In certain intellectual and educational circles across parts of the Spanish-speaking world, including sectors of Argentine educational culture, a particular narrative about Israel has taken hold. Israel is often presented not as a complex democratic nation, shaped by history, war, migration, religion, and trauma, but as a singularly illegitimate entity: a "settler-colonial project" whose very existence is treated as morally suspect.
This interpretive framework does not stay confined to universities, activist spaces, or political debate. Ideas shape emotional perception, and emotional perception ends up shaping social conduct. When a society is taught, again and again, to see a nation as singularly evil, hostility toward ordinary Jews tends to follow naturally behind it. The distinction between "anti-Zionism" and antisemitism, so carefully maintained in theory, frequently collapses in practice.
I have lived this personally. Walking with my sons, ages five and six, and speaking to them in Hebrew in public, I have encountered open antisemitic hostility more than once. In one case, it came from construction workers. In another, from a young upper-middle-class Argentine woman in an affluent neighborhood. My sons were simply speaking and singing in Hebrew. Yet for some observers, the language itself had become politically charged enough to provoke visible contempt.
This is the real consequence of narratives stripped of context, repeated often enough that an entire people begins to be seen through a moral caricature.
The Viral Image and the Manufacture of a Moral Narrative
Recently, a wave of outrage spread quickly online following reports of an Israeli proposal linked to the death penalty for terrorists. The controversy intensified after an image circulated of Israel's National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, posing next to a birthday cake decorated with an image of a gallows.
For many observers abroad, particularly those who encountered the story only through headlines, viral images, and social media fragments, the symbolism seemed shocking and deeply disturbing. The image was quickly treated not merely as evidence about one politician, but as evidence about Israel as a whole. But that interpretation ignored the broader political and institutional context in which Israeli governments actually operate.
Coalition Politics and Democratic Reality
Israel operates under a parliamentary coalition system in which governments are frequently formed through alliances between parties with markedly different agendas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not form his coalition because every sector of Israeli society shared identical political positions, but because significant parts of Israel's center and opposition refused to join a government led by Netanyahu, leaving him dependent on smaller nationalist and religious parties to hold a governing majority in the Knesset.
This does not mean that every statement, symbolic gesture, or policy proposal from coalition members reflects a national consensus. In fact, many controversial proposals generate immediate and intense opposition within Israel itself. That institutional opposition is precisely the part most often left out of international commentary.
The proposed legislation met resistance not only among activists or journalists, but also within sectors of Israel's legal establishment, its security services, its military leadership, and civil society more broadly. Israel's judiciary also functions as a significant institutional check, able to review, delay, limit, or strike down legislation that conflicts with constitutional principles embedded in Israel's Basic Laws.
Whatever one thinks of Israeli policy, this is not the structure of a monolithic authoritarian state. It is the structure of a noisy, fragmented, internally argumentative democracy.
The Selective Moral Yardstick
The international reaction also reveals something uncomfortable about modern political psychology: outrage is often distributed unevenly.
Several democratic countries retain capital punishment in some form. Japan continues to use hanging as its method of execution. Singapore also employs hanging within its legal system. India legally retains capital punishment, though it rarely applies it. None of these nations is routinely described in international discourse as a singularly illegitimate or morally exceptional state whose right to exist is implicitly in question.
Meanwhile, in openly authoritarian systems like Iran, public executions are neither inflammatory symbolism nor isolated political controversy. They are established state practice. Yet the emotional intensity directed at Israel frequently exceeds that directed at regimes where repression is systemic rather than contested.
This does not mean Israel should be exempt from criticism. Democracies should be criticized rigorously, especially during moments of fear, nationalism, extremism, or war. But criticism detached from proportion stops being analysis and becomes moral exceptionalism.
The Problem of Context-Stripped Perception
Modern media ecosystems reward emotional compression. Complex institutional realities are reduced to viral images, slogans, and symbolic fragments designed to provoke an instant moral reaction.
A politician standing next to a tasteless cake becomes, in the public imagination, "what Israelis are."
The existence of judicial review, parliamentary opposition, investigative journalism, protest, legal professionals, internal dissent, coalition instability, and institutional resistance disappears from view because complexity travels poorly online.
This dynamic becomes especially dangerous in the case of Jews and Israel, because centuries of antisemitic thought conditioned many societies to imagine Jews collectively rather than individually. The temptation to turn one figure's acts or rhetoric into evidence against an entire people remains extraordinarily powerful.
Democracy Is Measured by Its Capacity to Resist, Not by Its Purity
No democratic society is morally pure. Every democracy contains demagogues, extremists, opportunists, and moments of collective fear.
The relevant question is not whether unpleasant rhetoric exists. The relevant question is whether institutions exist that are capable of challenging it, containing it, exposing it, and opposing it. Democratic societies should be judged less by the existence of extremism than by the mechanisms they possess for confronting it.
Israel, with all its flaws and internal contradictions, remains a society defined not by unanimity but by permanent argument: legal, political, moral, cultural, and philosophical. Much of the world sees only the outrage. Far fewer notice the machinery that resists it.
And when that complexity disappears, ordinary Jews thousands of miles away, including children singing in Hebrew with their father on the streets of Argentina or Spain, end up paying the social price for narratives they had no part in creating.