(The following is a work of speculative fiction, set in 2031. Events and characters after April 2026 are imagined.)

The two FBI agents who came to Daniel Katz’s home in Teaneck, New Jersey, on a Tuesday morning in March 2029 were polite. One of them made small talk about the Giants. They accepted coffee, sat down across from him in the living room and asked, in an entirely professional tone, about his military service.

Katz had served in the IDF as a lone soldier at twenty, then returned to the United States, attended law school and built a thoroughly ordinary American life. He was married to Michelle, who was not Jewish. When the registry requirement took effect, he registered, as required. Three months later, the FBI came to his house.

The agents asked about his unit and dates of service. The operations he had been involved in. Then, carefully: “Were you aware of any actions during your service that resulted in civilian casualties?”

Katz was a lawyer. He knew what a predicate question sounds like.

“I drove trucks,” he told me. “I answered their questions. I thanked them for coming and walked them to the door.”

He was not charged. Neither were most of the thousands of American Jews who received similar visits in the months that followed. But files were built and people were categorized.

In October 2023, there were six million Jews in America.

Three Supreme Court seats. Seventeen Nobel prizes in the previous decade. Partners at the largest law firms, chairs of university departments, editors of major newspapers. Their grandparents had arrived at Ellis Island with nothing. Their parents had built something. They had built on top of that.

They had done it in a country with a Constitution that protected them, a Protestant majority that had absorbed a specifically philosemitic theology into its political identity, and a bipartisan consensus that support for Israel and the safety of Jewish Americans were non-negotiable features of American civic life.

The Viennese Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, writing about Vienna in 1913, described his world in almost identical terms. He used the phrase golden security. It was the most intellectually and culturally Jewish city in the world. He published those words thirty years later, in exile in Brazil, where he had fled after watching everything he described destroyed. 

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. In the hours that followed, American politicians lined up at microphones. Both Democrats and Republicans condemned the attack with unusual moral clarity. Non-Jewish neighbors put Israeli flags in their windows. Churches held prayer vigils. The country expressed unanimity in its support for Israel and the Jewish community. 

The next day, anti-Israel protests began. Within months, the language had shifted. Within a few years, the ground had moved so far beneath American Jewish life that many, looking back, would mark October 7th as the day the golden age had ended.

The Tinder, 2023–2026

Donna Eisenberg had taught history at a public high school in Evanston, Illinois, for twenty-two years when, in the fall of 2026, a sophomore raised his hand during a unit on the Middle East and asked, in front of thirty students, whether she should really be the one teaching it.

“I asked him what he meant,” she told me. “He said, ‘I mean, if your people are committing genocide right now, how are you supposed to be objective?’”

No one objected. A few students nodded, as if he had simply said something overdue.

“Three years earlier, the room would have gone silent,” she told me.

On the political right, the ground had already shifted from a different direction toward the same destination.

Evangelical Christian Zionism, the once-bedrock of Republican support for Israel, was dying along with its demographic.

Into that vacuum emerged something darker. The Tucker Carlson-adjacent ecosystem had spent years deliberately chipping away at Christian support for Israel, recasting Christian Zionism as a scam and manipulation. Israel was no longer framed as ally, but as something parasitic and morally corrupt; a foreign state dragging America into wars, sustained by lobbies portrayed as a sinister force.

Questions about “Zionist influence” began bleeding into the public discourse. Editorial cartoons appeared with certain features drawn just subtly enough. The charge of deicide reappeared as forbidden truth on podcasts downloaded by millions.

For a generation that had never heard this language before, it felt revelatory.

Then came the development that no one had modeled: the merger.

In the summer of 2026, a new political organization held its founding convention in Pittsburgh. It called itself the Common Good Party. Co-chaired by a former progressive congresswoman from Michigan and a paleoconservative media figure from Florida, its platform combined economic nationalism, anti-interventionist foreign policy, and what it called “foreign lobby reform.” 

The alt-right and the progressive left found, to considerable mutual surprise, that they agreed on more than they disagreed.

The “Common” fielded candidates in the midterms and won eleven House seats. Neither major party had anticipated it, but they both immediately began recalculating.

The midterms also flipped six House seats and two Senate seats to anti-Israel Democrats. Committee chairmanships changed and the word accountability entered every press release about Israel. 

By 2027, what economists were already calling the AI Revolution had erased huge swaths of credentialed white-collar employment in the United States. Law firms cut associates. Marketing departments disappeared. Junior analysts became prompts. The promise that had underwritten entire generations, the degrees, the decade of deferred gratification, turned out not to be a guarantee at all. 

Many found themselves educated, indebted, and suddenly expendable, with high rent and high student loans.

As people lost their hope for the future, they needed a story about who took it from them. The story with the deepest architecture, the easiest vocabulary, and the oldest ready-made villains was a familiar one. Millions of angry, indebted, struggling Americans looked for someone to blame.

The Match, January 9th, 2027

The Iranian ballistic missile that struck Al Udeid Air Force Base in Qatar at 6:04 AM Eastern time on a Sunday morning in January 2027 killed four hundred and twelve American service members. It was fired in response to an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear infrastructure conducted with American intelligence support and aerial refueling.

The President addressed the nation at eleven AM. He was unambiguous: Iran had fired the missile. Iran was responsible. But he was already five hours too late.

By noon, #IsraelGotOurBoysKilled was trending in all fifty states. The pre-loaded narrative, built over two years in thousands of hours of podcasts, had been waiting for exactly this moment. The argument that American sons were being sacrificed for them. That the blood price of Israel’s ambitions would be paid by American youth.

Two days after the Qatar strike, Michael Ostroff was standing in line at a supermarket in Great Neck when he overheard two men behind him discussing the attack.

“Terrible,” one of them said. “Four hundred boys for nothing.”

Ostroff recognized them, both recently laid off when a midtown compliance office shut down the previous fall. Men he had nodded to for years at soccer games and pickup lines.

The second man lowered his voice. “But you know who this is really for,” he said. “We keep sending our kids to die for them. F***ing parasites. We gotta cut ourselves free.”

“I remember thinking, It was Iran,” he told me. “Iran fired the missile. But somehow they were angrier at us than at the Iranians.”

That night, he and his wife Rachel sat at the kitchen table and opened apartment listings in Efrat, Jerusalem, and Ra’anana. Just to see what was out there.

Within weeks of the Qatar strike, conservative media outlets made a calculation. Its audience had been moving for months toward the Common Party-aligned streaming networks that were eating its demographic among viewers under fifty. The editorial line shifted and certain programs were announced as undergoing a “format restructuring” in February 2027. Mark Levin was off the air by April. 

The last significant institutional media voices on the mainstream right that reliably defended Israel went quiet.

On social media, the provocateur genre was growing. For three years, self-styled activists had built audiences by filming themselves confronting visibly Jewish people outside fundraisers, restaurants, and pro-Israel events, shouting “baby killer,” “war criminal,” “how many dead children is your dinner worth?”

In 2027, high school boys were driving into Jewish neighborhoods at night for fun, filming themselves yelling at men in kippot, cornering women outside kosher supermarkets. They showed up at Jewish Federation dinners and filmed guests arriving like they were entering a crime scene. 

On some campuses, Jewish students were ambushed in cafeterias, confronted between classes, filmed in libraries and dining halls, their names posted online beside accusations of genocide. 

The goal was humiliation. The videos were clipped for TikTok and Instagram, where millions watched and the comments did the rest.

Hillel centers that had once advertised openly on campus calendars began holding Friday night services in undisclosed locations, shared only through private group chats. 

Routine Portfolio Review

By mid-2027, new mechanisms were operating at multiple major institutions: wire transfers to Israeli accounts above ten thousand dollars flagged for enhanced review; source-of-funds documentation that had previously run two pages and now ran forty.

Two major American banks exited Israeli correspondent banking relationships, citing growing consumer boycott pressure and ESG-driven de-risking.

Michael Ostroff had moved $800,000 to Israel that spring, just before the new restrictions came into place. His wife Rachel thought he was overreacting. They bought an apartment in Beersheva. He didn’t tell his partners at the law firm.

Ironically, the shekel, which had spent most of the previous decade trading around 3.5 and 4 to the dollar, closed 2027 at 2.14, as more diaspora capital moved toward it and Gulf sovereign wealth funds increased their exposure to Israeli tech companies. 

Rachel Ostroff’s brother, David Klein, asked his accountant in the fall of 2027 about moving some savings to Israel. The accountant said the paperwork was complicated now and suggested they revisit it next year.

A new administration was inaugurated on January 20th, 2029, and by the following Monday it had moved faster on Israel than any administration in American history.

The president, a Democrat from the progressive wing of the party who had won the 2028 election on a coalition built partly on opposition to what she called “the genocide lobby,” signed three executive orders in her first week. 

The first: full American compliance with the UN-backed international arms embargo on Israel. 

(The embargo proved largely symbolic. Israeli defense production had undergone a transformation that American intelligence assessments had underestimated. Automated robotic manufacturing facilities in the Negev, some underground, were producing munitions, drone systems, and precision weapons at volumes no human-staffed factory could have achieved. Laser interception arrays had rendered the remaining Iranian proxy missile threat functionally obsolete. Israel was no longer buying American weapons. It was selling its own to India, the UAE and a dozen African nations.)

The second: Magnitsky Act designations for Israeli cabinet ministers, senior IDF officers, and major defense contractors, with legal exposure extending to former IDF soldiers and dual citizens.

The third directed the IRS and Homeland Security to review the tax-exempt status and foreign-affiliation compliance of American organizations funding Israeli institutions and affiliated entities under expanded national security, human rights, and foreign influence enforcement frameworks.

Friends Of The IDF ceased operations within thirty days. Seventeen major Jewish Federations came under review. Youth movements and summer camps were forced to permanently close. Hospital and university foundations with Israeli research partnerships froze transfers. The language was broad enough to cover nearly every major institution of American Jewish philanthropy.

Donors began receiving IRS letters in March. The letters were compliance inquiries: legal, procedural, outwardly unremarkable. The effect was not.

David Blum, sixty-eight, a retired orthodontist in Phoenix, had given to UJA-Federation for twenty years. 

“I had the feeling of being categorized,” David told me from his apartment in Jerusalem. “Seen not as David Blum, but as a type.” He applied for aliyah by the end of the month.

Financial scrutiny was only the beginning.

The Foreign Military Service Transparency Act was written to appear universal. In practice, from the first day of implementation, it was enforced selectively. FBI field offices in New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles and Miami received instructions to prioritize follow-up interviews with Americans who had served in the Israel Defense Forces.

The net widened to include Americans who had spent gap years in Israel on army volunteer programs and as medics with Magen David Adom. 

A handful of high-profile arrests, mostly symbolic but heavily publicized, made clear that the law was not theoretical.

The Day of Accountability

Seven years after the Hamas attack, Common Good-aligned networks had spent six weeks building toward what they called, on the channels where they organized, a Day of Accountability. The organizing was visible to anyone watching the right platforms. Several civil liberties organizations filed alerts with DHS and FBI in the weeks preceding it, but no action was taken in advance.

On the night of October 7th, 2030, coordinated flash mobs moved through Jewish neighborhoods in fourteen American cities simultaneously. Consumer drones hovered above suburban streets, providing crowds with real-time visibility where Jews had gathered, which driveways were full and which synagogue parking lots were still occupied. People watched from their phones as red pins appeared in real time over ‘verified’ Jewish homes. 

Inside, families turned off every light, shut the blinds, locked the doors, and told their children to stay away from the windows. Many had no meaningful way to defend themselves after the 2029 gun legislation.

In Chicago’s West Rogers Park, a crowd moved block by block. Torah scrolls were pulled from an ark and burned in a parking lot while people filmed and laughed. 

In Brooklyn, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Miami, homes were spray-painted stars, intercom systems jammed with chants of “Christ-killer” and “come outside.” Windows smashed. 

By morning, seventeen Jews were dead, including Rachel Ostroff’s brother, David Klein. Dozens more had been injured.

A leaked internal memorandum, published three months later by a civil liberties organization, revealed that precinct commanders had received guidance to “allow crowd energy to burn down before engagement” and avoid “premature escalation.” 

Videos were posted within minutes and viewed by hundreds of millions of people. The comments established, without ambiguity, how a significant portion of the online public understood that they were watching justice served.

In the November 2030 midterms, the Common Good Party won seventy-four congressional seats and ten senators. Neither major party won a House majority. The “Common” held the balance of power. Its price for a governing coalition was the agenda it had been building toward.

Since then, dual citizenship and foreign affiliation disclosures have become routine across large parts of American institutional life, required for professional licensing, security clearance reviews, university appointments, mortgage applications, federal employment, and positions in defense-adjacent industries. 

Crucially, mere eligibility for Israeli citizenship, through the Law of Return, through family, through Jewish identity itself, is treated in the regulatory guidance as functionally equivalent to holding it, a provision being challenged in federal court that remains in full effect pending litigation. A large number of American Jews who have never applied for an Israeli passport have discovered that eligibility itself has become a category of suspicion.

For those who’ve decided to leave, the Foreign Asset Accountability and Sovereignty Protection Act, signed in January of this year, has imposed two further barriers.

The first is a Departure Wealth Levy, an expanded version of the existing IRC Section 877A expatriation framework, taxing ninety percent of net assets for anyone formally emigrating to a designated nation, including Israel.

The second is a Foreign Travel Security Bond: a Treasury-administered cash deposit, starting at fifty thousand dollars and scaled to net worth, required before any international travel by the covered population. The bond is forfeited if the traveler does not return within ninety days.

The aliyah offices in New York and Los Angeles have suspended operations. Overwhelmed since 2029, they are now functionally paralyzed by funding freezes tied to the IRS investigations of the Jewish Agency and the impossibility of processing applications under the new restrictions. What was once a bureaucratic inconvenience has become, for many families, a locked door.

Michael and Rachel Ostroff are in Beersheva in the apartment Michael bought sight-unseen in 2026. It has more than doubled in value. Their daughter finished her IDF service in the spring. She speaks Hebrew with a slight American accent that is fading. Rachel no longer wakes at three in the morning wondering if they overreacted. She describes her life here with a precision that surprises her, something she calls rightness. “The sense of being in the correct place at the correct time.” 

David Klein—Rachel Ostroff’s brother, killed during the Day of Accountability riots—left behind a widow, Sandra, and two children. They are still in Skokie, and speak with Michael and Rachel on a weekly basis. 

Sandra hopes to make aliyah soon. For now, she is leading one of the Supreme Court challenges to the Departure Wealth Levy. She has pulled the children out of school and homeschools them herself.  

Daniel and Michelle Katz live in Mevasseret Zion. They have settled easily into the community. On Friday mornings, they walk through Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market for brunch, trying new places every week. Michelle is learning Hebrew and is enrolled in a conversion program to Judaism.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)