Joel EngelhardtIsraeli ambassador to United States pushes back against myths in remarks at Forum Club.
For a forceful defense of Israel look no further than Yechiel “Michael” Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
At his 45-minute presentation Thursday at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, the American-born Israeli who once served as an adviser to right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon offered to debunk “three popular, mind-numbing myths about Israel.”
- But first he issued a plea for truth.
“It seems like common sense, yet today facts don’t seem to matter anymore. … When independent thinking stops, cheap populism, conspiracy theories, echo chambers, groupthink and dangerous lies take hold. Dangerous lies about the Jewish people have poisoned far too many minds from East to West and from antiquity to today.”
- “A new generation has been fed ideas that glorified terrorism as resistance, dehumanized Israelis as unworthy colonialists, erased Jewish ties to our homeland and cast the West in its entirety as the bastion of evil. They come to see Israel as the little Satan but America as the big Satan. … I believe that we are in a period in which fighting to reclaim the soul of Western civilization is at stake.”
Why it matters: With the joint Israeli-U.S. attacks on Iran and the war in Gaza, Israel has been under intense scrutiny in the United States, where its historic levels of support have been slipping.
Myth 1: Israel commits genocide
Israel is not starving Gaza residents. And, even accepting Hamas-produced casualty figures, “the casualty rate of combatant to non-combatant (in Gaza) is the lowest in modern warfare,” he said at the Kravis Center’s Cohen Pavilion.
“We don’t starve people, not even our enemies,” Leiter said. “It was Hamas that starved Gaza’s population. We sent in hundreds of semi-trailers with humanitarian aid. Hamas took the food, and sold it, and deprived those it didn’t want to receive the food from receiving it, and we were blamed.”
A recent U.N. study of hunger in Gaza found that Gaza’s children are not suffering from malnutrition, he said. The UNICEF study released in August said 12.2% of children “were chronically malnourished, or stunted, reflecting the cumulative toll of more than two years of war even as humanitarian aid had scaled up since the October 2025 ceasefire.”
Myth 2: Israel determines President Trump’s Mideast policy
Scoffing at the notion that Israel — with its “fiendish prime minister who has kind of magical powers,” and its political donations from AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — has control over Trump, he cited his visits to the Oval Office.
“Let me share this with you. I’ve been in the Oval with the president nine times, 10 times, in meetings over the past two years, we don’t drive American policy. Rest assured, and American Jews don’t act on behalf of any foreign entity, including Israel. They act out of American interests, and everyone should take affront to the accusation that AIPAC is acting as a foreign entity or a foreign agent.”
- He pointed to Qatar’s influence on the American left. “Qatar has a footprint of over $400 billion invested in culture and education in the United States. They’re buying influence in your institutions, your schools, even in K to 12. And from all this, minds are terrorized by anti-Semitic tropes: Jewish money, Jewish power controlling everything.”
Myth 3: ‘The (Zohran) Mamdani Doctrine … I have nothing against Jews, only Zionists’
He recalled a similar argument made by the Soviet Union. “The Jews of Moscow didn’t fall for it. Neither should the Jews of New York or of Palm Beach,” he said. “Let’s not allow the enemies of Israel to determine for us what Judaism is.”
- “The Jewish narrative begins with Zionism. Sorry to break it to you. … The bond between God and Abraham is the bond between the people of Israel and the land of Israel. Now, you want to change it? Call it something else. But Judaism is Zionism.”
Of note: Leiter’s oldest son, Moshe, died in Gaza in 2023 when a building at the shaft of a Hamas tunnel blew up. Leiter’s son, Neria, a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces, is in a coma after a car rammed into him on Sept. 22 at a West Bank checkpoint. Leiter said he would hurry home to be at his son’s bedside and quoted a social media post his son wrote about fighting for Israel:
- “Honestly, it amazes me every time, how in a single moment, a group of citizens becomes a group of soldiers, without complaints, without calculations, in the best atmosphere there is, with smiles that show how blessed we are. Because in the end … it is a privilege to be part of the people who lived through this period, and not simply watch it pass by.”
