Friday November 6, 2026 – כ״ו חֶשְׁוָן תשפ”ז
Introductory note: Rabbi Josh Weinberg is Vice President for Israel and Reform Zionism at the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) and the Executive Director of ARZA, the Association of Reform Zionists of America.
“This week’s American midterm elections and last week’s Israeli elections have brought us to an important inflection point. They have exposed the fragility of political assumptions that have shaped both countries for decades and raised fundamental questions about democracy, political alliances, international relationships, and the future of liberalism.
For liberal Zionists, this is not simply a moment to assess who won and who lost. It is a moment to ask what we believe, what we are prepared to defend, and what kind of future we are working to create.
I would argue that liberal Zionism has never been more necessary, but it has also never been more challenging.
There is a question at the heart of this moment that Yehuda Kurtzer articulated particularly well:
“Have we reduced Zionism from an imaginative project about the future of the Jewish people to a test of loyalty to the existing State of Israel and, increasingly, to its government?
That distinction matters enormously. Zionism was never supposed to be only about having a Jewish Nation-State. It was about what the Jewish people could make possible once we had one. Jewish sovereignty, I argue, was the beginning of the project, not its conclusion.”
A different Israeli political coalition?
Perhaps the most consequential question emerging from Israel’s election is whether a new government can be formed with the participation or support of Arab political parties.
The combined 19 seats won by Ra’am (8 seats – this party has already been a member of a ruling government coalition under former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in 2021-22) and the Joint List (11 seats) make Arab citizens and their elected representatives central to Israel’s political future. A coalition that relies on Arab political participation presents an extraordinary opportunity.
Could Israel take a meaningful step toward becoming a more inclusive democracy by recognizing Arab citizens not merely as constituents whose votes matter, but as legitimate partners in governing the country?
Real ideological differences exist between the Arab parties and the Jewish parties seeking to replace Netanyahu. There are difficult questions about security, Hamas, Palestinian national aspirations, Israel’s Jewish character, and the responsibilities of government. These cannot be swept away. Nor should political partnership be confused with agreement on every issue.
But democracy is not predicated on ideological uniformity. It requires the ability to build coalitions across differences around shared interests and responsibilities.
This is where liberal Zionism must move beyond defending Israel’s existence and start articulating what we want Israeli sovereignty to accomplish.
We cannot advocate for a Jewish and democratic state while treating the democratic participation of one-fifth of its citizens as an existential threat. The question is not whether Israel can remain both Jewish and democratic while incorporating its Arab citizens into political life. The question is whether it can fulfill its democratic promise without doing so.
The American relationship is changing
The American midterm elections offer another important lesson. The political landscape is shifting, and the traditional bipartisan consensus around Israel can no longer be taken for granted.
President Trump’s statements about phasing out American military assistance to Israel, including the nearly $3.8 billion in annual assistance under the current Memorandum of Understanding (negotiated by President Obama), are particularly significant.
Military assistance has never been simply about the money. It represents a strategic partnership, a shared commitment to Israel’s security, and an acknowledgment of American interests in a stable Middle East. But the relationship cannot be sustained indefinitely through appeals to historical loyalty or by tying Israel’s fortunes to one American political party.
An American Jew can support Israel’s security, care deeply about Israelis living under threat, oppose the conduct of an American military campaign, and hold the American president accountable. These are not contradictory commitments. They are the responsibilities of someone who belongs to two democratic societies and takes both seriously.
Peoplehood cannot require political uniformity. It must instead demand curiosity, empathy, and a willingness to understand the very different circumstances in which our fellow Jews live.
The dangerous convergence of the extremes
Perhaps the most troubling development is the growing convergence between far-left anti-Zionism and far-right isolationism.
These movements emerge from different ideological traditions. The far right is often motivated by nationalism, isolationism, and hostility toward international institutions. The far left frequently approaches Israel through an anti-imperialist framework that collapses the complexities of Zionism, Jewish self-determination, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a single narrative of oppression and colonialism, missing the essential notion that the Jews are a People and a Nation (עם ואומה) and established our state in our historic Homeland.
Yet increasingly, they arrive at overlapping conclusions: Israel is illegitimate, American support for Israel is indefensible, and the liberal international order that has sustained the postwar world is itself suspect.
The danger is that Israel becomes increasingly isolated internationally, embraced primarily by those on the right who support its government for reasons that may have little to do with liberal democratic values, while rejected by those on the left who cannot distinguish between opposition to a particular Israeli government and opposition to the existence of a Jewish state.
This is not a sustainable position for Israel or the Jewish people.
And it makes the work of liberal Zionists to explain as clearly and urgently as possible why support for Israel is legitimate and important. We must refuse the false choice between a right-wing Zionism that demands loyalty without accountability and a left-wing anti-Zionism that demands abandoning the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination.
The Democratic Party and the changing conversation about Israel
We also need to be honest about a development that can no longer be treated as marginal: a growing number of Democratic candidates have campaigned on platforms that explicitly accuse Israel of genocide and promise to end American military assistance to the Jewish state. This is not the same as criticizing Netanyahu’s government, calling for a ceasefire, demanding humanitarian access, or supporting conditions on particular weapons transfers. Those are distinct positions, and we should be careful not to collapse them into one category.
But there is a meaningful difference between advocating accountability and making the termination of the U.S.-Israel security relationship a campaign commitment. There is also a difference between describing particular Israeli actions as unlawful or morally indefensible and declaring that Israel, as a state, is engaged in genocide. That is an extraordinarily serious legal accusation, and it should be addressed through evidence, law, and serious debate, not simply accepted as a political slogan meant to delegitimize Israel, curry favor with anti-Israel and/or antisemitic forces, or dismissed without engagement.
The International Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) has identified three distinct camps among Democratic policymakers and candidates: those who oppose all military assistance and use the language of genocide and apartheid; those who favor conditioning assistance on human rights and international law while generally avoiding those categorical accusations; and those who support the U.S.-Israel alliance while increasingly criticizing particular Israeli policies. This is a useful distinction. It reminds us that the Democratic Party is not monolithic, and that the growing presence of the first group should not lead us to disregard the much larger and more complicated conversation taking place across the party. One more thing to consider. There are members of the Democratic Party in the United States who oppose giving offensive weaponry to Israel but support giving defensive weapon systems such as Iron Dome and Jacob’s Sling. That is not an anti-Israel position, and those members of Congress who have taken that position should not be accused of being anti-Israel or antisemitic.
Our Liberal Zionist response must therefore be neither defensive nor dismissive. We should listen seriously to the concerns that animate progressive voters and elected officials: the civilian toll in Gaza, humanitarian access, the conduct of the war, settlement expansion, settler violence, and the absence of a credible political horizon for Palestinians. We should be willing to criticize Israeli policies and insist that American assistance be consistent with American law and democratic values. At the same time, we should challenge the idea that ending all military assistance, including defensive support, is the appropriate or inevitable expression of concern for Palestinian rights. We should ask what security arrangements would replace it, what consequences such a policy would have for Israeli civilians, and whether it advances a future in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in security and dignity. And we North American Jews must remain sensitive to Israelis who continue to live the trauma of October 7 and not judge them for it.
Here, Gadi Eisenkot’s four principles for potential partners in an Israeli government offer a useful starting point for evaluating policymakers outside Israel, too. Eisenkot has called for:
- Recognition of Israel as a Jewish, democratic, liberal, and egalitarian state;
- Commitment to the values of Israel’s Declaration of Independence;
- Advocacy for equal obligations of military, national, or civilian service for all Israeli citizens;
- Recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization whose military and governing capabilities must be dismantled.
These principles were articulated as conditions for joining an Israeli coalition, but they also offer a broader framework for the conversations we should be having with American and other international leaders.
The application abroad is not literal in every respect. American elected officials are not being asked to adopt Israel’s national service system. But the underlying questions are relevant everywhere: Do policymakers recognize Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people while insisting that it remain democratic, liberal, and egalitarian? Do they take the values of equality, human dignity, and democratic accountability seriously? Do they believe that civic responsibility and the protection of democratic institutions are shared obligations? And can they unequivocally distinguish between legitimate Palestinian national aspirations and the extremist anti-democratic anti-Israel and anti-Jewish ideology and terrorism of Hamas? These questions should be asked of friends and critics alike.
This framework also helps us avoid the false choice between unconditional support and categorical rejection. A policymaker can be a friend of Israel and a critic of its government. A policymaker can support Palestinian rights and oppose Hamas. A policymaker can defend Israel’s security while insisting that its government uphold the principles of its Declaration of Independence. What matters is not whether someone agrees with every Israeli policy, but whether their positions are grounded in a coherent commitment to Jewish self-determination, democracy, equality, security, and the possibility of a just political future for both peoples.
We should neither abandon our Democratic relationships nor abandon our Zionist commitments. We must learn to hold both.
We cannot afford to cede the Democratic Party to those who see Israel exclusively through the lens of opposition, any more than we can cede Zionism to those who see liberalism as incompatible with Jewish sovereignty. Our task is to insist that there is another way—and to demonstrate what that way looks like.
The goal is to build a new, broad-based conversation about the strategic, moral, and democratic foundations of the U.S.-Israel relationship. That conversation must include progressive Democrats, mainstream Democrats, Republicans, Independents, American Jewish organizations, Israelis (Jewish and Arab citizens), and Palestinians. And it must be rooted in the conviction that a secure Israel and a just future for Palestinians are not mutually exclusive aspirations.
From loyalty to imagination
The great mistake of Zionism was not that it succeeded in creating a state. It was that, in the process of moving from aspiration to sovereignty, we sometimes allowed the urgent demands of providing a refuge for Jews victimized by antisemitism and of state-building to displace the moral imagination that animated the movement in the first place.
The achievement of Jewish sovereignty for the first time in two millennia was extraordinary. But sovereignty was meant to be the platform from which the Jewish people could create something meaningful: a society grounded in the Jewish values of justice, responsibility, creativity, and collective purpose.
The Declaration of Independence provides an unfinished blueprint. It imagines a Jewish state that guarantees equality to all its inhabitants, develops the country for the benefit of all its residents, and aspires to peace with its neighbors.
That vision is not an obstacle to Zionism. It is Zionism.
Liberal Zionism must therefore be more than a political position between the Israeli right and left, or between American Jewish establishment politics and progressive activism. It must be an affirmative vision of what Jewish sovereignty makes possible.
It must insist that Jewish self-determination and Palestinian self-determination need not be mutually exclusive; that security and human rights reinforce one another for both peoples; that religious pluralism is essential to Jewish democracy; and that the participation of Israel’s Arab citizens is fundamental to Israel’s democratic legitimacy.
It must also create space for American Jews to engage with Israel without being asked to suspend their own democratic commitments or accept the policies of an Israeli government as an extension of their own political identity.
Peoplehood is not a demand that we all think alike. It is the recognition that we belong to one another even when we disagree.
The recent elections in Israel and the United States have created uncertainty, but they have also created openings and opportunities. Our task is not to defend the status quo. It is to reclaim the imagination that made Zionism possible in the first place.
We need to ask not only what Israel needs from us, but what we can contribute to Israel’s future. Not only how we remain loyal to the Jewish state, but how we help it live up to its highest aspirations.
Liberal Zionism is not a compromise between being liberal and being Zionist. It is the conviction that Jewish sovereignty carries an obligation to build a more just and democratic society.
That is the Zionism worth fighting for.
Shabbat Shalom”
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