by Sami Rahamim, Director of Communications and Community Affairs

June 20, 2025

What story are we living in?

Israel’s historic strikes against Iran appear to be reshaping the future of the Middle East. They should also drive us to examine—and clarify—the stories we’ve been telling about the past 20 months of war.

The human condition is defined by storytelling – we assign meaning to our actions and the events that surround us.

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Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, z”l, offered a helpful metaphor for when the same action results in different stories. Imagine three people at a restaurant, each ordering the same salad. One is on a diet. One is vegetarian. One keeps kosher. Same salad—completely different stories.

Israeli thinker Micah Goodman used this metaphor to examine the war that began with the Iran-backed Hamas massacre on October 7.

Story One is the dominant narrative: this war is the latest, albeit most gruesome, chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Given the shocking brutality of 10/7, the still-unsolved hostage dilemma, and the sheer destruction of Gaza – this story’s dominance is understandable.

Story Two frames the war as a regional conflict, where the long simmering tension between Israel and Iranian proxies comes to a boil. After the unprecedented Iranian missile barrage directly attacking Israel in April 2024, it became especially clear to many: this war is the first chapter of a direct confrontation between Israel and Iran.

Story Three zooms out even further to what historian Sir Niall Ferguson calls Cold War II, where a new authoritarian axis – namely China, Russia, and Iran – seeks to dominate smaller democracies like Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel, and upend the U.S.-led liberal order.

All three stories appear to be true simultaneously – and peril lies in inhabiting only one of them.  

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That peril has overtaken many of our country’s elite and “progressive” spaces—campuses, media, and activist networks—where Stories Two and Three are either ignored or met with confusion, and the false binary of Story One persists: Israelis cast as the primary aggressors, and those who seek its destruction as “resistance.”

This narrative, effectively branded as “Free Palestine,” has found willing audiences across the West, including among people who are understandably horrified by the very real Palestinian suffering in Gaza.

Tragically, by pursuing a strategy of boycotts over engagement and demonization over dialogue, not only does the “pro-Palestine” movement trap its followers in a false version of Story One, it stops them from exploring Stories Two and Three.

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Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian American analyst, who has lost dozens of family members to Israeli airstrikes, wrote last year in the closing paragraph of his vision for an “effective and meaningful pro-Palestine platform”:

It’s time for a rejuvenated pro-Palestine movement that serves as a big tent to encompass multiple views and opinions and to invite and promote broad alliances, especially with mainstream Jewish and Israeli communities, to work towards a just and sustainable resolution of the conflict once and for all. This is entirely attainable and achievable with humility, civility, patience, compassion and kindness, perseverance and determination, a willingness to accept reasonable compromises and accommodations, and, most importantly, the recognition of both sides’ undeniable and mutual humanity.

When that movement arrives, JCRC will be eager to engage.

In the meantime, our work in Minnesota and the Dakotas may not change the course of events in Tehran or Gaza—but we do have power. We shape the moral and narrative landscape here at home. We help our neighbors, our civic leaders, and our youth understand what’s at stake.

We get to choose which story—or stories—we live in. 

Let’s invite our fellow Americans to live in all three stories of this war. To see Israel as it really is: a tiny, flawed yet free society defending itself against a regime and ideology obsessed with its destruction.

A regime that has looted one of the world’s oldest, greatest civilizations and soaked the region in blood.

A regime with the deaths of Iranians, Arabs, Israelis, and Americans on its hands.

Thanks to Israeli courage and ingenuity, a new dawn may be breaking. If we widen our gaze and tell a more complete story, perhaps we can help bring about a new kind of awakening here, too.