In The State of Israel vs. the Jews, which was published in France in 2020, journalist Sylvain Cypel argued that then-incoming US president Joe Biden had the opportunity to “change the relationship between the United States and Israel for the first time in a very long time.” Cypel suggested that, by leveraging Israel’s security concerns with Iran and withdrawing diplomatic support from Israel at the United Nations Security Council, Biden could force Israel to end its decades-long occupation of Palestine. Although Cypel described this shift as improbable — especially given Biden’s nomination of “traditional” Antony Blinken to secretary of state — he saw the alternative as catastrophic: “If the extreme right ever comes to power in Israel, the entire Middle East could be dragged into a dizzying round of terrifying conflagrations.”

Two years later, the extreme right came to power in Israel, and the explosions predicted by Cypel soon followed. As of this writing, Israel’s war in Gaza, which many experts have called a genocide, has claimed the lives of more than twenty-seven thousand Palestinians and sparked a series of regional reprisals.

It is surely no comfort to Cypel that his worst predictions have come to pass. Born in France to a Zionist father, he visited Israel after high school, was conscripted into the Israeli military, lived on a communal farm, and enrolled in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Following the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Cypel began to draw parallels between the French colonization of Algeria and the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. As Cypel became increasingly anti-Zionist, he was further ostracized from Israeli society, eventually returning to France but continuing to cover the region for Le Monde.