It was as galling as it was predictable.
Last Thursday, the UN Human Rights Council released a report accusing Israel – whose women were raped by invading Hamas marauders on Oct. 7 and as hostages in Gaza – of “the systematic use of sexual, reproductive, and other gender-based violence” against Palestinians. Nothing less.
It also accused Israel of “genocidal acts.” Yet again. This was not some keffiyeh-wearing, backpack-hauling protester at Columbia University making audacious claims. It was an officially sanctioned UN body lending its imprimatur to the accusations.
Israel’s response was equally predictable.
Horrid antisemitism, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One of the worst blood libels the world has ever seen, said Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar.
But these statements likely had as much impact on global public opinion as the UN report had on Israeli opinion. A new approach is needed.
Einat Wilf – prolific author on Israel and Zionism, articulate lecturer, and former MK in the Labor Party and Ehud Barak’s short-lived Independence faction – has a suggestion: Stop focusing on the trees. Look at the forest.
Each UN report, each Amnesty International document, is a tree. Stopping at each one means getting lost in the forest.
The bigger picture, Wilf contends, is far more dangerous: the relentless equation of Israel and Zionism with whatever evil is dominating the discourse at the time – imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, white supremacy, and genocide. This is part of a much broader and more pernicious campaign: instilling a global mindset that the world would be better off without the collective Jew.
This is, by no means, a new mindset – indeed, it is an ancient one, she said. It is the notion that “there is a better world out there – a world of salvation, a world of racial purity, a world of human rights, of cleanliness, and that the collective Jew stands between this world and utopia.”
She argued that the same animating idea is at work today, but few articulate it in these terms. Israel’s reaction to the UN report, therefore, should not have been localized or limited to condemning it as libel, she maintained, but rather placing it in this much broader context.
Wilf, a Jerusalem native with a BA in government and fine arts from Harvard and a PhD in political science from Cambridge, has lectured and written extensively about what she calls the Palestinian “placard strategy.”
The term refers to the slogans that appear on placards at anti-Israel demonstrations, which, she said, “Is the repetitive, nursery rhyme equation of Israel, Zionism, and the Star of David to a litany of words that are all accepted as evil.”
Wilf speaks flawless, accentless English, leading many who hear her to assume that she was born in the US or has American parents. Neither is true. Rather, when she was in fourth grade, her family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, for two years while her father completed a post-doc at the National Institutes of Health.
“It’s a good age for a kid – not too early, not too late – to get the accent right,” she said.
Prestige suspends judgment: How anti-Israel accusations are perceived as credible
THE WORDS on the placards themselves – “colonialism,” “racism,” “apartheid” – matter less than their endless repetition, she argued. These words appear repeatedly in protests, the media, social media, and, crucially, institutions with global prestige, like the UN, giving them a veneer of legitimacy.
Wilf recalled a former KGB officer’s observation that “prestige suspends judgment.” If a prestigious institution – a UN body, a university, a human rights organization – endorses an idea, it gains automatic respectability.
That is why, she explained, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was so effective: 120 years ago, a book carried prestige, even if it was a fabrication.
Today, the same laundering process takes place. The formula – “Israel, Zionism, Star of David = evil” – gets reinforced through institutions that still command authority, however misplaced. Human rights organizations, academia, and the UN serve as conduits for these libels. Wilf noted that one can even earn a PhD by arguing that Zionism is colonialism. A tenure-track career can be built on the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.
The letters “UN” are still “incredibly powerful,” she said. “So we need to understand what’s going on. We need to understand how dangerous it is, and that’s what we need to convey.”
How some Jews give legitimacy to anti-Israel accusations
IRONICALLY, WHAT also gives these ideas prestige and legitimacy is when some Jews, like US Senator Bernie Sanders or American journalist Peter Beinart, voice them.
Asked how best to respond to them, Wilf replied that here, too, she would show the “big picture.” And that picture is that Jews, as a minority, have always faced immense pressures and temptations to betray their own people, with greater rewards for those who are more articulate and educated.
“There will always be the Jews who succumb to the pressures – that’s the price of being a minority in a world that still fundamentally feels uneasy with our continued existence,” she said, adding that these people are “useful” to the other side but never respected.
“This is the attitude to take: We understand it’s hard to be Jewish; there are rewards for selling us out. Some will fall to that pressure. There’s not much we can do about that. This is our cross to bear.”
More than a PR battle: Israel wages war on a genocidal global mindset
CONTRARY TO popular belief, Wilf argued, Israel is not simply engaged in a PR battle. The issue is more profound: A global mindset is being shaped – one that sees the world’s problems as solvable if only Israel ceased to exist. And as was chanted repeatedly after Oct. 7, this can be achieved “by any means necessary.”
Why are all means legitimate? Because if the collective Jew is perceived as the last barrier to utopia, then any means of erasing it are justified. Wilf cited a chilling example: A placard after Oct. 7 showing an Israeli flag in a dustpan with the caption, “Keep the world clean.”
“It is not a coincidence that all the evil words are on the side of Israel, Zionism, Star of David,” she said, “and that all the good words – justice, equality, freedom, and rights – are on the side of its negation, what I have come to call ‘Palestinianism,’ which is ultimately an ideology that is built on the negation of the collective Jew.”
This is the bigger picture, she said, and one that needs to be conveyed.
Once we do this, she continued, “We need to let people understand that this is the kind of ideology that brings down societies and that you do not have any moment in history where societies become obsessed with the notion that the collective Jew stands between them and utopia, and somehow it ends well.”
Rather than merely refuting each new libelous UN report, Israel must expose the deeper pattern at play. This “virus,” she warned, has been inserted into the Western world – into the US, France, and Britain. She also said that the Jewish people historically have had a “timing problem.”
“By the time the world wakes up to how destructive these ideologies are, we often suffer the brunt of the damage,” she argued. “So we need to first of all focus on ensuring that we suffer as little damage as possible as this ideology works itself through the world, but we have allies, and we have friends. We need to help them understand what’s going on.”
How can Israel fight the 'virus' of Palestinianism?
HOW SHOULD Israel go about doing that?
First, she said, it must start conveying this broader message – something its leadership, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu downward, has failed to do.
Netanyahu, Wilf contended, does not take Palestinianism seriously. She defined it as an ideology that unites Arabs from Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and their supporters around a singular obsessive objective: the erasure of the Jewish state.
Palestinianism has certain core tenets, she said, among them: From the river to the sea, there will be no Jewish state; Palestinians are perpetual refugees until “return is achieved”; return is not some “soft nostalgia” for a great-grandparent’s home – Oct. 7 is return: The erasure of Israel and Zionism is the only acceptable outcome.
Paradoxically, since he was no friend of the Jews, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin encapsulated the essence of this “Palestinianism” in a speech he gave to Parliament in 1947 explaining why Britain was returning its mandate over Palestine to the UN.
Wilf often cites this speech: “His Majesty’s Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”
That, she maintains, is the essence of the conflict – having nothing to do with occupation, settlements, displacement, or even the policies of this or that Israeli government.
Wilf sees Palestinianism as an ideology of erasure. “It does not seek self-determination. It does not seek statehood. It does not seek independence. It seeks only to prevent to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the land,” she said.
The career and achievements of Einat Wilf
ARRIVING AT that conclusion wasn’t the usual trajectory for someone who still considers herself on the Israeli Left. Wilf served as a foreign policy adviser to Shimon Peres from 2002 to 2006 and served in the Knesset from 2010 to 2013, first in Labor and then as part of Barak’s faction.
She hasn’t ruled out a return to politics and plans to take an “exploratory tour of Israel” to see if her ideas resonate and if “something clicks.” She’ll “make something political out of it if it does.” If not, she’ll “go home and write an essay about my failed journey.”
“One thing I’ve learned in politics is that people often say they want things – they want everyone gone, they want new faces, they want this, they want that – but when the time comes for decisions, they actually don’t want those things,” she said.
Over time, a series of pivotal moments reshaped Wilf’s understanding of the conflict.
One of those moments came from witnessing firsthand Palestinian leaders reject statehood. It wasn’t just learning about the Arab world’s refusal to accept partition in 1947. It was watching both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas walk away from offers of independence made by two prime ministers, Barak and Ehud Olmert.
“I’m seeing with my own eyes Palestinians walking away again and again from an opportunity to have a state,” she said. “And it just doesn’t make sense.”
She searched for historical parallels and found none. “I checked it. You don’t have an example of a movement that claims to want independence, liberation, and self-determination repeatedly saying ‘no,’” she said. “At one point, you have to say it is not a movement for independence, liberation, and self-determination – they want something else.”
Another turning point was living through the massacres of the Second Intifada. “I began to ask a simple question: What is going on?” She said that rejecting statehood and then going on a terrorist assault is not the way a people who genuinely want independence behave.
DURING THAT period, as a member of the Left, she was invited to meetings with moderate Palestinians – people educated at top universities in the US and the UK. She was stunned by what she heard.
“They were saying things like, ‘The Jews are a religion, not a people, and only a people, not a religion, has the right to self-determination,’ and that the connection you claim to the land is made up so you can steal it.” These, she stressed, were the voices of the moderates.
When people describe her shift in thinking as a journey from Left to Right, she rejects that framing. “I say that I remain an Israeli lefty in every kind of issue that matters. And I also say this is not a journey. I compare it to a scientific process of finding out empirical reality.”
She sees it as a case of hypothesis testing. “Like I tell people, compare it to a scientist. We had a hypothesis in the 1980s and ‘90s that came out of the First Intifada – the mood of the ‘90s that says that what separates us from peace is a Palestinian state and Palestinian control of territory.”
That hypothesis, she said, was tested “multiple times because we are good scientists.” Two Israeli prime ministers, Barak and Olmert, tested it with two different Palestinian leaders, Arafat and Abbas. In between, Ariel Sharon tried another approach through unilateral disengagement.
“We tested the hypothesis that what stands between us and peace is Palestinian control of territory, a Palestinian state. And it failed,” she said.
A good scientist, she continued, must then ask: What is the alternative hypothesis? And that led her back to Bevin’s formulation: “The Jews want a state; the Arabs want the Jews not to have a state.”
For Wilf, that simple formulation explains everything.
GIVEN HER views, one might expect Wilf to have at least a grudging respect for Netanyahu. She does not. In her view, he has fundamentally misjudged the nature of the conflict.
“At one point,” she said, “I thought it was his ego – his sense of self just doesn’t allow him to take Palestinianism seriously. He wants to focus on Iran.” But by fixating on Iran as the primary threat, she argued, the prime minister has ignored a more immediate danger. “It’s like the man has no understanding of where the dangers lie or who our enemies are.”
She believes one of his biggest missteps came in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, when US president Joe Biden visited Israel and delivered a deeply moving speech. “You could see how shaken he was by the evil that was unleashed that day,” she recalled. But then Biden added a crucial line: “Hamas doesn’t represent the Palestinians.”
The significance of that sentence, she said, was clear to her the moment she heard it. “I remember thinking, ‘We are going to pay dearly for this.’ And what did Israel – official Israel, under Netanyahu – do? It caved.” According to Wilf, military spokespeople were directed to reinforce the narrative that Israel was at war only with Hamas, not with the Palestinians.
For Wilf, this was a critical failure of leadership. Instead of going along with Biden’s framing, she argued, Netanyahu should have responded with measured but firm disagreement: “Thank you, Mr. Biden, for everything you’re doing for us – the aircraft carriers, the Iron Dome support. But unfortunately, all the evidence points to the fact that Hamas does represent the Palestinians.”
She pointed to the Palestinian celebrations on Oct. 7, the vast tunnel networks, the stockpiling of weapons, and the transformation of Gaza into what she called an “integrated, weaponized landscape.” In her view, pretending that Hamas and the Palestinian people are separate entities is a dangerous illusion.
“I am not going to send soldiers into battle based on a lie,” she said, imagining what Netanyahu should have said.
The failure to acknowledge reality, she argued, has led Netanyahu to incorrectly define the enemy. “It’s as if the US president in December 1941 [after Pearl Harbor] would have declared war only against Japanese pilots – saying, ‘other than that, we’re good.’”
Instead, she believes Israel must confront the broader ideological war it faces. “The correct war is, at a minimum, against Gaza and, more truly, against Palestinianism itself. This war will continue until the ideology of Palestinianism dies – so that Jews and Arabs can finally live in peace.”
For Wilf, the prime minister’s refusal to see the whole picture has had severe consequences. “If you don’t understand who your real enemy is, you will keep making mistake after mistake. And in that, I think Netanyahu bears responsibility for so much of what has gone wrong.
“He is fighting the wrong war.”
