Dossier mode
“Not Like Everyone Else”: Israel’s Ideology of Exemption
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the Israeli Influence on the United States hub.
“Not like everyone else.”
'We are not like everyone else, and that is why the laws that apply to everyone else do not apply to us' — a sitting member of Israel's Knesset, on camera. Not a fringe figure, and not a fringe sentiment: it runs through the government's posture toward international law and a large share of Israeli-Jewish opinion.
The quotes and the polling are FACT. That they reflect a mainstreamed ideology of exemption — not a slip — is PROBABLY TRUE. This documents a political ideology and specific statements, NOT Jews as a people or Judaism; we reject the antisemitic version of this claim outright and carry the large Israeli-Jewish dissent.
Antisemitism assigns a belief to Jews by birth. This quotes named Israeli officials, cites a named survey of Israeli Jews, attributes every claim, and counts the dissenters. That's the difference between an essence and an evidence file.
A sitting Knesset member said, on camera, that the laws binding other nations do not bind Israel.
In September 2026, video circulated of Hanoch Milwidsky, a Likud member of the Israeli Knesset: 'We are not like everyone else, and that is why all the laws that apply to everyone else do not apply to us.' He grounded the exemption in a religious claim — 'the Jewish people are born a high people' with 'a duty to create here a land of miracles and virtue' — and urged deference to religious authority over international diplomats. Captured on video, translated and shared by Israeli historian Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, reported by Middle East Monitor. Milwidsky is a sitting legislator in the governing party.
The current cabinet says it out loud: Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
Not a backbench problem. Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister, is a self-described 'proud homophobe' (Haaretz headlined a 2023 interview 'I'm a Fascist Homophobe, but I Won't Stone Gays'); in 2016 he defended segregating Jewish and Arab women in hospital maternity wards (Times of Israel); he organised a 2006 anti-gay 'Beast Parade' against Jerusalem Pride (Haaretz); and he has called for state 'reprisal' operations against Palestinians (Haaretz). Itamar Ben-Gvir, national security minister, is a disciple of Meir Kahane — whose Kach (ban Jewish–Arab intermarriage; mass expulsion) was barred from the Knesset under Israel's own anti-racism law and listed by the US as a terrorist organisation. Ben-Gvir was convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organisation, and for years kept a portrait of Hebron mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein in his home. Their own records, not an inference from religion.
And it did not start with them: officeholders on the record, across more than a decade.
In December 2013, Deputy Minister of Religious Services (later deputy defense minister) Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan told Maariv 'a Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual.' In July 2014 then-MK Ayelet Shaked (later justice minister) posted approvingly Uri Elitzur's article calling 'the entire Palestinian people is the enemy' — internationally condemned. In 2012 Interior Minister Eli Yishai said most migrants 'do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man' (Haaretz). In 2009 Housing Minister Ariel Atias said the Arab population's 'spread' 'must be stopped' (Haaretz). In a 2004 New Yorker profile, Moshe Feiglin — later a Likud deputy Knesset speaker — said 'you can't teach an Arab to be democratic.' And Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the state-appointed chief rabbi of Safed, said in 2011 that 'Arab culture is very cruel' (Haaretz), after a rabbis' ruling against renting to Arabs. The rule: anyone who held public office OR led a political party and said it in earnest belongs — including when the framing is religious. Set aside: private clergy, activists, or texts by people who neither held office nor led a party.
It was not only elected officials: the spiritual heads of governing-coalition parties said it too.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef — founder and supreme spiritual leader of Shas, in Netanyahu's coalition from 2009–2012 — said in a 2010 sermon that 'goyim were born only to serve us… We will sit like an effendi and eat,' likening non-Jews' purpose to a work animal's. Reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency; condemned by Jewish organizations in the US and Israel. Included under the same office-or-party rule, with the caution stated plainly: not a claim about Judaism (most rabbis and Jews reject this reading), but about the political boss of a governing party, whose word was that party's law. A party leader's doctrine is a political fact; a private congregation's is not.
At the state level, that exemption is policy: Israel rejects the authority of international courts over its conduct.
In July 2024 the ICJ found Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful and its policies in breach of the prohibition on racial segregation/apartheid. In November 2024 the ICC issued arrest warrants for PM Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant over the Gaza war. Israel's response in both cases was to reject the courts' jurisdiction rather than answer on the merits — Netanyahu denouncing the ICC warrants as 'antisemitic' and denying any international tribunal has authority over Israel. Whatever one thinks of the rulings, the response embodies the claim: the laws that apply to everyone else do not apply here.
It is not only the leadership: mainstream polling shows the belief is widely held among Israeli Jews.
Pew Research Center's 2016 'Israel's Religiously Divided Society' — a major survey — found 79% of Israeli Jews agreed that Jews deserve preferential treatment in Israel, and 48% agreed Arabs should be 'expelled or transferred' from Israel, while 46% disagreed. Widely reported by Reuters, VOA, and the Times of Israel. These are attitudes among Israeli Jews specifically: preferential status is a majority view, expulsion a view held by roughly half — not a fringe.
Put together, this is a mainstreamed ideology of exemption — not a set of gaffes.
A judgment about pattern and prevalence, graded as a strong inference. One quote could be one hardliner; one poll a snapshot. But the same claim recurs at every level — an open declaration on the Knesset floor, a government rejecting the jurisdiction of the world's highest courts, and a public in which preferential status for Jews is the majority view. That convergence turns isolated statements into a documented current: the belief that Israel is exempt from the rules it and its allies demand of everyone else. Carried dissent: 46% of Israeli Jews rejected the expulsion view, hundreds of thousands have marched against the government, and some of the fiercest critics of this ideology are Israeli and Jewish.
A law that binds everyone except one is not a law.
The exemption isn't self-executing — it needs a guarantor. Israel can reject the ICJ and ICC and treat the laws of war as optional only because the United States shields it: the vetoes that stop the Security Council, the weapons that keep the war supplied, the diplomatic cover that answers 'war crime' with 'antisemitism.' An ideology of exemption in Jerusalem is underwritten by policy in Washington — which is why an American accountability project documents it. It sits with In Their Own Words (how officials described Gaza after Oct 7) and Colonization, by Its Own Name (the movement's founding self-description). The line this page walks on purpose: the slur assigns supremacy to Jews by birth and we refuse it; the ideology assigns it to named officials and a measured public, and we document it — the difference between an essence and an evidence file.