Why Israeli Security-Service Agents Wanted to Talk With Charlottesville’s Mayor
During the fall of 2022, my family and I lived in Tel Aviv, where my wife and I were visiting professors at Reichman University, in Herzliya. I taught a class called “Democracy and Dictatorship.” It was a fraught time. Almost all of my students were in the military or veterans. Several were deeply concerned that Benjamin Netanyahu would bring a new era of antagonistic nationalism to Israel, at a time when they felt the country needed cohesion instead. One said she would likely leave the country if he won.
As the former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, I was asked to speak at the university’s annual World Summit on Counter-Terrorism conference, on a panel about the dangers of far-right terrorism in the United States. In my presentation, I recounted a chilling conversation I’d had in June 2017 with a civil servant from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism. He told me that Trump-administration officials had basically instructed his office to stop talking about white nationalists when they referred to domestic terrorism in the United States. He implied that this decision had been made for domestic political reasons.
Two months later, Charlottesville was invaded by multiple violent white-nationalist militias who’d plotted their attack
