I recently stumbled upon a journal called Sapir. If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if the Erev Rav launched a publication to whine about how the Erev Rav are being too Erev Rav, congratulations — your question has been answered.
Think of Sapir as the literary equivalent of a frum upper-middle-class panic attack: “Oy vey, we’ve gone too woke! But let’s not, chas v’shalom, become right-wing — that would be extreme!” It’s a mouthpiece for Jews who still shop at Whole Foods but get nervous if the cashier has blue hair and a nose ring. In short: centrists who still want to feel edgy.
Their article “If Not Now, When?” by Amit Segal attempts a familiar dance: admit that the left's approach — urgency, media blitzes, pressure campaigns — actually worked, lay out how it completely reshaped Israeli policy and public discourse, and then — wait for it — conclude that we should do the opposite.
You read that right. According to Segal, the left's strategy succeeded too well, so instead of learning from that and applying their tactics to our actual Jewish ideals, we should go back to “gradualism.” You know — the slow, halting, self-neutering approach that ensures we lose the war politely instead of winning it boldly.
“The Left had a terrible vision — but a genius playbook”
Segal's own examples lay this out perfectly.
Peace Now? Got full withdrawal from Sinai.
Oslo? Got the Israeli government to beg Arafat to take Judea and Samaria.
The Gaza Disengagement? Bulldozed 21 Jewish communities.
The Shalit campaign? Freed Yahya Sinwar and 1,000 other terrorists.
The lesson? According to anyone with a brain: damn, these people are evil — but they know how to win.
But instead of saying: let’s steal their strategy and use it to secure Jewish sovereignty over all of Eretz Yisrael, Segal wrings his hands and sighs that maybe we should stick to Ben-Gurion’s “little by little” approach — you know, the one that’s now being used to slowly choke out the Jewish state.
“Urgency works — so let’s be cautious forever”
The fatal flaw in Segal’s argument is this: he mistakes method for ideology. He sees that leftists act with “nowism,” with urgency, with maximalism, and then blames their results on the fact that they were urgent — not that they were urgently pushing evil.
It’s the same confused logic as saying: “Terrorists get global media attention by blowing things up. That attention is dangerous. So instead of getting media attention ourselves, let’s whisper in a cave and hope CNN finds us.”
Wrong. The issue is not the speed or volume of your advocacy — it’s what you’re advocating. The solution is not to slow down the right-wing cause — it's to speed it the hell up.
Use every successful method the left pioneered:
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Moral outrage? Ours is real.
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Media spin? Ours is honest.
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Absolutism? Damn right. The land is ours. Period.
If you admit the left's tactics work, and you believe the right is actually right — then your conclusion should be: time to go full throttle, in the opposite direction.
But that’s too scary for the Sapir crowd. They’d rather lose slowly, with dignity — and maybe get a blurb in the Forward about their nuance.
Bottom Line
Segal's piece is the quintessential Sapir article: eloquent, footnoted, and utterly cowardly. It acknowledges that the left's strategies are effective, admits the right's vision is more rooted in reality, and then — in classic centrist fashion — proposes applying the slow, ineffective approach of the right to the failed goals of the left.
Instead, we should be doing the exact opposite:
Use the left’s strategy. Apply it to the right’s mission. And don’t apologize for it.
Next up: we take a look at the rest of the Sapir editorial board and ask the real question — what even is a Bret Stephens, and why does he still have opinions?
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