Critical Counterinsurgents

On New Year’s Eve 1947, the Palmach, an elite unit of the Jewish Haganah militia, stormed the Palestinian village of Balad al-Sheikh, opened fire on families sheltering in their homes, and dragged men onto the streets before executing them in cold blood. At least sixty Palestinians, including women and children, were massacred that night. The slaughter at Balad al-Sheikh was an early declaration of Zionist intent, which sent terror coursing through Palestinian communities near Haifa. The massacre at Deir Yassin—where the Jewish Irgun and Stern militias, supported by the Palmach, murdered at least 107 Palestinians—would follow four months later, ratcheting the fear of Zionist terrorism to new heights and forcing tens of thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes. The Nakba had commenced.

Israel is a nation founded on and sustained by settler-colonial violence, whether the Haganah and Irgun militias in 1948 or their descendants, the Israeli Defense Forces, Mossad, and Shin Bet. Without the massacres, without the trails of tears leading to Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Egypt, and Jordan, Israel would not exist. Settler violence in the name of Jewish supremacy is both Zionism’s original sin and its operative logic. From the left flank of Zionism (represented by figures like Yigal Allon, leader of the Israeli Labor Party) to the right (like Menachem Begin, commander of the Irgun Militia and future Likud Prime Minister), the founders of Israel were united in their designs on historic Palestine and beyond. Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, declared in 1937, “We shall spread in the whole country in the course of time . . . [the partition] is only an arrangement for the next twenty-five to thirty years.” The dreams of early Zionist leaders live on in the settlers who terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank and push their settlements ever-deeper into what they call Judea and Samaria, or the “Land of Israel.”

To today’s liberal Zionists, this is a deeply inconvenient historiography. After all, the Zionist colonization of the West Bank is widely condemned, and the International Court of Justice recently found that Israel’s fifty-seven-year-long occupation and settlement of the West Bank is illegal under international law. For decades, liberal Zionist writers have attempted to portray the West Bank settlers and their benefactors as the bastardization of a sacred ideal, rather than what they more truthfully represent: the bare, exposed soul of Zionist settler colonialism, without reservation, without media training, without hasbara; pure, unadulterated violence, biblical racism, greed, and theft. The settlers are, if nothing else, remarkably honest about the nature of the Zionist project. By cordoning them off as aberrations to be rebuked, the intent of liberal Zionist commentators is to reclaim the legitimacy of Israel via controlled demolition.

This manifests in what the academic Kerry Sinahan recently described as “critical counter-insurgency,” a mode of commentary and reporting which is designed to “to rescue Zionism, rather than Palestinians, from the rubble of Israeli destruction.” Counterinsurgent critique is a means of controlling the narrative and constricting the spectrum of political possibilities. If the Zionists themselves set the parameters for acceptable criticism of Israel, they can ensure it serves their interest—and that it doesn’t go too far, to the rational end point of anti-colonial resistance.

The writer, journalist, and academic Ronen Bergman is a prototypical counterinsurgent critic. Bergman was born in 1972 in Kiryat Bialik, a suburb of Haifa a few minutes north of Balad al-Sheikh. After serving in the IDF, he has gone on to write extensively on Israel’s internal politics and is deeply sourced within the state’s security apparatus. In 2018, he released a book, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, in which he argues that Mossad’s assassination programs have been a tactical success but a political failure, specifically highlighting their negative downstream effects on Israel.

In 2018, Bergman joined the New York Times staff. And in May 2024, he coauthored, with Mark Mazzetti, “The Unpunished,” a sprawling, damning, sixty-page investigative report on settler terrorism in the West Bank. Bergman and Mazzetti take us through a history of Jewish “extremists” who have spent the past four or five decades pushing their settlements further into the West Bank, while entrenching their ideology—a fanatic, alien brand of Zionism, in the authors’ telling—in the heart of the Israeli state.

“The Unpunished” is not a neutral investigation: Bergman and his coauthor, Mazzetti, do not allow their findings to speak for themselves but rather situate them in a frame that is ultimately exculpatory of Israel and its origins. The piece is a sophisticated attempt to separate the state of Israel from the structure of settler colonialism—an intent which is apparent from the headline, “How extremists took over Israel”; to the introductory paragraph, which purports to tell “the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power”; to the multitude of suggestions throughout the piece that settler violence contradicts fundamental Israeli values, such as, “How did a young nation turn so quickly on its democratic ideals, and at what price?” Bergman and Mazzetti’s investigation is also a warning: that “the West Bank could boil over,” potentially into a dreaded Third Intifada. While critical of settlers, the article treats Zionism itself as a permanent political reality—a fact on the ground that must be dealt with, rather than contested terrain.

“The Unpunished” is one prominent, recent example of counterinsurgent critique, but the practice is hardly new. You could trace it back to Israel’s New Historians, led by Benny Morris, who began to challenge the official Israeli history of the Nakba in the 1980s. The goal then, as now, was not sober historical investigation—it was to acknowledge an undeniable critique of Zionism without fundamentally undermining its claim to legitimacy. New Historians like Tom Segev can allow that Palestinians were grievously wronged during Israel’s founding, yet still reverently write of the “founding fathers” who “set out to build a modern, democratic country based on Jewish, Zionist and universal values of justice.” As Mary Turfah writes, the New Historian movement was ultimately a form of “controlled dissent.”

Counterinsurgent critique, like any genre, relies on a set of stock tropes. Settlers, along with their benefactors like national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benjamin Netanyahu, are necessarily constructed as a foil—the bad Zionists—that implies the existence of a mythical good Zionist. The good Zionist believes in the “peace process” and the establishment of a Palestinian state (generally through the Palestinian Authority), with the qualification that this must be accompanied by “security” for Israelis, a slippery stipulation which is never explicitly defined. The good Zionist is someone like former prime minister Ehud Barak, who served in the wake of prime minister Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Israeli. Barak, per a generous profile in The New York Times Magazine in 1999 (“Peace. Period.”), battled to “reinforce a democracy” with support from the “dovish Israelis” and “moderate settler leaders,” in contrast to the “religious Israelis” who “dream of a theocracy.”

Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, remains a hotbed for what the Palestinian writer Basil al-Araj, martyred by the IDF during a raid on Ramallah in 2017, called the “progressive wing of counterinsurgency.” Criticism of the occupation, the settler movement, the siege of Gaza, and Netanyahu’s increasingly fascistic tendencies are littered throughout its pages—but almost always in service of saving the Zionist project from its own most self-destructive tendencies. In 2013, for instance, columnist Ari Shavit wrote that contemporary settlers have “derailed Israel from one historic path and moved it onto a different one.” That original path, according to another article by Shavit, written three years later, was one that turned Jews “into cultivators of the desert and founders of the state who live in their homeland as strong, proud sovereign individuals . . . who returned to be a free nation in their land—the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” The paper’s counterinsurgent critique is lauded as a substantive opposition by bastions of American liberalism like David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, who recently wrote that Haaretz “consistently attempts to wrestle, however imperfectly with the realities of what is going on in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.”

In the United States, there is perhaps no clearer spokesperson for the counterinsurgent critique than the editor in chief of The Atlantic and one-time IDF prison guard, Jeffrey Goldberg, who has been articulating some form of it for at least twenty years. In 2004, he wrote that Zionism is “the liberation movement of an oppressed people,” which settlers have tried to turn into a “fundamentalist theology.” In 2011, he castigated settlers as the “Jewish Hamas” who represent a “perverse branch of Zionism.” Their views would be “alien to Zionism’s founders,” he asserts ahistorically, and are “a catastrophe for Israel, Jews and Judaism.” Yet Israel’s principal founder, David Ben-Gurion, expressed the same territorial ambitions as the settlers who Goldberg argues embody their perversion: “Jordan has no right to exist . . . The territory to the West of the Jordan should be made an autonomous region of Israel.”

Goldberg is capable of defending the Nakba as the “Jews of Palestine prevent[ing] their own slaughter,” and, in the same breath, warning that contemporary Jewish settlements are a “nakba for everyone.” In this respect, he is much like fellow Atlantic scribe Graeme Wood, who recently argued that Israel has the legal right to kill Palestinian children just months after writing that Jewish settlers in the West Bank’s “heinous actions” constitute “ethnic cleansing.” Long-time New York Times columnist Nick Kristof embraces a similar level of cognitive dissonance. In late June, he wrote that in order to facilitate peace between Israel and Palestine, we must accept that “the seizure and occupation of other people’s land is wrong. And it is not wrong in a complicated, finely balanced way; it is simply, straightforwardly wrong.” He is, of course, referring to the occupation of the West Bank, not the Nakba, which he implicitly condones vis-à-vis his endorsement of the Israeli state.

Critical counterinsurgency does not play out only in the press but also in publishing, where entire books have been devoted to this rhetorical strategy. Consider former editor of The New Republic Peter Beinart’s 2012 book, The Crisis of Zionism, which argued that Israel’s supposedly democratic principles must be saved from the corrupting influence of the religious settler movement. The Crisis of Zionism is just one node in a long lineage—from Times correspondent Isabel Kershner’s The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for its Inner Soul (2023) and Gershom Gorenberg’s The Unmaking of Israel (2011) to Bernard Ashivai’s The Tragedy of Zionism (1985). Ashivai’s book is a now familiar lament to the “Labor Zionism” of old, which he argues was hijacked by the extremist “new Zionism.” This, once again, is willfully obtuse to the logic of settler colonialism, as the anti-Zionist Israeli Moshé Machover, who was expelled from the Israeli Communist Party in the 1960s for his writings, argued in a scathing contemporary review of Ashivai’s book:

Ashivai is unable or unwilling to understand that Labor Zionism was a colonizatory movement that created a settler state subject to an inexorable dynamic. Such a state has a Frontier, across which the previously dispossessed “natives,” resentful of their dispossession, mount desperate attacks. The frontier is always precarious and the colonizers feel insecure. The only way they can deal with this insecurity is to push the frontier still further. This is their manifest destiny. The process must go on to the bitter end, unless it is stopped by an insurmountable external resistance, or by internal revolutionary collapse, or by a combination of both. Israel could no more simply switch off Zionism than the expanding United States could stop itself short of the Pacific.

Some forty years after The Tragedy of Zionism, Ashivai wrote a 2024 cover story for Harper’s on “Israel’s War Within,” which he renders as a “two-front culture war” between the “secular Hebrew life” built by “Zionist pioneers” and the “Religious Zionist settler movement”—a war being waged to “determine what kind of state Israel will be.” According to Ashivai, the settler dream of founding “Greater Israel” was and is “grotesque, alien to many secular Israelis.” Yet those same Zionist pioneers conceptualized Israel’s borders as stretching across all of historic Palestine, into western Jordan, southern Lebanon and Syria, and northern Egypt. What counterinsurgent critique is fundamentally attempting to preempt and obscure is that the contemporary settler movement is not an alien corrupting force, but the logical progression of the Zionist enterprise.

Critical counterinsurgency most commonly rears its head during Israel’s crises of legitimacy. “The Unpunished” was published during one of Israel’s most vulnerable moments, as their international standing slips, global support for the Palestinian resistance grows day by day, and they barrel toward war with allied forces in Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza (lest we forget, the South African Apartheid regime was toppled in part by an unsustainable multifront war).

Similarly, counterinsurgent critique flourished during the Second Intifada, as the “peace process” collapsed, the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy continued to deteriorate, and Hamas emerged as the leading faction of the resistance with a commitment to armed struggle. “An Impossible Occupation,” written in 2002 amid the IDF’s assault on the West Bank, profiles an elite unit of Israeli commandos. While the piece is mostly an exercise in reputation laundering, presenting the IDF as an army guided by strict rules and morals, it also presents an argument against occupation—not on moral or legal grounds, but because the occupation creates more problems for Israel than it solves. Specifically, a “hostile population” which “overwhelmingly views [Israel] as the enemy.”

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ premier voice on the Middle East for four decades, also sought to distance settlers from the Zionist project in these years, writing immediately after the Second Intifada of the “Revolt of Israel’s Center” against the “danger the extremist settlers pose for Israel’s future.” He described the settlers as “inspired by a witches’ brew of Jewish fascism and messianism.”

“The Unsettlers,” another piece written near the height of the Intifada for The New York Times Magazine, anticipates the narrative of Bergman and Mazzetti’s investigation by constructing a false binary between the extremist settlers and the supposedly virtuous Zionists who are desperately trying to reign them in. Once again, the Nakba is somehow, remarkably, drawn in contrast to the contemporary settler movement: “For the secular Zionists who built the state, that dream meant having a place of refuge for Jews from around the world. For the outpost settlers, it means something quite different: a biblical Israel, a bigger home.” But this assertion, like so many others, can be contradicted by the words of Ben-Gurion himself, who mourned after the UN partition plan was approved in 1947 that “we lost half of the country, Judea and Samaria.”

Both in the early 2000s and now, a notable feature of counterinsurgent critique is the near total absence of Palestinian perspectives—apart from those who are occasionally invited to speak under the guise of their own victimhood. The Palestinians who articulate the sharpest and most dangerous critiques of Zionism, like Basil al-Araj or Refaat Alareer, do not find a platform in the New York Times or The Atlantic; instead, they are murdered or jailed. In publications like these, Palestinians primarily exist in relation to Zionism, as barometers for the soul of Israeli society. The lethal occupation can grind on, the fundamentally racist Israeli state apparatus can remain, so long as its most extreme and religious zealots are kept out of sight. Not because of the suffering, dispossession, torture, and psychological trauma they inflict on Palestinians, but because they make Israel look bad.

Edward Said’s classic 1984 essay “Permission to Narrate” reminds us that framing matters just as much, if not more, than the facts. The facts, as Said wrote, “do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them.” As such, narrative control is ultimately the goal of counterinsurgent critique—to present the same facts that make our blood boil, our eyes well up, and our skin crawl, but to narrowly constrict the range of acceptable conclusions you can draw from those facts.

This choked lexicon transcends the confines of liberal magazines, publishers, and newspapers. It is echoed by policymakers who play a material role in upholding Israel’s genocidal status quo. When Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful lawmakers in America, called for Netanyahu’s ouster in March, his speech borrowed techniques from the counterinsurgent playbook: acknowledge the mass suffering in Gaza and the “unacceptable vigilante settler violence in the West Bank,” but present the latter as an inflection point, a warning of the rightward drift of Israeli society rather than a damning indictment of Zionism itself.

The Zionism Schumer constructs is “the flowering of the Jewish people in the desert from the ashes of the Holocaust,” one which is now supposedly threatened by “right-wing zealots” and “extremist settlers” who—along with Israel’s “vicious enemies” that threaten to “expel and kill Jews living in their hard-won land of refuge”—pose a “major obstacle” to the long-term health of Israel.

Here we see the narrative bounds set by counterinsurgent critique calcify into policy. Less than two months after his speech, despite this public rebuke, Schumer invited Netanhyahu to speak in front of Congress—an invitation which many commentators have interpreted as a green light for a fresh round of regional escalation. The same settler-colonial structures remain in place, the bombs continue to flow eastward, Israel continues on its death march, but in the press and in our halls of power, a hobbled ideology is set on the path to redemption.