A War That Has Already Been Lost
By Ahmadie Thaha, Columnist
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — There are times when history runs like dark comedy. All players enter the stage in grand costumes, the war music blares, television cameras ready to broadcast victory.
But suddenly the script changes. The principal actors look confused, the audience begins to wonder, and the stage lights instead highlight something that has long been hidden.
That is roughly the tone that emerges from an Israeli journalist named Alon Mizrahi when he speaks about the latest war between Iran and the bloc of the United States and Israel.
His narrative sounds strange amid a climate of suppression — or perhaps silencing — by Western media regarding the details of a war started by their own country, the United States, which for a long time has felt most boastful and superior.
Alon Mizrahi is not a figure who suddenly appears from a shadowy corner of the internet. He was born in Israel to a Mizrahi Jewish family — namely the Middle Eastern Jewish community which historically and culturally is far closer to the Arab world than European Jewry.
His father is of Arab descent, while his mother comes from a family of Moroccan Jews. Because of that background he often refers to himself with a term somewhat rare in contemporary Israeli political discourse: a ‘Arab Jew’. A label that in Israel itself often feels like a paradox.
Like many young Israelis, Mizrahi completed his mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In his younger years he was even known for leaning politically to the right. But life’s journey often has a way of turning the compass.
After experiencing personal trauma — including the death of his brother in a motorcycle accident — his political views shifted drastically. He moved towards the radical left spectrum and began harshly criticising the ideology of Zionism, the structures of power within the state of Israel, and the way the state treats the Palestinian people.
Ultimately he chose to leave Israel and settle in the United States as a form of protest against what he calls the genocide being carried out by Israel in Gaza. From there he became one of the loudest Jewish voices opposing the policies of his homeland.
Mizrahi argues that Israel’s political elites and much of its society have become trapped in a deeply entrenched pattern of anti-Arab hatred, a condition that, in his view, can only be ended if the very structure of the Israeli state is dismantled and rebuilt in a new political form.
He is also known as the host of The Mizrahi Perspective, a geopolitics analysis channel on YouTube and Substack. In his writings he frequently discusses sensitive issues within Israeli society: the dehumanisation of Arabs and Palestinians, the racial hierarchy between European Jews and Mizrahi Jews, and what he describes as the psychopathology of colonial violence in modern Israeli politics.
Not surprisingly, his views have provoked sharp reactions from various groups. On one side, he has received support from anti-Zionist circles, human rights activists, and some progressive intellectuals who see him as the conscience within the Jewish community.