There’s a certain flavor of self-criticism that is particularly discouraging, and it amounts to a polity instinctively blaming itself for whatever ails it. Israel is facing its own version of this, and while it is and will remain confined to a minority, the Jewish state would do well to remember something about international conflict: The bad guys have agency, too.

The phrase “blame America first” hit the political bloodstream with US Ambassador to the UN Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s speech to the Republican National Convention in 1984. Ronald Reagan was running for reelection, and in her speech advocating for his candidacy, Kirkpatrick—still a Democrat at this point, but fed up with her party’s crisis of confidence in America—said this:

“They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do — they didn’t blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians — they blamed the United States instead.

“But then, somehow, they always blame America first.

“When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the “blame America first crowd” didn’t blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.

“But then, they always blame America first.

“When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn’t blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.”

She listed more examples, but the main point was, as she said, that “it’s dangerous to blame ourselves for terrible problems that we did not cause.”

The “blame Israel first” crowd should take note. Israel is a country with robust political freedoms and therefore a rowdy public sphere. That’s a good thing. And Kirkpatrick wasn’t criticizing the desire to blame one’s government when one’s government was at fault. She was describing a kind of autotext response that happens when one decides the enemy has no agency.

Benjamin Netanyahu is not the reason six hostages were executed last week, even if one agrees with various criticisms of individual decisions and policies of his during the course of the war. Even on the subject of the ongoing ceasefire negotiations themselves, there is far more certainty about what’s going on in the private councils of the government than is warranted. Is Netanyahu the main source of obstruction? Based on the timeline and the reporting, no, he does not appear to be. But I don’t know for sure and neither do those insisting he is .

Yet you wouldn’t know that by reading the commentary. In Haaretz, Dahlia Scheindlin—author of several heartfelt and right-minded pieces on the war and the West’s hypocritical silence on the sexual violence perpetrated against Israelis on October 7—described the anti-Bibi protesters as “driven half-mad by the Netanyahu government’s soulless resistance to a deal while Hamas dispenses of the hostages.” In a story next to Scheindlin’s, Yossi Verter accused Netanyahu of having “put an end to the hope beating in the hearts of most Israelis that the hostage deal currently on the table would finally be signed… Instead of considering how to prevent the murder of the remaining hostages, he ranted, puffed his chest and winked as if to say: Wait and see what happens next.” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, head of a progressive Jewish activist organization, slammed any Jewish organizations that are “not clearly calling for the Netanyahu administration to agree to a deal that will end the war.”

“End the war” here appears to mean something tantamount to “surrender.” Otherwise it completely ignores the role of Hamas, which started this war and refuses to end it by returning the hostages and submitting.

Netanyahu’s greenlighting of rescue operations after having already concluded one ceasefire-for-hostages deal has made it pretty clear he is anything but indifferent to the fate of the hostages. And it is risible to suggest that this government isn’t even “considering how to prevent the murder of the remaining hostages.”

These accusations aren’t mere policy criticism, they are the embodiment of blaming Israel first. Hamas kidnapped those innocent Israelis; Hamas starved and tormented them psychologically and maybe physically; and Hamas shot them in cold blood, while brave Israeli soldiers risked their lives to try to save them. Let there be no suggestions of moral equivalence between the two.