The End of the Parade

Israel disciplines its supporters who still fantasize about a liberal Jewish State; the government invests directly into settler violence; and how the threat of a boycott killed an annexation bill.

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On Sunday, May 31, as Israel unleashed relentless airstrikes across Lebanon, New Yorkers took to Fifth Avenue to celebrate the annual Israel Day Parade. In the days leading up to it, the big local controversy was that Mayor Zohran Mamdani, unlike all of his predecessors, did not plan to attend; his NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, would cheerfully go in his place. Many of the usual suspects excoriated Mamdani for the decision while simultaneously insisting he wouldn’t have been welcome anyway—a pretty good reflection of Israel’s posture towards its critics.

The ADL, for its own part, argued that the Israel Day Parade is not really about Israel, per se, but is “nothing more than a peaceful and positive celebration of the existence of the only Jewish state in the world” and the city’s “largest Jewish celebration,” thus making Mamdani’s refusal to attend ipso facto antisemitic.

It’s tiresome to keep pointing this out, but this conflation of Israel and Judaism fits squarely within the ADL’s own definition of antisemitism.

And then, a funny thing happened: Israel’s leaders showed up to New York’s Israel Day Parade big Jewish celebration. Not as random attendees, but as members of the State of Israel’s official delegation, organized by Israel’s consulate general in New York. Who could possibly have seen this coming?

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—currently overseeing the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank—was there. So was Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, who once suggested nuking Gaza and bombing humanitarian aid sites. Minister of the Negev, the Galilee, and National Resilience Yitzhak Wasserlauf attended too; while giving a pep talk to soldiers heading into Gaza, Wasserlauf offered “a blessing on the one who seizes babies and dashes them against the rocks.” And then there was MK Ariel Kellner, who previously declared, “One goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.”

Next came the predictable condemnations from all the good liberal Zionists in New York who had attended the parade. Here’s the “progressive” candidate in the NY-12 race, alarmed that one of the most influential and outspoken leaders of Israel appeared at its parade:

New York’s governor condemned Smotrich’s attendance while insisting the parade was really about Jewish pride, community, and unity—not, somehow, the state explicitly named in the title of the event:

NYC’s attorney general reduced Smotrich’s genocidal politics to “Islamophobia”:

My own congressman—who ignored me when I pleaded for protection from raging settlers—expressed shock and disgust that Smotrich had attended:

The NYPD commissioner seemed confused about what exactly she had been celebrating, while the House minority leader confirmed, once again, that he remains incapable of change:

Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, lamented that the Israeli consulate general in New York tricked them, telling the New York Times, “There was a complete lack of transparency here. They did not share any information about these attendees coming to the parade. We certainly asked, and they did not share these names.”

Imagine the Israeli consulate bringing members of the Israeli government to the Israel Day Parade!

To be fair, these aggrieved paraders often find themselves confused. They are the same people who cannot seem to explain how a state in an Arab region can maintain a Jewish majority while remaining democratic. The ones who denounce National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric then react with incredulous denial when confronted with his impact. (ICYMI: Ben-Gvir’s latest proposal is for the IDF to take women and children hostage in Lebanon.) These are the people who accused protesters outside the Greater Israel Real Estate Fair at Park East Synagogue of antisemitism, insisting the event had nothing to do with the settlement movement, while illegal settlement real estate was being openly marketed inside.

Here is journalist Will Bredderman of Jewish Insider, whose beat largely consists of digging up old tweets from Mamdani staffers and presenting them as evidence of antisemitism:

I genuinely wonder whether Bredderman is naïve enough to believe this was a “thoughtless” move rather than a deliberate act of disciplining. Smotrich capped off the parade weekend by visiting Park East Synagogue himself—proving all of the protesters right—and declaring that “We’re done apologizing.” This wasn’t a message to Israel’s adversaries. It was a message to those who continue to defend a version of Israel that doesn’t exist. The whole parade weekend was a humiliation ritual for liberal Zionists, a reminder that the real Israel will not cooperate with their fantasy.

The nerve of Mamdani to skip this parade!

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With that, a few updates on what the real Israel is up to in the West Bank while the world’s attention—such as it can still follow Israel’s every belligerent move—is on Iran and Lebanon:

Last week, the Knesset passed a bill by Religious Zionism MK Tzvi Succot—last seen attempting to break into an Arab Israeli school with an electric saw—granting tax benefits to residents in 58 settlements. The criteria for the benefits are based in part on “security,” meaning the deeper settlers push into Palestinian territory, the more handsomely they’ll be rewarded.

This week, Haaretz revealed that Israel is fast-tracking more than a billion shekels for the establishment and expansion of 69 illegal settlement outposts across the West Bank, including deep inside Areas A and B, ostensibly under Palestinian Authority administrative control. The government quietly approved an emergency allocation to begin planning and legalizing the outposts, many of which do not even fully exist yet. Another billion-plus shekels is expected to follow for roads, infrastructure, mobile homes, public buildings, and “temporary sites” that will function as settlements long before formal legalization is complete. “According to the developing decision,” Haaretz writes, “hundreds of millions of shekels will be allocated for 15 mobile homes for each outpost, in addition to two prefab structures designated for public institutions.” (As regular readers of this blog know, the sudden appearance of mobile homes near a Palestinian village is often the first sign of a new outpost—and the first step toward settler attacks on that community, something I’ve documented in Turmus’ayya, Umm al-Khair, and many other places.) This comes on top of Smotrich’s decision in May to approve more than a billion shekels for paving roads to new settlements, even as Israel’s 2026 budget is expected to implode and defense expenditures continue to soar.

So, to state it plainly: these are direct investments in settler violence, made by the same government that claims to be fighting it—and just the latest evidence that the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is among the state’s most central projects.

Here’s what I wrote in March about the state’s strategic approach to settlement expansion:

1. The army partners with settler leaders to plan and approve new outposts—mapping sites, coordinating with commanders, and issuing orders for how they will be secured.

2. Settlers then establish the outposts themselves—planting flags and caravans on Palestinian land and cutting access roads.

3. The state provides them with military protection; some are gifted guns, drones, ATVs, other military-grade gear, money, and infrastructure.

4. The settlers fan out from their new outposts, terrorizing neighboring villages, often with soldiers either standing alongside them or clearing the way, emptying the land of Palestinians—more than 70 rural communities have been violently expelled since October 7.

5. When the footage gets bad enough, Israeli leaders issue condemnations and, on rare occasions, arrest a settler foot soldier but never the architects.

6. Then, quietly, the state incorporates the gains—retroactively legalizing the outposts, paving the roads, and absorbing the stolen land into the ever-expanding settlement project.

This folds into an even broader strategic approach, which is to move beyond the old settlement heartlands in Area C, encircle Palestinian towns in Areas A and B, choke off access to farmland and grazing areas, and sever the roads that connect them. Smotrich laid this out plainly in September when he introduced his “sovereignty plan,” which would place roughly 82% of the West Bank under full Israeli control while confining Palestinians to a handful of dense, isolated population centers. From there, Israel could annex most of the territory under the principle of maximum land, minimum demographic change—sidestepping the thorny question of citizenship that full annexation would entail.

As government and security officials, soldiers, settlers, and every Israeli journalist know, there is simply no way to carry out this scale of settlement expansion without violence.

All this came to mind when I had the misfortune of stumbling across this passage from a recent essay by Sam Harris, titled “Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel”:

It’s too bad Sam Harris won’t debate critics of Israel, because I’d like for someone to ask him how he squares this claim with the undeniable fact that the most defenseless Palestinian communities in the West Bank—Bedouin shepherding villages—are being systematically chased off their land by armed settlers backed by the Israeli military and government. The idea that these communities are “building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom” is nearly as laughable as the suggestion that the powers-that-be in Israel are interested in a “diverse, tolerant” society. You have to wonder if Harris has bothered to listen to the words these people actually say out loud.

Or what about seven-month-old Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, shot in the head and chest by IDF soldiers while in her mother’s arms on Friday—is Palestinian culture responsible for her death, too? Is the fact that soldiers refused to provide medical aid to the bullet-riddled infant—or that nobody will face consequences for murdering her—a reflection of Israel’s culture of peace and love? Harris has always been a raging Islamophobe, but his detachment from reality is reaching new heights.

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Before I sign off, some good news. Last month, I wrote about what I called the biggest Israel-Palestine story you haven’t heard about: a sweeping bill that would have transferred authority over archaeology and heritage sites in the West Bank—and potentially Gaza—from the military to a new civilian body aligned with the settler movement. The bill was framed as a narrow antiquities measure, helping it to elude global attention, but was in reality a major step toward annexation, granting Israeli civilians expanded power over land seizures, zoning, and security deep inside occupied Palestinian territory.

Last week, Haaretz reported that Netanyahu effectively killed the bill, halting discussions after intense opposition from both the Israeli military and legal establishment. Army officials warned that the legislation would create major operational problems and strengthen accusations of “creeping annexation.” Legal advisers argued that transferring authority over Palestinian land to Israel’s Heritage Ministry would represent a dramatic break from the existing military occupation framework, which is nominally based on international law. In other words, the problem with the bill is largely framed in terms of poor optics and potential diplomatic blowback.

But another group also played a central role in torpedoing the legislation: the Israeli archaeological establishment. As I wrote in The Drift, these mainstream archaeologists opposed the bill not on moral principle but out of concern for their own professional interests:

The anti-occupation archaeologist Alon Arad “said his establishment colleagues understand that erasing ‘the separation between legitimate archaeology in Israel and non-legitimate archaeology in the West Bank’ would mean international organizations’ ‘boycotting the Israeli Antiquities Authority.’ Funding could dry up, and even Israeli archaeologists unwilling to cross the Green Line might be barred from attending conferences and publishing in scientific journals.”

For decades, mainstream Israeli archaeologists have allowed the far-right to use their discipline as a weapon for chipping away at the brittle veneer of laws protecting Palestinians. It’s a familiar story in Israel: a powerful group of cynical actors aggressively seeks to oppress and displace Palestinians; a left-wing minority belatedly emerges to protest in vain; meanwhile, the majority of the population carries on as if nothing is wrong. And by the time they recognize the threat they’ve nurtured within their society, it’s too late to stop it.

Here’s part of a letter from the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities to Netanyahu:

The enactment of a special law establishing a statutory corporation with authority over enforcement and archaeological and heritage research in Judea and Samaria, under the auspices of the Ministry of Heritage, will be perceived in the political and academic worlds as an act of annexation in the Judea and Samaria areas. This will undoubtedly lead to an immediate deterioration in Israel’s international relations in the field of archaeology, and it will also affect other areas of science and research.

We therefore call upon the government and the Committee to refrain from advancing the proposed legislation and to leave the field of archaeology in Judea and Samaria in the hands of the Staff Officer for Archaeology Unit, which operates within the framework of the [IDF’s] Civil Administration in close cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority.

There is a very clear lesson here. Boycotts—or in this case, even the threat of boycotts—work.

One of the standard criticisms of the BDS movement is that it unfairly punishes Israelis who play no direct role in the state’s violence. Putting aside Israeli civil society’s complicity in the state’s crimes, this notion also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of one of the mechanisms of boycotts: once these “innocent bystanders” feel their own interests are threatened, they begin pressuring their government to change course. In this case, it seems to have worked.

This is the great irony of the liberal Zionist posture of claiming to support Israel while opposing its current government: If they were actually interested in changing the country, they would be all-in on hitting it where it hurts. Instead, they have spent years demonizing BDS as antisemitic. By contrast, narrow measures, like the newly announced sanctions by six European countries on a handful of Israeli settler groups—while they certainly don’t hurt—do little to change the political dynamics inside Israel that incentivize settlers to keep expanding. They may even harden them: Yisrael Ganz, head of the powerful Yesha Council, responded to the sanctions by calling on the Knesset to retaliate by “dismantling the Palestinian Authority, ending the artificial division of Judea and Samaria into Areas A, B, and C, and strengthening Israel’s presence and sovereignty throughout the region.”

The liberal Zionist position is a fundamentally contradictory one. I do not envy it. But, if I’m being completely honest, I am so grateful they keep holding parades to show the rest of us exactly what they represent. Can’t wait for next year’s!

Settlers preparing for a parade in the Palestinian village of Huwara.

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Note: apologies for the slower cadence of newsletters recently. I’m in the middle of a few larger projects, along with some upcoming travel, all tied to these same themes—so more on that soon. In the meantime, thank you for your patience.