There is a particular kind of Jewish public figure who has become indispensable to the Western anti-Zionist project. He is not Arab. He is not Muslim. He is not a Western leftist with no connection to the region. He is Jewish, often Israeli-born, and he has built a career, a platform, and an identity around condemning his own people for the entertainment and validation of others. He presents himself as a man of conscience, a brave truth-teller who speaks at personal cost. His audience finds him irresistible. And he has no idea what he is.
Ilan Pappé and Gideon Levy are the most prominent examples of the type. Pappé is an Israeli-born historian who has adopted a totalizing ideological framework in which Zionism is the original crime and every subsequent Israeli action is read as its continuation. He has compared Israeli conduct to Nazi practice. He has acknowledged explicitly, in a 1999 interview with the French newspaper Le Soir, that his work is driven by ideology rather than evidence: “The struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers.” A historian who has declared in advance that he is not a truthseeker is not a historian. He is a propagandist with footnotes.
Levy is a longtime columnist for Haaretz who has made a second career appearing on international television and YouTube panels, delivering with great consistency and apparent anguish the most damning possible interpretation of every Israeli action. He presents himself as a man of conscience, tormented by what his country does. Western audiences find this posture irresistible. But consistency of condemnation is not the same as honesty. A man who arrives at the same conclusion regardless of the facts is not a witness. He is an advocate who has already written the closing argument.
Levy has described his own journey in a single sentence: “At first, I saw an occupation. Then I understood it was apartheid. Today, what’s happening in Gaza is, without a doubt, genocide.” Meanwhile, the population of Gaza grew from 360,000 in 1967 to over two million by 2023. A people being subjected to genocide do not sextuple their population.
What both men share, and what their audiences almost never examine, is the credential. The argument deployed on their behalf is not really about their analysis. It is about their origin. Look, even Israelis say so. The Israeli dissident becomes a human citation, a way of preempting scrutiny before it begins. And it works, not because the argument is sound, but because the credential feels like proof.
It is not proof. It is a performance. And it is worth asking: for whom?
Not for Palestinians. The intended audience of Pappé and Levy is not a family in Gaza. It is a professor in London, a journalist in Paris, an activist in California who has been looking for a conclusion and needs a conveniently credentialed messenger to deliver it. The performance is not an act of solidarity with the oppressed. It is an act of social positioning within Western intellectual culture, where condemning Israel is the price of admission to certain rooms, and where a Jewish or Israeli voice condemning Israel is worth more than any other, because it comes wrapped in the appearance of self-sacrifice.
Pappé and his type keep running after the gentiles, dancing like a dog looking for little scraps of meat they throw him, while they laugh at him: “Look how the funny Jew does his clumsy little stupidities to entertain us.”
One day, they kill the puppy, cook it, and from its skin they make wallets, from its fat, soap, and from its hair, a little pillow. And then, after using that wallet to go shopping, they come home, wash their hands with that soap, and when they go to bed, they lay their head on that pillow.
And as they sleep, perhaps they dream, and in their dream, that funny little dog keeps dancing for them, trying hard to earn their love and acceptance, when he should be back with his true family, the other dogs like him, who will accept him, love him for who he is, and care for him without his having to humiliate himself.
They will not turn him into objects like soap, a wallet, or a pillow, because they see his true value as a fellow Jew, proud to be himself in this world.
The Jews who understood this built something that endures. They did not build it by performing for strangers. They built it by coming home.