Ezra Klein had a column in yesterday’s Times about New York’s Jewish community and the apparent split in attitudes towards Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor. The column is classic Klein—classic Obama-era wonky center-left smart-sounding commentary. And it has the classic Obama-era wonky center-left smart-sounding blindness on Jewish issues today.

There is a lot in the column to write about, but I want to focus on one point. One of Klein’s basic ideas is that Israel’s problem is that it isn’t enough like America. What the Jews in Israel really need is multi-ethnic liberal democracy, just like the Jews in America. Instead, what they have is an “ethnostate” that regards itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people and that is fighting a bloody and terrible war in Gaza that makes it hated around the world and endangers Jews.

Do better, Ezra Klein. Never mind the ridiculousness of an American telling anyone to be more like America as if it were still 1996. Never mind the ridiculousness of an American Jew (I assume Klein is Jewish) telling an Israeli Jew to look to the safety and security of life as a Jew in America in 2025 as a model. Look at the Arab states that surround Israel. Jordan, according to its constitution, is “is an Arab State,” and the Jordanian people “is a part of the Arab Nation.” Islam is its official religion. Egypt is “part of the Arab nation,” and Islam is its official religion. Lebanon “has an Arab identity and belonging,” though its constitution does not make Islam the state religion. My goodness, even Palestine defines itself legally as “part of the larger Arab world,” its people as “part of the Arab nation,” and Islam as its state religion. The same was true for Syria until this year, when in an effort to woo the West, its new Islamist president put on a western style business suit and adopted an interim constitution that dropped the “Arab nation state” stuff (but kept Islam as the state religion). And these are just the Arab states that border Israel. Israel lives in a sea of dozens of officially Arab and Muslim states, essentially all of which expelled their Jews long ago. Those Jews, by the way, are the Mizrahim, who make up the majority of Jewish Israelis today—not the Ashkenazim, the “European settler-colonialists” of the academic left’s fantasies.

America is not a traditional nation-state. Due to its history of mass immigration (and of course the slave trade), it has drawn its population from nations all around the world. So it’s understandable that an American would look at a traditional nation-state and see something wrong that needs fixing. Imagine the American who travels abroad to a society he doesn’t understand and whose language he doesn’t speak, and who simply shouts louder in English at the bewildered locals in order to make himself understood. That is Peter Beinart and, it seems, that is Ezra Klein.

I am aghast, I am agog, I look askance, when people slam Israel for calling itself the nation-state of the Jews. The Palestinians’ goal is to set up the nation-state of the Palestinians (or in another formulation, a nation-state of the Palestinians who are part of the Arab nation). Why not hector the Palestinians and explain the benefits of multi-ethnic democracy to them? Or why not hector the Syrians, who have just been either slaughtering or failing to protect their Druze minority (Israel acted militarily to shield the Druze, causing the Secretary-General of the UN to condemn the Israeli actions but not, as far as I can tell, the violence against the Druze).

There are answers to these questions. Some of them are ahistorical and frankly antisemitic. Hence the widespread “Temple denialism,” belief in the “Khazar theory,” or other pseudo-historical arguments that try to undermine the connection between the Jews and their homeland. Some are based, often unconsciously, on old antisemitic attitudes: the Jews are and ought to be vagabonds, either because they rejected Jesus as the Messiah or because they rejected Mohammad as God’s prophet, and so forth. Some are based on a typically Western way of looking at the world in the twenty-first century, confusing weakness for goodness (might doesn’t make right, but might also doesn’t make wrong). I am sure Klein dismisses the first. I hope he is not influenced by the second. I fear he embraces the third.