The world’s leading expert on Israel is a remarkable man.
He does not speak Hebrew or Arabic. He cannot distinguish Hamas from Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine from the People’s Front of Judea, or the Israeli government from the one he has fabricated in his imagination.
His knowledge of Jewish history begins shortly before 1948 and ends with a photograph of Benjamin Netanyahu looking insufficiently ashamed.
Still, his authority is unquestionable. He writes for a major newspaper.
His credentials are formidable. He once spent seven hours at Ben Gurion Airport en route to Phuket. He has read three tweets about Gaza, watched half a documentary while answering emails, and possesses several intense feelings his therapist has helped him name.
The feelings matter. Facts can be checked, disputed, contextualised, or disproved. Feelings are sovereign. Our expert feels Israel is doing something wicked, although the precise wickedness changes with the news cycle.
International relations bores him. He never finished von Clausewitz. History is cluttered with dates, factions, wars, treaties, and other impediments to moral exhibitionism. The Middle East contains far too many actors for a subject expected to fit inside an 800-word column.
His intellectual awakening occurred at Ben Gurion Airport. He bought a coffee, noticed an armed security officer, and immediately grasped the militarization of Jewish consciousness.
The officer did not speak to him, which he later described as “chilling."
Uniforms were visible. Passengers were questioned. Bags were searched. Passports were inspected. The entire airport behaved as though the country had enemies.
In his own country, airport security responds to threats. In Israel, it reflects paranoia, authoritarianism, and an unhealthy Jewish preoccupation with not being murdered.
This distinction is central to sophisticated journalism.
He also encountered an impatient woman in the coffee queue. She looked tired, spoke brusquely to the cashier, and failed to apologise for standing near him. He filed the experience away for a panel on “the hardening of Israeli society."
Hearing her speak and realizing she was an Israeli Arab caused a brief neurological malfunction.
By departure, he had acquired what generations of historians, soldiers, diplomats, archaeologists, linguists, and theologians had somehow missed: a comprehensive understanding of Israel.
The newspaper recognised his genius immediately. Soon he was explaining what Israelis should do, what Palestinian Arabs believe, what American Jews fear, what Arab regimes intend, and what the Middle East requires.
The arrangement suits everyone. He supplies moral theatre at negligible intellectual cost. The editor acquires a conscience without undertaking research. Readers enjoy righteous indignation without confronting a single strategic dilemma. Awards committees detect bravery, television producers detect gravitas, and colleagues detect the approved opinion delivered with suitable solemnity.
His ignorance is not an obstacle. It is the qualification. Knowledge might introduce hesitation, proportion, or doubt. It might even force him to choose between mutually incompatible accusations, an intolerable burden in modern journalism.
His expertise is omnivorous. He understands Israel’s past, future, psyche, moral deformities, and the secret motives of ten million strangers.
When Israelis elect a government he dislikes, fear has corrupted their politics. When Palestinian Arabs elect a terrorist movement, agency becomes a culturally insensitive concept. Israel is responsible for its choices. Palestinian Arabs are responsible only for their suffering.
This is first-principles reasoning in its purest form.
His second principle is that every Israeli action must be judged against an imaginary alternative in which no civilian is harmed, every hostage released, every missile intercepted, every terrorist arrested peacefully, and every foreign correspondent remains comfortable in a Jerusalem hotel, which is presented in print “just kilometres from the front line."
Reality offers trade-offs. He offers adjectives. He urges Israel to “show restraint," though he has never specified how much, for how long, or what Israel should do when restraint produces more Jewish funerals.
Such vulgar details are best left to generals, whom he distrusts.
If Israel retaliates quickly, it is vengeful. If it waits and plans, the destruction is systematic. Air power is cowardly. Ground troops are brutal. Warning civilians is forced displacement. Failing to warn them is deliberate targeting. Striking military infrastructure beneath civilian buildings is an attack on civilian buildings. Leaving it intact is apparently humanitarian.
The contradiction is not a flaw. It is the product.
Lesser minds seek consistency. Serious journalists understand that Israel can be guilty in several mutually exclusive ways at once.
His method is rigorous.
First, he searches social media for an image capable of producing the correct emotion. It need not be recent, verified, local, or even connected to the event. Its purpose is not evidentiary but liturgical.
He then contacts a Western academic whose biography contains “settler colonialism," “decolonial praxis," or “lived experience." The academic explains that Israel is a European colonial project, despite Jewish indigeneity and the fact that roughly half of Israeli Jews descend from communities across the Middle East and North Africa.
Our expert regards this as narrative vandalism.
He may mention it in parentheses before returning to the more useful claim that suspicious Europeans appeared in 1948 with suitcases, tanks, and malicious disregard for his future column.
Jewish history is his greatest nuisance. It is ancient, extensively documented, and full of embarrassing connections between Jews and the land of Israel. Even the Hebrew Bible, annoyingly familiar to civilization, complicates the claim that Jews arrived as foreign interlopers.
So history begins wherever innocence can be assigned correctly.
Usually 1967. Sometimes 1948. On scholarly days, 1917, when Britain committed the inexplicable offence of recognising Jewish national aspirations in the Jewish ancestral homeland.
He goes no further. Ancient kingdoms, archaeology, continuous Jewish presence, liturgy facing Jerusalem, expulsions from Arab lands, centuries of persecution, and the industrial extermination of European Jewry make the moral cartoon needlessly untidy.
He is not opposed to Jewish history. He simply objects when it interferes with anti-Jewish conclusions.
Palestinian Arab history receives devotional treatment. Every grievance is hereditary, every failure externally imposed, every violent movement a complicated response to forces beyond its control.
A Palestinian Arab terrorist is never merely a terrorist. He is a product of humiliation, occupation, trauma, colonialism, failed diplomacy, masculine despair, spatial confinement, and perhaps humidity.
An Israeli victim is a “settler," “soldier," “resident of a disputed area," or “supporter of the right-wing government."
The expert adores context. Context is what terrorists receive after murdering Jews and what Israel is denied after responding. When Hamas massacres civilians, burns homes, takes hostages, rapes women, and fires rockets from populated areas, he warns against viewing events “in a vacuum."
When Israel retaliates, the vacuum is instantly restored. The massacre becomes context. The response becomes the crime.
He then appears on television wearing the expression of a surgeon announcing a death.
“This did not begin yesterday," he intones.
Few things did. The Norman Conquest did not begin in 1066. The Second World War did not begin in 1939. His article did not begin when he opened his laptop. Everything has antecedents.
The phrase lets him retreat through history until responsibility evaporates.
A terrorist planned an attack, selected a target, acquired a weapon, crossed a border, entered a home, and murdered a family. Yet after enough context, the killer becomes incidental to the killing.
Conditions shaped him. Policies shaped the conditions. History shaped the policies. Competing narratives shaped history. Everyone is responsible, therefore no one may be blamed.
This is modern punditry’s supreme alchemy: turning moral responsibility into dense fog.
Naturally, he rejects accusations of double standards. Israel, he says, is held to a higher standard because it is a democracy.
The higher standard is infinite. Democracies may be condemned for their failures, elections, borders, military doctrine, responses to attack, tone of voice, and stubborn insistence upon survival.
Dictatorships, terrorist regimes, and theocratic movements receive a lower standard because expecting decency from them would be culturally arrogant.
Israel must display Scandinavian ethics while fighting a medieval death cult. When it fails, the expert calls the contrast revealing. When the death cult behaves like a death cult, he calls it complex.
He is especially offended that Israelis ignore his advice.
They should make peace with enemies who reject their existence, strengthen leaders without popular legitimacy, empower moderates unable to enter much of the territory they supposedly govern, surrender strategic depth, trust international guarantees, cease pre-emption, and respond proportionately to adversaries who define victory as Israel’s annihilation.
He has not solved the operational details because he thinks morally, not militarily. Israelis, trapped in the grubby provincialism of consequences, ask tedious questions.
Who controls the territory? Who disarms the militias? Who stops weapons smuggling? Who enforces the agreement? What happens when the observers leave?
These are questions for lesser people. He has the courage to imagine peace because other people’s children will die if his imagination is wrong.
That is his defining privilege.
Every failed policy increases his certainty. Every collapsed ceasefire proves the need for another. Every withdrawal followed by rocket fire shows the withdrawal was insufficiently generous. Every rejected peace offer demonstrates that Israel must make a better one.
No evidence can defeat a theory whose author suffers no penalty for error.
His newspaper keeps publishing him because he performs an important social function. He reassures educated readers that the Middle East is not a tragic arena of irreconcilable ambitions, religious fanaticism, power, memory, and survival. It just awaits their vocabulary.
Wars are caused by insufficient empathy. Fanatics are frustrated negotiators. Religious totalitarianism is economic anxiety in traditional dress. Genocidal slogans become moderate when translated selectively, and harmless when not translated at all.
Above all, Israel’s survival dilemmas are not dilemmas. They are moral examinations devised for Western journalists to grade.
The expert may never learn Hebrew or Arabic, study military doctrine, read the Hamas charter, visit a border community, speak to a hostage family, inspect a terror tunnel, meet an Iranian dissident, or ask why Israelis no longer trust international guarantees.
None of this will hinder his career.
Expertise is no longer knowledge acquired through disciplined study. It is ignorance endowed with confidence, ideology laundered through prestige, and vanity mistaken for conscience.
He writes for a major newspaper. He possesses feelings. He once visited the airport.
Israel should consider itself instructed.
Nachum Kaplan is a journalist, media consultant and commentator. He has 25 years of international media experience, having held senior international roles at Reuters and IFR (International Financing Review). Access his work on Substack.