The Jewish Treaty

There is a conflict between the collective known as “the Jewish People” and the rest of humanity. That’s undeniable. And the fact is, conflicts always involve at least two sides behaving badly. Each side contributes to generating the conflict. This is true on the individual scale, and on the national scale.

Most Jews believe this conflict is unilateral: that it’s all Gentiles doing bad things to Jews, and not the other way around. And whatever bad things Jews do, it’s only in defense against the bad things Gentiles did, are doing, and will do if not preemptively interdicted.

I know, because I used to believe it too. I grew up believing that all Gentiles were secretly Jew-haters, and that if they were being nice to me, their bigotry was merely lying dormant, waiting for the right chance to erupt again. Jew-hate was a force of nature, like a hurricane or a blizzard. Storms don’t “decide” to happen. Nothing in particular “causes” them. And so the only way to stop antisemitism was to fight it, intimidate it, suppress it, drive it out. That’s what I thought. Just the same as you.

But at some point I noticed that it makes no sense. It denies a basic aspect of how humans work: when people are mad at other people, it’s usually because they did something.

If the patient were an individual person, this would be easily identifiable as a classic narcissistic pattern. When a person is incapable of processing the idea that he or she carries even just some of the blame for his or her conflicts with others, we diagnose that as narcissistic personality disorder, at best.

But when the subject is Jews and the Jewish People, suddenly, out comes the narcissistic idea that it’s categorically wrong to accuse the Jews of anything.

Even a collective, such as a nation, can be identified as the perpetrator of atrocities without arousing any indignation or controversy. Examples include the Germans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the British, the French, the Americans, the Hutus, the Burmese, and lots of other peoples. You can accuse them of atrocities and evil deeds without yourself being accused of bigotry for having leveled the accusation. But if the nation is Israel, or the Jewish People (which has behaved like a nation since long before 1948), out comes the narcissism. You’re an antisemite because you’re describing what you’re witnessing.

The Swiss should never be un-accusable.
The Navajo should never be un-accusable.
The Yoruba should never be un-accusable.
The Jews should never be un-accusable.

And because the Jewish collective consciousness refuses to accept even the possibility of being even partly responsible for the conflicts it finds itself in, it keeps repeating the same behaviors that drive those conflicts’ intensification. It keeps responding to legitimate criticism with censorship, dissent with intimidation, and inquiries with laughably silly logical fallacies and outright evasion. It reframes the problem from “the behavior being criticized” to “the criticism itself,” and then attacks the person who has the criticism – and never, ever addresses the substance of the criticism itself, and never responds to it.

And when people see Jews doing that, it lowers their opinion of Jews. Because when people behave badly, and others notice, it lowers their opinion. That’s how psychology works. And when they see the same type of person doing the same type of bad behavior, over and over and over again, on a consistent basis for a long time, their opinion of the entire group or type gets lower. People have to navigate a world with danger and scarcity, and have to make decisions about whom to trust and whom not to. And if a group of people consistently behaves in a destructive and dangerous way, others around them are right to view them adversarially.

This is “How Humans Work 101.” But Jews have forgotten it, and expect others to forget it, and impose on others a moral duty to forget it, and denounce them as immoral if they refuse to forget it.

Guys, we gotta stop that.

I write this as a Jew. Both my parents are Jewish. All four grandparents were Jewish. I have zero documented Gentile ancestry going back to the early 1800s. I went to Hebrew school for 12 years, had a bar mitzvah, hung out at Hillel in college, went on Birthright, worked on a kibbutz, and traveled from Eilat to the Galilee. I was religious for a time. I went to two overnight Zionist summer camps where we saluted a foreign flag on US soil and sang a foreign national anthem every evening before dinner. I have family who live in Israel now. My Jew cred is impeccable. I’ve met lots of Jews. Everyone at my bar mitzvah was Jewish.

And I have something most people writing about this don’t have: results. I have friends now whom most of you would call “antisemites.” People with Nazi symbols in their bios call me friend and brother. I recently spent a week at the home of a man who believes the Holocaust was a hoax and that a Jewish cabal is plotting to rule the world. We went hiking together, just the two of us, far out into the woods, and I was completely unarmed. If he’s what you think he is, why did I make it home – with a new friendship?

I’ll tell you how. Keep reading.

The Stakes Are Ultimate

I wake up every day and see Israel set a new record for atrocity – a new low of depravity that no player has ever unlocked before. Not just killing, but laughing about it. Filming it. Singing about it. At the 2025 Jerusalem Day Flag March, crowds of Israeli youth chanted “There’s no school in Gaza, there are no children left,” alongside “Flatten Gaza” and “May your village burn” (Haaretz, via FMEP; Democracy Now).

[Link: library of videos documenting this behavior]

And it isn’t a fringe. In a Penn State survey published in Haaretz, 82% of Jewish Israelis supported expelling the population of Gaza, and 47% agreed the army should do what Joshua did at Jericho – kill every inhabitant of a conquered city (Jerusalem Story).

Then I open my phone and see other Jews defending it. That includes my own family. With the exception of my mom and maybe one cousin, almost everyone in my family “stands with” what I’m watching. My cousins tell me “this is a defensive war” and “we’re only targeting terrorists.” Most of the people I see laughing and celebrating and mocking dead children have the same surnames as kids I went to school with. It’s personal.

I want to teach Jews to notice the narcissistic nature of this pattern, and the danger it poses to the world if it keeps escalating. Because that’s what’s happening right now: Israel and its defenders are escalating. Every time people catch Israel in another atrocity, Israel’s supporters redefine the atrocity as “defensive” or “legitimate,” and attack the people who caught them, with intimidation, censorship, and worse. They even redefine the moral architecture of Western culture to normalize whatever it was that they did. Israel bombs schools? Bombing schools is normal and ok now. Israel puts children in military prisons without due process? That’s normal now too. Israel erases entire cities from the map? Normal. Every time Israel crosses a Rubicon, they drag Western minds and souls across it with them.

This is a war, being waged socially and technologically, culturally and spiritually. And in the past few years, the war has turned monstrously kinetic – in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, in the West Bank. And Israeli leaders are already naming the next one. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett stood before the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and declared, “Turkey is the new Iran” (World Israel News; Israel National News). Egypt may follow, and potentially the entire world, if the world ever decides to hold Israel physically accountable for what it’s done.

[Source needed: Egypt]

If this keeps escalating, there is no end point. Each time you destroy someone for being an “antisemite,” everyone else sees it… and becomes antisemitic. Then you have to destroy them too. And the cycle keeps expanding until there’s nothing left to destroy.

No amount of control ever satiates. The more threats (or perceived threats) you eliminate, the more pop out from every corner, and the more threats you start seeing that aren’t even there – until you either collapse into a puddle of obsessive paranoia… or someone from the outside stops you and takes the control away by force. That’s how it always goes.

In other words, if Israel keeps breaking taboos, crossing Rubicons, normalizing atrocities, and demolishing country after country with fire, then eventually the rest of the world – which outnumbers Jews roughly 500 to 1 – will feel its own survival is at stake. And when a world of 8 billion people feels that way about 16 million, the outcome isn’t a mystery. It’s the nightmare every Jewish child is taught to fear. And we would be walking straight into it.

Think it through, purely in terms of survival. In a fight between 16 million and 8 billion, there is only one scenario where the 16 million win: the one the antisemites describe, where Jews secretly control the world’s governments. If that isn’t the case, then the numerical and territorial disadvantage makes the fight utterly hopeless. And if someone believes Jews need to control the world’s governments to be safe, that belief is precisely the thing the rest of the world would be fighting against. Either way, escalating is suicide. Even if you care nothing about the Gentiles, self-preservation alone says: stop escalating, and start de-escalating, now.

Our own scriptures warned us about this. Divine protection is withdrawn when the people become wicked. The land spits out those who defile it. It has happened twice before. There is no promise that it can’t happen a third time.

So, bottom line, this road leads to one of three places:

1. Israel's wars keep spreading until the whole world is on fire.
2. The world, pushed past its breaking point, turns on the Jews before that happens.
3. We all regain our sense and de-escalate this disaster, now, while we still can.

The key ingredient in #3 is Jews waking up to the narcissistic nature of how we frame our conflicts, and engaging in genuine introspection on the question of why everyone hates us, why we’ve been expelled from cities and kingdoms over a hundred times, and how we are generating the very conflicts whose persistent recurrence we lament.

Don’t take my word for how often it’s happened. Here’s Congressman Randy Fine, at a podium, in October 2023: “We are a people that has been kicked out of every place that we have ever lived, for 2,000 years. Every. Single. Place.”

It’s hyperbole, but he’s not wrong about the pattern. The question he never asks is the only one that matters: why?

I learned in Hebrew school that when your own people fall into murderous madness, you have a special duty to speak up. They were talking about the Germans, of course – the farmer in his field, watching the cattle cars go by, keeping his head down. Neutrality was complicity. Silence was complicity. Every Jewish kid in the modern world got that lesson. “Never again.” Well, now it’s again. And I will not stay silent.

The Gentiles Aren’t Blameless

Gentiles treated Jews badly, many times. Even when individual Jews did real wrongs, entire communities were punished as a block. Blood-guilt is never a sound legal doctrine.

And even while ostensibly tolerating Jews, Gentiles often ostracized and picked on Jewish individuals as outsiders – even ones who put down their pride and were trying to assimilate. These small acts of meanness don’t get headlines or museums or memorials in public squares, but they are real, and arguably just as consequential as the big, famous stuff.

Jewry Holds Humanity’s Shadow

Social rejection turns people dark. It brings out their shadow. Everyone has negative personality traits, even if they’re only buried like seeds – but consistent social isolation waters them. And through this cycle, the Jewish People have become a sort of “receptacle” for humanity’s shadow archetype. We are carrying the intergenerational trauma of centuries of separation and ostracism – and have built up the mental defense mechanisms needed to cope with it.

Many of those mechanisms are fundamentally antisocial. And foremost among them is the idea of “Chosen-ness.” It’s a classic pattern: when the nerdy kid gets rejected and has to spend his adolescence alone, watching others have fun, and being teased for being different, he builds up resentment, and a sense of specialness. “They’re not picking on me because they’re better – they’re picking on me because I’M better.”

And then he might even start fantasizing about justice and revenge. Sitting by himself at the lunch table for nerds, maybe flanked by a few other kids with a similar experience, he plots a future of getting rich, buying a company, being the boss, and then giving orders to the jocks who bullied him way back in high school, and telling them “no, you can’t take a vacation.” (Read more: The Cycle of Ostracism and the Jungian Shadow)

But, being someone who has suffered social isolation myself, I empathize. I can’t blame the ostracized for resenting their ostracizers. And that’s why I’m not pegging Jews as the sole cause of the conflict. That would be flipping around to the opposite extreme from the current zeitgeist. “All of it is the Jews’ fault” is as extreme as “None of it is.”

I’m familiar with Jung, and I know you don’t beat the shadow by destroying it. You have to integrate it. That takes a whole lot of truth being learned and understood. So I’m asking Jews to learn about our people’s shadow, including the dark things done to other peoples.

History is a Jewish value, one of the primary ones. So it shouldn’t be controversial to ask Jews to learn the dark side of their own history. I did it, and I’m still standing. Knowledge doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s the first step in healing.

But I also want the Gentiles to appreciate that the Jewish shadow is their shadow too. The Jews may be serving as the receptacle for the archetype, but Humanity as a whole is what’s been filling it up. Jews are still part of Humanity, and Humanity is what ultimately created this shadow, through a trillion little unloving choices (and a few big ones), repeated over centuries.

This is the Gentiles’ contribution to the conflict. Both sides have a reckoning to do.

And perhaps, in the end, the function of the Jews is to make humanity better, in a roundabout way, by mirroring the collective shadow to be integrated. If the human race can figure this puzzle out, I feel that we “graduate” to a more whole and healthy form of civilization.

What Happens When You Try It

So what does introspection look like in practice? Here’s what I do.

When I meet someone online who says “All the Jews are bad, there’s not a single good one,” the first thing I say is: “I’m sorry for what we did.”

If they say “Too bad, I don’t forgive you,” I say: “And given everything that’s happened, I don’t blame you. I don’t expect you to forgive us. But I’m still sorry.”

And immediately they soften. By the end, they’re saying things like: “Well, I guess you’re one of the rare good ones. If the rest of them were like you, we wouldn’t have had any problems. Best wishes in your quest to wake your people up.”

In 30 seconds, I’ve taken them from “All Jews are bad” to “Most Jews are bad.”

That may not sound like much, but it’s not just a change in statistics. It’s a change in category. They thought Jews were bad as a category. I show them that no, it’s still a set of individuals acting on free will. If one pig can fly, then perhaps any pig can fly. It’s the four-minute mile. It was thought to be impossible, and once someone broke it, others broke it in succession.

They’re shocked that a Jew wants to listen. Shocked that a Jew will give them credit for a valid point. Shocked to see a Jew admit to being wrong. Most of them are not irrational. They’re just hurt. And they didn’t think we had it in us.

If there's one good Jew, there could be two. Or three, or a hundred, or a thousand.

Why a Treaty

The world can do better than where this is heading. That’s why I wrote a treaty: a set of things Jews and Gentiles can do at the same time to build trust and de-escalate this conflict now. It’s the first written treaty of its kind that I know of.

It works row by row. In each row, people who are Jewish make one commitment, and people who are not Jewish make a matching one, at the same time. Jews agree to stop shutting down inquiry into our history, including the dark side; Gentiles agree that the inquiry will be honest, sourced, and held to the evidence. Jews acknowledge that our collectives act, and answer for what they do; Gentiles agree to judge every individual by his own choices, never by his blood. And so on down the line: one standard for everyone, no chosen people, no scripture as a license to harm, no intimidation of any kind. Neither side gives up anything the other side doesn’t match.

I’m not alone. Many Jews and Jewish organizations are already doing the right thing and resisting, and you’ll find them here. I honor them for their compassion and courage. My approach is unique, but the mission isn’t.

You don't make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies. That's why they call it peace.