Tangle - PREVIEW - I think I’m leaving Zionism, or Zionism is leaving me.

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

As the war in Gaza passes the 20-month mark, Executive Editor Isaac Saul has been reflecting on how his views on Israel — and his identity as a Zionist — have changed since Hamas’s October 7 attack. In today's Friday edition, Isaac is tackling the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and exploring how the war has fundamentally shifted his beliefs about the conflict. It’s a deeply personal piece that Isaac has been developing over the past few months, and we’re looking forward to your thoughts, feedback, and criticism.By the way: If you are not yet a podcast member, and you want to upgrade your newsletter subscription plan to include a podcast membership (which gets you ad-free podcasts, Friday editions, The Sunday podcast, bonus content), you can do that here. That page is a good resource for managing your Tangle subscription (just make sure you are logged in on the website!)Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up! You can also give the gift of a Tangle podcast subscription by clicking here. You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by Ari Weitzman and Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and Jon Lall. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and on days like today, a lot of my take. This is a tough one, guys. You might hear already and not the cheeriest tone in my voice. This was a hard thing to write. I think it's going to be a hard thing to read. It's going to be a hard podcast to publish, but I think it's necessary and more than anything, I think it's honest. I think it's just honest. It's just genuine. It's my true feelings. It's

my true thoughts and a lot of people are not going to like them. It's my true feelings. It's my true thoughts. And a lot of people are not going to like them. Many people might like them. I'm sure. I hope. I hope this resonates for some. But the reality is I know this is a really difficult subject and I'm saying a lot of really big, powerful stuff here. Not powerful like, oh, I'm brilliant and my writing's great and whatever, powerful like using big meaningful words and saying things that I think are offensive to some people or on the other hand, you know, too late and finally is what a lot of people are going to say. But for me, it's just where I'm at now.

So I don't know. I'm just going to start if that's okay. I was 21 years old the first time that I went to Israel. Like many American Jews, my first experience was through Taglet Birthright, a Jewish organization that offered a 10-day, all-expenses-paid tour of the country. For young Jews, especially the secular kind as I was, the Birthright trip is often a moving and dramatic experience. You are greeted

and spoken to like a long-lost family member returning home. You were told accurately that the land you were on was ruled by your ancestors thousands of years ago. You were surrounded in public for the first time by other Jews, no longer a minority as you would be throughout the Middle East or subject to nonstop Christmas advertising and immature punchlines about your nose as you might be in the United States.

It is equal parts exhilarating and identity forming. And like most of the people on the trip, I was moved to tears at several moments or thought for the first time that God might be real or wanted to join the Israeli army and protect this nation of my people. I wasn't naive about the context. I was a burgeoning journalist, a skeptic of faith and organized religion, and I understood that this trip was a propaganda tour. But I couldn't deny the feelings that it stirred in me. My sense that this place felt like home, that I had centuries of connection to it, that it was a safe haven for my people in the wake of the greatest attempt to destroy

us in world history, and as we Jews are often reminded, there have been many. And so, I fell in love. It was hard not to. On top of awakening in me a dormant spiritualism, a sense of being home, and an innate desire to be part of something bigger than yourself, it offered simpler joys. The incredible geography, the ancient and heart-stopping beauty of Jerusalem, Israeli girls, beaches, delicious food, and the deep sense you are at the center of the spiritual universe. I didn't just fall in love either. I pledged to come back. And when I graduated from college, I did just that. I moved to East Jerusalem for six months, living in an all-boys yeshiva, studying Hebrew and Torah, immersing myself in my faith.

I also traveled to Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring. I went to the Golan Heights. I played pickup basketball with Arab and Muslim friends. I volunteered at Ultimate Peace, a program that brings Palestinians and Israelis together through Ultimate Frisbee. I explored the edges of Israeli society where tensions between Israelis and Palestinians run the hottest. I went to Hebron and saw the West Bank.

I slept at the border of southern Lebanon. I crossed into Egypt and Ra'afah. I stood across from the Gaza Strip and felt the friction that permeates so much of society there. It was, and still is, the most intellectually stimulating period of my life. That exposure burst the bubble my birthright trip had created and allowed me to see Israel much like I saw my own country, full of blemishes and contradictions and in some cases abject horrors. The more people I spoke to the

more complicated my feelings, the more I read and experienced the less I felt I knew. But somehow my love and connection to Israel only grew. By the time I left that second trip, I was two things I was not when I arrived. An observant Jew and a committed Zionist. I had always been Jewish, at least in the cultural sense of observing holidays and feeling connected to other Jewish people. But in Yeshiva, I actually became a religious Jew. I got the meaning behind the traditions, the source material to my world understanding, the opportunity to stress test my beliefs and my doubts. I found the answers I sought compelling. I brought this new connection home, found a rabbi, started studying the Torah and attending synagogue weekly. I felt and still feel as I write this an undeniably

strong pride for Israel that is hard to shake. The story of Zionism is one of a culture and connection to land reclaimed and revived. For Jews to go from early 20th century pogroms in Europe and the Holocaust to having their own sovereign state surrounding the Holy City in just a few decades still feels, to me, like a kind of miracle within the larger 5,000 year history of Jerusalem. I'm not here to revisit the entire Israeli, Arab, or Jewish Islamic conflicts, just to describe my personal story of coming to Zionism. Israel was formed by Zionists and the global community with plenty of good intentions, and the context of its formation must include the centuries of Jews

being persecuted across Europe and the Middle East that preceded it, the Holocaust, the changing boundaries of the world with so many new nations and lines being drawn, the rise and fall of Arab rule in the region which itself included unimaginable violence and displacement, the inevitability of war at the time to settle such boundaries, and the perseverance of a small but mighty people who happened to be mine. However, the modern global context also includes Israel's actions since its formation. The pain of the Palestinian people, the Nakba, the war crimes, the assassinations, Israel's backing of Hamas, the blockades,

the broken promises. To me, being a Zionist is to know that Israel is far from perfect, but to believe that criticizing the obvious flaws of Israel's government is worth it to push the country towards something better, towards the value of its ideals and the vision of a Jewish state. Accepting Israel's faults, but believing in its promise is largely the position I held on the morning of October 7, 2023. If you read my writing in the days that followed,

you'll see me grappling with my love of Israel, my identity as a Zionist, my identity as a Jew, and the reality that the life Palestinians were living could not be peacefully maintained. I knew Israel bore some responsibility for the conditions that led up to October 7th, and I feared things were about to get a whole lot worse. What I did not expect, and what in some ways left me heartbroken or in denial, is that

the next 20 months would leave me questioning the project of Israel as a whole. Questioning my Zionism, feeling isolated from my fellow Jews along with any other straightforwardly pro-Palestine or anti-Israel team. I suppose, really, what I didn't expect was to feel so utterly alone, so politically homeless on this issue, and so disillusioned and full of pessimism about the future. I'd like you to imagine for a moment that today is October 8th, 2023, and I make the following prediction. In May of 2025, approaching two years into the war sparked by Hamas' brutal terrorist attack and hostage-taking, 100,000 Gazans would be dead.

Most of Gaza would be flattened. Hamas would still be in power. A quarter of the Israeli hostages would be dead. Most of Gaza would be flattened. Hamas would still be in power. A quarter of the Israeli hostages would be dead. Two dozen would still be in captivity. Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis would all be firing rockets into Israel. Trump would be president and proposing relocating millions of Gazans out of the Strip. Netanyahu would be prime minister and aligned on Trump's vision. Israel would be accused of genocide by multiple human rights organizations. And the Israeli military would be accused of genocide by multiple human rights organizations, and the Israeli military would be preparing

to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely. Would anyone have argued that was a success or that Israel was winning the war? The answer is obviously no. If I had posited this on October 8th, most people would have thought I was being hyperbolic about the worst possible outcome. In fact, I issued a warning just a few days after Hamas's attack, which was met with resounding condemnation from many of my fellow Zionists, saying that I was overreacting,

framing Israel unfairly and committing a kind of blood libel against Jews. Here's what I wrote then, quote, Israel's desire for violence is not unlike Hamas's. It is just as much about blood for blood as any legitimate security measure. Israel will have every right to respond with force. Toppling Hamas, a group by the way Israel aired in supporting, will now be the objective and the civilian death will be seen as necessary collateral damage. But Israel will also do a bunch of things they don't have a right to do. They will flatten apartment buildings and kill civilians and children,

and many in the global community will probably cheer them on while they do it. They have already stopped the flow of water, electricity, and food to two million people and killed dozens of civilians in their retaliatory bombings. We should never accept this. Never lose sight that this horror

is being inflicted on human beings. As the group B'tselem said, there is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or cited as part of a war against terror. I mourn for the innocence of Palestine just as I do for the innocence of Israel. And as of late, many, many more have died on their side than Israel's, And many more Palestinians are likely to die in this spate of violence too. I think, almost in its entirety, this prediction has come true. If anything, it was understated. The only part of it that hasn't come true is that the international community has not

cheered Israel's actions. Instead, after the first few months of war, Israel has faced condemnation across the globe, probably because its actions have been more horrific than many of us imagined. Many respectable observers, not just activists or pundits or members of the UN with a track record of anti-Israel bias, but lifelong experts on war crimes in their field, have described what Israel has done in the last 20 months as a genocide or genocidal acts. Throughout the war, Tangle readers have insisted that I call Israel's actions a genocide while others have pressed me to defend

Israel from accusations of committing a genocide. Others still have more generally asked where I land. I first tried to tackle this question in early 2024 and I'll start how I did then, by defining the terms. Many people debating this issue seem to believe that genocide means killing every single member of an ethnic or religious group intentionally. Others think it means killing a great deal of civilians. Neither is the definition of genocide. In the current UN Convention of Genocide, which Israel is a party to, genocide is defined as, quote, acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Those acts can be, one, killing members of

the group, two, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, three, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, four, measures intended to prevent births within the group, or five, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. On the basic facts, Israel is quite obviously guilty of number one and number two. It has killed Palestinians and caused them serious bodily or mental harm. Israel is also almost certainly guilty of number three, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. The state has repeatedly cut off aid, food, and water from entering the Strip, and it has accepted, if you believe Israel's stated numbers on the

combatants it has killed and widely accepted low-end estimates on the death toll, that roughly two-thirds of the people it has killed are civilian non-combatants. They also appear to be considering number five, which is forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, depending on how you define that. Israel is, after all, openly moving forward with an operation to displace all two million Palestinians in Gaza to a humanitarian zone and then returning to flatten the entire Gaza Strip. Israel has justified this by saying that Hamas is hiding in civilian areas and will not agree to the exact terms of a ceasefire deal Israel desires, even though Israel repeatedly violated the most recent ceasefire that it accepted, which is also the most promising ceasefire deal it has had. The question, then, is intent. Whether Israel is committing these acts with the intent to destroy and whole or in part Palestinians as a people. If you wanted to find Gaza as a territory or nation, you could also ask if Israel's intent

is to destroy and whole or in part the national group that is Gazans. And the question of Israel's intent is sticky. First, what do we mean by Israel here? Based on the people I know intimately, I do not think most Israelis want to see Palestinians in Gaza destroyed, though some polls suggest otherwise. Plenty of polling does support my viewpoint, though. For instance, a recent Channel 12 poll found that 54% of Israelis believe the decision to expand its war in Gaza is politically motivated. Just 25% agree with the prioritization to destroy Hamas over getting the hostages home. 78% oppose the government's refusal to launch a

state commission inquiry into understanding the failures that led to October 7th. But the Israeli government is a different matter. Israeli citizens did vote for their political leaders, but they are not in control of what is happening in Gaza. Those decisions are made by members of the Knesset, military leaders, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And if Israel as a country wants a regime to change, the will of the people will likely have to wait until 2026 to be expressed. Of course, most governments or militaries committing acts of genocide do not state their intent plainly,

which makes the charges difficult. But in this case, unfortunately, plenty of government officials have made plain language statements of intent to pick from. In the weeks that followed October 7, calls from the class of 2017 were made. Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. Thank you for listening to this preview episode of Isaac's latest Friday piece. To complete this episode and to hear other Friday editions as well as ad-free daily podcasts, please go to readtangle.com where you can sign up for a podcast membership or a bundled

membership that gets you a discount on both the podcast and the newsletter. Isaac, Ari, and Camille will be here with the Sunday podcast and I will return on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Peace. you