There is an ancient, recurring tragedy in the history of our people. When the Prophets of Israel walked the streets of Jerusalem and Samaria, they did not arrive with wild, ungrounded hysterics. They brought cold, realistic, deeply grounded assessments of moral decay and strategic vulnerability. They spoke of structural failures and warned against dangerous, short-sighted political alliances with foreign powers like Egypt or Assyria.
Yet, the establishment’s response was almost entirely uniform: a knee-jerk deflection. Rather than examining the weight of the message, they questioned the loyalty of the messenger. Jeremiah was branded a traitor and thrown into a pit; Amos was told to flee and preach elsewhere. It is a universal human reflex—when faced with an uncomfortable reality that threatens our peace of mind, it is far easier to destroy the critic than to reform the system.
This psychological insulation is not unique to ancient history, nor is it exclusive to any one political culture. Decades ago, I witnessed this exact institutional self-defense mechanism operate at the highest levels of the American conservative establishment. Today, I see the very same dynamic playing out within Israel’s religious Right.
The Washington Precedent: The Shunning of Andrew Eiva
In 1985, Andrew Eiva was a deeply committed, conservative American patriot. He was a champion of the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance, working tirelessly to ensure that the U.S. government delivered the necessary tools—most notably, Stinger missiles—to defeat Communist expansion. Eiva was not an outsider trying to dismantle the mission; he was an insider trying to make it succeed by exposing the glaring flaws and bureaucratic failures of the CIA’s covert pipeline.
Yet, because his clear-eyed analysis threatened the comfortable orthodoxy of the Washington establishment, he became a target for his own political tribe. A professional, three-phase smear campaign was launched against him by front groups with deep ties to the intelligence community, designed to dismantle his credibility step by step.
The campaign began by manufacturing trust through verifiable half-truths, using minor, twisted facts—such as misrepresenting Eiva’s honorable military discharge as leaving under a “cloudy set of circumstances”—to poison the well and create a smoke screen of suspicion. Once this murky context was established, the playbook shifted to smear by association, linking Eiva to controversial foreign figures to make any association with him politically toxic and force the resignation of his prominent sponsors. Finally, the campaign delivered the fabricated kill shot: accusing Eiva of being a suspected contact man for East German intelligence—a devastating, career-ending charge of treason.
Crucially, this professional manipulation did not remain confined to the high-level bureaucracy of the intelligence community; it rapidly trickled down to the conservative street in Washington. Grassroots activists, donors, and patriotic citizens—the very people who shared Eiva’s anti-Soviet goals—instinctively closed ranks. Lacking the access or the inclination to verify the rumors, they adopted the establishment’s talking points as truth. Eiva was promptly shunned in conservative quarters, locked out of the offices, think tanks, and social circles that had once championed him. Rather than fix a defective pipeline and save lives, the conservative street chose to defend the institutional narrative, branding a true patriot as an outcast. The cost of this collective delusion was paid in blood on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
The Modern Israeli Mirror: The Tribal Defense Mechanism
Years later, I brought Andrew Eiva to Israel to conduct a security assessment of Judea and Samaria. His findings, which culminated in my report on the Israeli government’s acquiescence to Palestinian Authority first-strike preparations, revealed a chilling truth: the “unconscious orthodoxy” that defended Washington’s failures was alive and well in Jerusalem.
Writing for Jewish Home News, I frequently observe this same deflective reflex among the religious Right. When presented with a calm, realistic, and entirely un-hyperbolic assessment of our political or military vulnerabilities, the reaction from certain segments of our camp is rarely analytical. It is tribal.
This is not a hypothetical vulnerability; it is a pattern I have watched play out in real-time when confronting our camp’s most cherished political illusions. When I warned that the blind adoration of foreign patrons had clouded our judgment, arguing that Donald Trump’s diplomatic maneuvers with Riyadh were effectively handing Saudi Arabia the keys to our long-term destruction, the response was not a sober, strategic debate. It was an immediate closing of ranks.
The exact same defensive reflex was triggered when I compiled ten official admissions demonstrating how the celebrated Abraham Accords were quietly disarming the IDF—compromising our qualitative military edge in exchange for diplomatic pageantry, while silently freezing our claims to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. Instead of engaging with the sobering data, our camp defaulted to a localized version of the Washington playbook. They questioned the writer’s motives, labeled the critique as “Leftism” or “divisiveness,” and buried their heads deeper into the sand.
The Illusion of the Managed Destiny: The Excuse-Maker in Chief
Nowhere is this self-defense mechanism more tragic than in the camp’s unyielding defense of Binyamin Netanyahu. There is a biting irony in the political figure of Netanyahu, whom we might describe as being “born pregnant“—always carrying an innate, pre-packaged seed of compromise and excuses. From the very beginning of his decades-long tenure, Netanyahu has never been short of elaborate plans, strategic explanations, and eloquent reasons for why he cannot act, why sovereignty must be delayed, or why security threats must be contained rather than neutralized.
We are told to trust his peerless strategic genius, yet his actions consistently align with a larger theatrical production of “managed destiny.” This is a script written not in Jerusalem, but in the halls of globalist think tanks—reminiscent of the Brookings Institution’s blueprint, “Which Path to Persia?” This plan outlines a carefully orchestrated, step-by-step game of managed containment and proxy tensions. It is a controlled geopolitical dance that keeps both Israel and Iran locked in perpetual, calculated hostility. By keeping the nation in a state of suspended crisis, this system ensures Israel’s strategic dependence on global actors while sacrificing actual, decisive victory. Netanyahu plays his assigned part in this managed theater to perfection, prioritizing his own political survival and the administrative longevity of the system over the ultimate security of our people.
The religious Right knows Netanyahu is a liar. They have watched him cycle through the same broken promises for decades. Yet, they continue to cast their ballots for him because they allow themselves to be manipulated through fear. We are continuously trapped in a false choice—a rigged game of political three-card monte where we are forced to pick the “lesser of two evils.” We convince ourselves that we are engaging in practical politics, but in reality, we are choosing to be pacified by a system where all key players are ultimately on the same team. To avoid the terrifying realization that our trusted political protectors are actively managing our vulnerabilities rather than resolving them, we target the commentator who dares to point out the theater.
We would rather live in a comfortable illusion than face a demanding truth.
The Compliance of Convenience
This reluctance to confront systemic failure leads directly to a cycle of selective vigilance—what we might call the compliance of convenience. We claim to despise the current political and security paradigms. We grumble about the Oslo framework, the containment doctrine, and the hesitancy of our leadership. Yet, we have grown remarkably comfortable living within the very system we critique.
A prime example of this can be found in the communities of Judea and Samaria. When an acute security crisis arises—when lives are directly threatened and the immediate danger becomes too loud to ignore—there is a sudden, furious awakening. Residents mobilize, lobby their representatives, protest, and demand a fundamental overhaul of the security apparatus.
But what happens once the acute phase passes?
The moment the government applies a tactical sedative—a temporary checkpoint, a localized military operation, or a quiet promise of future funding—the collective posture defaults back to sleep. The urgency evaporates. We quietly return to our daily routines, once again relying on the very state structures and security doctrines we just acknowledged were fundamentally broken.
We settle back into the system because demanding structural, long-term change requires too much sustained, uncomfortable labor. It is far easier to accept a temporary band-aid and resume our slumber than to maintain the relentless, exhausting vigilance required to secure our future.
True Loyalty Demands We Surrender Our False Idols
True loyalty to the land of Israel, to its people, and to the values of the Torah does not mean defending the failures of a right-wing coalition. It does not mean shouting down those who point out the cracks in our walls. It requires us to understand that our reliance on Basar V’Dam—flesh and blood—and our trust in a rigged democratic farce is a direct threat to our survival.
If our democratic system were genuinely righteous, if our leaders brought authentic security, and if our judicial system were not a compromised cabal of self-serving actors, it would be difficult to tell the Jewish people to stop trusting in them. But we have no such excuses. We are dealing with a system that is a manifest farce, led by politicians who would willingly let their own people die if it advanced a strategic goal or settled a political score.
This modern political delusion is the spiritual heir to the Sin of the Spies (Meraglim). When Moshe Rabbeinu warned the people of the Canaanites and the Amalekites, it was not because he feared them, but because they did. By choosing to analyze their entry into the Land through natural military equations and strategic calculations rather than pure faith in Hashem, the people sealed their own fate. Moshe essentially told them: “If you insist on playing by the rules of natural strategic considerations, then you will be left to face those brutal realities on natural terms.”
Today, we are committing the very same sin. By putting our faith in political strongmen, “lesser of two evils” mathematics, and foreign diplomatic pageantry, we are choosing to face our enemies on harsh, natural terms. This selective vigilance and trust in flesh and blood presents an immediate, literal danger to our lives.
The path to the ultimate Redemption (Geulah) demands that we recognize that only Hashem protects us. We do not have to wait for a horrific catastrophe where we are forced to cry out in terror and pain from what the nations are being set up to do to us.
We have a precious, immediate opportunity to avoid that suffering. But to do so, we must outgrow our childish reflex of targeting the messenger. We must find the moral stamina to look at uncomfortable data, abandon our trust in a broken political theater, and refuse to be lulled back to sleep.
Our lives, and the lives of our children, depend on our willingness to wake up—and stay awake.
