I write this as a Jew, and not from the neutral air of commentary.

I write from within Jewish reality, and from within one of its fractures. I do not approach Israel as a hypothesis, an experiment, or a state awaiting the moral permission of others. For me, Israel’s existence is not conditional. It is not provisional. It is not a favor granted by history, nor a license issued by the nations. It is a necessity with a depth older than modern diplomacy. And precisely because that is so, I refuse to speak of Israel in the thin language reserved for ordinary states, as though it were merely one sovereign apparatus among others.

That refusal matters now because on the 19th day of the war Benjamin Netanyahu did more than offer a battlefield update. He attempted to define an ending. He said Iran could no longer enrich uranium or build ballistic missiles. The deepest issue is not whether that claim will prove fully durable in technical terms. The deeper issue is that political language moved ahead of reality and tried to seize the authority to decide what “finished” should mean before the war itself had produced an unquestionable end-state.

That is always a dangerous moment. It is the moment when power no longer waits for reality to close, but begins trying to declare closure into existence.

Where the enemy goes missing

This is not an argument about moral equivalence. Israel is not morally equivalent to Hamas, Hezbollah, or the militia architecture sustained by Iran. A state defending its population is not the same thing as organizations built around civilian entanglement, ideological absolutism, and the strategic use of death. But war can generate structural symmetries without producing moral sameness. One side has air power, intelligence systems, allies, and the language of legality. The other has tunnels, cells, rockets, sacrificial mythologies, and the language of resistance. There is no symmetry of virtue here. There is, however, a symmetry of mechanism: both sides become dependent on an enemy that cannot be finally exhausted.

That is where endless war begins.

Hezbollah was not the end. Hamas was not the end. Gaza was not the end. Iran, too, is no longer being described simply as a state with facilities and launch capacity. It is being recast as a moving chain of laboratories, engineers, proxy fields, infrastructures, memories of retaliation, and future possibilities of reconstitution. The enemy no longer has one place. It becomes layered, mobile, partially spectral. Once the enemy has no place, legality stops acting as a real limit. It begins to travel after violence from target to target, giving every extension the tone of necessity.

This is not a plea for Israeli weakness. It is not a sermon about moral purity delivered to a society under attack. It is a harder question than that: can a state preserve itself if its language of self-preservation no longer distinguishes defense from the endless administration of force?

Real strength does not lie in declaring every act necessary in advance. Real strength lies in recognizing the threshold at which necessity begins to reproduce itself.

When legality follows violence

One truth almost never stated publicly in its naked form is this: states do not kill only because they must. They kill also because they can. Because they possess means that make violence executable, scalable, and politically manageable. The threat may be real. Often it is. That still does not explain the scale, continuity, and elasticity of killing. Those depend on available capacity. First there is capability. Then comes justification. Everything else is rhetoric designed to make capability appear as duty.

The same is true, in another register, for non-state violence. Non-state actors do not live without legitimacy. They live under a different regime of legitimacy. They do not justify violence through law. They justify it through the absolutization of the enemy. For them, the enemy is civilizational, historical, total. Its disappearance can be imagined as redemption. Their violence is not more honest. It is simply less embarrassed.

The state widens legality because the enemy has no fixed place. The non-state actor abandons legality because the enemy is everywhere. Both feed the same machinery of endless war.

In such a world, apology becomes nearly impossible. Not because grief vanishes. Not because victims are unreal. On the contrary, the victims are painfully real, which is exactly why the problem is so severe. But apology requires an addressee. It requires a relation between act and wound, between agent and recipient, between harm and acknowledgment. What happens when the object of violence is no longer only a person, a unit, or a state, but also a network, a tunnel system, a scientific capability, a support environment, a future possibility of regeneration?

To whom does the apology arrive?

The human addressee disappears inside the security diagram. That is why modern war speaks so fluently of tragedy, collateral damage, regret, and necessity, and so rarely says the one word that would expose its difficulty: sorry.

And yet Israel cannot be read on neutral symbolic ground. Jewish force is not judged in the same atmosphere in which the force of other states is judged. Beneath much anti-Zionist language there still move older antisemitic reflexes, in which Jewish self-defense is uniquely suspect and Jewish sovereignty remains somehow permanently conditional.

I reject that premise entirely.

Israel does not exist by permission. Its right to exist is not a proposition awaiting validation from the nations. For me, that question is closed before argument begins.

A Jewish state is not a normal state

But if that question is closed, another question opens. It is not whether Israel may exist. It is whether Israel will understand itself only through the categories of ordinary statehood.

That, for me, is the more serious danger.

Jewish existence was never merely a Western political identity in local dress. It carries another ethical inheritance, one that cannot be reduced to the familiar grammar of the modern West with its distributions of legality, innocence, guilt, and ritual remorse. I am not speaking of moral superiority. I am speaking of genealogical difference. Jewishness binds life, memory, responsibility, endurance, and collective distinction in a way that does not arise from the same source as the ethical languages of Europe, even where formal similarities exist.

This is where the deeper fracture begins. In Israel’s case, the stakes are not exhausted by the preservation of a state. Beneath modern sovereignty there remains something older and harder to name: not communal identity in the ordinary sense, but a memory of differentiation, even of apartness, that cannot be fully translated into the apparatus of the state.

I do not mean superiority in any vulgar moral or civilizational sense. I mean a different genealogical status, a burden of non-reducibility. “Jew” here cannot be exhausted by citizenship, religion, ethnicity, or the vocabulary of modern identification. Something in that word precedes the state and exceeds it.

That is why the phrase “Jewish state” is not a neutral constitutional description. It never was. It does not merely mean a state with a Jewish majority, or a nation-state belonging to Jews in the routine modern sense. It means that the state bears the burden of representing something older than sovereignty. That burden cannot be discharged by procedure alone.

Struggles over conversion, descent, inclusion, return, and belonging are not side issues. They reveal the constitutive problem of the state itself: it is trying to legislate a source that precedes legislation. The more strongly it calls itself a Jewish state, the more insistently the unanswered question returns: what exactly is the state claiming to carry?

In vulgar language, one might call this chosenness. I would not. That word is too easily degraded into pride, superiority, or the cheap theater of exceptionalism. The truer word is apartness. Not privilege, but burden. Not exemption, but non-reducibility. Not glory, but an irreducible status that cannot be dissolved into ordinary political form.

If Israel becomes legible only to the West

There is also an internal struggle that must not be hidden.

The conflict around Israel is not only between the state and its external enemies. It is also a struggle over whether the state exhausts Jewish reality. Parts of the ultra-Orthodox world reject the state not merely politically, but genealogically. I do not cite them as authorities. Their positions can be parasitic, deformed, and at times morally repellent. But as symptoms they matter. They expose a truth Zionist normality never fully settled: the state exists, the state is necessary, the state is unquestionable in its right to exist, and yet the state does not exhaust what Israel means.

There is an even more intimate layer.

The phrase “Jewish state” was not lived equally by all Jews in the same way. The state did not merely gather Jews. It also established, often silently, which Jews would count as normative in its own mirror.

Much of the official gravity of statehood, memory, seriousness, and legitimacy was historically shaped through Ashkenazi forms of political self-understanding. Other Jewish inheritances entered that framework under pressure, often required to translate themselves into a norm that did not fully arise from them.

This matters because the meaning of Israel is inseparable from the question of who gets to speak as a Jew, and from which Jewish archive.

I write this also as a Sephardic Jew. Not to add a personal note, but because this is a location of truth.

I do not write as though “the Jew” were a transparent category. I write from within a Jewish reality that has never been fully identical with the dominant state idiom of Jewishness. That is not resentment. It is an epistemic position.

It says that Jewishness cannot be exhausted by one official tone of self-representation.

If the Jewish state becomes legible only in the language of Western sovereignty, administrative seriousness, and securitized necessity, then something essential is lost. Israel does not become more real that way. It becomes thinner. It becomes easier for the West to recognize, and easier for Jewish reality itself to disappear inside that recognition.

Without the irreducible internal otherness of Jewish life, Israel risks becoming not too Jewish, but not Jewish enough. A phantom of the Western world in Hebrew dress.

That is the deepest danger I hear beneath the rhetoric of closure.

Israel may win campaigns. It may destroy facilities. It may restore deterrence for a time. But if its language becomes wholly the language of ordinary state survival, then victory itself may become the form of a deeper loss. Not the loss of territory. Not the loss of deterrence. The loss of thickness. The loss of internal Jewish difference. The loss of that non-Western ethical inheritance through which Jewish life has never been merely communal identity and never merely a local variant of European political man.

What must be defended is not only the state, but the irreducible Jewish reality the state was never meant to erase.

If that reality is blurred, flattened, or absorbed into the categories of the surrounding world, Israel may remain standing while something more difficult and more ancient is quietly lost. And that loss would not be corrected by military success, international recognition, or the approval of history. It would mean that the Jewish state survived, but Jewish apartness had been translated out of itself.

If that sentence becomes impossible to utter without embarrassment, then what is disappearing is not only a political language.

It is a people’s thickness of reality.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

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