BETRAYAL

The Lie That Hurt the Most

I expect lies from Hamas.

I expect lies from anti-Israel activists.

I expect lies from professors who have never heard a Red Alert siren but somehow believe they have mastered the laws of war from the comfort of an Ivy League faculty lounge.

I even expect lies from politicians who discovered Israel on a map sometime after October 7.

I’ve developed a thick skin for all of them.

But I was not prepared to see the same lie repeated by on LinkedIn by a Jewish community leader.

Someone I “thought” I respected.

Someone whose words carry weight.

That one hurt.

Not because I expect Jews to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu. Israelis certainly don’t. Spend ten minutes in any café in Jerusalem and you’ll hear twenty opinions before the waiter brings your coffee.

That’s democracy.

What stopped me in my tracks was something far more dangerous.

The casual assumption that Benjamin Netanyahu is guilty of war crimes.

Read that sentence again.

Not accused.

Not alleged.

Not under legal challenge.

Guilty.

Since when did Jews abandon the presumption of innocence?

Since when did allegations become convictions?

Since when did LinkedIn replace a courtroom?

The International Criminal Court is a kangaroo court run by rapists, sexual predators, and terrorist-loving thugs. As Jews, of all people, we should know exactly where that road leads.

We have lived through centuries of people deciding we were guilty first and looking for evidence later.

The Dreyfus Affair was not simply one man’s tragedy.

It was a warning.

An entire civilized society convinced itself that a Jewish officer was guilty because the accusation fit the narrative everyone wanted to believe.

Facts eventually won.

But only after reputations had been destroyed.

Only after justice had been mocked.

Only after the crowd had already celebrated its verdict.

History should have taught us something.

Apparently it didn’t.

I live in Efrat.

Not Manhattan.

Not Brussels.

Not The Hague.

Efrat.

In the mountains of Judea.

The heartland of Jewish history.

The place where Abraham walked.

Where King David tended sheep.

Where Jewish history isn’t an archaeological exhibit behind glass.

It’s outside my window.

When rockets fall, they fall on my country.

When reservists disappear for months, they disappear from my community.

When funerals take place, they take place in my homeland.

I don’t experience this war through hashtags.

I live it.

I speak to IDF soldiers.

I hear stories that never make CNN.

I hear about command centers beneath hospitals.

Weapons hidden inside schools.

Explosives stored in mosques.

Tunnel entrances in children’s bedrooms.

Hostages dragged beneath civilian neighborhoods.

An enemy that deliberately transformed hospitals into shields, schools into fortresses, apartment buildings into military compounds and then discovered that the world blames Israel for fighting back.

That isn’t military genius.

It’s moral depravity disguised as strategy.

So let me ask the question almost nobody asking Israel ever seems willing to answer.

How would you fight that war?

No slogans.

No hashtags.

No carefully rehearsed talking points.

How?

Do you leave the terrorists beneath the hospital?

Do you ignore the rocket launcher beside the kindergarten?

Do you abandon the hostages because Hamas surrounded them with civilians?

Every person eager to condemn Israel has an opinion.

Very few have an answer.

Then comes the legal reality that too many people conveniently skip.

Israel has one of the most independent judicial systems in the democratic world.

Not according to Israeli politicians.

According to decades of Israeli jurisprudence.

Our Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against Israeli governments.

It has blocked government policies.

Forced military changes.

Overruled ministers.

Investigated military conduct.

Convicted public officials.

Even sent a former Prime Minister to prison.

Think about that.

Israel’s own legal system prosecuted and imprisoned one of its own prime ministers.

How many countries in the Middle East can say that?

How many dictatorships investigate themselves?

How many authoritarian regimes allow judges to overrule elected governments?

The ICC was created to serve as a court of last resort when countries are unwilling or genuinely unable to investigate themselves.

Whether that standard has been met in Israel is a legitimate legal debate.

Pretending Israel has no functioning legal system is not.

It is simply false.

Then there is another uncomfortable fact.

The prosecutor who pursued the case against Netanyahu did not leave office as an untarnished symbol of international justice. He was removed after ICC member states voted to dismiss him following findings of serious sexual misconduct. He denies those findings, and they do not determine every legal issue before the Court.

But spare me the lectures that this entire process exists on some flawless moral pedestal above politics, personalities, and institutional failure.

It doesn’t.

None of this means Israel is above criticism.

It isn’t.

No democracy should be.

If Israeli soldiers commit crimes, investigate them.

If commanders violate the law, prosecute them.

If governments make mistakes, expose them.

That is exactly what democracies do.

Israel has done it before.

Israel will do it again.

But stop pretending that allegations equal guilt.

Stop pretending that filing charges ends the legal debate.

Stop pretending that international institutions are incapable of error, politics, bias, or inconsistency.

And please, for the love of Jewish history, stop handing the world’s oldest accusation against the Jewish people a fresh coat of paint.

Because every time a Jewish communal leader casually repeats “war criminal” as though the verdict has already been written, the world hears something very different.

It hears, “Even the Jews agree.”

That sentence will travel farther than any correction ever will.

That’s why this matters.

Jewish leadership is not measured by how quickly you echo fashionable opinion.

It is measured by how seriously you pursue the truth.

Do your homework.

Read the laws of armed conflict.

Understand the principle of complementarity.

Study Hamas’s military doctrine.

Talk to Israeli soldiers instead of activists.

Visit the communities that buried their dead after October 7.

Stand in Efrat.

Stand in Sderot.

Stand in Kfar Aza.

Stand at the Nova memorial.

Then tell me, with a straight face, how any democracy on earth could have fought this war differently against an enemy that built an army beneath hospitals, schools, mosques, and homes while using its own civilians as shields.

This isn’t about Benjamin Netanyahu.

Prime ministers come and go.

Governments rise and fall.

This is about whether truth still matters.

Whether evidence still matters.

Whether Jews, after everything our people have endured, still remember that accusations are not convictions.

I expected better from our enemies.

I demanded better from our own.