It’s tough being a centrist Jew like me these days.

I mean those of us who believe in Israel’s right to exist and defend itself but abhor the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing regime — notably the collective punishment of Palestinians for the vile acts of terrorist groups like Hamas. We are being squeezed between extremist Jews on the left and right.

Progressive Jews on college campuses have joined with pro-Palestinian activists who, if not motivated by Jew-hatred per se, are de facto antisemites; many fault Israel’s very existence for the atrocities committed against its citizens. (I happened to be in Amman, Jordan, on October 7, 2023, and was so disgusted by Al Jazeera’s coverage holding Israel rather Hamas responsible that I nearly threw the television set out the hotel-room window.) Yet radical Zionists often side with neo-fascists and populists like Viktor Orban, who routinely exploit antisemitism for political gain; they’ve found common foes in globalization, pluralism and Islam.

I’ve seen Israeli “Kidnapped” hostage posters in my university neighborhood defaced with swastikas. Meanwhile, pro-Israel fanatics have unloaded on me the slander that liberal financier and Holocaust survivor George Soros was actually a Nazi collaborator as a teenager in Hungary.

When I traveled throughout Israel in 1979 it was still an idealistic nation, full of young, hip visitors from Western Europe and North America, many of them not Jewish. The causes of its rightward swerve aren’t simple but I blame it mostly on the decades of war, terrorism and every other conceivable type of hostility from the Arab and Muslim world. Across the political spectrum in Israel today, there seems to be little appetite left for the two-state solution. In my view, there’s no prospect for peace in the Levant and sovereignty for the Palestinians until they reject their most-radical elements and abandon the dream of destroying the Jewish state.

As a secular Jew (who attended Hebrew grade school in Montreal for a few years, and once spoke the language pretty fluently) I grew up with the standard belief that the welfare of our people depended on Israel’s role as a sanctuary; that Israel was an imperfect country for an imperfect world, which had nearly succeeded in eradicating us. But I’ve never been religious nor wanted to depart the West to live there. Now I wonder if Israel’s reckless behavior in Gaza has made it a liability to Jews worldwide, putting Israeli Jews along with those in the Diaspora in greater peril.

I began to sour on Israel when I learned at the end of the ’90s that my late wife’s conversion under a Conservative rabbi did not necessarily pass muster in Jerusalem, where Orthodox Judaism held sway. Since then I’ve noticed an attitude among very nationalist Israelis and their allies abroad that the Diaspora’s main purpose is to elect pro-Israel governments and provide financial support to the Zionist project. (I’ve also sensed a lack of respect when telling them of an ancestor who landed in Normandy with the Canadian forces and helped liberate Western Europe from the Nazis; and of another who risked prosecution by forging scores of documents to bring unwelcome Jewish refugees to Canada. It’s as if only fighting for Israel mattered to them.)

Despite the billions of dollars of direct aid the United States has given Israel under the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, they boast that only the Republican Party is good enough, especially with Donald Trump at the helm. For the millions of American Jews who usually vote Democratic because we care about bigotry, climate change, healthcare, gun violence and democracy, this is unacceptable. Betting the house on MAGA also looks short-sighted to me, as younger Americans are less pro-Israel than their elders. When confronted with extremist Zionists here who ignore the harm Trump’s policies are doing to ordinary Americans and Canadians, I don’t hesitate to suggest that they pack up and move to Israel.

Netanyahu’s government and its rightist supporters appear not to mind if his nation is regarded as a pariah in much of the world, nor care if this fuels antisemitism globally. (Hateful assaults on Jewish civilians are never justified but, as unfair as it is, they’ve been a fact of life for centuries and should be denied any possible pretext.) Militarily powerful and backed (for now, at least) by Washington, Israel remains a small country vulnerable to attacks by unmanned aerial weapons from as far away as Yemen. I suspect that life has become highly stressful — indeed, difficult — for many Israelis.

Some readers will no doubt find this post offensive without getting beyond its admittedly provocative title. So be it. But I cannot evade the conclusion that the survival of the Jewish people is now at least as dependent on the Diaspora as on Israel itself, a notion that its current leaders should but probably don’t appreciate well enough.