Last month, Israel’s alternate prime minister Yair Lapid gave a speech on anti-Semitism, which he described as a species of the “family” that includes any persecution of people “not for what they’ve done, but for what they are, for how they were born.” His comments provoked a sharp response from his main political rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, who accused him of minimizing anti-Semitism and denying its uniqueness—sparking much argument in the Israeli press. To Haviv Rettig Gur, this controversy reflects a broader one that goes back to the origins of Zionism itself:

[Early] Zionists acknowledged anti-Semitism’s strange power but argued it was caused by the [unusual] condition of the Jews within the societies in which they lived. Normalize the Jews and you’ll end, or at least “normalize,” anti-Semitism, transforming it from a unique, society-mobilizing hatred to mere banal prejudice. Jewish nationhood and self-reliance would end the world’s obsession with the Jew.

In hindsight, it might astonish us that Zionism could ever have believed the solution lay in changing the Jew. Anti-Semitism, then and now, was simply too useful to be abandoned just because the Jews of the eastern hemisphere had reorganized themselves into a nation-state.

It’s no great leap to notice the parallel between [neo-Nazis’] argument that Jews, through some secret political order, are the cause of America’s troubles, and the claims by some progressives amid the racial reckoning now rocking American society that Israel, in some equally hidden political order, is responsible for those racial ills.

In this sense, Gur concludes, there is something “apparently unique” about the hatred of Jews, namely:

the role Jews are forced to play in the political imaginations of non-Jews as the incarnation of, and explanation for, their deepest fears and most vexing social ills. It is not the idea that Israel is doing wrong, but the idea that Israel, in some deep order of global affairs, is what is wrong with the world.

Last week, the New York Times reported, based on unnamed sources within the Trump administration, that the president had asked Israel not to carry out a planned strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. That is, somebody deliberately gave this information to the press, which later tried to confirm it by speaking with other officials. Amit Segal writes that, “according to figures in Israel’s security establishment,” this is “the most serious leak in Israel’s history.” He explains:

As Israel is reportedly planning what may well be one of its most consequential military operations ever, the New York Times lays out for the Iranians what Israel will target, when it will carry out the operation, and how. That’s not just any other leak.

Seth Mandel looks into the leaker’s logic:

The primary purpose of the [Times] article is not as a record of internal deliberations but as an instrument of policy itself. Namely, to obstruct future U.S. and Israeli foreign policy by divulging enough details of Israel’s plans in order to protect Iran’s nuclear sites. The idea is to force Israeli planners back to the drawing board, thus delaying a possible future strike on Iran until Iranian air defenses have been rebuilt.

The leak is the point. It’s a tactical play, more or less, to help Iran torpedo American action.

The leaker, Mandel explains—and the Times itself implies—is likely aligned with the faction in the administration that wants to see the U.S. retreat from the world stage and from its alliance with Israel, a faction that includes Vice-President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and the president’s own chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Yet it’s also possible, if less likely, that the plans were leaked in support of administration policy rather than out of factional infighting. Eliezer Marom argues that the leak was “part of the negotiations and serves to clarify to the Iranians that there is a real attack plan that Trump stopped at the last moment to conduct negotiations.”