone left behind, life would be pretty sweet. They believed that this cabal was responsible for all the evil in the world, all the wars. It was holding back all the cures for all the diseases. That basically the cabal created the concept of debt.

There have been messianic movements since ancient times. The one we now know as Christianity has been by far the most successful of these movements, but there have been others as well. One feature of a number of these movements is that the messiah is not bound by the rules that govern ordinary people’s behaviour.

In the 17th century a Jewish messianic claimant named Shabbetai Tzvi appeared in the Ottoman Empire.³ He performed acts that were shocking violations of Jewish law: turning fast days into feasts, pronouncing the forbidden divine name and the like. Aided by a brilliant young theoretician and publicist named Nathan of Gaza, he attracted followers, and messianic fervour swept the Jewish communities of the Middle East and Europe. This popular enthusiasm was perceived as a threat to the Ottoman regime, and the Sultan had Shabbetai Tzvi thrown in prison and offered him the choice of death or conversion to Islam. He chose conversion, which despite Nathan of Gaza’s strenuous efforts to explain his actions was widely regarded as an unacceptable deviation from the messianic script. The movement deflated, although it retained some adherents and the hangover from Sabbateanism lasted for the better part of a century.

The story of Shabbetai Tzvi illustrates an important question for messianic movements: what happens when events don’t follow the messianic script? In the case of Shabbetai Tzvi, the movement fell apart. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, his followers successfully wrote and won acceptance for a new script. In the case of Donald Trump – well, let’s follow the thread of conspiracy theories into the 2020s.

QAnon reached something of a high point in January 2021. Many of the Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol on January 6 saw themselves as enacting the QAnon storm. Also in January 2021, a firm QAnon believer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, took her seat as the new member of the House of Representatives for Georgia’s 14th congressional district. But QAnon would soon be overtaken by another conspiracy theory, this one involving a real pedophile. “On the right,” wrote David French, “the (Jeffrey) Epstein story became the thinking man’s version of the QAnon conspiracy theory.”

There are some things that are known. Unquestionably, Jeffrey Epstein was very rich and had many powerful friends, some of whom he entertained on his private island. Unquestionably, Epstein was a sexual predator who recruited large numbers of young women and girls for sex. And he unquestionably died in prison in 2019, in what was ruled a suicide.

Also unquestionably, one of Epstein’s powerful friends, at least at one time, was Donald Trump, and Trump had some inkling of Epstein’s sexual proclivities. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” We also now know, after the release of emails from Epstein’s estate in November, that Epstein alleged that Trump “knew about the girls” and “spent hours at my house” with one of them.

Most of the rest is speculation. Much of the speculation surrounds the “Epstein files” held by the United States government. At the core of those files there is supposed to be a “client list” of powerful people for whom Epstein procured sex. In the MAGA imagination, that list consists of prominent Democrats and their friends in the media, Hollywood and elsewhere. Republicans anticipated the release of the Epstein client list in much the same way that QAnon believers had yearned for the storm.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump said he thought he would release the Epstein files if he was elected president. “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing,” said JD Vance two weeks before the election. Kash Patel said the FBI had Epstein’s “Black Book.” Trump appointed him director of the FBI. In September 2024, right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino said the client list was “a huge deal” that was going to “rock the Democrat party.” Bongino is now deputy director of the FBI. After she took office as Attorney General, Pam Bondi said the client list was “sitting on my desk right now for review.” She later claimed she was misinterpreted.

Somehow, Trump’s enthusiasm for releasing the Epstein files waned once he was President. In June, after Elon Musk’s relationship with Trump had degenerated from an alliance to gut the U.S. government into a mudslinging match, Musk tweeted that Trump was “in the Epstein files” – a tweet he subsequently deleted. In July, the Justice Department and the FBI jointly released an unsigned memo reporting on “an exhaustive review of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein.” The review concluded that Epstein harmed more than 1,000 victims. However, there was no client list, no evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals and nothing to suggest that his death was anything other than a suicide. In the interest of protecting victims, the review “found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials.”

The memo, wrote David French, “detonated like a bomb in the MAGA universe … Make no mistake: MAGA is very angry. After the Department of Justice released its memo, MAGA influencers exploded.”

In early September, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, introduced a discharge petition to force a House vote on a bill calling for the release of the Epstein files. The petition needed the signatures of a majority of House members – 218 out of 435 – to take effect. In late October, the bill had attracted the signatures of 213 Democrats and four Republicans. One of those Republicans was Marjorie Taylor Greene. Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat, was elected in late September to fill a vacant seat in Arizona. However, House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose highest value is loyalty to Donald Trump, avoided swearing Grijalva in for two months. When the House returned in November, she was sworn in and became the petition’s 218th signature.

We don’t know that the Epstein files contain any information that is damaging to Donald Trump beyond what we already know. We do know that Trump is going to great lengths to avoid releasing those files. Will the release of the Epstein files, if it ever occurs, be the critical moment when the course of events deviates from Trump’s messianic script? Will the aura of divine election that has clung to him, especially since that bullet grazed his ear in Butler, finally dissipate?

Bringing America to Trump and Jesus

Another bullet, fired in Utah on September 10, 2025, brought the relationship between MAGA and evangelical Christianity to a new level. This bullet hit its target, striking down the influential young conservative writer, speaker, broadcaster and organizer Charlie Kirk.

Charlie Kirk was as much a religious as a political figure. According to the website of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the organization he founded and built into a major force on the right, “Charlie Kirk poured his life into building a movement rooted in faith, freedom, and love of country.” In a speech in December 2024 at AmericaFest, TPUSA’s major public event, Kirk celebrated the election of Donald Trump a month earlier, in which TPUSA had played a significant role: “We cannot take credit for what happened on November 5. Who deserves credit is God Almighty.”

Elsewhere in this issue, Steven Hill touches on Charlie Kirk’s retrograde views on women’s roles in society.⁴ In an interview with the New York Times, Erika Kirk, his widow and successor as CEO of TPUSA, described their relationship as “an Ephesians 5 marriage.” According to chapter 5 of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in the New Testament, “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife just as Christ is head of the church.”⁵

The relationship between Christianity and politics was on full display at the memorial for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21. David French described the memorial as “one part worship service, one part political rally.” But it would perhaps be more accurate to characterize it with a phrase borrowed from Christian theology (I hope I’m not offending my Christian friends here): just as Jesus is fully God and fully man, so the memorial was fully religious and fully political.

“It’s true that we need less government. But we also need a lot more God,” said Pete Hegseth. “Live worthy of Charlie Kirk’s sacrifice and put Christ at the centre of your life.”

“Ultimately he was a Christian evangelist,” said Tucker Carlson. “The only real solution is Jesus.”

Perhaps no one was clearer than Vice President Vance: “Charlie brought the truth that Jesus Christ was the king of kings, and all truths flow from this first and most important one … It is better to be persecuted for your faith than to deny the kingship of Christ. He is a hero for the United States of America and he is a martyr for the Christian faith.”

Intentionally or not, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s speech had overtones of QAnon: “When I see Erika and her strength and her courage I am reminded of a famous expression: The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot withstand my strength and the warrior whispers back, I am the storm. Erika is the storm. We are the storm.”

Trump’s own speech, while focusing mostly on praise of Charlie Kirk and his usual political tropes, nevertheless contained some religious notes: “We have to bring back religion to America, because without borders, law and order and religion, you really don’t have a country. We want religion brought back to America. We want to bring God back to our beautiful USA like never before. We want God back.”

Four days later, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” NSPM-7 directed the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to “coordinate and supervise a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.” It highlighted some “common threads animating this violent conduct”; these are  “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Being anti-Christian and being anti-American are intertwined, and they make you, potentially, a domestic terrorist. Such is the religious-political alliance that Donald Trump and his supporters have built.

Countering this alliance will not be easy. On the basis of PRRI’s surveys, Robert P. Jones concludes that while MAGA is a product of both economic and cultural anxiety, cultural anxiety is the dominant factor. Hence, he says, if the Democrats

think they’re going to kitchen-table their way out of this problem, they are sorely mistaken. They really are going to have to engage on the cultural and identity issues here. This is the way the MAGA movement has gained its momentum and force … We’ve got to figure out how to tell a story about who we are as Americans and how we can all live together in a pluralistic democracy, and why everybody has a stake in that.

Religions are born, grow, spread and endure through stories. The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur’an, the Hindu scriptures – all of them are filled with stories that have enchanted people for millennia. MAGA, drawing on Christian themes, tells a compelling story about God and country. Can its opponents tell a better one?

Continue reading “For God and country” →

Image: Israelis demand a hostage deal in Haifa, May 6, 2024. © Rndmst | Dreamstime.com

‘The first pogrom of the 21st century’

On October 7, 2024, Le Devoir’s Paris correspondent, Christian Rioux, evoked the slaughter – the “pogrom” as he and others called it – that had taken place a year earlier:

Women murdered before or after being raped. Fathers killed in front of their children. Pregnant women with abdomens riddled with bullets. Bodies of young women stripped naked handed over to an enraged crowd. Corpses decapitated with a shovel, sometimes on the ninth try. And one of the killers shouting with joy as he called his parents to tell them the good news: “Dad, Dad! I killed ten Jews with my own hands!”

Pages could be filled with these horrors. That’s how extraordinary the butchery of October 7 was. The hate-filled young man got it right. He was not targeting enemy soldiers, adversaries or even Israelis. He was targeting Jews, and Jews alone. No, this massacre was not an act of war or killing as happens regularly in all conflicts, let alone a gesture of resistance. All this is miles away from what we call war, which, whatever you may say, has its rules,.

All the eyewitness testimonies agree: those reported in the New York Times investigation conducted for two months in Israel and published in late December 2023; those collected by journalist Lee Yaron in her book 10/7: 100 Human Stories; Israeli surveillance cameras; videos shot by the victims; and the GoPro cameras of the torturers themselves. There is no contradiction in what they show: a racist crime carried out not by those we call soldiers but by God-crazed fighters called jihadists, who unfortunately set themselves up to pass for liberators.

As feminist sociologist Liliane Kandel noted, these people were slaughtered or burned alive “only because they were Jews” and for nothing else. The desecration of bodies by chopping them up or burning them testifies to a clear will not to defeat one’s adversaries but to exterminate them. Hamas pointedly dubbed the massacre Operation Al-Aqsa Flood – in other words, a flood sent by Allah to punish the infidels. Historically, such massacres have a name: pogroms, a Russian word meaning “destroy fully” that was used to describe deadly and racist attacks on Jews in the last century. October 7 was the first pogrom of the 21st century.

If we don’t recognize what is particular and unique about this raid, what it means to the Jews but also to all of us, we will be doomed to understand nothing about this event and its aftermath. Because there was a before October 7 and an after October 7.

The French historian Georges Bensoussan explained that the real terror did not occur on October 7 but on October 8. Israel had not yet reacted when antisemitic acts broke out in many cities. In the face of such a despicable attack, Israelis expected a modicum of compassion and solidarity; the opposite has happened. The dead had not yet been buried when the word suddenly went out that what Romain Gary and Albert Cohen called “the oldest hatred” in the world had been aroused.

‘It still feels like October 7, 2023’

In Jerusalem on the same day, early in the morning, Jessica Steinberg, the culture editor of the Times of Israel, was in a crowd outside the residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

I woke up much earlier today, October 7, 2024. One year ago, my first sense that something was happening was when I awoke to sirens warning of a rocket attack in Jerusalem, at 8:10 a.m.

One year later, today, I woke suddenly at 5:20, when I heard our dog, Suki, barking in the living room, probably at someone passing by.

It was ten minutes earlier than I needed to get up, having set my alarm in order to drive over to Azza Road, where hostage families were gathering near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence to sound a siren at 6:29 a.m., the hour that the Hamas terrorist attack began last year.

We stood there, hundreds of us, surrounding these families, around a dozen of them, their faces so familiar to us now after months – 12 months – of hearing their stories and their cries. Their faces, and the faces of their loved ones, of Idan Alexander and Ofer Calderon and Keith Siegel, Naama Levy and Liri Albag, Matan Angrest and Ofer Wenkert, so many of them, 101 in total, still, in Gaza.

I was there in my professional capacity, Jessica the reporter who has become so familiar with these families and their faces after covering the hostages over the course of the last year, but of course I was there as regular Jessica as well, Jessica who lives in Jerusalem with her husband and two kids, two teenagers who were getting up right about then, and donning white t-shirts for the ceremonies in their school, Jessica whose husband Daniel has a hard time tearing himself away from the news, Jessica standing next to her sister Beth Steinberg and brother-in-law Ira, all of us in a state of disbelief that it’s one year later and as many bereaved families say, it still feels like October 7, 2023.

The hostages. In the days after October 7, 2023, it seemed that they might become a rallying point for all Israelis as the country overcame the divisions that had plagued it in the previous year and pulled together in the face of the tragedy that had befallen it. After all, redeeming captives has been a deeply held Jewish value since ancient times. In 2011, Israel released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners (one of whom was Yahya Sinwar, who would become the leader of Hamas and the chief architect of the October 7 attack) in exchange for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been held in Gaza for five years. The prime minister who signed off on that deal was the same one who now held the office, Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the unity aound the hostages did not last. Instead, the families of the hostages became a rallying point for opposition to the Netanyahu government, which many of the hostage families felt had betrayed them. While bringing the hostages home was an official Israeli war aim, mounting evidence suggested that Netanyahu’s efforts had been directed toward undemining any possibility of a ceasefire deal that would bring about their release. Such a deal could lead to the departure of two far-right parties from Netanyahu’s coalition and the collapse of his government. In that event, Netanyahu would have to face the corruption charges that have plagued him since 2019 without the protection of the prime minister’s office. He would also be unable to avoid being held accountable for the security failures that allowed the October 7 attack to happen.

In the days leading up to the October 7 anniversary, the hostage families refused to have anything to do with the official commemmoration ceremony being organized by the government. Instead, they and others organized their own ceremony, which had far more energy than the official one.

‘Time is running out for the hostages’

Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza entered a second year and spread to a second front. Israel struck back at Hezbollah in Lebanon, which had been launching rockets at northern Israel since October 8, 2023. Meanwhile, lack of progress in obtaining the release of the hostages and frustration on the part of the families continued. Eden Solomon wrote in Haaretz on October 19, 2024:

Ali Alziadana, brother of Youssef Alziadana, who was abducted from a dairy farm in Kibbutz Holit along with his sons Hamza and Bilal and his daughter Aisha, has served as the family spokesperson for months. Bilal and Aisha were freed after 55 days, but Youssef and Hamza remain captive.

Recently, after extensive efforts, Ali feels the public struggle has reached a standstill. “We talked, we shouted, we cried out – and no one is listening,” he says. “I feel invisible. When your own country doesn’t listen to you, it hurts the most because it’s home, and then you just don’t know what to do.”

Since June, the family has received no signs of life from Youssef and Hamza. “We pray they’re alive, but we know nothing,” Ali says.

“The uncertainty is unbearable, and the government has forgotten them.” He accuses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of missing opportunities for a deal. “What is more valuable than the hostages? More than the lives abandoned on October 7?”

Youssef, 54 and a father of 12, has diabetes and requires daily insulin. “If he’s alive, how is he getting his treatment?” Ali asks. “We thought it would be a matter of weeks, certain the hostages would be a priority. We never imagined they’d stay there this long.”

Ali describes his nephews’ slow recovery since their release. “They’re okay, thank God, recovering gradually,” he says, emphasizing the mental toll.

“They’re still receiving psychological treatment, but physically, they’re fine.” Aisha, who was engaged at the time of her abduction, hasn’t set a wedding date yet. “She won’t marry while her father remains captive,” explains Ali.

Ali feels powerless, overwhelmed by thoughts of what to do next. “I hear the bombings in Gaza from my home. It feels like I’m under attack. It’s unbearable. Every moment, I think of something new: maybe I’ll go to Egypt, but how would I meet the ambassadors? Maybe to Jordan, but how could I reach the king? I don’t trust the government anymore. They’ve abandoned us.”

After a diplomatic trip with other hostage families, meeting ambassadors from Qatar, Hungary, and Switzerland, Ali says there is no deal on the horizon. “The ambassadors said no talks are in progress, and no initiatives are being taken. Without a deal initiator, we’re stuck,” he says.

“I heard they might delay any talks until after the U.S. elections. If that’s true, it’s terrible. Every moment they’re held is critical. Every minute is a death sentence.”

That was one of many such stories. Nine days later, it was Amir Tibon’s turn to report in Haaretz:

Exactly six months ago, a video was released by Hamas showing my friend Omri Miran, a 47-year-old father of two young girls who was kidnapped on October 7 right in front of his daughters. The video showed Omri alive, with a long beard, uninjured and able to coherently speak before the camera.

It was the first sign of life his family had received since he was taken hostage, and it brought a dose of optimism to his loved ones and friends. He had survived half a year in the hands of Hamas. Soon, we all thought, he would return home as part of a deal to release the Israeli hostages and end the war in Gaza.

Little did we know. Half a year later, hope has made way for alarm and despair. In the course of those six months, more Israeli hostages were killed than released. After a successful military operation brought four of them back alive (costing the life of one heroic officer who died while rescuing them from their captors), Hamas significantly worsened the conditions in which all of the remaining hostages are being held. This most likely includes Omri. No new video of him has been released since then.

During this period, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been on a campaign – a politically focused effort to make the Israeli public forget about the hostages, their suffering, the urgent danger to their lives, the unthinkable reality faced by their families.

He has celebrated the killing of Hamas chiefs Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar, the two architects of the October 7 massacre, while ignoring the fact that Sinwar – in his attempt to escape the IDF in Rafah – very likely gave the order to murder six hostages who had been held in a tunnel near his hiding place. One of those six was U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

Long hours of fruitless negotiations were wasted as the months went on. Netanyahu refused to sign any deal that would include an end to Israel’s war in Gaza; Hamas refused to sign any deal that didn’t include that. Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians died, and the situation of the hostages has continuously deteriorated. Israeli officials can’t say for certain how many of them are still alive.

Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, who played a key role in the 2011 Israel-Hamas negotiations that led to the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, has been insisting for months that only one deal is truly possible: the release of all hostages in return for the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners; an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza; and an end to the war. Netanyahu’s far-right governing coalition partners, who hold the keys to his political survival, oppose this deal. So far, the prime minister has preferred their support over the hostages’ release.

This deal was on the table when Omri’s video was released, half-a-year ago, and it remains the only real option for a deal today. Omri remains in Gaza, in the hands of the enemy, while we wait for the urgency of his release to overcome cynical political calculations.

On November 23, Tibon recalled the temporary ceasefire that had brought about the release of some 100 hostages a year earlier – a “miracle” to which Israelis responded with “tears of sadness, but also tears of joy”:

When that agreement collapsed at the end of November, and the fighting in Gaza resumed, everyone assumed that within weeks, or at most, several months, another deal will be reached, and the almost 140 hostages who were not released will then be returned. This turned out to be a delusion. A year has passed since those last happy days of November, and no progress has been made in the negotiations for a second deal.

The obstacle has been, and remains, the gap between Hamas and the Netanyahu government on one main question: will the second deal include a clear commitment on behalf of Israel to end the war. Hamas says that without this, it won’t release the hostages; Netanyahu refuses, and is willing to only accept a temporary cease-fire after which the fighting in Gaza will resume. The Biden administration has tried to square this circle for a year now to no avail. Sadly, instead of facing up to the sad truth – that only ending the war will bring back the hostages alive – the administration, especially Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, has been lying to itself and to the families of the hostages that a deal on Netanyahu’s terms is possible.

Time is running out for the hostages who have so far somehow survived the unbearable conditions they are being held in. We can still save them, but only if we tell the truth. A deal can be reached – if it leads to the war’s end. Anything else is a waste of time – and time is the one thing we cannot afford to lose.

‘They are out of words – and they each say that’

As I write on November 25, Israel is about to sign a ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The ceasefire in the north may help create conditions for a ceasefire deal in Gaza that would lead to the release of the hostages – or it may not. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s office has been roiled by the deepening “BibiLeaks” scandal, which, as Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz on November 22,

is suspected to have included stealing classified documents, doctoring them and sending them to media outlets in Israel and abroad, while bypassing the military censors. The goal was to mold Israelis’ opinions, undercut the hostage families’ struggle and thwart pressure for progress in the hostage talks. In short, Netanyahu’s people tried to derail one of the war’s goals that the prime minister himself had articulated.

On November 24, the cabinet called on government agencies to boycott Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper that has been most critical of the Netanyahu government.

And on November 25, Jessica Steinberg went to another hostage demonstration in Jerusalem:

It was Monday afternoon in Jerusalem, and the fourth week of Mishmeret 101, or Shift 101, the latest in the various protest movements for the hostages.

It’s a women’s movement, gathered around the hostage mothers and everyone wears white while sitting on the ground outside a government building, whether it’s the Knesset or Netanyahu’s Jerusalem house or the President’s Residence. They sit for several hours, quietly, sometimes softly singing, sometimes with one of the hostage mothers getting up to say a few words at the beginning or end or middle.

But the idea here is that they are out of words – and they each say that, nearly every time.