He began writing the second on 14 May 2018, after observing that the Trump administration's relocation of its embassy to Jerusalem was celebrated in the global press while, on the same day, the fact that Israeli troops kept conducting from a safe distance mass shootings of protesting Gazans,[1] was ignored, evidence, in Cypel's view, of the extraordinary ideological influence Israel has managed to exercise over world opinion.

[4]He attributes the silence to the ideological success with which Israel has, by "blindfolding" Western support for what Cypel considers to be an ethnonationalist segregationist state,[13] managed to deflect critiques of its practices by associating such criticisms with anti-Semitism.

Never has Israel's ideological influence appeared so evident: from its impact on the "war on terrorism", which is of paramount importance and which Jean-Pierre Filiu has ably shed light on in a recent book, to this capacity to silence any criticism by the threat of having oneself immediately taxed with accusations of anti-Semitism.

This diplomatic influence is expressed symbolically by the Israeli capacity to have adopted in important international circles a new definition of anti-Semitism, in which criticism of Zionism and Israel are included.

[b]Cypel speaks of the growing disenchantment of American Jews with developments in Israel,[13] instancing as an example the Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin's remark in 2006, once thought to border on blasphemy: Most piercing to me is the pain of watching a tradition, my Judaism, to which I have dedicated my life, disintegrating before my eyes.