A Fatwa, a Sunset, and an Unexpected Witness

“Your blood is sacred no more.” That is how Dalia Ziada explained the fatwa issued against her, on Shai Davidai’s podcast last year. The fatwa meant that the protection civilization is supposed to extend to a human being had been withdrawn, and the withdrawal had been pronounced by a religious authority equipped to make it stick. She left Cairo because staying would have killed her.

Dalia is an Egyptian writer and political analyst, a devout Muslim — an Arab Spring figure who never stopped, a critic of Hamas and political Islam, a senior fellow at think tanks across three countries. She now coordinates the Washington office of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. For the past two academic years she has been visiting American campuses with Hillel International, speaking from inside her own tradition to audiences mostly unequipped to hear her.

When I saw her last week, Dalia made an unexpected observation: “Israel is the glue holding the Jewish people together.”

Even though I was raised secular and live a secular life now, I know and feel this in every part of who I am. And yet, since October 7, the voices telling the Jewish people, telling me, threaten to drown out that knowing.

I wanted to understand when it had clicked for her — personally, not analytically.

“It clicked,” she told me, “after October 7th, when I got to the United States and saw what the Jewish community was suddenly absorbing.” What she saw was a structural inversion of the standard story.

The standard story is that Western liberal democracies extend protection to Jewish minorities, and treat Israel with measured criticism, as parallel signs of their own liberalism. Dalia’s claim is the opposite: that the Jewish communities in Western societies are one of the main reasons those democracies are still standing — and that what holds them together, as Jewish communities, is Israel. Because a people without a place is held together only by memory, and memory eventually attenuates.

The argument runs through social cohesion, a sense of belonging.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s long strategy — what its own documents call Civilizational Jihad — is calibrated to a Western world that has become post-belonging, post-collective, atomized into individuals who no longer experience themselves as bound to anything larger than their own preferences. Such a world is permeable because there is no shared substance to defend. And the strategy works because the target stops being a society in the demanding sense — in the sense that, together, despite differences, we........

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