Israel is No Longer a Western Nation:

How Tribal Codes Influence Israeli Policy

In my July 1st post, “The Israel No One Expected—A Tribal Nation,” I examined how Western Christians often misread the Middle East by looking through a universalist lens, misunderstanding the deep tribal realities of the region. This post explains the demographic shift inside Israel that has made Western-style peace expectations increasingly unrealistic.

As Israel heads toward Knesset elections on October 27, 2026, the most decisive force in its politics is rarely the one Western headlines emphasize. It is the Mizrahim. These are the descendants of Jews who lived for thousands of years in the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia in countries like Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Morocco since the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE.

These Jews—expelled from the Arab and Muslim world—are now residents in Israel. As citizens for five decades, they have reshaped the country’s direction entirely. Their influence on Israeli politics and government has made Israel steadily less interested in the peace scripts pushed by the West. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Yemeni Jews rescued from Yemen and flown to Israel as part of Operation Magic Carpet

The incredulity of Western Mainline Christians at failed peace attempts results from a false assumption that both Arab Muslim nations and Israel are basically Western European in character. They must be like us, we think. They must have our values, which include concepts like peace at all costs, compromise, and Christian ideologies.

Western perception may have been right about part of Israeli politics when we consider the long-dominant Ashkenazi (European Jewish) Labor Party. It was the fading old guard of this establishment running the country in 2000 and 2008 whose Western mindset offered land for peace with the Palestinians. But a permanent shift was already underway. [1]

This upheaval began in 1977 with the historic Mahapakh election, which propelled Menachem Begin’s Likud party to power and broke three decades of Ashkenazi Labor dominance. Working-class Mizrahi voters from tent camps and development towns—built to house the massive wave of Jewish immigrants from Arab lands after 1948—played the leading role in defeating the Ashkenazi elite. When they took power, Western political idealism took a back seat to a worldview shaped by the realities of the Middle East. [1, 2]

Mizrahi voters have served as kingmakers ever since. They consistently back right-wing and nationalist blocs by wide margins (often 20–25+ points higher than Ashkenazi communities) and strongly support parties such as Shas, the Mizrahi-oriented ultra-Orthodox party focused on Mizrahi/Sephardic (Spanish) religious tradition, social welfare, and fighting discrimination. [1]

Menachem Begin (16 August 1913 – 9 March 1992)

Today, Jews of Mizrahi or combined Mizrahi/Sephardic origin—including the rapidly growing mixed-heritage population—constitute a new plurality of Israeli Jews. With more than a third of all Jewish newborns already coming from mixed Ashkenazi-Mizrahi families, the effects are creating a foundation for political change.

Mizrahim are not a political monolith. There are Mizrahi voices who advocate deeper engagement with the Arab world. But the broader trend is unmistakable: their growing demographic and cultural weight has moved Israeli politics toward an unapologetic realism rooted in family memories of persecution and expulsion from thousands-of-years-old culturally Arab homelands. [1, 2]

The new reality is visible today in powerful roles across the Israeli government, the IDF, and Israeli culture. Notable figures embody the shift. David Levy, born in Morocco, rose from tent camps and manual labor to become Foreign Minister. Miri Regev, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants, became a forceful Likud minister who has pushed back against Eurocentric cultural elites. They—and the voters they represent—operate by the region’s ancient tribal codes of strength, honor, and survival. [1]

Miri Regev

David Levy with Yasser Arafat

That same consensus drives many of Israel’s fiercest internal battles, including judicial reform. What Western media frames as a simple fight over democratic norms is, on the ground, a determined effort by the post-1977 Mizrahi majority to reduce the influence of institutions long viewed as bastions of the old European Ashkenazi elite. [1]

The resultant gap with much of Western discourse begins with fundamentally different historical lenses. Progressive circles, mainline Christian institutions, and pro-Palestinian voices (including theologians such as Mitri Raheb) often center Holocaust guilt and European responsibility on Ashkenazi Jews, framing support for Israel as atonement for past sins.

The central argument advanced by Palestinian leaders and their advocates is that Palestinians are being forced to pay the price for the creation of Israel because of the sins of the West—the Holocaust. This claim treats the Holocaust as the reason Israel exists, and Western support for the Jewish state as a form of atonement.

Progressive circles, mainline Christian institutions, and pro-Palestinian voices repeat and amplify this narrative. It is an effective strategy. What they incorrectly conclude is that any Western support for Israel must be “blind” or unconditional, driven solely by that guilt. By framing Israel’s existence as the product of Holocaust guilt, they convert Western moral discomfort into political support for the Palestinian cause.

Yet the premise is false. The Jewish Zionist movement began in the 1880s, when the land in question was still part of the Ottoman Empire. There was no “Palestine,” and the Holocaust was still more than fifty years away. Israel was not created to atone for Europe’s crimes; it was the return of a people to their historic homeland.

Mizrahim, who now anchor Israel’s security-focused majority, carry a completely different trauma: they were not victims of Nazi Germany but of the Arab and Muslim world. After 1948, roughly 850,000–900,000 Jews were expelled or forced to flee ancient communities in countries like Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, and Egypt. Israel absorbed the vast majority. [1, 2, 3]

Operation Magic Carpet. 1949-1950

This history demolishes the common claim that Israelis are “White European colonial settlers” imposing themselves on indigenous Palestinians. A large portion of Israeli Jews are themselves indigenous Middle Eastern refugees—people for whom Europe and progressive circles feel zero ancestral guilt. These refugees and their unique worldview bring deep skepticism toward both Arab intentions and Western compromises because of their direct experience and repeated wars. [1]

The Arab states’ refusal to resettle Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war was not a humanitarian failure. The Arab states employed a calculated strategy: keep the refugees in limbo, block integration, and weaponize the demand for a “right of return” to undermine Jewish sovereignty from within. Palestinian refugees became pawns played by Arab states in a larger regional chess game with the elimination of Israel as part of the stakes.  

Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008 approached negotiations with a Western transactional mindset. Conventional accounts often blame Israeli intransigence, settlement expansion, or insufficient generosity. Yet even generous offers—Barak’s proposal at Camp David (a Palestinian state on most of the West Bank and Gaza, land swaps, and shared sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem) and Olmert’s even more far-reaching 2008 map—were ultimately rejected. Palestinian leaders walked away without counteroffers, and the Second Intifada’s wave of suicide bombings followed Camp David. To the Mizrahi-influenced Israeli majority, this confirmed that the core impasse was not borders or settlements but the refusal to accept a Jewish state in any borders.

The Abraham Accords succeeded because of strength, not concessions. Arab states confronted a strong, militarily confident Israel operating by neighborhood rules—not a hesitant one seeking approval of the West. Mizrahi Jews, especially those of Moroccan descent who spoke Arabic, played a decisive role. They helped bridge gaps in ways traditional Western diplomacy could not, as indigenous voices speaking to peers with deep cultural understanding. Arab hosts were visibly delighted by Israeli delegations that included Arabic-speaking Jews who shared regional customs, music, and traditions. The signing ceremonies themselves prominently featured Arabic alongside English and Hebrew. [1]

This approach delivered real breakthroughs and expanded peace with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco. What many in the West call “Israel behaving badly” is better understood as a Middle Eastern nation-state acting defensively for survival in a hostile region. The Mizrahi consensus will not risk national existence to satisfy external progressive expectations. They know the cost of misplaced trust on the tribal battleground of the Middle East.

Today, modern secular institutions—the United Nations, international courts, and human rights NGOs—act as a new type of moral priesthood. They champion a universalist ethic that views strong national or tribal particularism as problematic. They have repackaged Christian universalism into the language of globalism: replacing “neither Jew nor Greek” with borderless human rights, “the Kingdom of God” with “international law,” and “the Church” with supranational bodies like the UN and the International Criminal Court. These bodies, acting as the new priesthood, claim moral authority over sovereign nations and tribes.

Many mainline Christians remain unaware of this quiet swap. They have unconsciously traded the actual Gospel—personal repentance, forgiveness through Christ, spiritual rebirth, and the hope of God’s Kingdom—for a social and political gospel of global human rights, equity, anti-nationalism, and universal solidarity. What began as theology has quietly become ideology.

²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

This instinct flows directly from Christianity’s foundations. In Galatians 3:28, St. Paul wrote that in Christ there is “neither Jew nor Greek.” Paul, himself a devout Jew, universalized the message: Gentile believers did not need to become Jews or observe the full Torah. The faith became borderless.

While many mainline churches have officially moved away from the classical theological supersessionism that claimed God fully replaced Israel with the Church as the “New Israel,” Paul’s vision still exerts a powerful influence. It creates what we might call a political supersessionism: the deep-seated sense that particularist identities—a specific people, tied to a specific land, with a distinct way of life—must yield to universal ideals. Abstract virtues—loving enemies, transcending tribal boundaries, seeking justice for the marginalized—feel more Christian than the gritty business of a tribe ensuring its own physical survival.

Many in the mainline Christian tradition struggle with the return of Jews to their homeland. Israel has become a sovereign, tribal, and unapologetically particular country that prioritizes survival and strength in a hostile region. The result is a lingering reluctance to fully support a Jewish state that refuses to be “universal” on progressive terms—and a tendency to frame support for Israel as mere Holocaust guilt while downplaying Mizrahi suffering.

An ancient tribal people that refused to dissolve its particular identity has returned to its historic land and now defends itself without apology. A strong, rifle-bearing Jewish state disrupts the preferred image of the tragic, defenseless Jew. It forces an uncomfortable question: Can abstract, borderless ideals stop hostile forces at the gate—or must a people sometimes simply stand and fight?

Final Thoughts: A Note on the Western Double Standard

It’s compelling to look closely at the response of Western nations when their own soil is threatened. Following the September 11 attacks, Western calls for justice did not incorporate abstract, universal values like turning the other cheek, transcending tribal boundaries, or seeking justice for the marginalized.

Instead, we declared war on Iraq—a country completely irresponsible for the attacks—and simply beat the crap out of that country to the tune of an estimated 200,000 civilian deaths verified by tracking archives. That is to say nothing of the near-total military and infrastructure destruction left in our wake. This massive contradiction forces difficult, uncomfortable questions: What is genocide? Why does the West tolerate massive tribal defense for its own survival while branding it as a moral failure when utilized by Israel? [1, 2]