Why Israel Rejects Western Guilt

Why does Israel so often seem to be arguing with the entire modern West? The answer, in Dan Scheuftan’s telling, is not simply that Israel has bad public relations. Nor is it enough to say that every criticism of Israel is Antisemitic. The story is bigger, messier, and much more uncomfortable.

At its heart is a collision between Western guilt and Israeli survival. Much of the West has learned to distrust nationalism, military power, borders, and the confidence of nations that defend themselves. Israel has learned almost the opposite lesson. Its experience says that when threats are immediate, wishing them away is not morality. It is negligence.

That is why the argument is so sharp. Israel is not merely rejecting a policy suggestion here or there. It is rejecting an entire fashionable worldview.

Israel’s Problem Is Bigger than One Explanation

There are two easy explanations for why hostility toward Israel has become so widespread.

The first says it is all Antisemitism. There is plain truth in that. Ancient prejudice has not disappeared. It has simply found newer language, newer platforms, and very respectable people to repeat it.

The second says it is all about occupation, Palestinian suffering, Israeli mistakes, or military abuses. Again, there are real questions to ask. Israel is not perfect. No country is. War is ugly, civilians suffer, and states can make serious errors.

But neither explanation, by itself, captures the scale of the phenomenon. Why is Israel so often treated not as a flawed democracy in a brutal conflict but as the uniquely evil state? Why are Jews far beyond Israel’s borders held responsible for its actions? Why do accusations become so extreme so quickly?

The claim is not that criticism of Israel is forbidden. It is that Israel is judged by a strange and radically unequal standard.

Scheuftan’s framework has three parts:

• Israel’s security needs clash with the modern Western worldview.
• Antisemitic ideas offer a ready-made arsenal for attacking Israel.
• Western guilt meets a refusal elsewhere to accept responsibility, with Jews made to carry the blame.

That combination, he argues, explains more than any single-cause theory ever could.

Western Guilt Meets Israeli Survival

Western guilt is not the same thing as healthy self-criticism. A society should be able to look honestly at its failures. It should acknowledge colonialism, slavery, discrimination, war, and the ways power can be abused.

But Scheuftan’s criticism is that Western guilt can slide from self-examination into a kind of moral autopilot. The West becomes responsible for every injustice, every conflict, every failure, everywhere. The world gets divided into permanent victims and permanent victimizers. The victim is denied agency. The stronger party is assigned endless blame.

That way of thinking can feel compassionate. But it can also become wildly detached from reality.

Compassion without judgment can become an excuse for refusing to see what people, movements, and regimes actually choose to do.

Israel, meanwhile, sees itself in a long-term struggle against enemies who openly deny its legitimacy. Israelis do not experience existential danger as an abstract topic for a seminar room. The memory of 1973, the Second Intifada, rocket attacks, and October 7 makes preparedness feel like a basic duty.

This is the key divide. In a comfortable Western setting, getting security wrong may lead to embarrassment or a change of government. From Israel’s perspective, getting the basic threat assessment wrong could be catastrophic.

So when Western guilt says military force is always suspect, national identity is inherently exclusionary, and deterrence is somehow morally crude, Israel hears something very different: a request to take risks that others will not pay for.

The Western Lessons of War

Europe’s modern political imagination was shaped by the horror of two world wars. It is understandable that “never again” became a deep moral instinct. War was seen as the ultimate failure, and peace as the supreme good.

But Scheuftan argues that this lesson can be pushed too far. If the only lesson drawn from history is that force must never be used, aggressive forces learn that democratic societies may not defend themselves.

Israel’s lesson is harsher. Peace does not arrive because a nation wants it badly enough. Peace is often preserved when enemies believe aggression will fail and carry a cost they cannot afford.

For Israel, deterrence is not a celebration of violence. It is the attempt to make the next war less likely.

That is why Israeli attitudes toward military defeat can sound jarring to people shaped by Western guilt. Israelis can feel sorrow for civilian suffering while still believing that an armed movement seeking to destroy them must be defeated. Those are not contradictory emotions. They are the moral reality of war.

Scheuftan argues that civilian harm should always be minimized. He points to practices such as warnings before strikes as evidence of Israel’s effort to distinguish between terrorists and civilians. Yet he rejects the idea that minimizing harm requires abandoning the mission of defeating armed enemies.

That, in his view, is where some Western discussions fail. They demand standards that leave a democratic country unable to fight groups that deliberately operate among civilians and exploit civilian vulnerability.

When Good Ideas Become Extremes

Some of the most important ideas in liberal democracy are good precisely because they are balanced with other good ideas.

Human rights matter. Restraint matters. Peace matters. International cooperation matters. Individual liberty matters.

But Scheuftan’s central warning is that every good idea can become destructive when it is turned into an absolute. Liberalism without the willingness to defend liberal society becomes fragile. National feeling without limits can become chauvinism. Human rights language without context can be manipulated by people who hold human life cheap.

The goal should be to optimize competing values, not maximize one value until everything else breaks.

This is why he sees a danger in radical progressivism. It can begin with admirable moral impulses, then end up treating self-defense as shameful, national identity as suspect, and the use of force as proof of evil rather than a tragic necessity.

In that atmosphere, Western guilt becomes a badge of virtue. A country proves its goodness by blaming itself. A commentator proves moral seriousness by being harsher on their own society than on regimes or movements that openly reject liberal values.

Israel does not fit that emotional script. It is stubbornly national. It is unapologetic about Jewish self-determination. And it insists that survival is a legitimate concern. That alone makes it unfashionable.

National Identity Is Not a Dirty Word

Israel’s national identity is central to this argument. Zionism is the belief that Jews, after centuries of vulnerability and persecution, need a sovereign homeland in their ancestral land. Recent attacks on Jews around the world have only made that conviction stronger for many.

But national identity does not automatically mean ethnic hostility. Scheuftan points to Israel’s internal story, where Jews from European, Middle Eastern, North African, Ethiopian, and other backgrounds have built a shared national culture. Families have mixed. Social divides remain, as they do everywhere, but a common Israeli and Jewish story has pulled people together.

This is the opposite of the caricature often produced by Western guilt, in which strong national belonging is automatically treated as sinister.

A shared story can be a source of solidarity, responsibility, resilience, and generosity. It does not have to be a threat.

Israel’s model is also not one of limitless universal obligation. A country can care about outsiders without dissolving its responsibility to its own citizens. Scheuftan argues that solidarity begins with the people who share a society, its laws, and its future.

That is a blunt challenge to the idea that borders are morally suspect. It also helps explain why immigration, demographic change, and national confidence have become inseparable from wider debates about Western guilt in Europe and Britain.

The Fantasy of the International Community

Another major part of the argument concerns international institutions. The phrase “international community” is often used as if it describes a coherent moral authority. But who exactly is included? What values guide it? And why should a vote among states with wildly different political systems be treated as a moral verdict?

Scheuftan argues that international bodies can be captured by majorities that do not share liberal democratic values. In that environment, anti-Israel resolutions, language, and campaigns can gain legitimacy through sheer repetition.

That does not mean every international institution is worthless or that every criticism is illegitimate. It means that the label “international” is not a magic stamp of truth.

For Israel, the problem is practical. It cannot delegate its survival to organizations that may be politically hostile, easily manipulated, or detached from the realities of the region. Once again, Western guilt can turn institutional approval into a moral substitute for judgment.

How Antisemitism Becomes an Instrument

Scheuftan makes an important distinction here. Antisemitism may not be the original motivation of everyone who despises Israel. Many sincerely believe they are defending human rights, peace, or oppressed people.

But once Israel is cast as an enemy, old Antisemitic patterns become enormously useful. They offer ready-made stories, emotional shortcuts, and accusations with centuries of force behind them.

He identifies several recurring templates:

• The ultimate evil: Israel is portrayed as uniquely monstrous, rather than as a country facing moral and strategic dilemmas.
• Dehumanization: Jews are cast as cruel people who delight in harming innocents, including modern versions of the ancient blood libel.
• Conspiracy: Jews or Israel are accused of secretly controlling governments, media, wars, or events far beyond their reach.
• The enemy of whatever matters most: Jews are blamed for capitalism by some, communism by others, nationalism by some, and globalism by others.
• Dual loyalty: Jewish citizens are treated as suspect because of presumed loyalty to Israel.

The power of these stories is that they can be used by people on opposite ideological poles. The far left may accuse Jews of colonial domination. The far right may accuse Jews of hidden control. The details clash, but the target is the same.

Antisemitism is remarkably flexible because it can tell every group that Jews are the obstacle to the thing that group loves most.

This is why Western guilt becomes so dangerous when it merges with old stereotypes. The West says it must account for its sins. Jews are then placed in the role of the West’s supposedly purest symbol and blamed for the sins from which everyone else wishes to distance themselves.

The Dangerous Denial of Agency

There is another cruelty hidden inside Western guilt: the denial of agency to people treated as perpetual victims.

If every failure in the developing world is blamed entirely on colonialism, poverty, or Western intervention, then the actual decisions made by governments, armed movements, and political leaders disappear from view. That is not respect. It is a lower expectation dressed up as sympathy.

Scheuftan contrasts this with countries and societies that have chosen constructive paths, taking responsibility for their future rather than treating history as a permanent alibi. His point is not that history does not matter. It obviously does. His point is that history cannot explain everything forever.

When Western guilt meets a politics that refuses responsibility, the arrangement is almost too convenient. One side eagerly accepts blame. The other side eagerly gives it away. Israel and the Jews become the place where both impulses meet.

What Europe Can Learn from Israel

The argument reaches far beyond Israel. Europe and Britain are wrestling with questions about borders, integration, demographic change, national confidence, and the willingness of free societies to defend themselves.

Scheuftan’s answer is not that every immigrant is a threat or that cultures never change. He explicitly notes that people can integrate and cultures can change, for better or worse. The issue is whether a country has the confidence to set conditions, enforce laws, protect women, defend its values, and maintain social cohesion.

For him, the deeper problem is a society that loses faith in its own future. A country that does not want children, does not believe in its own story, and cannot explain what it is protecting will eventually seek substitute causes.

A society needs more than outrage and fashionable causes. It needs a sense of continuity, belonging, and a future worth building.

That is where the rejection of Western guilt becomes a broader argument about democratic health. A civilization should recognize its failures without becoming unable to defend its achievements. It should show compassion without surrendering judgment. It should welcome those who join its civic life without pretending that borders, culture, and security do not matter.

Moderation Is the Real Alliance

The political conclusion is not that Israel should simply trade one extreme for another. Scheuftan is clear that radical left and radical right movements can both be hostile to Jews, liberal democracy, and social stability.

The natural partners for Israel, he argues, ought to be moderates: people on the center-left and center-right who understand that security, human rights, freedom, national identity, and compassion must be held together.

That is a much harder project than joining a tribe. It requires resisting the easy emotional pull of Western guilt without falling into indifference or cruelty. It requires judging facts rather than repeating slogans. And it requires acknowledging that a nation under real threat may see the world differently from those protected by distance.

Israel’s message, at its bluntest, is simple: it can learn from the West, admire much of what the West has built, and still refuse the demand to gamble with its existence for the sake of fashion.

That refusal may be unpopular. But survival rarely begins with popularity.