THE CIVILIZATIONAL PARADOX

How Israel’s Survival Strategy Became Its Identity Killer

There is a particular discomfort that belongs to diaspora Jews alone — not the discomfort of being targeted, which has its own long and documented history, but the discomfort of watching something you loved at a distance become unrecognizable. Not because it changed overnight, but because a strategy accumulated, year after year, until the thing the strategy was meant to protect had been quietly hollowed out.

This is where some of us find ourselves now.

For nearly half a century, Israel mounted one of the most remarkable cultural soft-power projects in modern history. Orchestras toured Europe. Scientists collected Nobel Prizes. Filmmakers competed at Cannes. Athletes carried a flag that meant something beyond borders. Dancers, architects, writers — a young nation, born out of catastrophe and desert, was exporting proof of concept to the world: that a people who had been history’s most deliberate target could build something luminous, something worth the attention of civilization. For diaspora Jews — in Buenos Aires, in New York, in Paris, in Melbourne — this was not a minor thing. It gave our relationship with Israel a quality that was aspirational rather than defensive. We did not have to agree with every policy to feel that pride. The pride was real because it was about flourishing, not survival.

But there was something else, something that required no Zionist conviction whatsoever. In a region defined for centuries by theocratic certainty — where a woman who challenged the veil could be flogged, where a Jew or a Christian or a person of no faith at all had no standing except as a tolerated guest at best, a target at worst — Israel stood as an alternative. Not a perfect one. Not an innocent one. But a real one. A place where the medieval consensus of the surrounding world did not apply. You did not need to be a Zionist to understand the value of that. You needed only to look at what surrounded it. Israel earned support on its own terms, as a civilizational proposition: that in this particular corner of the ancient world, something different was being attempted. That proposition gave diaspora Jews everywhere not merely pride but a cause that felt, in the deepest sense, worth defending.

That project is now, for all practical purposes, suspended.

The Israeli violinist arrives in a European capital and is received not as a musician but as a political actor. The filmmaker submits to a festival and finds the door closed — not to the film, but to the flag. The athlete competes under protest from the stands.

These individuals have, in most cases, nothing to do with the decisions that produced their country’s isolation. They are, in the oldest sense, ambassadors — and they are being turned away at the border of the world’s goodwill, not because of who they are, but because of what their passport now signifies.

This is the civilizational paradox, and it demands to be stated with precision: we are not talking about whether Israel had a choice. That is a different argument, and an honest one, but it is not this argument. We are talking about what the cumulative cost of the choices made has been — not in lives, not in territory, not in geopolitical standing, but in something harder to quantify and perhaps harder to recover. The ability to proselytize. The ability to say to the world: look what we built. Look what is possible.

That ability has been consumed by the strategy required to survive.

And here is where ambivalence becomes not a weakness but the only intellectually honest position available. Because both things are simultaneously true. Israel may have had no clean alternative in the short term — the neighborhood it inhabits does not reward restraint in any simple way, and the threats it faces are not invented. And Netanyahu, for all that his name is now attached to this failure, did not manufacture the conditions that made his calculus feel necessary to enough Israelis to keep him in power for so long. There are no villains here in the operatic sense. There is something more like a river — a current of choices and consequences, each one generating the next, until you look up and find yourself somewhere you never intended to be.

What was intended, presumably, was security. What was also built, without intending it, was a fortress so total that the culture it was meant to protect can no longer move freely in the world.

Some of us, watching from outside, grieve this. Not with anger — anger requires a clear target — but with something closer to the grief of watching a person you admire make a long series of decisions that you could not stop and cannot undo. The Israel of our imagination — the Israel of the concert hall and the laboratory and the film set — was never entirely separate from the Israel of the border and the checkpoint and the military order. We knew that. We chose, for a long time, to hold the two images in the same frame without demanding that they resolve.

They have now resolved. Not in the way any of us would have chosen.

Netanyahu’s name belongs in this essay because this is, in significant measure, a political failure with a human author. But the paradox itself is larger than any one figure. It is what happens when survival and identity are forced into contradiction — and when the contradiction is allowed to run, unresolved, for long enough that the world stops waiting for the resolution.

The Dreidel: Everyone Loses.

There is a game Jewish children have played for centuries, at Hanukkah, on winter nights, in whatever country offered them temporary shelter. A small spinning top — a dreidel — with four faces. Nun: nothing happens. Gimel: everyone wins. Hey: take half. Shin: put one in. The game encodes, in its simplicity, the ancient Jewish understanding that fate spins and lands where it will, that the outcome is never entirely in your hands, that you play anyway.

This spin has landed on a face the dreidel was never supposed to have. Not nun, not gimel, not hey, not shin. Something outside the original rules. A fifth face, unmarked, unanticipated. The one that says: everyone loses.

The violinist turned away at the door. The scientist received with suspicion. The filmmaker without a festival. The diaspora Jew without the Israel of their pride. The dissident in Tehran without their nearest alternative to the medieval world they are trapped inside. All of us, in our different ways, holding what remains of something that was genuinely worth having — and trying to make sense of how the river brought us here, and what, if anything, can be retrieved from it.

We are not required to renounce. We are not required to defend. We are required, perhaps, only to be honest about the spin, and about what it has cost everyone in the room.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley is a documentary filmmaker and author based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Director of more than fifty films for PBS, National Geographic, and European public television, he is co-founder of Heritage Film Project and a former Regents Lecturer at UCLA. His work explores biography, cultural history, and the intersections of memory and identity across the Americas and Europe.