Mike Isaac is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer later this year. In an announcement, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance write: “You are undoubtedly familiar with his groundbreaking reporting on, among other companies, Meta and Uber, as well as his many other scoops and investigations. Mike is joining us at a key moment, as we work overtime to expand our presence in Silicon Valley.”

Last week, The Atlantic announced the hires of Sophie Haigney and Robert F.  Worth (who had been a contributing writer) as staff writers; Zachary Fryer-Biggs, Jebediah Reed, and Alex Stockton as senior editors; Lindsey Sitz as a producer for video podcasts; and Kevin Roose as a contributing writer.

Today’s staff note is below:

Dear everyone,

We’re writing with exciting news this morning: One of the country’s best reporters, Mike Isaac, is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer. For the past 12 years, Mike has been the leading technology reporter for The New York Times. You are undoubtedly familiar with his groundbreaking reporting on, among other companies, Meta and Uber, as well as his many other scoops and investigations. Mike is joining us at a key moment, as we work overtime to expand our presence in Silicon Valley.

About Mike: In addition to having broken some of the most consequential stories of our time, Mike is also a brilliant writer and fantastically creative. On a personal level, he is also hilarious. He is drawn to the biggest stories and most difficult reporting challenges, and knows Silicon Valley better than most anyone. In addition to his daily coverage of AI, the strange economics of the modern information system, and the most powerful people on the planet, Mike is also a best-selling author of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, which was adapted into a Showtime series of the same name. (Those who have followed Mike’s reporting as closely as we have over the years will remember when he uncovered the existence of the company’s secret Greyball program.)

Mike is a journalist who matches the mission of The Atlantic—someone who brings great reporting firepower and tremendous writing talent, plus a deep love of magazines, and an uncommon level of ambition and creativity. We could not be more excited to welcome him and cannot wait for him to get started. Mike starts in December and will remain based in the Bay Area.

Please join us in welcoming Mike to The Atlantic.

Best wishes,
Jeff and Adrienne

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | press@theatlantic.com

A decade ago, an Apple executive named Phil Schiller had a message for people using computers that were more than five years old. “This is really sad,” he said, with apparent sincerity, to scattered applause during an iPad Pro launch event. The remark was meant, seemingly, to encourage those poor souls to toss their obsolete devices aside and upgrade their way toward the future. (In other words: buy more Apple products.)

That was 2016, during the era when Apple announced new products to great fanfare, the average iPhone user traded in their device about every 23 months, and releases came with promises that buyers would “never want to go back to old technology again.” Over the years, more and more Americans have begun to rethink this upgrade formula. Some of them are turning to secondhand-tech marketplaces; others are combing eBay to pick up obsolete gadgets that remind them of a more offline time. But there exists another segment of the population that’s taken a different approach: They’ve refused to replace their devices at all.

[Read: There’s no reason to buy a new phone anymore]

Call them legacy users, or upgrade holdouts. They’ve clung to iPhones with home buttons, Bush-era computers, and headphones older than some tech CEOs, even when doing so impedes their ability to complete everyday tasks like emailing or navigation. The holdouts I spoke with don’t necessarily reject technology. Instead, they told me, they just want to use it on their own terms.

Some members of this community are older and put off by the prospect of learning a new interface. Others are minimalists who appreciate the simplicity of older technology, or anti-consumerism advocates looking to retain a sense of autonomy. Many aren’t driven by any sort of principle at all besides mere practicality: When I asked Larye Parkins—the proud user of a Compaq computer released in 2007, the same year that Superbad hit the box office and Myspace dominated social media—what he would call himself, he came back with a simple reply: “I’m just cheap.”

In some cases, their devices are old enough to now be on display in museums. Mike Tyran, a 66-year-old nurse, has long jammed out to ’80s glam bands on his 2003 iPod, a subsequent model of which can be found in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Tyran also uses a smartphone, computer, and television that are all nearly a decade old and goes by “Old Turkey” on iFixit, a website dedicated to tech repairs. There, he dispenses and gathers tips on maintaining aging gadgets. Like many other holdouts, Tyran has no interest in contributing to e-waste heaps or shelling out five figures for gadgets with AI capabilities. “I have ‘NI’—natural intelligence,” he told me. “I’m good with that.”

The common enemy of upgrade holdouts is planned obsolescence, or deliberately designing products to have short lifespans. The term was coined nearly a century ago by the real-estate broker Bernard London. “There is little demand for new goods when people make their old and worn-out things do, by keeping them longer than they should,” London wrote. Today, no industry is more closely associated with the practice than Big Tech. Take Apple, which in 2020 agreed to settle lawsuits alleging that it was secretly slowing down older iPhones. Beyond “batterygate,” the company has also long engaged in “parts pairing,” the practice of preventing certain third-party parts from working in a repaired device, and discontinued hardware service for hundreds of its products over the years.

When it comes to continuing to use early smartphone models, just getting them to connect can be a problem. The 2G and 3G cellular networks they ran on have been largely phased out across North America (the latter can be found only in certain geographic enclaves). One of those pockets is in Saint John, New Brunswick, where Gary Flanagan—among the 2.3 percent of customers still using Koodo Mobile’s “legacy” network—managed to call me from his iPhone 5S, first released in 2013. Flanagan, a 54-year-old nonprofit consultant, occasionally finds himself unable to download apps or watch YouTube videos, and his younger co-workers rib him. But for the most part, he’s content. “If it works, it works—and I still use it,” Flanagan, who also still wears a pair of Radio Shack headphones he was gifted in 1983, told me.

Nathan Proctor, the right-to-repair campaign director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, told me that some devices are made obsolete overnight, while others die a slow death as software updates are gradually halted. In order to keep using them, holdouts must contend with constraints in their day-to-day lives. Mark Turner, the owner of a nearly 10-year-old smartphone, told me he’s delayed buying a newer version of his hearing aids because their pairing app isn’t able to run on his device. Others, such as Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist and University of Michigan professor who uses an AT&T flip phone, find work-arounds to navigate a world powered by QR codes—for Toyama, that means borrowing his wife’s old smartphone.

Such trade-offs can be a small price to pay for maintaining a sense of control over one’s digital presence. As a freelance copywriter and editor, Josh Fredman says laptops are essential for him. But the 44-year-old has put off replacing his computers—a 16-year-old Toshiba and a 13-year-old HP model—because they serve as an oasis from today’s digital spaces, free from the constant notifications and update alerts of modern operating systems. One of Fredman’s laptops can no longer connect to the internet and has become his “art computer,” used for writing fiction and composing music. He’s replaced faulty fans and hard drives on the other laptop, and installed a gaming package from 2009 that allows him to play Solitaire without the interruption of advertisements.

Keeping old hardware alive is often a communal effort. Last year, iFixit helped host several “install parties” of Linux, an open-source operating system that can breathe new life into obsolete computers, at cafés and libraries across the country. A simple search on YouTube brings up numerous how-to guides on jailbreaking Kindles in order to free older models from Amazon’s software restrictions. And a decade ago, fans of the discontinued smartwatch brand Pebble grouped together to create Rebble, a platform of web services that reinvigorated technically defunct smartwatches. Wayne Seltzer, who got his Pebble watch as a Father’s Day gift in 2015, told me he appreciates the “kindred spirits” nature of the project.

Similar sentiments against tech consumerism are materializing—albeit in a less radical manner—in broader movements toward refurbished gadgets, and in a resurgence in retro electronic devices led by younger generations fatigued by today’s digital overload. But keeping up the lifestyle is a challenge. Most of the people I spoke with either have tech and engineering backgrounds that primed them for implementing complex hardware and software fixes, or are retired and able to put time and effort into learning them.

In some cases, even the most ardent holdouts have been forced to give up. Seltzer eventually sold his Pebble watch after struggling to download certain medical features on it. Flanagan recently discovered that he will have to finally give up the iPhone 5S when the 3G network it runs on is dismantled next spring. And Tyran, or “Old Turkey,” is feeling pressure from his family to upgrade. His daughter, in particular, gets frustrated when he can’t see the emoji she sends him. But he’d rather live in a world with some inconveniences than have a new one imposed on him. So, for now, he’s still holding out.

The principle that government ought to be administered for the benefit of all citizens, not on behalf of one political party, lies at the core of America’s democratic enterprise. The Trump administration couldn’t care less: It appears to see the federal government not as something to steward on behalf of all Americans, but as an opportunity—a set of levers it can pull on to protect its reign.

America’s adherence to this principle of executive neutrality has never been perfect, but as a norm it has been honored more than breached. When I served as a political appointee in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, the idea that the secretaries of defense or homeland security or the attorney general would have ever appeared at a political rally was unimaginable. Their roles were too important to national security to risk being perceived as partisan operatives.

Not so in the Trump administration. Its members are willing to use the public power at their disposal to do what they can to give Republicans an edge in this fall’s elections—to campaign for candidates from their public pulpits, to push broadcast-news coverage in a more favorable direction, to try to strong-arm the U.S. Postal Service into regulating mail-in balloting into oblivion, to threaten withholding FEMA relief funds from those states that don’t elect Republican candidates, to release pro–Donald Trump propaganda funded by taxpayer dollars, and, the most crass offense, to offer $5,000 checks to voters if Republicans win. Some of these tactics are in a legal gray area; others are plainly forbidden. But all of them are violations of the precept that the party in power should not tilt the electoral scales toward itself.

The most egregious area of activity has been the total disregard administration officials have shown for the Hatch Act. The law, passed in 1939, imposes limits on certain government employees to ensure that these officials in their executive functions are above partisan political activity. Federal employees may not use their official authority to influence an election, though they can engage in political activity when they are off the clock, and restricted employees (which includes all national-security and law-enforcement personnel) may not “take an active part” in any political campaign.

The law is still being enforced, but only against everyday federal employees. For example, the DHS inspector general recently found that some FEMA disaster responders had violated the Hatch Act when they skipped providing assistance to homes with pro-Trump signs after Hurricane Milton.

But in Trump world, the law is for thee and not for me. Attorney General Todd Blanche has turned out to be something of a serial campaigner. He traveled to Long Island to give a speech at a rally for Bruce Blakeman, a Republican running for governor of New York. He gave a speech at the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention. He stumped for Michael Whatley, a Senate candidate from North Carolina.

[Read: The problem with Trump’s new taxpayer-funded ads]

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went to the Iowa State Fair to support Republican Representative Zach Nunn. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy gave an August speech at a super-PAC event supporting GOP candidates in Michigan in which he mixed official business with praise for a Republican candidate. And, as The Atlantic has reported, Trump even went so far as to have a secret points-system competition among his Cabinet members to see who could travel to the greatest number of competitive House districts over the summer (though, to be clear, not all of that travel was overtly in violation of the Hatch Act).

Who is supposed to do anything about any of this? That responsibility falls to the Office of Special Counsel, whose head Trump fired early in his second term. He then nominated as his replacement a host of a far-right podcast, whose past behavior and qualifications were so poor that even the Senate Republicans could not support him. Despite not having a permanent leader, the OSC has managed to launch a Hatch Act investigation of one person of great interest to the president: former Special Counsel Jack Smith. The investigation is in response to a complaint that Smith sought quick criminal-trial dates for Trump as a means of influencing the 2024 election.

Perhaps less egregious but no less troubling has been the erosion of the traditional neutrality of the Federal Communications Commission. For years, the FCC’s equal-time rule (not to be confused with the broader, now-repealed fairness doctrine) was the legal embodiment of the principle of the government’s neutrality among the different political factions. The rule required that if a broadcaster allowed a candidate to appear, it “shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates” for that office. Exceptions were possible for bona fide news events. The rule has generally been interpreted quite leniently—allowing, for example, programs such as Access Hollywood, Today, and The Howard Stern Show to host political candidates on the air without requiring their opponents be allowed the same.

Under Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, the agency has perfected the use of its authority to threaten broadcasters it perceives as anti-Trump. In late January 2026, the FCC issued new “guidance” aimed at late-night-TV hosts, effectively reversing the long-standing leniency. Some networks responded by changing what they put on their shows. CBS pulled an interview of James Talarico, the Democrat from Texas running for  Senate, from Stephen Colbert’s late-night show.  

Without a doubt, the single most noteworthy effort the FCC has undertaken involves its obsessive pursuit of ABC. The effort to influence the network’s programming began in late 2025 when Carr urged ABC (owned by Disney) to pull Jimmy Kimmel from the air after he inartfully commented on Charlie Kirk’s death. Appearing on a right-wing podcast, Carr said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead”—seemingly a not-so-veiled threat of licensure action. Though Kimmel was suspended, he eventually returned to the air.

Not content with this (or perhaps angered that Kimmel was put back on the air), Carr moved, in April, to conduct an early review of all eight FCC licenses held by ABC. As purported grounds for the review, the FCC questioned the diversity and inclusion practices of the network. ABC filed a lawsuit in August, seeking to forestall the review, claiming that it was retaliatory and in violation of the First Amendment.  

The FCC contends that ABC’s lawsuit is premature—that it has yet to decide whether to take enforcement action against the company. But the mere threat of a review is bad enough. The Trump/Carr pressure campaign is working.

In July, Trump gave an address to the nation, and ABC decided not to broadcast it. But it did put it on livestream (which it would not normally have done) as a way of mitigating the threat of retaliation. Likewise, The View, which historically has hosted political candidates, has stopped doing so after the FCC began an investigation following an appearance by Talarico. ABC has now, on the cusp of the election, decided to withhold a Kimmel interview of Talarico from its on-air broadcast, punting it to YouTube instead.  

There can be no doubt whatsoever as to the political nature of these enforcement actions. Immediately after warning late-night-TV hosts (a group Trump loyalists perceive as liberal) about the applicability of the equal-time rule, Carr clarified that talk radio (known for its conservative tilt) was not subject to this guidance. As the lone Democratic-nominated FCC commissioner, Anna Gomez, put it, the action was part of the “administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech.”

[Read: The ‘easy way’ to crush the mainstream media]

Finally, consider one effort to bend the institutions of government to Trump’s political benefit where he has (at least to date) been less successful—mail-in voting, a case which, mercifully, Trump lost in the Supreme Court last month.

Correctly or not, Trump seems to believe that Election Day voting favors Republicans, and thus he has attempted to use his power over the government to make mail-in voting more difficult.

Central to that effort was Trump’s executive order “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” and more particularly his direction to the USPS to draft a rule establishing “uniform standards” for mail-in ballots to be implemented.

This anodyne formulation concealed, as a Massachusetts district court described, a rather more draconian final rule which would have required state and local election officials to submit their ballot envelopes to the USPS for approval and thereafter provide the identity of each mail-in voter to the USPS for input into a federal government-run electronic portal. The enforcement mechanisms for these requirements would have been stringent: Absent approval of the ballot envelope, no voter data could have been input. And without ballot-design approval, intelligent barcodes, and voter-data registration, the USPS would have refused to deliver mail ballots to voters.

Every state’s mail-in-ballot process would have been subject to federal approval under the guise of mailing-envelope standards. In his appeal to the Supreme Court, the solicitor general likened this requirement to “analogous preparation requirements for the mailing of cremated remains and replica explosives.” He further contended (notwithstanding the title of the executive order) that the rule was simply a regulation of the USPS and not meant to federalize control of the elections.

Even though it has, thus far, been unsuccessful, Trump’s misuse of the postal service is of a piece with his overall project of using the federal government to his party’s advantage. It is effectively a repudiation of the postal service’s “universal service” obligation—the mandate not to refuse mail unless specifically authorized to do so by Congress—with intent to convert the USPS’s neutrality into a political cudgel.

When politicians repurpose government action to help themselves maintain power, they are breaking a fundamental promise of governmental impartiality in providing services and benefits. Trump’s assault on this principle of executive neutrality has not yet taken root in American culture. If it does, we will lose far more than control of the House or the Senate; we will lose the possibility that the will of the people can prevail.

Rachel Somerstein thought it would be “really wonderful and fun to have three children.” That is, until what happened happened.

When she was delivering her first baby, many years ago, Somerstein spent nearly 24 hours in labor before the baby’s heart began decelerating. The physician recommended a C-section. She received anesthesia, but as soon as the scalpel touched her skin, she knew something was deeply wrong. “I felt that,” she recalled saying as her legs bucked from the pain.

As Somerstein wrote in her 2024 book, Invisible Labor, she felt all of it—the entire surgery. In the following years, Somerstein developed PTSD and would panic during medical procedures; she told her husband she wasn’t sure if she’d ever want to have another baby. She remembers thinking, “I just don’t know that I can get over the fear,” she told me.

She ultimately did: Four and a half years later, she had her second baby. But she now thinks that, if not for the horrible first birth, she might have had another child in between. Somerstein’s experience was extreme, but her deliberations over her family size reflect a typical trajectory: Many women start out with a notion of their ideal number of children, and then finances, health, relationship status, and other factors can push that number up or down. Sometimes, women have more children than they initially intended, but, more commonly these days, they have one or two fewer than they’d hoped.

As politicians and academics puzzle over what, if anything, to do about America’s shrinking fertility rate, lost in the conversation is that many people would like to have more kids—but their personal circumstances prevent them from doing so. Rather than simply promoting the idea of being a parent, then, one way to boost the country’s birth rate may be to make it easier for parents to say yes to additional children.

[Read: What number of kids makes parents happiest?]

Since roughly the 1970s, if you were to ask a random 20-year-old woman how many children she’d like to have, the odds were pretty good that she’d say “two or three,” several researchers told me. But this was less a true, firm preference than a reflection of the social norm, which is that for several decades, the majority of women were having two or three kids. “Saying you want two kids when you’re 20,” Sarah Hayford, a sociologist at Ohio State University, told me, “is not telling us that much about you”—or how many kids you’ll go on to have. (Although men, of course, also have opinions about the number of kids they want to have, few studies have been conducted on their preferences, Hayford said, and thus I’ll mostly focus on women in this article.)

Over the past decade or so, the picture has shifted: More and more, women say they aren’t sure how many children they’ll have, if any. In a study published last year, Hayford and two other researchers analyzed a nationally representative survey of more than 40,000 women and found that in 2018, 48 percent of childless women who hoped to have children were uncertain whether they actually would, compared with 40 percent in 2002. This change may reflect an understanding that having children can be derailed by various obstacles—the first being that most people want to be married before they have kids, Julia Behrman, a sociologist at Northwestern University, told me. The marriage rate is declining, and although plenty of people have children on their own or with a partner they’re not married to, many unmarried women won’t go on to have one child, let alone multiple.

Being married or partnered, however, does not determine how many children a person will have. Karen Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies family formation, described fertility intentions as a learning process of sorts. A couple might have a baby and discover that they love being parents and want to do it again and again; others might find that day care costs far more than expected, making another child unaffordable. “Before you have kids, you are imagining what parenthood is like based on your friends’ experiences, based on what you’ve seen on TV, based on what you see out in the world,” Guzzo said. Only once people have a child do they know what parenthood is really like, and the experience might be better or worse than they had imagined. “People who are pretty determined about having that first kid can often find a way to do that,” Guzzo said. But “increasingly, that second kid is, Let me evaluate where I am right now and see if I can fit another kid in here.”

A number of factors can determine whether a couple has a second child, Rachel Margolis, a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario who has also studied family formation, told me. “People who I know who stopped at one,” she said, “either they met each other really late in life, or they disagreed about how many kids they wanted.” Or, she continued, they weren’t happy with how they were allocating child-rearing responsibilities, or they had stressful jobs that didn’t accommodate parenting, or they’re in a same-sex partnership and it was harder for them to have more than one kid, or, or, or. Life comes at you fast.

[Read: The unglamorous truth about the average tradwife]

As in Somerstein’s case, a difficult birth and postpartum period can make someone hesitant to do it all over again: Margolis found in a 2015 study that Germans who had a pronounced drop in well-being after having their first child were less likely to have a second child than those who had no decline. Similarly, a study of women in the U.K. found that those who experienced postpartum depression after one birth were less likely to have additional children. Somerstein, who now leads birth-trauma groups, told me that the question of whether to have another baby “comes up in every single meeting.”

Another reason people may vacillate about having kids, or having more of them, is that many Americans have been sent—and have absorbed—the message that “you should not have a kid until you’ve got all your ducks in a row,” Guzzo said. Finish school, get a job, get married—don’t be an unwed mother. People may feel pressure to live in a good neighborhood with good schools, where housing tends to be more expensive, and to have a partner who wants that too. Oh, and make sure that partner takes on half the physical and mental load. “I think people want to have kids,” Guzzo said, but they might also think: “Some of those things that I think need to be in place before I have kids might not happen.”

Social and policy changes might address some of the obstacles that prevent people from having a family of their desired size. Guzzo said that if child-care infrastructure were stronger and if paid leave were more plentiful, America would “probably see a bit of a boost in birth rates, particularly the second- and third-birth rates.” If young people felt established enough to marry and buy homes earlier in life, they might start having children sooner, which could increase the likelihood that they’d have a second or third kid. And if more medical providers took women’s pain—both physical and mental—seriously, fewer women might have the kinds of traumatic births that discourage them from trying again.

When Somerstein was 41, after she’d had her two children, she got her appendix taken out. A friend suggested that she get her fallopian tubes removed at the same time—a procedure that can lower the risk of ovarian cancer without the need for a separate surgery. “I just couldn’t do it,” Somerstein said. “I was like, Maybe I want to have another baby.” Uncertainty can take another form too—that of leaving the door ajar.

Sign up for Video Village, a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.

Perhaps you’ve heard the news: Movies are back. For many of us (including quite a few of you, I imagine), they never went away, but 2026 has been a year of guarded optimism in Hollywood. Ticket sales are up, the box office is booming, and, most heartening of all, superhero movies aren’t propping up the industry largely by themselves. The diverse success of large-canvas storytelling such as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and out-of-nowhere tiny-budget hits including Curry Barker’s Obsession have demonstrated how this art form still can seize the zeitgeist like few others.

If you’ve ever read my movie coverage in The Atlantic over the decade-plus I’ve been here, my feelings of triumph and relief at this sanguine state of affairs should come as no surprise. I work primarily as a film critic, trying to spotlight popular art that matters, unearth little gems trying to make noise amid a crowd of “content,” and provide some thoughtful context on why the films I don’t like don’t work for me. I also love talking with filmmakers about their influences, the arc of their career, granular scene and shot choices, as well as writing wide-angle analysis, looking at the ways the industry responds to current events, and how the big-screen experience has fought for survival since the pandemic.

Video Village, which will arrive in your inbox every Thursday, will have all of that to offer—criticism, recommendations, and commentary on what’s happening in the world of movies. This newsletter takes its name from the industry term for the nerve center of a movie set: a collection of monitors where the director and their crew can watch footage live, making sure everything is looking good. But I also want to curate my own little nerve center with this community, bringing everyone together to share in this passion with unbridled enthusiasm. I’ll be suggesting fun viewing projects for you to undertake, and flipping through streaming offerings, new releases, old classics, and even random DVDs I have piled up. If you share in my cinema obsession—even at a fraction of my intensity—it’ll be a fun ride.

Photographs by Julia Sellmann

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When Freddy Marquez was 12, he was hit by a motorcycle while biking and smashed his face into the pavement. He healed fast, but as adolescence reshaped his boyish features, the scar started to tug on his upper lip, leaving his mouth ajar. “Mom,” he said, “I’m going to high school. I don’t want to look like this.” So in September 2024, his parents found a surgeon in central Florida, where they live, to do a scar revision.

On the morning of his surgery, Freddy went into the operating room around 9. His mom, Joana Jardin, settled into a waiting-room chair, expecting to drive him home in a few hours. Noon came, then 1 o’clock, then 2, then 3. “Where is my son?” Joana began to ask. “Where is my son?” The staff couldn’t tell her anything, except that she had to wait. She watched as other parents picked up their kids from surgery and left. At 4 o’clock, she realized she was the only one in the waiting room.

When Joana finally got to see Freddy, around 5, he was barely conscious. His eyes were closed, his breaths shallow. He was just sleepy, a nurse reassured her, because he’d gotten Benadryl after a hive-like rash broke out—but not to worry, the monitors tracking his vitals showed nothing else awry. Eventually, Freddy managed to slump into a wheelchair, his eyes still closed. He was sent home.

The next day, Freddy woke up. Then he threw up. He was still drowsy and now irritable. His head hurt. Joana took him to urgent care and later to the ER, where doctors who evaluated him figured he was just recovering from surgery. But in the coming days, his symptoms became stranger and more disturbing. Freddy started losing control of the muscles in his face. He developed tremors. He choked on his saliva. He lost his balance. He felt what he could only describe as electricity coursing through his brain. “Please, Dad, pray for me,” he would cry when the “electricity” struck.

At the hospital where Freddy was finally admitted, doctors ordered two separate MRIs of his brain, and, to keep him still during the scans, they put him under anesthesia. Both times, he took hours to regain consciousness. Both times, he emerged worse than before.

Freddy lost the ability to walk. His body spasmed and twitched as his muscles took on a life of their own. When Joana saw her son in the hospital bed—eyes staring at the ceiling, limbs flailing wildly—she remembers thinking this is how people once believed you could be “possessed by a demon.”

The scans found spots of white in Freddy’s brain—signs of dying and dead neurons—but no explanation as to what had caused them. In the coming weeks, he got better and then worse, worse enough that doctors ordered yet another MRI. His parents begged the hospital not to use anesthesia again. Don’t worry, Joana remembers being told; the doctors can do it safely. They do it all the time. Joana felt that she had no choice but to trust them. As Freddy slid into unconsciousness, she once again started ticking off the hours waiting for him to wake up: 1 p.m., 2, 3, 4. “Where is my son?”

Freddy never woke up. His body went into cardiac arrest, then respiratory failure. He died on December 29, 2024, at age 14.

Before that final MRI, in one of their last conversations, Freddy had blurted in a half plea, half accusation, “You don’t understand what is happening to me, Mommy.” He was old enough, by then, to have lost faith in his parents’ omniscience but young enough to still yearn for it. His ordeal had revealed to him that the adult world is riddled with unknowns; that the assurances of even doctors in white coats can mean very little. “I promise that I’m going to understand. Until my last breath,” his mother told him. “I’m going to understand.”

And she would, eventually. Joana did not know it then, but Freddy’s death would be linked to dozens of cases of unexplained catastrophic brain damage after routine anesthesia, all in children or young adults. Several, like Freddy, died. Others became permanently disabled.

The mystery of why Freddy died would ultimately collide with one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of medicine: How does anesthesia work in the first place? How is it that anesthesiologists can induce a state that some have called “functionally equivalent to brainstem death”—only to reverse it? This process happens 60,000 times a day in operating rooms across the United States. Yet it remains poorly understood. What happened inside Freddy’s brain, some researchers now think, may be an extreme version of what happens inside any of our brains when we slip into unconsciousness under anesthesia.

This past May, in Germany, I watched a doctor give a talk to her colleagues about two eerily similar cases almost two decades apart. One was Freddy’s. The other was that of a boy in Germany who went under anesthesia for a broken arm in 2006. Like Freddy, Ulrich “Uli” Gabriel Gobin Hernández was 14. Like Freddy, he took hours to wake up and then gradually lost control of his muscles. But unlike Freddy, Uli survived. The woman giving the talk was not Uli’s doctor. She was his mother.

Yaremy Hernández Castillo, who is soft-spoken and modest to a fault, wore a white coat with sensible sneakers as she flicked through slides of her son’s brain scans. Most of her colleagues at the cardiac-rehab hospital where she worked had no idea that she’d spent the past 20 years—outside her job as an internist—trying to decipher his condition. Early on, she had intuited that what happened to her son could be explained only by something still unknown to medical science. “Uli Gabriel, patient zero,” she came to think of him. But in the initial lonely years of her investigation, his doctors doubted her. Her own medical colleagues did too. “Everyone told me it was absurd,” she recalled to me, even as they could muster no better explanation.

These were the facts of Uli’s case: On Saturday, January 14, 2006—a beautiful day to hit the slopes—he went snowboarding near his family’s home in the Bavarian Alps. Uli took a jump way too fast and landed on his right arm; the humerus bone did not withstand the force of impact. He ended up at the local clinic, where Yaremy worked at the time, and where she trusted he was in capable hands. On weekends, the alpine-village clinic treated an influx of skiers with mangled bones.

But as the hours passed and Uli did not wake up from surgery, Yaremy began to worry. When he finally did rouse—confused, vomiting, and talking “like a drunk man”—her instincts both as a mother and as a doctor screamed that something was wrong.

The trauma surgeon came to check on Uli’s arm and declared it perfect—his own job was done. No one else seemed to share Yaremy’s growing alarm at her son’s mysterious neurological symptoms. The word she kept using to describe this period was alone. To get an MRI of Uli’s brain, Yaremy personally arranged for an ambulance to take him to a larger hospital. On the MRI, two ghostly white spots appeared in his basal ganglia.

The death of brain cells in the basal ganglia, which coordinates movements of the body, explained Uli’s symptoms, which progressed to erratic twisting, painful muscle spasms, and involuntary protrusion of the tongue. But what had caused the damage? No one knew. Uli could still walk and talk, albeit with some difficulty, and he remembered everything: the confusion, the pain, the seven dwarfs from Snow White plastered all over his pediatric hospital room, which, as a 14-year-old, he found tragically uncool. He was impatient to get better and to get out; he had tickets to a Foo Fighters show less than two weeks later. But the day of the concert came and went, and Uli remained stuck in the hospital, his symptoms unresolved, their underlying cause still unknown. The tests that doctors ran all came back negative.

Had his anesthesiologist made a mistake? Yaremy couldn’t dismiss the possibility. How does a perfectly healthy kid become so sick from routine anesthesia, other than because of a terrible mistake? Malpractice could give grief a direction and a shape, suggesting a person to blame (a doctor) and a means of redress (a lawsuit). Friends kept telling Yaremy to sue. In the end, she did, filing a lawsuit against Uli’s anesthesiologist, Ludwig Düthorn, a senior colleague whom she regularly passed in the hallways of their clinic. At the very least, she figured, the lawsuit could help uncover what had really happened.

At the clinic, Yaremy began to avoid the ICU, where Düthorn worked, unsure of what to say about the tragedy that had rattled both of their lives. Düthorn, too, was haunted by the case. He replayed the surgery in his mind, searching for any hint of the debacle to come. Uli’s blood pressure had dipped briefly—but that wasn’t uncommon during anesthesia, and would not have been enough to cause this level of brain damage. Düthorn had counteracted the drop with a routine dose of noradrenaline, and that had worked as intended. All of Uli’s other vitals were unremarkable. All of the dosages had been double-checked by a nurse.

Afterward, whenever Düthorn had to anesthetize a healthy young boy, he would think of Uli. “I was personally devastated,” he told me. “I thought, I did the anesthesia. It is my fault. But on the other hand, I could find no mistake.”

The death or serious injury of a healthy child from anesthesia is so unusual as to be universally shocking to doctors these days. Anesthesia is known to pose risks to the elderly or ill, but even then it is far safer than it once was.

In the 19th century, as many as one out of 2,500 patients died under chloroform, then a popular anesthetic. But patients were willing to take the risk, because the alternative was pure, visceral horror: During the pre-anesthesia era, hospitals would put their operating rooms in towers, so as to spare other patients from all the screaming.

Like many medical breakthroughs, the discovery of anesthesia was something of an accident. Doctors became aware that ether, a popular party drug at the time, made giddy revelers insensitive to pain. They decided to give it a try in the operating theater: The first public demonstration was carried out on October 16, 1846, when a 21-year-old man under ether had a malformation removed from his neck at Massachusetts General Hospital. (The name anaesthesia, from the Greek for “without sensation,” was suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the eminent doctor and essayist who also gave this magazine its name, in 1857.) At the time, doctors did not understand why ether worked; that it did was good enough.

General anesthesia today is often likened, colloquially, to sleep. But what it does to the brain is stranger and frankly spookier: A patient who is merely asleep would not lie still and take a bone saw to the chest. To render someone so deeply unconscious, anesthesia shuts down multiple distinct functions in the nervous system, making a patient insensate, paralyzed, and unable to form memories. The brain under anesthesia is suppressed to such an extent that Emery Brown, an anesthesiologist at Harvard and MIT, has compared it to coma or brain-stem death.

“The key thing is that it’s reversible,” Brown told me. When anesthetics stop being administered, the patient starts to rouse within minutes. Their consciousness flips back on. The spell breaks. This total reversal has happened millions of times in millions of people, the magic of it now mundane. But Uli had needed hours to find his way back to consciousness, his brain adrift someplace too deep and too dark to return from unscathed.

In the months after his accident, Uli’s symptoms became manageable enough for him to return to school. Still, he could be unsteady on his feet. On a walk with friends and their dog one day in 2007, he took a tumble and fractured his collarbone. His mother hoped the bone would heal without surgery, but his erratic limb movements from the damage to his brain kept jostling the broken bone. Surgery became inevitable.

Wary of anesthesia, Yaremy asked his doctor to avoid the type Uli had received for his arm surgery. She had no scientific evidence to cite, but she hoped he would listen to her, as a worried mother and as a fellow doctor. He did not.

This time, Uli did not wake up for days. Yaremy thought he was going to die. She would open his eyelids to check his reflexes. Nothing. When his eyes finally stayed open on their own, Uli was delirious. He screamed whenever an unfamiliar nurse entered his room. He had trouble following conversations. His skin became hypersensitive to touch. He lost more control over his limbs. He would never again be able to play guitar in his band or impress girls with snowboarding tricks. He would never even walk or talk on his own.

Yaremy struggled to care for him at home, and she began to contemplate her life in small-town Germany. She had grown up an ocean away, in the boisterous city of Caracas. At 21, she met a German man at a disco in Venezuela, who became her husband and then Uli’s father, and who persuaded her to move to this tiny ski town, where her new in-laws ran a hotel. When she arrived—with 1-year-old Uli in her arms—she spoke little German. For a long time, she was the only foreigner in town. She missed the warmth of the Venezuelan sun and she missed her large family, who she knew would rally to help her back home.

And so, soon after the disastrous second surgery, Yaremy boarded a plane with Uli, now 17, to Caracas. Her younger child decided to stay in Germany with their father. They all planned to reunite in Venezuela later, but Yaremy knew her marriage was already over, its existing cracks widened by the new challenges of caring for their son.

The move proved, in one way, fortuitous. A few years into living in Caracas, Yaremy encountered the first hint that what had happened to her son had also happened to someone else. When picking up medication for Uli—Botox to relax his clenched muscles—she met another mother doing the same for her own son. The facts of his case sounded awfully familiar: anesthesia, delayed awakening, brain damage, loss of muscle control. The mother told Yaremy about a spate of anesthesia complications in the Venezuelan state of Carabobo in the early 2000s, which were blamed on a contaminated batch of sevoflurane, then a fairly new anesthesia drug in the country. Her son, this mother said, was one such case.

Uli, too, had gotten sevoflurane during both surgeries. The colorless and faintly sweet gas has since become one of the most widely used anesthetics worldwide. But Uli’s surgeries were two years apart and 5,000 miles away in Germany, which had had no reports of contaminated sevoflurane. Yaremy couldn’t see how the incidents in Carabobo could be connected to her son’s. Still, she filed them away in her mind.

Not long after, Yaremy began chasing down a second clue, which emerged as Uli’s malpractice case wound its way through the German legal system. The lawsuit itself was unlikely to succeed, now that Uli had suffered the same complications under a different anesthesiologist, but an expert examining the facts of the case made a crucial observation: The two symmetrical white spots in Uli’s basal ganglia, he said, looked much like the brain damage found in people with inherited mitochondrial disease.

Mitochondria are the tiny structures inside our cells that act as power generators. When they become dysfunctional, cells are first starved of energy; then they die. The most vulnerable cells are the most energy-hungry ones; neurons are particularly susceptible, especially those in the basal ganglia. In children with mitochondrial disease, neuron death can be triggered by physiological stress of any kind: fasting, illness, dehydration, and, yes, anesthesia. Perhaps the fault lay with Uli’s mitochondria too.

In 2013, Yaremy managed to secure an appointment at a leading genetic-disease lab in Houston. She boarded the plane with Uli, convinced that the answer awaited them at their destination. There, specialists ran a series of blood tests on Uli and searched his DNA for mutations that cause mitochondrial disease. “I felt like I was going to see the light,” Yaremy told me over breakfast in May. “But nothing happened.” She sighed, her shoulders tense with disappointment.

The tests found no mutations known to cause mitochondrial disease. Moreover, Uli had never exhibited other symptoms; mitochondrial dysfunction affects numerous parts of the body, including the heart and muscles, and symptoms frequently manifest in childhood. Uli had been a healthy and energetic boy: walking before age 1, skiing at 3. Yaremy wondered if her son’s reaction to sevoflurane could be caused by a novel mitochondrial mutation. Uli remembers hearing the doctor, who did not know he understood English, mention her belief dismissively to his medical students.

Yaremy and Uli returned home to Caracas, where they had been building a new life. Uli enrolled at Venezuela’s largest university; using an eye-tracking device to communicate, he graduated with a degree in modern languages. Yaremy worked her way up to professor of medicine at the same university.

Then, in the mid-2010s, Venezuela’s petroleum-dependent economy cratered. Public hospitals lacked equipment as basic as disposable gloves; inflation soared to more than 1 million percent. Even with her connections, Yaremy began to struggle to obtain Uli’s medications. She decided in 2018 to uproot their lives once again, taking Uli back to Germany, where he could receive more reliable care.

By then, Yaremy was closer to finding the explanation for Uli’s condition than she knew. She already held key pieces of the puzzle. But it would take a second tragedy in her family for her to realize how they fit together.

In June 2020, Yaremy got a call from her younger cousin—and Uli’s godmother—María Fernanda Pozo Castillo, or Mafer. They are close, having grown up together in Caracas. Because Yaremy is the doctor in the family, Mafer told me, everyone bugs her with their ailments. (“Yaremy, I have a headache,” she said, slipping into an imitation.) But she was calling about something much more serious. Her 13-year-old son, Matías, had just had knee surgery after a bike accident in Austin, Texas, and he’d struggled to wake up. He had gotten sevoflurane.

“Mafer, no!” Yaremy said.

Even as she began to relive the cold dread of waiting for Uli to wake up, Yaremy pulled herself into problem-solving mode. “Don’t leave the hospital without an MRI, okay?” she told her cousin. “If the doctor says it’s not necessary, it doesn’t matter. You demand an MRI.”

Mafer remembers that the doctors were reluctant to order a brain scan for her son—he’ll be kicking a ball again in three weeks, they told her. But she kept asking and asking until they acceded. Sure enough, the MRI—which was done without further anesthesia—showed two white lesions in the basal ganglia. “Same places,” Yaremy immediately said when she heard this. “Same places as Uli Gabriel.”

In the coming days, Matías started experiencing involuntary limb movement. He developed muscle contractions, even more severe than his older cousin’s, that left him screaming in pain. The contractions have persisted, even with high doses of muscle relaxant delivered straight to his spinal cord. This past summer, Matías’s pain became so excruciating that he had to be hospitalized in the ICU. His mother cares for him full-time. Before we spoke on the phone, she kept apologizing that she might need to leave at any minute to tend to him.

Yaremy was devastated for her family; so was Uli. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” he told me when we met in the spring, tapping the sentence out letter by letter on a board that he uses to communicate.

Yet amid her grief, Yaremy’s scientific mind got to work: One kid in her family? Okay, a fluke. But two? It had to be genetic. She thought of Uli’s mitochondrial-DNA test from seven years earlier. The sequencing had found no mutations known to cause disease. But the report did note some “variants of unknown significance,” including one called m.11232T>C, meaning that the 11,232nd letter of his mitochondrial genome had been altered from a T to a C. No one made much of the finding; all of us have variants of unknown significance in our genomes, most of which are of little consequence, like minor typos that do not obscure the meaning of a sentence. But maybe this mutation was, in fact, significant.

Mitochondria carry their own loop of DNA, separate from the chromosomes that make up the rest of our genome, and are inherited through the maternal line. Yaremy’s mother and Mafer’s mother are sisters, so they and their children share the same mitochondrial line.

Could a single typo in their mitochondrial DNA be responsible for all of the catastrophic brain damage in the family? And what was the connection to sevoflurane?

Yaremy now began searching for a scientist to study her family. She suspected that Uli and Matías carried the same mutation, as might other relatives. Two of her mother’s sisters, she realized, had also suffered complications after surgery that now seemed to trace back to anesthesia. Were others at risk too?

She found Julio Montoya, an expert in mitochondrial disease at the University of Zaragoza, in Spain, who saw her email in a waiting room as he was about to undergo emergency surgery for a detached retina. With his one good eye, he read it and replied immediately. He was keen to investigate.

Montoya and his colleague Eduardo Ruiz-Pesini had, it turned out, seen the m.11232T>C mutation before. In 2018, they had found it in a Venezuelan boy at a Barcelona hospital. This patient had become severely ill after surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids—and deteriorated even further with subsequent rounds of anesthesia in later years. The Spanish team decided, along with Yaremy, to put together a formal research proposal. The boy from the Barcelona hospital would become patient one in their study; Uli became patient two, and Matías patient three.

Over the years, Yaremy had talked with colleagues in Venezuela about Uli so relentlessly that word sometimes came back to her of similar cases: nearly always kids, nearly always after routine surgery. An introvert by nature, Yaremy had to learn to badger anyone and everyone for a useful crumb of information.

She began running down some of these rumors: The wife of the son of a friend knew a neurologist who knew an anesthesiologist who knew of a boy who had fallen ill after surgery on a broken forearm. He became patient four. Patient five was the boy whose mother she’d met picking up Botox in Caracas. A physical therapist told her about a boy who’d had cleft-lip surgery—patient six. An old friend from medical school, an anesthesiologist, had examined a boy who developed symptoms after surgery for a cochlear implant. The friend had once been skeptical of Yaremy’s theory, but now he helped her gather data. This boy became the seventh and final patient in the study.

All of the patients who ended up in the study were boys, but Yaremy heard of girls affected, too. For every patient she managed to track down, she followed other trails that ran cold. Families who’d filed lawsuits were reluctant to talk; others were lacking complete medical records. The allegedly contaminated sevoflurane in Carabobo, Yaremy learned, had been widely discussed among doctors at the time, but news coverage of the events 20 years ago had disappeared from the internet as a result of the regime’s media crackdowns and poor digital recordkeeping. She managed to get hold of one newspaper article—a printout saved by the mother picking up Botox in Caracas. But she was not able to find any other families whose children had died or become disabled in Carabobo.

A haunting pattern appeared in the cases she was able to pull together. All seven patients in the study had received sevoflurane. Most of them could trace their maternal relatives to Carabobo; Yaremy’s own maternal grandmother was from the state. And all seven had the same T-to-C mutation. This mutation is extremely rare, even in Venezuela, but it is an estimated 15 times more prevalent in Carabobo, where it is believed to have originated many, many generations ago. The Spanish researchers hypothesized that this old mutation had taken on new, potentially fatal importance in the era of modern anesthesia.

General anesthesia today is usually achieved through a cocktail of drugs, both inhaled and intravenous. Of these, sevoflurane is one of the most popular, particularly for children. It is easy to administer, quick to work, and not irritating to the airways. But sevoflurane seemed to behave differently—and dangerously—in the presence of the T-to-C mutation.

To prove this, the Spanish researchers would need to collect cells with the mutation and subject them to sevoflurane in a lab. Yaremy volunteered her own. In the fall of 2024, she found a colleague to draw her blood and a lab to biopsy a ribbon of her skin. Her cells soon made it to Spain, where the team got to work.

As the lab experiments were ongoing last summer, tragic news came out of Chile. Five children there had suffered terrible outcomes after routine anesthesia; four were dead, according to an alert from the Chilean Society of Anesthesiology. All five children were Venezuelan.

The news spread within the Venezuelan diaspora. In the past decade, more than half a million Venezuelans have moved to Chile, where they have not always found themselves welcome. Now some of the parents alleged that poor medical care and discrimination had killed their children. They filed lawsuits and demanded justice on social media. In videos the parents shared of their children on Instagram and on TV, they are all bouncy and bright: a 4-year-old girl swinging in gymnastics class, a 2-year-old boy in a Messi jersey kicking a soccer ball.

Chilean investigators were able to collect genetic samples from only three cases—out of what had grown to a total of seven in the country—but all three patients had the same T-to-C mutation. One of the children who died in Chile, Yaremy later learned, was the cousin of a patient in her study. As word of the mutation spread around the world, doctors started reporting cases in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Peru, and Guyana.

“I suffered with each kid, each mother,” Yaremy told me. Even when a child survived, she saw ahead to their “lifetime of complications.” She often thinks about the boy with the cleft lip from her study, who, abandoned by his mother, lives in a poor village in Venezuela with his grandmother. His family can’t afford Botox or other treatments. In videos she has seen, his muscles are always clenched, his limbs unusable.

Back in Spain, the researchers raced to finish the experiments. They ultimately found that cells carrying the mutation were indeed hypersensitive to sevoflurane. This mutation could explain why Uli—and Matías and all the other children—had stayed unconscious for so long after surgery. The study, with Yaremy as a co-author, was the cover story of the June 2026 issue of Anesthesiology, the official journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. Accompanying it was an editorial written by two physician-scientists in the U.S., Richard Levy, at Stanford, and Philip Morgan, at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

I had first spoken with Levy a few months earlier, after the ASA issued an alert—following up on the one in Chile—about terrible complications from anesthesia, primarily sevoflurane, in people with maternal Venezuelan ancestry. In our conversation, I asked what seemed like a basic question: How does sevoflurane work? “If you can figure that out, you have a Nobel Prize,” Levy told me. “The reality is, we don’t know.” We don’t know how any inhaled anesthetics work. But this novel mutation out of Venezuela, he and Morgan thought, might hold a clue.

Anesthesia likely taps into something evolutionarily ancient in the body. A one-cell protozoan, a Venus flytrap, and a human are all susceptible to anesthesia—and two of those things don’t even have a brain.

For most of the 20th century, scientists clung to the idea that these drugs perturb the fatty membrane of living cells—a hypothesis based on how the gases behave in olive oil. But by the 1980s, a new dogma began to take hold: Anesthetics bind to proteins on the surface of brain cells, which interrupts their signaling. This is best understood in a drug called propofol, which is a common anesthetic but not an inhaled one; the milky-white liquid is delivered via IV. In an elegant set of experiments in the 2000s, scientists identified propofol’s primary target as a protein called the GABA receptor. Yet the same experiment, when repeated with a common inhaled anesthetic, failed to find an analogous target. Decades later, it remains elusive. Maybe it doesn’t exist.

Today, the general consensus regarding the mechanism of inhaled anesthesia is that the gases bind weakly to many proteins in the brain, which together add up to complete loss of consciousness. Most practicing anesthesiologists don’t think much about this. Sevoflurane works. The proof is in the operating room every day. What more do you need?

But a group of researchers dissatisfied with the conventional wisdom on proteins, including Levy and Morgan, has been slowly building the case for an alternative hypothesis: Actually, it’s the mitochondria.

When these researchers heard about children with a mitochondrial mutation dying from anesthesia, they immediately saw the implications. Scientists have long relied on rare mutations to probe the mysteries of biology. In another Venezuelan state called Zulia, for example, families with a shared mutation for Huntington’s disease have been crucial to our understanding of the condition. Rare mutations are a kind of natural experiment.

Morgan, along with his wife and scientific collaborator, Margaret Sedensky, had once run lab experiments looking for mutations that altered sensitivity to anesthesia—though only in a tiny, transparent worm called Caenorhabditis elegans. When they induced random mutations in the worm, they found that the relevant ones were clustered in the mitochondria. Their findings didn’t make much of an impact among their fellow anesthesiologists, though. “We’re like the comic relief at our big national meeting of 15,000 anesthesiologists,” Sedensky told me. “ ‘Here come the worm doctors.’ ”

But Morgan and Sedensky kept working out the details of their theory. Inhaled anesthetics such as sevoflurane, they now argue, work by inhibiting the mitochondria, inducing a kind of temporary brownout in the brain. The bubbles used to transport brain chemicals become frozen in place, like cars that have run out of gas. They restart as soon as anesthesia is discontinued. But in some hypersensitive patients, the mitochondria could become so impaired that their brain cells die. Morgan had found some of these hypersensitive patients before, but he believes Uli’s mutation could help pinpoint more precisely how anesthesia works on mitochondria. This past summer, cells with the mutation—derived from Yaremy’s blood sample—arrived in the couple’s lab in Seattle.

Understanding how anesthesia works, Levy told me, could enable scientists to design better drugs that precisely target the brain, without lingering side effects. Though modern anesthesia drugs are generally quite safe, they are imperfect. They affect the cardiovascular system; they affect ostensibly unrelated areas of the brain, such as the region that controls nausea. And they have been linked to cognitive decline in the elderly after surgery—though the degree to which the drugs are responsible, as opposed to other factors such as the physical effects of surgery, is still being debated. How much of that can be avoided?

Before her study was published, Yaremy had someone she needed to call: Ludwig Düthorn, Uli’s anesthesiologist after the snowboarding accident. She had not seen Düthorn since testifying against him at the malpractice trial years earlier. She’d lost the suit; legally, he had already been absolved. Personally, she felt she had to apologize.

Düthorn was gratified to know what Yaremy had found, but even now, he told me, he feels a doubt gnawing at him in the operating room. Uli had a silent and novel mutation in his DNA. Could his next 14-year-old patient have a different one?

Cases like Uli’s unsettle everyone they touch. In the 2000s, Rafael Legórburu, then an anesthesiologist in Caracas, treated a young boy who would not wake up after sevoflurane—a case he now suspects was connected to this mutation. The boy suffered profound brain damage. Legórburu still finds it difficult to talk about 20 years later. “I have a scar,” he told me, “for the rest of my life.” Today he lives in Spain, where he practices aesthetic medicine, administering Botox and fillers; he says he’ll never touch sevoflurane again.

Doctors are now revisiting a number of old malpractice cases—some of which resulted in large settlements—that might be explained by the T-to-C mutation. An anesthesiologist whose hospital had settled one such case involving their patient told me they felt relieved, and vindicated. (They spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by the hospital to speak publicly.) At the same time, they could not entirely shake their sense of responsibility. “It was the worst experience of my life,” they kept telling me.

A group of Venezuelan anesthesiologists—largely based in the U.S.—recently formed the Venezuelan Anesthesia Perioperative Risk society, or VAPOR, to raise awareness of the mutation among health-care workers, and to promote guidelines for screening and treating patients with maternal Venezuelan ancestry. A quarter of Venezuela’s population—8 million people—has left the country in recent years, meaning the mutation is scattered more widely than ever. Yet within Venezuela, no lab is testing for it, and anesthesiologists do not routinely have access to the specialized equipment needed to administer anesthesia without inhaled gases.

Yaremy is working with scientists to continue studying the mutation, about which many questions remain: Do other anesthetic drugs, inhaled or administered via IV, pose a danger? Are children more vulnerable, or have we simply not looked hard enough yet in adults? The oldest known patient to be affected was 31 years old.

In her own life, Yaremy has finally found a measure of stability. She and Uli live in Radolfzell, a bucolic lakeside town in southern Germany, where she works at the cardiac-rehab hospital. It’s calmer than the ICUs where she’s worked in the past. “B-O-R-I-N-G,” Uli joked, tapping out the letters in English. But the calm is welcome after years of upheaval. Uli has his own apartment and a rotating cast of full-time assistants; he works as a translator for medical records. (He is fluent in English, Spanish, and German.) He is a doting uncle to his niece and nephew, the children of his younger sibling, Levi.

The mutation still lurks in their lives. Both times after giving birth, Levi, who uses they/them pronouns, developed an infection in the uterus and needed surgery. Yaremy made sure that they did not get sevoflurane. But what about Levi’s kids, who also have the mutation? What if they’re rushed into emergency surgery on their own? Levi had closely followed the news of the children who died in Chile. “They could have been my kids,” Levi remarked as we parted ways after a family lunch by the lake. The water was a brilliant clear blue that day; so was the sky.

A few days after I left Germany, Yaremy learned about a new suspected case: a 12-year-old boy who’d had trouble waking up after surgery in Caracas. “How can this still be happening?” Uli wrote to me. “I mean what the ****!?”

Joana, Freddy Marquez’s mom, first caught wind of the suspected mutation in the summer of 2025, when she heard on social media about the children who’d died in Chile. She, too, is originally from Venezuela. And she made the connection instantly. Months earlier, when Freddy had been hospitalized, his doctors had ordered a genetic test that turned up a variant of unknown significance. Freddy had the m.11232T>C mutation as well. This information never made it into his chart for the same reason Uli’s mutation wasn’t initially taken seriously: No one understood its importance at the time.

Joana began commenting about Freddy on every related post she could find. One by one, she linked up with others who told similar stories: another mother in Florida, the family of a girl who died in Houston, Yaremy’s cousin Mafer in Austin, and so on. Joana got added to a WhatsApp group for the parents in Chile, which has since evolved into a de facto global support group for parents of children with this rare mutation. Through the group, Joana also learned of Yaremy. They spoke for the first time in February, and recognized in each other a maternal instinct that is both steely and tender. “She was in tears,” Joana told me, “and I was in tears.”

In February, Joana appeared on Instagram Live in a zebra-print shirt to talk about Freddy, alongside other affected mothers. The zebra print was a reference to the old medical adage “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras”—meaning: think of the common explanation, not the exotic one. But sometimes, it is zebras. Freddy died because what happened to him lay just outside medical knowledge. His particular mutation is rare, but encounters with the unknown in medicine are not. Joana was asking for some humility, some openness to the possibility of zebras. Since Freddy’s death, she has made advocating for people with rare mitochondrial conditions her life’s mission.

Joana can still picture him: swimming, playing basketball, riding “like crazy” on his bike as Gordito, his Alaskan malamute, raced alongside him. “His flipping dog is now chasing me wherever I go,” she said. And Joana continues to propel herself forward. She’s cold-calling researchers. She’s going to medical conferences. She’s offering up her own cells to study. She is keeping the promise she made to Freddy before he died.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Going Under.”

Updated at 5:40 p.m. ET on October 5, 2026

Hours after the United States snatched Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from Caracas in a Special Forces operation, Marco Rubio strode into the side chapel of Saint Augustine Catholic Parish in Miami surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents. Sunday-evening Mass had just begun when the priest saw Rubio enter. The rest of the congregants saw him too. Their heads turned in unison. The city’s favorite son had helped oust a longtime Miami nemesis, and now their hero was among them.

Toward the end of the service, the pastor, Richard Vigoa, walked to Rubio’s seat and administered Communion to the secretary of state, according to several church members who described the scene. The parishioners stood and applauded. Vigoa and Rubio are both Cuban American, as is the overwhelming majority of Saint Augustine. Implicit in the congregation’s euphoria was an expectation: Cuba was next. After 65 years of waiting, Miami’s Cuban exiles believed that the Trump administration—with Rubio at its center—was poised to overthrow the socialist government. “There was this feeling that ‘finally, it’s our moment,’” Nicolás J. Gutiérrez Jr., one of the congregants, told me.

That was nine months ago. Since then, those sky-high expectations among South Florida Cubans have given way to repeated disappointments. U.S. negotiations with Raúl Castro’s grandson appear to have stalled. Talk of a Venezuela-style strike in Havana has dissipated as the military remains mired in Iran. Rubio’s tone toward Cuba, meanwhile, has softened—leaving people here worried that they’ll be let down yet again.

Older Cuban exiles still remember the anguish of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Younger ones recall the false hope attached to Fidel Castro’s death and the false start of President Obama’s reconciliation effort. Now Miami finally has a secretary of state whom it trusts to act in Cuba. But even Rubio seems unable to deliver on the community’s singular demand.

In Miami, the intricacies of geopolitics can feel very local. The congregants of Saint Augustine still see Rubio most Sunday evenings. Gutiérrez’s wife walks by him with the church collection plate, but it’s an inopportune moment to ask about U.S. foreign policy, she has decided. Like other Miami Cubans, her family has sought out intermediaries. The exiles are searching for insights into the secretary’s planning—and they want to make sure he knows what they’re thinking. One man told me that he had been working through a dentist who gives Rubio’s son helicopter lessons. Another boasted that his daughter had gone to prom with Rubio’s son. Gutiérrez has been emailing a contact at the State Department whom he knows has seen his messages. When I visited him at his home in Coral Gables, he pulled out his phone to show me the proof. “Look—it says, ‘Received. Thanks,’” he said, pointing to the email.

Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to gain Rubio’s ear. Gutiérrez has become one of the leading crusaders for Cuban exiles seeking restitution for their family properties in Cuba. He said his own family had lost 100,000 acres when the Castro regime redistributed and nationalized private property across the island. Gutiérrez is now working with more than 1,000 families in similar circumstances. He wants Rubio’s support in that quest.

Others in Miami have urged the secretary to prioritize the estimated 1,300 political prisoners still jailed in Cuba. Some have ideas about how the economy could be liberalized, or who should run the country, or how to rebuild the electrical grid. They have invited him to conferences and cocktail parties and fundraisers, but he has rarely shown. They’ve been left to decipher Rubio’s public account of what the U.S. has in mind for Cuba.

Immediately after the Maduro raid, Rubio seemed to hint at a looming military operation: “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned—at least a little bit,” he said on January 3 at a Mar-a-Lago news conference. President Trump began talking approvingly about the “Donroe Doctrine” and all of the ways in which his administration would dominate the Western Hemisphere. Rubio, operating as national security adviser as well as secretary of state, seemed perfectly positioned to steer the U.S. away from distant conflicts and back to subduing adversaries in its own backyard.

But then Trump decided to go to war with Iran. As the U.S. again focused on the Middle East—and as the old Venezuelan regime maintained its hold on power, only without Maduro—Rubio seemed to grow more cautious about an intervention in Cuba. At the United Nations General Assembly last week, he struck his most restrained note yet: “Cuba has a golden opportunity to place itself on an irreversible path towards a better future. And we are prepared to be helpful in that regard if they are open to it.”

The group chats and email threads of Miami lit up. Was Rubio preparing the city’s Cubans for another era of disappointment?

The Sixto brothers, Juan and Rafael, stood on the patio of a Miami mansion. A crowd of Cuban American entrepreneurs was arrayed in front of them. Biscayne Bay glittered behind. Rubio had been invited, but so far, he hadn’t shown up. “This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for,” Rafael said in a speech to the crowd. “We need detailed solutions. We need a plan of action.”

The brothers and their colleagues had formed the Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce in the days after the Maduro operation, when it seemed almost certain that regime change was coming for Cuba. They formed 14 committees. They strategized about a future Cuban stock exchange. One of their members flew to Cuba to inspect the country’s oil terminals and report back about future energy investments. It’s possible they were getting a little ahead of themselves.

There are about 1 million Cubans and Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County, more than a third of its total population. Some arrived just as Castro seized power, in 1959. Others came with the Mariel Boatlift, in 1980, or on small rafts in the mid-1990s. Another wave arrived from 2021 to 2024, as the island’s humanitarian crisis intensified during an economic collapse. Among them were spies dispatched by the Castro regime, as well as anti-Communist militants stockpiling weapons. But mainly, they were an ever-growing mass of exiles praying for the moment when the existing order would unravel in Havana. “Florida is that part of the Cuban stage where declamatory exits are made, and side deals,” Joan Didion wrote in 1987. “Florida is where the chorus waits to comment on the action, and sometimes to join it.”

The exiles have long resisted any attempts by the U.S. government to make nice with the regime. The majority of Miami’s Cuban exiles say they will invest in Cuba only when the Communists are gone. An April Miami Herald poll found that more than half of Cuban and Cuban American respondents in Florida disapproved of the Trump administration’s negotiations with the socialist government. Yet Rubio, it appeared, was supporting talks, seeking an arrangement like the one he had brokered with Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela, which prioritized economic reforms over a political transition. “South Florida’s Cubans Made Their Wishes Clear and That Must Weigh Heavily on Rubio” was the headline the Herald ran above an editorial about the polling results.

[Read: Cuba’s old economic model is ‘exhausted’]

When the Sixtos’ speeches were over, small groups chatted by the pool. One man came up to Rafael. It was clear that the Trump administration’s momentum on Cuba was slowing, he said. For so many decades, exiles in Miami had prepared for Cuba’s future—building legal frameworks and conducting feasibility studies. Now things appeared to be stalled, again.

“So what are we supposed to do?” he asked Rafael.

“We need a contingency plan!” Rafael said, his own language suggesting diminished expectations. “We need to be ready.”

Rubio’s parents migrated to Miami from Cuba in 1956, before Castro seized power. From the beginning of his political career, he described himself as the son of exiles, even though his family hadn’t been subject to the same political repression as those who left after Castro’s rise. It was a part of the story he told throughout his political ascent—from the first Cuban American speaker of the Florida House of Representatives to the first Cuban American secretary of state.

The group that gathered at the Miami mansion did not want to believe that Rubio, steeped in the politics of el exilio, would accommodate the Castros. Maybe, people told me, he was angling for a secret deal that would lead to the expulsion of the entire regime. Maybe—maybe!—they would tolerate a short political transition, if Rubio promised it would mark the end of communism.

“I don’t trust Trump on Cuba,” one man told me at the party. “But Marco Rubio is our savior.”

By 8 p.m., Rubio still hadn’t shown up. On the printed agenda for the night, there was mention of an unnamed special guest, which excited some of the invitees. Could it be the secretary? Or someone else from the administration who could offer clarity? But when it came time to introduce that cameo, the owner of the mansion, Dr. Jorge Suárez-Menéndez, had disappointing news.

“I’d like to introduce my friend Mary Flynn,” he said. The special guest was the sister of Mike Flynn, Trump’s onetime national security adviser and a leading purveyor of right-wing conspiracy theories. She had little to say about Cuba but shared thoughts about the Democrats and child trafficking. Dinner was served. People gave up on the long-shot possibility that Rubio would appear. Juan Sixto pulled me aside next to the pool. “Rubio supports us,” he told me. “If he was in Miami, he would have been here.”

The consensus was that Rubio was trying his best during an impossible time. Trump had chosen war in Iran over regime change in Cuba, people said. That wasn’t Marco’s fault. (Many people at the party referred to him by his first name, whether they knew him or not.) Two men in their 80s walked by me and Juan as we spoke. Both had been prisoners during the early days of the Castro regime. They had built successful businesses in Miami but still toasted to “next year in Havana” at meetings. “We’re going to move all the money from here to the island,” Juan said. “This is the only group that can do it.”

When the cocktail party ended, the guests trickling past the Roman-style fountains in the front yard, I drove west from the mansion toward Hialeah. I passed storefronts that have popped up across the city catering to Cubans looking to send supplies to the island—Envios a Cuba and Todo para Cuba. The best sellers are basic food items and battery packs—signs of how extreme Cuba’s humanitarian crisis has become. The World Food Programme has reported an increase in people going hungry. A 12-by-12-inch box of supplies costs $29 to send from Miami.

The U.S. this year increased sanctions on Cuba and on foreign companies doing business with the regime, an economic vise intended to weaken the government but that Cuban officials say restricts the flow of food and medicine. Roughly 2 million Cubans have left since 2020—about a fifth of the island’s population. Many of them have landed in South Florida, a generation of exiles, most of whom are poor and without permanent legal status. Most still have immediate relatives in Cuba, and they scrape together the money to send boxes of basics to those who could not leave.

[Read: A reverse Ellis Island]

Rubio has spoken publicly about the immense human suffering on the island. “The truth is Cuba has already fallen,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity last Monday. But a humanitarian crisis did not mean the regime had collapsed or was on the verge of collapse. Remittances and aid from Miami had helped Cubans eke by, and the regime had eked by too.

With U.S. aircraft carriers and warplanes tied up in the Middle East, there are limited resources available for a Venezuelan-style operation in Havana. Even if the Trump administration wanted to pursue a military option in Cuba, it’s unclear whom its target would be and what a succession plan would look like. On the diplomatic front, too, little seems to be happening. Miami’s exiles have followed the U.S. negotiation with Raúl Castro’s grandson, also named Raúl, with caution. But those talks stalled after the U.S. demanded that the current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, step down. The result is stasis. Even those in Miami who have spent their days angling to contact Rubio have had to admit: The secretary of state doesn’t seem to have a secret backup plan. “I don’t think that he bears the position of power to make the final decision,” Rosa María Payá, a leading member of the Cuban opposition who says she has discussed Cuba policy with Rubio, told me.

Payá’s father, Oswaldo, had once been considered the most prominent democratic challenger to the Castro regime, before he died in a car crash in Cuba in 2012. An independent investigation later determined that the regime had killed him. Afterward, Rosa María moved to Miami for her own safety, joining the exile community. She observed that those exiles “never really disconnected” from the island. They had waited—and waited—for some combination of U.S. action and domestic conditions to break the regime.

It now appears they have longer to wait. But this is a place that is used to waiting. Along with the disappointment that the Trump administration hasn’t yet acted is a growing sense of inevitability—that the situation in Havana is unsustainable, that regime change is a foregone conclusion. And above all, there’s the belief that Miami’s man in Washington still has a long career ahead of him.

This article originally said Marco Rubio attended Mass at Saint Augustine Catholic Parish on a Saturday evening and that parishioners see him most Sunday mornings. In fact, Rubio attended on a Sunday evening, which is when he typically attends.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. The attack was the worst disaster in the history of the Jewish state. Three years later, it’s clear that it was an even greater disaster for Palestinians. Determined to punish Hamas and prevent future attacks, Israel responded with a devastating invasion of Gaza that killed more than 70,000 people; it estimates at least 22,000 were combatants. Today, 2 million Palestinians, 80 percent of the population of Gaza, have been displaced from their homes.

But if Hamas was defeated militarily, it largely succeeded in its goal of swinging Western public opinion against Israel. The spectacle of Israeli powerlessness followed by the violent display of Israeli power profoundly changed the way the Jewish state is seen and discussed. Perhaps the best way to gauge that change is to look at the transformation of the word Zionist.

Zionism was coined in the 1890s to name the organized political movement to create a Jewish state. After that goal was achieved with the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, the label continued to be claimed by people who took pride in its existence and wanted it to survive and thrive. This included most American Jews, but not only them. Two weeks after the Hamas attack, President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and declared, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”

It’s unlikely that those words will be heard again from an American president, of either party. To understand why, all you have to do is type the word Zionist into the search bar of any social-media platform, and review the rancid results.

The border between the internet and real life has become alarmingly porous. In May, Maureen Galindo, a candidate in the Democratic primary for a House seat in Texas, posted that if elected, she would turn an ICE detention center into “a prison for American Zionists,” where “most of them” would be castrated for being pedophiles. The notion that Zionism is a perversion or sickness is shared by extremists of many stripes. The far-left pundit Hasan Piker has called it “a mental illness,” and the far-right pundit Tucker Carlson has said that Christian supporters of Zionism are victims of a “brain virus.” The same ecumenism can be seen in the career of the term Zio: Originally popularized as an anti-Semitic slur by far-right white supremacists such as David Duke, it is now casually used by anti-Zionist Jews such as the actor Odessa A’Zion, whose now-problematic name compelled her to clarify on social media that she is “not a zio!”

[Adam Louis-Klein: The left-wing case against anti-Zionism]

The belief that Israel should continue to exist, which is what most people who call themselves Zionists mean by that word, does not seem to entail Nazism, insanity, or a taste for political conspiracy or sexual perversion. But the goal of this rhetoric, and the more genteel equivalents used in parts of academia and the culture industry, is not to provide an accurate definition; it is to make the word Zionist so toxic that people will be afraid to claim it.

And Jews have gotten the message. Last year, the Jewish Federations of North America conducted a public-opinion survey on “Jewish Life Since October 7th.” It found that 88 percent of American and Canadian Jews “believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state,” but that only 37 percent were willing to call themselves Zionists. Yet it’s clear that most Jews are not opponents of Zionism—only 7 percent of respondents called themselves anti-Zionists. Their problem is not with the idea of Zionism, but with the term itself.

Ironically, nothing would have suited the founders of Zionism better than for the world to stop talking about it. Their aim was to create not an ism, but a country; once that was achieved, the ism could be discarded, like scaffolding from a completed building. Anshel Pfeffer, a prominent left-wing Israeli journalist, has written that “Zionism ended on May 14, 1948,” the day the State of Israel was created. Today, Israel is not an idea but a real place, complete with shopping malls and sports teams and commuter trains, where 10 million people, three-quarters of them Jewish, live mostly ordinary lives. In this sense, hating Zionism in 2026 is a category error—like railing against the idea of American independence a century after the Revolution.

When people say they hate Zionism, Pfeffer argues, what they really mean is that they hate the conduct of the state Zionism created: “‘I no longer believe in Zionism’ seems to have become just another way of saying ‘I’m thoroughly pissed-off by the policies of successive Israeli governments.’” And there is no doubt that the collapsing reputation of Zionism has been driven by outrage at the Netanyahu government’s conduct of the war in Gaza. The most illuminating part of the Federations survey asked respondents how they define Zionism. A popular answer among those who call themselves non- and anti-Zionist was “supporting whatever actions Israel takes.”

If that definition were accurate, even the president of Israel couldn’t be considered a Zionist. In a speech in May, Isaac Herzog fiercely denounced Israelis who commit violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, saying that ultrareligious settlers “defile our home and depart from every basic norm—moral, legal or Jewish.” But then, the language of American anti-Zionism can’t be understood simply as criticism of Israeli actions. There is something deeper at stake when a politician calls for Zionists to be castrated, or when the group Jewish Voice for Peace associates its opposition to Zionism with the struggle against “white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, colonialism, militarism, and capitalism.”

No nation is without enmities and rivalries, yet somehow no Ukrainian has ever bombed a Russian Orthodox Church in the U.S., the way a Lebanese émigré drove a truck full of gasoline and explosives into a synagogue in Michigan in March. No sympathizer with Tibet or Taiwan has ever murdered people at a China-sponsored event in the U.S., the way an American killed two Israeli-embassy workers at a diplomatic reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in 2025.

To inspire this kind of hatred, the policies of a foreign government are insufficient. It requires an idea—an evil principle that must be eliminated for the good of humanity. The word anti-Semitism is now used to condemn prejudice against Jews, but it was invented in Germany, in the late 19th century, as the name of a proud political movement. Members of anti-Semitic parties wanted to distinguish themselves from old-fashioned Jew-haters; their target wasn’t religion but “Semitism,” which sounds like the name of an idea. If defeating “Semitism” meant exiling or killing the millions of Jews who lived in Europe, so be it; the disease was so bad that any cure was justified. Today, anti-Zionism follows a similar logic. Opposition to an ism cloaks a desire to exile or kill the millions of Jews living in Israel, and to punish Jews in other countries who object to this prospect.

So there is a dreadful inevitability about the way anti-Zionism has rediscovered the ancient themes of Jew-hatred. One example can stand for many: In January, an X account called “illuminatibot,” which has 2.4 million followers, posted that “Zionist tunnels were discovered under synagogues in NYC. Stained mattresses and baby high chairs were found inside.” The word Zionist here has no connection to Israel or to political ideology. It is simply a placeholder for evil, and the suggestion that Jews are doing unspeakable things to children in synagogues would have been perfectly familiar in 14th-century Europe.

In this sense, the persistence of the term Zionism in 2026 is the clearest sign of the failure of Zionism itself. For Zionism believed that creating a Jewish state would demythologize and detoxify Jewishness, making the Jews a “normal” people. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, wrote that “the Jews, once settled in their own State, would probably have no more enemies.” To understand why that prediction turned out to be so wrong—to judge what Zionism accomplished and what it failed to accomplish—you have to go back to the beginning of the story.

Before Zion was an ism, it was a place—a hilltop fort conquered by King David in his campaign against the Jebusites, a Canaanite tribe. According to the second book of Samuel, it was on the site of this stronghold that David founded his new capital, Jerusalem, importing carpenters and stonemasons from Lebanon to build himself a royal palace. The king changed the name of the hill to City of David, but the original name wasn’t forgotten—there’s a Mount Zion in Jerusalem today, though it’s probably not the same one the Bible talks about. More broadly, Zion became a synecdoche for Jerusalem and, by extension, for the whole kingdom ruled by David and his successors.

Even in biblical times, Zion was more often ruled by foreign empires than by the Israelites. The land of Israel was conquered by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, with interludes of Jewish self-rule. Still, it remained the home of most of the world’s Jews until 66 C.E., when a radical faction in Jerusalem rebelled against the Roman empire and launched a war for national independence; it minted coins with the inscription “For the Freedom of Zion.” After several years, the Romans crushed the rebellion, and in the course of the fighting, the Temple in Jerusalem—the center of Jewish worship—was burned to the ground.

Until the Holocaust, this was the worst catastrophe in Jewish history. The historian Josephus, who fought in the rebellion as a general in the Jewish army, wrote that more than a million Jews were killed, many by starvation, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. After a second failed uprising in the 130s C.E., the Romans set out to destroy what remained of Jewish society. To signal this policy, the emperor Hadrian changed the name of the province from Judea to Syria Palaestina, after the people known in the Bible as the Philistines. This is the origin of the name Palestine, which the land bore for the next 1,800 years under the rule of successive empires—Byzantine, Arab, Turkish, British.

By the Middle Ages, most Jews lived in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and only a small number remained in the biblical land of Israel. Yet Zion continued to play a central role in the Jewish imagination. Over the centuries, Judaism developed a complex theology and mysticism of exile, seeing the loss of the Jewish homeland as a punishment inflicted by God. It followed that only God could decide when the exile would end. Mainstream Jewish tradition specifically prohibited settling in large numbers in the land of Israel, though individuals could live there—and through the centuries, despite the obstacles, a determined few returned.

Jews instead imagined the return to Zion as a sudden, supernatural event, which would take place when God sent the Messiah to redeem the world. Like the Second Coming for Christians, Jews believed this was certain to happen eventually, but it was impossible to know when, much less to bring it about through human action. All they could do was pray, and the Jewish prayer service is threaded with petitions for an end to exile. Three times a day for almost 2,000 years, Jews have asked God, “May our eyes behold your merciful return to Zion.”

Today Jerusalem is once again the capital of a Jewish country, and some 600,000 Jews live in the city, alongside nearly 400,000 Muslims (and 15,000 Christians). Yet observant Jews around the world still recite the prayers asking for an end to exile. This paradox points to the most important fact about Zionism: It fulfilled the ancient hope of return, but not in the way Jews had always dreamed of, by a miraculous redemption. Instead, it used politics and diplomacy to create a secular state.

The word Zionism encodes this mismatch—a biblical name joined to a modern ideological suffix. It was a product of 19th-century Europe, the birthplace of so many isms—liberalism, nationalism, socialism, communism. In fact, most of the early theorists of Zionism came to it after being disillusioned with one of these other ideologies, which kept failing to solve the problem that concerned them most personally: the persistence of Jew-hatred.

[Read: Understanding Zionism]

The first thinker to follow this trajectory was Moses Hess, a German philosopher who started his career as a collaborator of Karl Marx’s and spent decades agitating for a socialist revolution. Then, in 1862, he changed course and wrote a book called Rome and Jerusalem, which anticipated Zionism by considering Jews not as followers of a religion, but as members of a nation. “The Jewish religion,” he wrote, “is, above all, Jewish patriotism.”

This way of thinking broke with traditional Judaism, which defined the Jewish people by its relationship with God. But it was also a sharp rebuke of modern Jews who hoped to assimilate into European society. After the French Revolution, many countries in Western and Central Europe “emancipated” the Jews, removing old legal barriers that made them second-class citizens. But Hess observed that legal equality had not led to true belonging: “In spite of the degree of education to which the Occidental Jews have attained, there still exists a barrier between them and the surrounding nations, almost as formidable as in the days of religious fanaticism.” Rather than trying in vain to become German or French, Hess argued, Jews should recognize that they constituted a nation of their own, and work for “national regeneration.”

Rome and Jerusalem didn’t reach a large audience at first, but other thinkers kept finding their way to similar conclusions. Leon Pinsker, a doctor from Poland, grew up in the mid-19th century trusting that Jews would one day be accepted in Russian society; he learned to speak Russian, was one of the first Jews to attend a Russian university, and edited a Russian-language Jewish magazine. But late in life he could see that his hopes had been disappointed, and in 1882 he published a pamphlet titled Auto-Emancipation, arguing that it was time for Jews to take charge of their own fate.

Why was it, Pinsker asked, that hostility toward Jews was so enduring and took so many different forms? “To the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the property owner a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival.” The reason, he argued, was that the Jews had lost their nationhood. Exiled from their ancient homeland, they were doomed to wander the Earth like ghosts without a body. The only way the Jews could rescue themselves, physically and spiritually, was by leaving Europe to settle in “a land of our own.”

Initially, Pinsker didn’t believe that this land had to be the biblical land of Israel. But around this time, a number of groups calling themselves “Lovers of Zion” started to organize for emigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman empire, and in 1884 Pinsker led a conference to unite them into a movement. These groups were tiny: One of the first was made up of 14 university students from Kharkiv, who helped establish an agricultural settlement called Rishon LeZion, Hebrew for “First to Zion.” Today it is one of the largest cities in Israel, with a population of about 250,000.

The most consequential Zionist awakening took place in 1895 in Paris, where Theodor Herzl was working as a foreign correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s leading newspaper. Herzl was a shining example of what Jewish emancipation was supposed to achieve. He was a successful journalist and playwright who spoke German rather than Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European Jewish masses. In fact, Herzl knew almost nothing about Judaism. Yet for his whole adult life, he wrote in his diary, “the Jewish Question grieved me bitterly.” If full assimilation couldn’t stop Jews from being excluded, hated, and attacked, what could?

Herzl came up with a staggeringly ambitious new answer. In his pamphlet The Jewish State, he called for the mass emigration of European Jews to Palestine—and, unlike earlier writers, he set out a plan for how it could be done. Jews would sell their property in Europe and use the proceeds to buy land in Palestine, working collectively through a new political body, the Society of Jews, and a new economic organization, the Jewish Company. The task was immense, but Herzl insisted that it was not impossible. He estimated that transferring the bulk of European Jewry, millions of people, would require an initial investment of $200 million (the equivalent of almost $8 billion today) and take about 20 years.

Herzl wasn’t the first person to entertain such a vision. The reason he’s remembered as the founder of Zionism is that he created institutions to make it a reality. In August 1897, he convened the first Zionist Congress, in Basel, Switzerland, where more than 200 delegates from 17 countries founded the Zionist Organization, a real-world version of Herzl’s Society of Jews. Zionism was now not just an idea but a movement, with leaders, a program, and the stature to negotiate with governments.

A skeptic would not have found the congress very impressive—just a collection of self-appointed activists who met for three days to make speeches. But after it was over, Herzl wrote in his diary: “Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word—which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly—it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.”

Fifty years and eight months later, on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel declared independence. Herzl didn’t live to see his prophecy vindicated: He died of heart disease in 1904, at the age of 44, and was buried in Vienna. In 1949, his remains were taken to Jerusalem, where they were interred in the new country’s national cemetery, on Mount Herzl.

Herzl may have been right about the timing, but the process of creating a Jewish state turned out to be completely different than he imagined. Radical movements generally underestimate the obstacles they face; it’s hard to be a realist and a revolutionary at the same time. As soon as Zionism evolved from an idea to a practical enterprise, most of the early theorists’ assumptions proved to be wrong.

The first mistake was to underestimate the difficulty of nation building. Zionism quickly became popular among Eastern European Jews, by offering a vision of dignity and renewal to an oppressed people. But attending Zionist meetings in Poland or Ukraine was far more appealing than actually packing up and moving to Palestine, a poor and remote place that few European Jews knew anything about. From 1881 to 1914, when the First World War cut off emigration, roughly 2 million Jews moved from Eastern Europe to America; only about 70,000 went to Palestine, and many of them left after discovering how difficult life was there.

The ones who stayed tended to be young and ideologically committed, and professed a combination of Zionist and socialist beliefs. This cohort included many of the future founders of Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, who emigrated from Poland to Palestine in 1906, at the age of 19. These Jews didn’t want to continue the European way of life at a different address, the way Herzl imagined. They wanted to create a new civilization, with its own language—a revived and modernized Hebrew—and an economy based on labor unions and collective farms.

This agenda brought them into direct conflict with Jewish religious authorities. Most traditional rabbis vehemently opposed Zionism, seeing it as a secular movement that led Jews away from God. They considered the very idea of settling the land of Israel before the coming of the Messiah to be heretical. For their part, many Zionists blamed religion for Jewish weakness and passivity. Others simply saw it as a relic, irrelevant in a modern society. When Herzl designed a flag for the prospective Jewish state, it included no Jewish symbols—just seven gold stars on a white background, representing the new country’s progressive seven-hour workday.

But with religion too, Zionism underestimated the complexity of the task it had set for itself. It reconceived Jewishness as a political identity, rather than a religious one, but how could a Jewish state avoid having a profound connection with Judaism? The depth of the connection became clear at the Zionist Congress in 1905, when the delegates considered the British government’s offer to designate a territory in Africa for Jewish settlement.

The “Uganda plan” made concrete a question that Hess, Pinsker, and others had asked. Did a Jewish state have to be in Palestine? If the goal was securing a place where the Jews could control their own destiny, couldn’t it be located anywhere? But after a bitter debate, the congress voted to reject the Uganda plan. Zionism couldn’t deny the implications of its name: The biblical land of Israel was the only homeland the Jews could accept.

[From the April 2024 issue: The golden age of American Jews is ending]

Zionism’s most consequential mistake was its failure to anticipate that Palestine’s Arab population of roughly 450,000 would resist the Jewish claim at every step. In his seminal 1979 book, The Question of Palestine, Edward Said wrote that “the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism” was “a struggle between a presence and an interpretation”—that is, between the Arabs already living in Palestine in the late 19th century and the Zionists’ understanding of the country as the past and future Jewish homeland.  

At first, Zionist theorists minimized that conflict. Herzl predicted that the Arabs of Palestine would welcome Jewish settlement, because it would raise the standard of living for everyone. Ottoman Palestine was poor and sparsely populated, but the assumption that its inhabitants would simply be grateful for the blessings of European civilization was self-serving. As early as 1891, Arabs in Jerusalem petitioned the Ottoman government to forbid the sale of land to Jews. After making a tour of Jewish settlements in 1912, Ahad Ha’am, a leading Zionist figure, warned that “many natives of Palestine” were beginning to “look askance, quite naturally, at the selling of land to ‘strangers,’ and do their best to put a stop to this evil.”

What was clear on the ground, however, seemed less important to Zionist leaders in Europe, who were focused on the bigger geopolitical picture. The movement was divided between “practical Zionism,” which pursued incremental growth of Jewish settlements in Palestine, and “political Zionism,” which aimed to win control of the country via a diplomatic coup. Once that was achieved, the political Zionists imagined, mass immigration would quickly create an overwhelming Jewish majority.

And for political purposes, public opinion in Palestine was irrelevant. At the time, there were no independent Arab countries in the Middle East; the whole region was ruled by the autocratic Ottoman empire, and the only vote that counted was the sultan’s. Herzl tried to convince the Turkish ruler to grant a charter for Jewish settlement. When that failed, Zionists lobbied European governments to bring pressure to bear. One of these unofficial diplomats was Chaim Weizmann, a chemist at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, who would become the first president of Israel.

These efforts paid off during the First World War, which found the British and the Turks on opposite sides. In the last months of 1917, a British army marched north from Egypt and drove Turkish forces out of Palestine in a swift campaign, reaching Jerusalem in six weeks. Britain and its ally France now had the power to redraw the map of the Middle East, carving Ottoman territory into Arab states that still exist today—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.

As for Palestine, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, announced in a public letter on November 2, 1917, that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The Balfour Declaration didn’t explicitly promise a Jewish state, but it looked like the fulfillment of Zionist hopes. The British Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin later called the Balfour Declaration “the greatest event in Jewish history since the destruction of Judea.”

The Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, by contrast, calls it “a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous population,” the start of a campaign to “force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” Khalidi’s book is titled The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, and in a real sense, the war in Gaza is the latest and most terrible episode in an armed conflict that has been going on since the end of World War I, when Arab resistance to Jewish settlement turned violent. In 1920, Arab and Jewish militias clashed in the village of Tel Hai. It was a minor skirmish that left 13 dead, but it looms large in Zionist history, for two reasons: It was the first battle involving a Jewish military unit in 1,800 years, and it signaled that the future of Palestine would not be decided by diplomacy alone.

In the 1920s, the question of how to respond to Arab opposition led to the most important split in the history of the Zionist movement, one that has shaped Israeli politics ever since. Should Jews in Palestine adopt a defensive position, relying on British protection while continuing to buy land and recruit new immigrants? Or should they recognize that Arab hostility was permanent and British support unreliable, and stake out an aggressive position in the conflict that was sure to come? The majority of Zionists, including Weizmann, the official leader of the movement, took the first course. Vladimir Jabotinsky demanded the second.

Next to Herzl, Jabotinsky is the most important figure in the history of Zionism, but he was and still is deeply divisive. A man of letters like Herzl—he wrote novels and translated Edgar Allan Poe into Hebrew—he was radicalized by the persecution of Jews in the Russian empire, and even changed his first name to the Hebrew Ze’ev, meaning “wolf.” During World War I, he organized a Jewish unit to fight in the British army, but no sooner had he settled in Palestine than the British put him in jail, for collecting weapons to arm a Jewish militia.

Jabotinsky demanded that the Zionist movement revise its strategy, and his followers became known as Revisionists. In an influential 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” he argued that mainstream Zionists were deluding themselves about the situation in Palestine. The conflict between Jews and Arabs was not a “misunderstanding” that could be solved “if we can only make it clear to them how moderate our intentions really are,” he wrote. It was a genuine clash of national interests, which became inevitable the moment Zionism set its sights on a Jewish state.

“There is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached,” Jabotinsky wrote. “So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say ‘non’ and withdraw from Zionism.” If Jews wanted to build a state, they would need the protection of an “iron wall”—that is, an armed force. Jabotinsky believed that Arabs and Jews would eventually live together in peace: “I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone,” he wrote. But peace would come only once Jews had proved that they could not be ejected, either.

The Jewish population of Palestine grew from about 84,000 in the 1922 census to 175,000 in the 1931 census, and then to an estimated 450,000 in 1939. This Jewish society—known as the Yishuv, from the Hebrew term for “settlement”—was the foundation of the State of Israel, and it could not have come into being without British sponsorship. But Jews never came close to being a majority in Palestine before World War II. The mass immigration that Herzl imagined did not take place, for several reasons. The country lacked the economic capacity to quickly absorb millions of people, and European Jews were reluctant to leave the places where they had lived for centuries, unless it was absolutely necessary. After Hitler came to power, in 1933, for instance, more than 50,000 German Jews left for Palestine.  

But in the 1930s, the British began to limit immigration as their commitment to a Jewish “national home” waned. In 1936, the Arabs of Palestine began a revolt against Jewish immigration and British rule that continued until the start of World War II, three years later. Britain had crucial economic interests in Arab countries, and British India had the largest Muslim population in the world. Britain’s leaders began to wonder whether it was worth antagonizing so many for the benefit of so few. In 1937, a commission proposed partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states; some Zionist leaders wanted to accept, but Arab leaders refused. In 1939, the British announced a new policy: Jewish immigration to Palestine would be capped at 75,000 total over the next five years, then effectively prohibited.

By revoking the Balfour Declaration on the eve of the Holocaust, the British ironically confirmed the most powerful argument for Zionism, from its beginnings to the present day: The Jewish people need a state of their own in order to survive. “We are facing an elemental calamity,” Jabotinsky testified to the committee considering partition in 1937. “We have got to save millions, many millions. I do not know whether it is a question of rehousing one third of the Jewish race, half of the Jewish race, or a quarter of the Jewish race; I do not know, but it is a question of millions.” By closing the door to Palestine, the British ensured that those millions had nowhere to go when the Holocaust began. By 1945, the Jewish population that Zionism was created to rescue, and that it imagined would populate the Jewish state, had been annihilated by the Nazis.  

It’s widely believed that Israel was created as reparations for the Holocaust. That’s one reason the country’s opponents have found it politically effective, since long before the war in Gaza, to characterize it as a genocidal state: If a country that exists as compensation for genocide is actually an agent of genocide, the rationale for its existence is negated. This is often paired with the charge that Israel is a product of colonialism—just another example of white Europeans stealing land from an Indigenous people.

A closer look at the events leading up to Israel’s declaration of independence shows that neither of these interpretations fits the facts. The revelation of the Nazi death camps did not lead Britain to hand over Palestine, or any part of it, to the Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors remained in displaced-persons camps in Europe for years after the end of World War II because the British continued to restrict immigration to Palestine, and no other country—including the United States—was willing to let them in. In a notorious episode in July 1947, a ship carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors to Palestine was intercepted by the Royal Navy, and the passengers were sent back to an internment camp in Germany.

What finally convinced Britain to withdraw from Palestine was a Jewish national-liberation movement employing the same tactics that drove European empires out of Asia and Africa—including terrorism. After World War II, the Revisionists’ military wing, known as the Irgun, embraced terrorism to pressure the British into withdrawal. In 1946, the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where the British had their administrative headquarters, killing 91 people. The head of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, became prime minister of Israel in 1977; the political party he founded, Likud, is now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Similar stories could be told about Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, and other former colonies where erstwhile terrorists became national leaders. If progressives who admire those nations’ liberation movements abhor Israel, it is because Zionism cuts across the usual political categories.

Zionism was born as a reaction against European bigotry and violence, but unlike other peoples victimized by Europeans, the Jews mostly lived in Europe, so their self-emancipation required leaving to create a new country somewhere else. The place they fixed on was their indigenous homeland, from which the Jews had been largely expelled centuries earlier by a genocidal empire. But the land of Israel was now Palestine, and the Jews could make a home there only against the will of its Arab inhabitants. Zionism was able to take root with the support of the British, but that support lasted barely 20 years, and then the Jews had to fight both the British and the Arabs.

By 1947, the British empire was in retreat everywhere, exhausted politically and economically by World War II. In August, British rule in India ended after 200 years, and the territory was hastily partitioned between Hindus and Muslims. The result was massive chaos and violence that killed up to 2 million people and left India and Pakistan mortal enemies to this day.

In November of the same year, the United Nations voted to partition the much smaller territory of Palestine between Arabs and Jews, with similar results. The Arabs of Palestine had never accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish presence there, and when Israel declared independence, they took up arms, supported by armies from five states. In the war that followed, Israel conquered part of the territory designated by the UN for a Palestinian state, and 700,000 Arabs were driven out or fled—an event remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.” Some 6,000 Jews, 1 percent of the Jewish population, were killed in the fighting.

The history of Zionism involves so many paradoxes that some basis can be found for almost any characterization of the movement. It was European and anti-European, religious and anti-religious. It can also be considered both a success and a failure.

In the summer of 1895, Theodor Herzl read an early draft of The Jewish State to a friend, Emil Schiff. When he was finished, he saw that Schiff had tears in his eyes—not because he was moved, but because he thought Herzl was in the grip of mental illness. “My dear friend, there is something wrong with your nerves. This book is a product of sickness. You must see a doctor,” Schiff recalled saying.

It wasn’t an unreasonable reaction. The notion that the Jews, who for 2,000 years had been synonymous with homelessness and powerlessness, could build a country of their own—not when the Messiah came, but within a human lifetime—sounded delusional. Yet in the epigraph to a later book, Herzl declared, “If you will it, it is no dream,” which became a Zionist slogan. The creation of Israel demonstrates that the most important force in human affairs isn’t wealth or numbers, but the power of an idea.

Zionism may have succeeded in creating a Jewish state, but it failed to solve the problem that the Jewish state was supposed to solve. The “sole purpose” of the movement, wrote Max Nordau, one of its early leaders, was “to normalize a people which is living and suffering under abnormal conditions.” Jabotinsky said the same thing: “Every nation on Earth, every normal nation, they all have states of their own,” he testified to the British commission. “That is the normal condition for a people.”

Part of the normal condition of a state is to have enemies. In predicting that the Jews would have no enemies once they had their own country, Herzl was thinking of the hatred they would escape by ceasing to be powerless; he did not think about the hatred they would attract by exercising power. The key contribution of Revisionism to the Zionist project was to understand this fact and take it seriously. Jabotinsky was viewed by the Jewish liberals and intellectuals of his time as little better than a fascist, because he insisted that Zionism’s goals could not be achieved without force.

The history of Israel, from 1948 to the present, shows that he was right. If not for its military power, the Jewish state would long since have been destroyed—by invasion in 1948, 1967, or 1973; by terrorist assaults like the one perpetrated on October 7; or by Syria, Iraq, or Iran, whose attempts to develop nuclear weapons have been thwarted by Israeli attacks. Today, however, the most serious dangers facing Israel—terrorism, international isolation, the radicalism of far-right politicians and religious settlers—can’t be overcome by force. In different ways, they are all products of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a century of violence has shown that, despite the fantasies of extremists on both sides, this conflict cannot end in military victory. If it is to end at all, it can only be by achieving something even more difficult: peaceful coexistence.

When Israel’s war of independence concluded with an armistice, in 1949, the new state, intent on preserving a Jewish majority, refused to allow the Arabs expelled during the fighting to return. About 150,000 Arabs remained in Israel, constituting 20 percent of the population. But no country of Palestine came into existence in the part of the territory designated by the UN for an Arab state, because it was annexed by neighboring Arab countries—the Gaza Strip by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan.

Then, in 1967, Israel conquered those areas in the Six-Day War, gaining control over most of historic Palestine. This was the goal of Revisionist Zionism, but the Revisionists had assumed that it would happen because of mass Jewish immigration. “There will always be two nations in Palestine—which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority,” Jabotinsky wrote in “The Iron Wall.” Today, however, the Jewish and Arab populations “between the river and sea” are roughly equal, about 7.5 million each. This means that the Jewish state’s control over all of historic Palestine cannot be maintained democratically. Roughly 2 million Arabs are citizens of Israel and participate in the country’s elections. More than 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military occupation, and 2 million in Gaza are ruled by Hamas.

Neither Jews nor Arabs believe this situation is desirable or sustainable, but no one has found a way out of it. From the 1930s to the 1990s, repeated proposals were made to settle the conflict by partition—creating two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs. But for two countries to live in peace in a territory the size of New Jersey would require a degree of mutual acceptance and trust that seems even less attainable today than it did in the past. In 2012, 66 percent of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and 61 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution; in 2025, those figures were down to 33 percent and 27 percent.

[Graeme Wood: Israel can’t postpone its reckoning forever]

Another way for the conflict to end would be for one side to expel the other once and for all. When expelling Palestinians is proposed by far-right Israeli politicians, the world condemns the idea, and rightly so. But when the converse is proposed—dismantling the State of Israel and expelling the Jews—it is applauded by much of Western enlightened opinion, under the name of anti-Zionism. An illustrative example came in the summer of 2025, when Zohran Mamdani was running for mayor of New York City and a protester berated him for saying that Israel has the right to exist. Mamdani, who is as anti-Zionist as they come, meant that the country can continue in some form, but not as a Jewish state. That wasn’t good enough for the protester, who accused the future mayor of hypocrisy for saying Israel can exist at all while also embracing the slogan “Free Palestine.”

The protester was insisting on a fact that the politician preferred to obscure: Anti-Zionism is the only contemporary political movement whose goal is to destroy a country. Rather than describing this as a struggle against Zionism, a malign abstraction, anyone who calls for the destruction of Israel should be obligated to explain in concrete terms what would happen to the approximately 7.5 million Jews living there. Would half of the world’s Jewish population be “driven into the sea,” as Arab propagandists long threatened—that is, murdered, as on October 7? Would they “go back to Europe,” as protesters on American college campuses sometimes demand—where 6 million Jews were murdered, and despite the fact that today, half of Israeli Jews trace their ancestry to the Middle East and North Africa? Many anti-Zionists openly endorse these ideas. In March, the prominent Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa responded to a video of Israel’s defense minister on X with this comment: “these parasites will be sent back to Eastern Europe, if not the gallows.”

Other anti-Zionists, including Jewish ones, are more likely to say that Jews and Arabs will live together peacefully in a multiconfessional country. This was the vision that Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist currently fighting deportation from the U.S., shared in an April interview with the Forward, a Jewish publication. He acknowledged that “it might sound like a very ideal utopia.” But the idea of Israeli Jews living under a government that would include Hamas or Hezbollah isn’t utopian. It’s a recipe for the kind of sectarian civil war that has devastated Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq for decades. No wonder the idea of a single state is overwhelmingly opposed by both Palestinians and Israelis.

It can seem that the only alternative left is despair. In September 2025, a Gallup poll found that only 21 percent of Israelis and 23 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem “think that a permanent peace between Israel and Palestine will ever be achieved.” But perhaps the idea with the greatest potential to shape a better future in Israel is the same one that has shaped the country since the beginning: Zionism.

For those who have turned the word into an obscenity, it may seem bizarre to suggest that Zionism can be a constructive force. They believe that it must be vanquished, along with the state it brought into being, for the good of humanity. This is a role that Jews and Judaism have played in the Western imagination for thousands of years. For adherents of medieval Christianity, of the Enlightenment, of biological racism, it was obvious that Jewish collective existence was the chief obstacle to human progress. Today, Zionism is seen the same way. If, as the radical Swedish thinker Andreas Malm put it in the title of a recent book, “the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the Earth,” then the survival of humanity depends on the elimination of the Jewish state.

But though this logic is emotionally compelling to anti-Zionists, its actual tendency is to make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unsolvable. By insisting that Jewish statehood is an illegitimate aspiration that appeals only to evil people, anti-Zionists confirm Zionism’s central argument: that without a Jewish country, the Jewish people are defenseless in a hostile world. In the face of such hostility, Israelis consider it suicidal to give up military power or territorial control.

The effective target of anti-Zionism is not Israel but Jews in the United States and Europe. Since October 7, they have had their first taste of a kind of pressure that earlier Jewish generations knew well: to win individual approval by repudiating collective identity. On social media, on college campuses, in professional organizations, Jews know that they can be called upon at any time to reject Zionism and Israel, in whatever terms the caller demands. But as with other kinds of bullying, this demand cannot be satisfied, because it doesn’t want to be satisfied. Giving in is always interpreted as a sign of weakness that encourages further demands.

History, and the experience of some of today’s leading Jewish critics of Israel, shows that individual Jews can’t dissociate themselves from the status and fate of the Jews as a whole, even if they try. Earlier this year, the New York City politician Brad Lander defeated an incumbent in a Democratic House primary, partly on the strength of his outspoken criticism of Israel. But in August, when Lander joined a demonstration against a Hindu-nationalist speaker at Madison Square Garden, he was attacked by his fellow protesters for not being anti-Israel enough. “We don’t want no Zionists here. Get the fuck out!” one shouted.

Instead of seeing the persistence of Zionism as a historical or moral error, it’s more accurate—and more useful—to understand that persistence as a political opportunity. The reason Zionism didn’t disappear in 1948 is that its mission went beyond creating a Jewish state. The state is necessary for the Jewish people to survive; that belief has been abundantly and tragically vindicated. But the history of Zionism shows that it is compatible with many different conceptions of the Jewish state: territorially expansive or limited, religious or secular, socialist or capitalist. This openness made for bitter divisions in the Zionist movement before 1948, as it does in Israeli politics today. What’s certain is that, by any standard, the national life that Zionism envisioned—a “normal” existence, not one based on domination and fear—has yet to be achieved. The work of Zionism will remain incomplete until Jews and Arabs live in peace in the land that both have the right to call home.