New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)  There is an old debating trick that works only on readers who do not check. It involves 3 Steps:

1. State the conclusion with great confidence
2. Attribute panic to the other side
3. And quietly bury the one fact that would collapse the entire argument.

Sebastien Levi’s recent opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post, headlined as the “panicked” outburst of an Israeli ambassador, performs this trick from its first sentence to its last.

The essay opens by psychoanalyzing Prime Minister Netanyahu—projecting onto him the very fear the author wishes to assign—and then extends the same maneuver to Ambassador Yechiel Leiter. The reader is told, before a single fact is offered, that the ambassador’s words prove the Israeli government’s “utter disdain” for American Jews.

What the reader is never told is what J Street actually did, what its president actually said, and what the ambassador actually responded to. Once those omissions are restored, the piece does not merely weaken. It reverses.

The Buried Fact: What J Street Actually Did

Levi characterizes J Street as a body that merely “criticizes” the Israeli government—a normal democratic activity, he implies, that the ambassador cannot tolerate. He frames the April legislative episode as a narrow vote “specifically targeted on bulldozers and 2,000-pound bombs.”

This is the load-bearing claim of the entire op-ed, and it is not accurate.

The actual record is a matter of public reporting. In April, J Street published a policy document calling for the phasing out of direct United States military assistance to Israel altogether—including the funding connected to defensive systems such as Iron Dome—at a moment when Israel is engaged in a multi-front war against Iranian proxies. This is not a targeted objection to a particular munition. It is a call to wind down the security relationship itself.

That is the “duplicitousness” the ambassador named.

An organization that advertises itself as “pro-Israel” while advocating the removal of the aid that keeps Israeli civilians alive under rocket fire has invited precisely the question Leiter asked: how can one be pro-Israel and simultaneously advocate an arms embargo on a state fighting for its life on seven fronts? Levi never quotes that question. He cannot, because once it is on the page, the “panic” framing dissolves. The ambassador was not panicking. He was describing a contradiction in plain words.

The Word Levi Will Not Print: Genocide

The single most important fact about J Street’s recent trajectory appears nowhere in Levi’s essay.

Nowhere.

In a public newsletter issued on Tisha B’Av—the Jewish fast day mourning the destruction of both Temples—J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, wrote that he had been “persuaded” by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel broke the international genocide convention.

Read that again, and note the date. The head of the organization that Levi presents as the authentic voice of mainstream American Jewry chose the Jewish calendar’s day of national mourning to lend his name to the blood libel of the twenty-first century: that the state founded by the survivors of genocide is itself committing one.

Whatever one thinks of any particular Israeli policy, this is the accusation that animates the campaign to isolate, boycott, and disarm the Jewish state. J Street’s president embraced it.

An honest essay defending J Street would have to reckon with this. Levi’s essay does not mention it. He asks the reader to believe that the ambassador attacked a body of reasonable critics over a vote about bulldozers, while withholding the fact that the body’s leader had publicly endorsed the genocide charge weeks earlier. This is an omission of epic proportion upon which his entire false argument depends.

The Polling Sleight of Hand

That a large majority of American Jews believe one can be pro-Israel and criticize an Israeli government is unremarkable; it is also true of most Israelis, who criticize their governments vigorously and constantly. The question the ambassador raised was never whether criticism is legitimate. It was whether advocating the termination of Israel’s defensive aid during a war, and endorsing the genocide accusation, still falls within the meaning of the word “pro-Israel.”

Levi answers a question no one asked, and treats the applause as a verdict. A favorable view of the Israeli people tells us nothing about support for an arms embargo on the Israeli state. The statistics are real; the inference is a magic trick.

The Quotation That Was Quietly Trimmed

Levi reports that the ambassador told Jewish critics to “shut up” and “make aliyah” if they want to change things—rendering Leiter as a man who tells Jews to be silent or leave. The actual words, widely reported, are less convenient for the thesis.

Leiter stated that he meets with pro-Palestinian groups and would have no objection to J Street if it presented itself honestly as pro-Palestinian. His objection was specifically to an organization branding itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy” while working to defy the position of Israel’s democratically elected government and restrict its arms. His point about aliyah was not “leave and be silent.” It was the opposite: those who wish to determine the policy of the Israeli government are welcome to become citizens and vote in its elections, rather than lobby a foreign legislature to override the choices of the Israeli electorate.

One may disagree with that argument. But Levi does not answer it—he amputates it, replaces it with “shut up,” and argues against the stump.

“Words Matter as Much as Substance”

Near the end, Levi reaches for his most resonant line: “One argues or fights an opponent but cures and extirpates cancer.” He is appalled by the ambassador’s use of the word “cancer,” declaring that “words matter as much as substance.” On this, at least, he is correct. So let us hold his own words to the standard he has just announced.

The Man Being Attacked

It is worth pausing on who Yechiel Leiter actually is, because Levi reduces him to a caricature—a hardliner barking at dissenters. The reality is a figure of unusual depth, and one whose biography is a direct refutation of the very charge his critics level.

Leiter was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and made aliyah as a young man to serve in the IDF. He holds a doctorate in political philosophy, and his post-doctoral work on the political thought of John Locke was published by Cambridge University Press—a serious scholarly accomplishment for any academic, let alone a working diplomat.

He served as chief of staff to Netanyahu in the Finance Ministry and as an adviser to Ariel Sharon. He is, in short, precisely the “eloquent speaker with a deep understanding of American culture and politics” that his appointment described—a man who has lived on both sides of the relationship he now represents.

And he has paid for that relationship in the most absolute currency there is. On the tenth of November, 2023, his eldest son—Major Moshe Yedidya Leiter, a physician, an officer, a husband, and a father of six whose youngest child was barely three months old—fell in battle leading his soldiers into Gaza after the October 7 murderous and rape massacre. Moshe had completed his service and chosen to return to combat. He was killed by a Hamas booby trap in a tunnel shaft.

In a televised interview, the ambassador said something that should be set beside every accusation of indiscriminate slaughter ever leveled at the Jewish state: that his own son died because the IDF does not kill civilians indiscriminately—that Moshe went in on foot, at far greater personal risk, precisely because the army takes precautions no other military in history has taken. A father who has buried a son under those circumstances does not need lectures on the cost of Israel’s wars from a commentator in a studio. When such a man calls an organization’s posture “duplicitous,” the burden is not on him to soften his words. It is on the organization to explain itself.

There is a further irony. The charge at the heart of Levi’s essay is that the ambassador holds “utter disdain” for bipartisan support. Yet on assuming his post, Leiter stated plainly that bipartisan backing is a foundational element of the U.S.-Israel relationship and that he intended to work with both Republicans and Democrats to keep Israel a unifying issue across party lines. That is the public record. Levi’s thesis requires the reader not to know it.

The Author’s Own Record

Sebastien Levi presents himself as the dispassionate diagnostician of an extreme government—a correspondent for French Jewish radio offering measured analysis. His published writing tells a different story. The author who is scandalized by intemperate language has a long and well-documented habit of it, deployed in precisely the same direction, year after year.

In a 2019 essay published under his byline, Levi described the alliance between American Evangelical Christians and Israel as “morally disgusting,” and characterized Israel’s most steadfast non-Jewish supporters in the United States as “useful idiots.”

The same piece dismissed religious Zionists as people who regard secular Israelis as “tools.” This is the writer now lecturing an Israeli ambassador on the importance of moderate language and the sanctity of bipartisan goodwill.

Elsewhere, Levi has written that Israel “is becoming…a nemesis for many liberal Jews,” has likened Israel under its current government to “illiberal democracies such as Poland or Hungary,” and has framed Israeli gun-rights legislation as a “sad symbiosis” between Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel. After the Pittsburgh massacre, he attacked the Israeli government and its representatives for being, in his telling, indifferent to American Jews. His themes for nearly a decade are unmistakable: the fault is always Israel’s, the villain is always Netanyahu, and the rhetoric is always as heated as anything he now condemns in others.

Levi asks the reader to receive him as a neutral observer reporting that Israel’s standing is collapsing. He is not a neutral observer. He is a longtime, openly partisan critic who has spent years writing that Israel’s elected leadership is the disease—and who now expresses horror that someone used a medical metaphor against an organization he favors. The standard he invokes against Leiter is one he has never applied to himself.

A Word from the Nevi’im

The holy prophet Isaiah had a name for the inversion at work in this kind of writing—the practice of dressing the harmful as the principled and the principled as the harmful. Yeshayahu (5:20) pronounced: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who present darkness as light and light as darkness.” An organization whose president has lent his name to the genocide libel, and which seeks to strip the Jewish state of its defenses in the middle of a war, is not made “pro-Israel” by the label it prints on its letterhead. To insist otherwise is to call darkness light.

What the Essay Avoids

Levi accuses the ambassador of avoiding “all discussion about the substance.” The accusation is a confession. The substance is this: an organization calling itself pro-Israel has, in the space of a single year, endorsed the genocide accusation through its president and called for phasing out the defensive aid that protects Israeli civilians under fire. An Israeli ambassador said so, bluntly. One may wish he had said it more diplomatically. But the question of tone is not the question of truth, and Levi has spent two thousand words on the former precisely to avoid the latter.

Conclusion

The op-ed is built on a single rhetorical structure repeated in every paragraph: attribute fear to the other side, omit the disqualifying fact, and present a partisan’s grievance as a demographer’s report. Strip away the projection and restore the record—the genocide endorsement, the call to end defensive aid in wartime, the trimmed quotation, the author’s own decade of incendiary language—and what remains is not an analysis of Israel’s standing in America. It is a defense brief for an organization that has wandered far from the meaning of the words it still wears as a brand.

Ambassador Leiter’s metaphor was sharp. It was also, on the money, a description rather than a slander. And the man complaining loudest about its sharpness is the last person entitled to do so.

The author can be reached at [email protected]