Response to Herb Keinon’s Article – Jerusalem Post Op-Ed
By Daniel Ciccia
What the State of Israel is losing today is not a matter of poor communication, nor a defeat in the battle of images. What Herb Keinon, in his op-ed published by the Jerusalem Post, describes as a « strategic disaster » due to a lack of narrative control is not a failure of diplomatic storytelling—it is far deeper: it is the loss of a moral and historical credit that had, until now, been widely granted to Israel, often blindly.
Israel is not losing a battle of perceptions. It is losing the lucid trust of peoples and states, including among its most steadfast allies. And this is not the result of media bias or a supposed failure to communicate « Israel’s side of the story. »
It stems from what the extreme violence administered—yes, administered—in Gaza actually means: an opportunistic effort to establish territorial hegemony and to definitively expel the Palestinians from any possibility of claiming a national home, of investing in their own historical narrative. This violence is not merely an excess of war. It is part of a deliberate strategy, one in which Hamas itself acts to obstruct any resolution.
So yes, the initiative to revive the two-state solution responds to public emotion and to the suffering of the Palestinian people—crushed between Hamas and the IDF—but it is not driven by emotion alone.
A rational analysis is gradually asserting itself, laying the groundwork for a reasoning based on law, reparation, and justice, in light of what has happened, and what is still happening, to ensure that the dispossession of a fundamental Palestinian right fails—because the narrative framework that justifies it is now under serious scrutiny.
A Political, Not Just Moral, Indignation
The indignation that is rising is not circumstantial, and it is not purely moral. It stems from a strategic realization: Israeli policy under Benjamin Netanyahu—over twenty years in power, a tenure rivaling that of Vladimir Putin—has weaponized the post-Rabin ambiguity to methodically push the boundaries of a Greater Israel that dares not speak its name, except on the margins of government coalitions, while never acknowledging its betrayal of the Oslo Accords.
This ambiguity allowed Israel to maintain a dual posture: speaking peace while enacting colonization. But that era is over. The time for clarity has come. And this clarity is not demanded by Israel’s enemies—it is demanded by its democratic friends, by global civil society, and by many Jewish voices themselves, weary of seeing their history taken hostage by a political agenda that disfigures it.
Europe Steps Forward, Head Held High
It is Europe, today, that restores dignity to diplomacy.
France, by advancing a new initiative with Saudi Arabia for the revival of the two-state solution, chooses to face History with unflinching resolve.
It no longer lets its foreign policy be dictated by the inertia of old alliances, but by a demand for coherence—between its principles, its past, and its responsibility toward the future.
Germany, for its part, is initiating a major symbolic shift: it no longer satisfies itself with unconditional support and begins to free itself from the reflex of absolute solidarity dictated by its memory.
The United Kingdom, meanwhile, is making a notable diplomatic turn, reflected in symbolic gestures and a shift toward the French position of recognizing Palestine.
This is no longer a reaction to shocking images from Gaza. It is a recognition of a moral and strategic dead end, and a call to act accordingly. These countries, explicitly or implicitly, are saying that Israel’s impunity—long protected by the memory of the Holocaust—cannot last forever, and that the two-state solution remains the only viable path, as long as it ceases to be a fiction.
A « Narrative War »? Against a Diplomatic Juggernaut
To claim that Israel is a victim of poor communication is a spectacular inversion of reality. Never has a state enjoyed such a vast and internationalized apparatus for narrative defense: think tanks, shadow diplomacy, media allies, and academic influence. France itself is a striking example.
While much has been said—often justly—about the rise of “Islamo-leftism” in academic circles, far less attention is given to the spread of pan-Zionist discourse in universities, media, and foundations. This narrative machinery stifles critical thought, brandishing accusations of antisemitism at anyone who dares question Israeli policy. Antizionism is, by definition, labeled a form of antisemitism—yet it’s baffling how pro-Hamas ultraleftists embrace this logic so passively, knowing full well it reinforces Israel’s strategic posture.
Foolishness doesn’t explain it all. Doctrinaires are rarely stupid.
Naming Pan-Zionism
Pan-Zionism, as I propose to define it, marks the ideological overflow of historical Zionism into a logic of perpetual expansion, systematic conflation, and political impunity. This conflation—between Judaism, the Jewish people, and the Israeli state—is not only untenable. It is dangerous.
It obstructs peace, as it bans any political critique under the guise of memory protection. It is, like the misuse of the Kabbalah in this context, a weaponized Godwin point.
Rejecting the reading offered by pan-Zionism is not a denial of Jewish history. It is a refusal to let that history be instrumentalized to obscure the suffering of another people. It is the defense of Israel’s right to exist within a shared legal framework—not atop the ruins of law itself.
A Revealing Paradox: Pan-Zionism and Islamo-Leftism Feed Each Other
It is not the least of paradoxes that pan-Zionism derives part of its legitimacy from the very thing it denounces: Islamo-leftism. Each reinforces the other. Each uses the other’s excesses to justify its own, in a polemical symbiosis that prevents any nuanced thinking. Democratic thought is trapped in confrontation, reduced to the destructive paroxysm of binary opinion. Every form of terrorism thrives in this soil.
In this context, Russian manipulation—aimed at exacerbating identity fractures and dislocating democracies from within—pushes the distortion even further. But the resulting cognitive fog, by casting harsh light on the machinery of extremes, also reveals the underlying architecture. It exposes conditioned reflexes. It clarifies what was previously obscured.
Thus, the apparent chaos can hasten the necessary clarification—and compel democratic societies to reclaim their discernment, and the path of real politics, of statesmanship. Europe seems to be leading the way. Others will follow.
Trump, Netanyahu, Putin: Reality Is Taking Hold
Donald Trump now offers unwavering support to Israel and currently questions—through his uniquely theatrical style—the merits of recognizing a Palestinian state. Many have caricatured him, but in truth, he acts with a form of strategic lucidity. And in his way, he serves as a mirror—one before which even Putin can no longer dissimulate.
Trump likely understood why Israel objected to his own assessment of Iranian nuclear neutralization. Where Trump sought to contain, affirming that Iran no longer had military nuclear capacity, Israel countered with an alternative narrative: that the nuclear threat remained intact. It demanded massive strikes. It called for all-out war.
That moment is no longer current—but it revealed much. It showed two things: Trump does not blindly follow Israel, and Trump reads the real. He is reading it now. And perhaps that is what most distinguishes his posture—and what made Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent gesture so hollow: publicly handing Trump a copy of the letter he sent to the Nobel Committee to propose him for the Peace Prize.
Some movies don’t make it in Hollywood. Hollywood is not a nightmare machine. It’s a dream machine—with, perhaps, screenwriters still worth listening to.
En attendant la Renaissance 