I spent this week in Washington doing two things. Some of it was talking, on stages, to audiences who wanted to hear what an Israeli editor makes of this moment. Most of it was listening. And the longer I listened, the more convinced I became that the most important conversations in the world right now are the ones almost nobody is willing to have in public.
Let me give you the moment it came into focus. In a closed forum, far from any camera, I sat with about a dozen representatives from across the Middle East, most of them not Jewish, several from countries that have no relations with Israel at all. One of them told the room, plainly, that a year ago he could not have attended a gathering like this. The war with Iran changed that.
Then, lowering his voice only slightly, he said what several others in that room clearly believe: that the moderate Arab world quietly hopes Israel and the United States will finish the job, because a defanged Iran serves every sane government in the region.
He will not say that on the record. None of them will. That gap, between what serious people believe in private and what they are willing to defend in public, is the story of this entire week. It is, I have come to think, the story of our entire era.
Everywhere I went, I kept meeting the same person wearing different clothes. Call him the homeless moderate. He is the Gulf official who wants normalization and fears his own street. He is the liberal American Jew who can no longer recognize the party that was his home for half a century. He is the Israeli who loves his country and is worn down by its politics. He believes complicated things in a moment that rewards only simple ones, and so he has gone quiet.
And here is what I keep wanting to tell him, which is the heart of this column. Moderation used to be the safe, comfortable middle of the road. After October 7, it became the bravest and loneliest position in public life. The extremes are easy. They come with a tribe, a hashtag, and instant applause.
Moderation asks you to hold two uncomfortable truths in the same hand and defend both, which earns you applause from no one. That is exactly why the moderate majority has fallen silent, and exactly why its silence is now the gravest danger we face. The vacuum does not stay empty. It gets filled by the worst voices in every camp.
Some doors close, others open
Start with the region. Something is shifting. The same war that has Israel and Washington stuck in the mud, unable to bring the confrontation with Iran to a close, has also cracked open doors that were bolted shut a year ago. The moderate Arab states can feel it.
But feeling it and saying it are two different acts of courage, and too many leaders are content to whisper to us what they will not tell their own people. The region will not be reordered by men who brief reporters off the record and then go silent at the podium.
American Jewry is where homelessness is hardest to watch. I spoke at a senior living community outside Washington, where I met a woman, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, born in Poland, who told me plainly that she believes we are heading toward another Holocaust. I do not share her certainty, but I will not wave away her instinct either. All week, liberal American Jews told me a version of the same thing.
They cannot abide US President Donald Trump or the way he governs. And yet, they can no longer defend a party that too many of them privately admit has made hostility to Israel, and at times to Jews, a badge of honor rather than a disqualification.
What struck me was that the people saying this most clearly were not activists but senators. At the AJC Global Forum, John Fetterman and Dave McCormick, a Democrat and a Republican who described themselves as joined at the hip, agreed that antisemitism has burrowed deeper into the Left than the Right.
Fetterman, to his credit, did not flinch. He said his own party has a more serious problem standing up for Israel, and pointed to candidates who now wear anti-Israel politics as a virtue.
McCormick refused the false comfort of equivalence while naming the rot on his own side, too, the Nick Fuenteses and the podcasters who hand them a microphone. He called the surge of hatred since October 7 a second surprise attack on the Jewish people. Two moderates, on a stage, saying out loud what a great many people only mutter. That is the entire point.
Ted Deutch, the committee’s CEO and a former congressman, named the deeper problem in two words. Antisemitism, he said, has become instrumentalized and institutionalized, no longer a creature of the fringes but a fixture of mainstream politics and media.
The same stubborn, unglamorous habit shows up in the House, where Josh Gottheimer and Mike Lawler, a Democrat and a Republican, keep linking arms on Israel when it would be easier not to. Nobody gets rich on applause for that kind of thing.
And yet, when I asked these same homeless Jews what they would do, many told me they would vote again, without enthusiasm, for the very party they had just finished indicting. That paralysis worries me more than any single politician. Homelessness that cannot move is not only a misfortune that befalls you. After a while, it becomes a choice.
Netanyahu's poor timing
It does not help that the sounds coming from Jerusalem sometimes make the moderate’s job harder. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNBC this week that he wants to move Israel from American aid to partnership, to wind it down to zero because, in his words, we have come of age, the idea itself is defensible and arguably overdue.
But the timing landed badly with the very pro-Israel Americans working hardest to defend this war. They do not object to the destination. They wonder why he chose this hour to hand the loudest critics a fresh line.
Israel has its own homeless. I have written in this column about the religious Zionist voters searching for a serious Right that is neither Likud nor the Religious Zionist Party, a home that would finally insist the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) share the burden of a war that has ground everyone else down through hundreds of days of miluim, reserve duty.
That hunger is why our political pages are suddenly full of talk of a new party, a Gilad Erdan here, a Yoaz Hendel there, names circling one another in search of a vessel. Whether any of it clears the electoral threshold is almost beside the point. The churn itself is the symptom. A great many Israelis are looking for a home and cannot find one, and what they are really asking for is not a party but a unity government worthy of the sacrifice.
So this is my appeal, after a week in Washington spent mostly listening. This is the hour of the moderates, and moderation now demands nerve. It means speaking in full sentences in an age of slogans. It means defending complexity to a crowd that wants a villain. It means refusing to perform for your own tribe and trying instead to be understood by the region and the world.
The moderates in the Democratic Party must confront the members of their own house who will bash Israel at every opportunity. The moderates in the Republican Party must back the brave moves this administration is making in the region and, as many honorably did this week, name the Tucker Carlsons among them.
Moderate Israelis must fight for a unity government rather than wait for one to arrive. Moderate haredim must choose contribution over exemption. And the moderate Arab leaders who tell us in private to finish the job must find the courage to say a fraction of it in daylight.
We need leaders who speak more than one language, and I don’t mean only English. We need Israelis who speak American, and Americans who speak Middle East, and people in every capital who can speak the dialect of stability, cooperation, and complexity without embarrassment.
We keep waiting for a hero loud enough to drown out the other side. That is not what this moment needs. It needs the unglamorous courage of the complicated sentence, said in public, by people with nothing to gain from saying it. The shouting will not stop. The open question is who is willing to be boring and brave in front of a crowd that wants neither.