With elections looming, many Israelis are dooming and glooming. It’s not healthy for citizens in democracies to view every election as existential. The panic ignores Israel’s many economic, social, cultural, and generational successes. Those strengths heighten the contrast with a broken political system featuring toxic debates, barn-burning demagogues, and incompetent governance. It makes one wonder. Perhaps The Jerusalem Post’s thought-provoking, must-read commentator, with a wonderful sense of history, Amotz Asa-El, is right: Maybe Jews just aren’t good at politics.
Asa-El’s book, The Jewish March of Folly: The Dramatic Events, Fateful Results, and Unlearned Lessons of Ancient Israel’s Political Suicide, was a best-selling sensation when it was first published in Hebrew in 2019. Assessing the past, it warned of an inbred, intentional, Jewish disdain for politics – epitomized by often fratricidal tendencies, and legitimized by the prophets, then the rabbis.
The author’s motivation for writing the book summarizes his argument. Throughout decades of reporting on Israeli politics, he kept encountering “deaf ears, resolute voices, and narrow minds that collectively convinced me that my forebears’ anarchism, tribalism, factionalism, and fatalism are alive and well,” and still “threaten my people’s future.”
The judicial reform explosion three years later, followed by the Hamas-led massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023, intensified Asa-El’s despair. In 2019, Zionism’s successes had made his conclusion more hopeful than the title. An updated version is now available for English-speaking readers on Amazon.
This is not a standard Jewish history – neither in its methodology nor its interpretation. Rather than tracking the story chronologically, Asa-El articulates a thesis, decrying Jews’ propensity for civil war and their aversion to shrewd nation-building politics. Rather than emphasizing what others have done to us, he mourns what we’ve done to ourselves.
The title salutes Barbara Tuchman’s 1984 classic The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, which chronicles smart statesmen making disastrous choices. Tuchman’s book analyzes four case studies. This book’s grandeur comes from Asa-El’s vast canvas: His story “lasted millennia, spanned much of the globe, and involved hundreds of protagonists,” from Moses to Albert Einstein.
The book begins with a rich rereading of the Bible you didn’t get in school. Asa-El highlights the “dozen forgotten civil wars that the Jewish people’s ancestors fought across some 12 centuries.” Their “overarching causes, their fateful results, and those results’ disastrous effect on the Jewish people’s future, to this day, are what this book is about.”
Asa-El's book abandons conventional periodizing, goes conceptual
Rather than periodizing conventionally – dividing Jewish history into stages – Asa-El goes conceptual. He starts with “Nation,” charting the “Hebrew tragedy’s… national roadmap” – meaning the Israelites’ addiction to infighting – culminating in the Ten Lost Tribes catastrophe.
After that depressing play-by-play, part two analyzes the “anarchism” of the squabbling tribes and of the righteous but unrealistic prophets.
Part three, “Space,” pivots on “The Jewish Big Bang” – the global dispersal after Rome destroyed the Second Temple, thanks to civil war.
In exile, “Israelite History” becomes “Jewish History.” By divorcing Jewish life from life in the Jewish homeland, Jews launched an unparalleled historical experiment. They tried proving “the possibility of a people’s national life after its political death” by sanctifying time, not just space.
With most evicted from Israel, the religion evolves. The Jews develop skills for surviving abroad and bypassing politics rather than governing. This sets up Asa-El’s repudiation of Jewish fatalism in parts four and five, “Time” and “Psyche.” The assumption that their misery came from God and would only be cured by God kept the Jews weakened and oppressed.
Asa-El’s story culminates with another Jewish Big Bang, the atomic bomb. While the Nazis slaughtered six million powerless Jews, many homeless Jewish scientists helped America tap into mass destructive power. The centuries-long experiment in wandering and accommodating produced exceptionally talented people who shaped the modern world – but also broken people, too easily targeted in the world.
Yet Asa-El ends with a different Jewish Big Bang. Israel’s 1948 War of Independence vindicated Zionism, created the State of Israel, spawned the New Jew, and reset the trajectory of Jewish history. Emphasizing the 1948 game-changer would have reinforced his conclusion that Zionism saved the Jewish people from their fate as passive, apolitical, perennially squabbling, and defenseless victims – even as he fears Israel’s dysfunctional politics reverting to the destructive historical pattern.
He ultimately offers rays of hope amid dangerous thunderclouds. “Israel was undoing The Jewish March of Folly’s geography” of dispersion, defeatism, and despair. Inspiring anecdotes confirm that most Israelis realize “we are all in one boat.” They’re drowned out, however, by devastating examples of pettiness, partisanship, and polarization. They’ll unnerve readers even more because he so skillfully contextualizes them as a recurring, historical phenomenon.
Finally, despite the book’s excellence, its post-October 7 ending is too short, simplistic, and op-ed-like. So busy critiquing ultra-Orthodox “separatists,” anti-Palestinian “zealots,” and Bibi-worshipping “royalists,” Asa-El missed an opportunity to apply his historical lens to two enduring paradoxes.
Pre-October 7 'conceptzia' only half the story
True, the conceptzia (rigid assumptions) before October 7, preceded by the judicial reform crisis, and followed by a polarizing, bullying government, embodies Asa-El’s fears. But that’s only half the story.
Israel’s comeback, the society’s remarkable resilience, the restoration of the balance of terror – leaving our enemies fearing us more than we fear them – and Israelis’ rich Jewish and modern lives keep Israel in the World Happiness Index’s Top Ten. That vindicates Israel, Zionism, and Asa-El’s important argument for thoughtful power-playing and mature politics.
At the same time, Asa-El should have analyzed the current tensions with American Jewry and within American Jewry through his clarifying lens. The American Jewish community is updating the debates about power and prophecy, about being ethical, and about fitting in, which he tracks so effectively.
And the un-Jews, the anti-Zionists, and new Isaiahan Diasporists judging Davidic Israel so harshly, who increasingly repudiate Zionism, also resonate in the Jewish and Israelite history Asa-Al has illuminated brilliantly.
Although this final thought may sound critical, I can think of no higher praise. Whether or not Asa-El agrees with this alternative analysis – or others – he has done such a masterful job of creating and sharpening his historical lens that many now apply it easily. That confirms how clear, how resonant, and just how much of a must-read Jewish March of Folly is – in any language.
The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) in Jerusalem. He recently published, with David Suissa, 250 Reasons to Thank America, and with the JJPI, The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership, the 250th Anniversary Edition. He is also a professor and Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University.
The Jewish March of Folly: The Dramatic Events, Fateful Results, and Unlearned Lessons of Ancient Israel’s Political Suicide
By Amotz Asa-El
Yedioth Books
511 pages; NIS 70