How I Chose Sides on Israel

Seven months before October 7, I knew embarrassingly little about Israel. Today, I consider myself one of its most committed defenders.

After watching another American election in which our relationship with Israel became a political liability, it’s important to remind myself that my convictions aren’t determined by election returns. In fact, it’s exactly when my political positions become inconvenient that I must remember why I hold them in the first place.

In February 2023, I was invited on a ten-day trip to Israel through an organization called Passages, whose mission is to “bring a new generation of Christian leaders to Israel to deepen their faith, forge lasting bonds with the Jewish people and return home equipped to strengthen America.” To be transparent: as a Catholic convert of nine years at the time, I was focused on this trip from my own faith’s perspective. We were scheduled to arrive on October 22.

I vowed to learn as much as I could about Israel before my trip. So, I started reading. What began as trip preparation quickly became something much more meaningful. I sought out the land but found its people.

Centuries—millennia—of persecution, exile, and repeated attempts at annihilation, countered by unrelenting endurance and determination to preserve their faith, traditions, and identity, have resulted in a modern people that is the envy of the world: Israel has the highest fertility rate of any OECD country and is a global leader in technological innovation, spending more on R&D per GDP than any OECD country.

I wasn’t studying with blinders on, though. No country is perfect, and I don’t vow blanket support for Israel’s government. But I could say the same about America. Instead, I developed a genuine affection for a people and its story. While my history lesson should have tipped me off, I still couldn’t imagine so many people in my own country (and around the world) developing such a violent hatred toward them.

Then October 7 happened, and my trip was canceled. While I struggled to comprehend the brutality, I was astonished by something else: the reaction. Some Americans were already finding ways to rationalize the murder before many Israeli families had even learned the fate of their loved ones. It wasn’t just the celebration from some of the usual bad actors, but the refusal of others to condemn it that shocked me.

That response began to shape my understanding of a debate that has consumed me for the last three years. With my opinions (and dare I say, morals) intact, I began listening less to what people were saying and more to who was saying it.

I recalled a lesson from my parents: you can tell a lot about a person by the company he keeps. The people we admire, defend, and voluntarily associate with reveal a lot about our values. I began applying this simple childhood lesson to the increasingly bitter Israel debate.

No matter how fast I scrolled between internet personalities, mainstream media voices, and even elected officials, I couldn’t avoid three figures in my algorithm. And they made it easy for me to choose sides.

Nick Fuentes has built a following around racial resentment and contempt for the basic principles of human dignity. Myron Gaines, one of the more prominent “manosphere” figures, has made a career out of reducing relationships to a power contest and treating women like second-class citizens. And Tucker Carlson has not only spread misinformation about Israel but also platformed some of the loudest anti-Israel voices on his show to peddle conspiracy theories that most rational people wouldn’t entertain.

I have been vocal about the overuse of the word “anti-Semite,” and I’ll withhold its use here. To me, the distinction is not whether someone is critical of Israel but whether he holds it to different standards than comparable nations and seeks to cast blame on it for the ills of the day. These men make careers out of my definition.

More revealingly, I noticed less about this group’s political positions and more about who they were encouraging their audiences to become. They replaced wisdom with resentment and traded intellectual curiosity for suspicion. Israel became a catch-all to convince a generation of young Americans that someone else was responsible for everything wrong in the world.

I have spent years building my own platform around the crises facing young Americans—particularly young men. I promote masculinity defined by responsibility, self-sacrifice, self-discipline, and service to others. When I see influential men encouraging grievance, contempt, and conspiratorial thinking, I don’t merely disagree with their politics. I question their character.

Meanwhile, I found another group whose example pulled me in the opposite direction: Jewish Americans like Liel Liebowitz, who rides the New York City subway wearing his yarmulke, refusing to hide his identity despite what it might mean for his personal safety; Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, who defends Catholic teaching against anti-Semitism and emphasizes Christianity’s Jewish roots; political commentator Douglas Murray; historian Victor Davis Hanson; and ordinary citizens willing to risk friendship, professional opportunities, and social standing to defend principles they believe matter more than popularity.

What attracted me to these people wasn’t even their support for Israel. It was that they demonstrated qualities I wanted to cultivate in myself. We often hear that character is revealed by what you do when no one is looking. For these people, character is revealed by what you do when everyone is looking, and it may cost you something. And character especially matters when deciding whom to trust and whose judgment deserves serious consideration.

This creates a full-circle moment for my own faith. Matthew 7:16-20 says, “By their fruits you will know them.” Christ wasn’t strategizing on foreign policy. He was teaching us something about the relationship between what people profess and how they live.

Social media rewards volume over virtue. The result is a culture in which millions of people choose their information based on who makes them feel vindicated rather than who challenges them to become better. That recipe destroys societies.

The outcome of the midterms only reinforced this conviction. Many will see the results as a rejection of America’s relationship with Israel. I understand why. Americans are tired of war and can feel the ramifications as they walk down grocery aisles or fill up at the pump. Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously.

But I can share those same concerns with my fellow Americans and still be willing to draw a line. I can question the wisdom of a war without questioning the worth of an ally. I can be critical of the Israeli government without abandoning the Jewish people.

If this makes me less popular, so be it. I’ve never prioritized popularity in arriving at my convictions. My reputation is between God and myself.

I want all four of my children to understand that the most important measure of a person isn’t how loudly he speaks or how many “likes” he gets. It’s whether he has the character to do the right thing when it might cost him something.

Which brings me back to Israel. Studying Israel taught me something that extends well beyond the Middle East. We live in an age when Americans are increasingly encouraged to choose sides before they’ve bothered to understand them. I did the opposite.

I approached Israel knowing almost nothing. My journey began with curiosity, deepened with history, was affected by a tragedy that made the moral stakes impossible to ignore, and ended with convictions I had not anticipated holding.

Three years later, those convictions have only deepened. The company we choose to keep is not merely a reflection of what we believe. Over time, it influences who we become.

One day, my kids will look back at the people their father admired, the causes he defended, and the voices he chose to amplify. I imagine they’ll see that I didn’t always get the answers right. But I hope they’ll also recognize that I tried to stand beside those whose character was worth emulating.

In a world that often obsesses over choosing the winning side, I’d rather choose the company worth keeping.