To Progressive Democratic and Democratic-Socialist Candidates for Congress and Senate,

We American Jews who love and support Israel but oppose the policies of the most right-wing extremist and messianic government in Israel’s history, and who believe in the right of the Palestinian people to a state of their own alongside Israel need to know your response to a number of questions before we decide whether to vote for you.

Though winning the majority in the House and Senate for Democrats is a very high priority for us in order effectively to resist the Trump Administration’s assault on American democracy and our democratic norms, the rule of law, the US Constitution, health care, civil rights, immigrant rights, human rights, the environment, the destruction of America’s good name internationally, and to be a bulwark in stopping the most self-dealing and corrupt American president and administration in our 250 years as a nation, for many of us American Jews who care deeply about the importance of the American-Israel relationship, some of you have taken positions against the State of Israel that question its legitimacy and its right to self-defense following 7 October 2023.

After the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when Egypt and Syria simultaneously attacked Israel and the United States came to Israel’s aid to prevent its destruction, I was asked what I would do if the United States ever turned against Israel. At the time the question suggested a reality I could not imagine because it was widely accepted in the United States that it was in America’s self-interest to support Israel as a bulwark of democracy in the Middle East and that Israel shared with the United States common democratic values.

I, along with many American Jews who historically have voted in majority percentages for Democratic Party candidates, are therefore deeply worried that there are growing numbers of candidates for Congress and the Senate in the progressive political left who have unabashedly turned away from support for Israel and blurred the lines between the extremist Netanyahu government and the State of Israel as a whole. These candidates are forcing those of us in the pro-Israel, pro-peace and pro-democracy movement to choose between voting for you as Democratic Party candidates or supporting the people and State of Israel, a choice we never thought we would have to make.

It is therefore very important for us to know your true beliefs and attitude towards the State of Israel.

I ask you therefore to respond publicly to the following questions:

• Do you believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, and that the Land of Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people?
• Do you believe that the Palestinian people have a right to a demilitarized state of some kind in their historic homeland alongside Israel?
• Do you believe that your support for the rights of the Palestinian people is a zero-sum game that precludes you from advocating for Israel as a long-term American ally?
• Do you support the principle of two states for two peoples (i.e. Israel and Palestine) in their shared national homeland?
• Do you oppose or support the global Boycott Divestiture and Sanctions (BDS) movement that denies the right of the Jewish people to a state anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea?
• Do you condemn categorically Hamas’s and Islamic Jihad’s attack against Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023 in which they murdered and raped more than 1200 babies, children, women, young and old people, and took more than 250 hostages into tunnels under Gaza for many months of captivity in inhumane conditions?
• Do you believe that what occurred on 7 October 2023, the worst attack against the Jewish people in more than one hundred years of the Israel-Arab conflict, that Israel had the right to respond militarily in its self-defense against Hamas and Islamic Jihad?
• Though Israel’s response tragically destroyed the Gaza Strip and created a humanitarian disaster that many supporters of Israel criticized harshly, do you believe that Israel committed genocide against the Palestinians? If so, on what basis do you make this claim given that the accusation has not been adjudicated by the International Criminal Court? (1)
• Do you condemn both Israeli settler violence against Palestinian civilians and Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians in the West Bank? (2)
• Do you condemn nations the human rights record of which are far worse than anything Israel has done (e.g. North Korea, Syria, Myanmar, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Sudan, Turkey, Yemen, Belarus, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Somalia, and more)?
• Do you believe that Hamas should have any role in a future Palestinian government given its continuing rejection of Israel’s legitimacy?

To your constituents:

For those of you who feel as I do and living in congressional districts and states in which candidates for Congress and the Senate have been hostile to Jews and Israel, and who have not adequately responded to the above questions, I ask you to forward this blog to them and their campaigns and insist that they respond to the questions above in detail.

Notes:

1. The Genocide Convention defines “Genocide” as the committing of certain acts “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The key determining factor in characterizing a war as a “genocide” requires “intent.” Given that Hamas deliberately built its tunnels underneath homes, apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, health clinics, and mosques, it is unclear without an impartial inquiry that there was a crime committed by Israel that is as serious as “genocide”. For candidates for office in the US to cavalierly accuse Israel of genocide in its war against Hamas in order to politically align themselves with anti-Israel forces on the progressive left is slanderous. This does not mean that war crimes were not committed or that actions were taken that broke international law. On 8 October 2023, I heard anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian forces in the United States already calling Israel’s military response to Hamas a “genocide.” At that point, the war had not actually even begun. Further, in Israel Arab-Israeli citizens have rights, and though they are discriminated against, there is no effort by the Israeli government to expel them from Israel. And in the West Bank, there has been no action such as what happened in Gaza against the Palestinian Arab people. Reasonable and fair-minded people ought to wait for an objective evaluation by the International Criminal Court to determine what was done and what the intent was in the prosecution of the war against Hamas before making a judgment concerning “Genocide.”
2. Violent attacks are occurring by terrorists in both the Jewish and Arab populations against each other in the West Bank. However, Jewish settlers are attacking Palestinian civilians and their property with far more frequency than Palestinians are attacking Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

“Everything depends on how we live in our land and how we behave here. Our brethren in the Diaspora want to see here what is missing there in the cultural and spiritual and moral life of Galut [Diaspora]; … If they do not feel that our values here are unwavering, we will not find a path to their hearts … Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] must give the Diaspora something more than Jews of any other country can give: something with a spirit of holiness, above and beyond the usual and commonplace.”

So said Chaim Nachman Bialik in Tel Aviv in January 1926 as he prepared to tour the United States and raise money for the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Bialik’s aspirations for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel beg the question: Has Israel lived up to Bialik’s and the founders of the Jewish state’s expectations and dreams?

In many ways it has. Israel remains a parliamentary democracy, though Israel needs a constitution that delineates clearly the separation of governmental powers and that spells out human rights for all its citizens and inhabitants.

Israel absorbed millions of Jews from around the world, built great universities and a thriving modern culture. It is a world center of innovation in medical, communications, environmental, and agricultural technologies; pharmaceuticals; computer software development; and start-up companies of every kind. Israel claims more PhDs per capita than any other country in the world, and despite multiple wars and terrorism, Israel’s economy has attracted international companies and businesses to build there. After the murderous Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 Israel re-established itself as the most powerful and strategic military in the Middle East.

Despite these significant accomplishments, Israel today is not the source of pride and inspiration for a portion of US Jews. Why?

Part of the answer has to do with what North America has become for Jews. Here we are beneficiaries of a vibrant and multicultural society that respects religious and minority rights despite the dramatic rise in antisemitism in recent years and the fact, according to polls, that American Jews are feeling increasingly unsafe. Nevertheless, many Jews no longer feel they need Israel as an anchor for their Jewish identity. Some feel that Israel has taken them for granted and that their voice and concerns are not heard by the Israeli government. Others have turned away because of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians there, and Jewish settler violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.

I was born a year after the state was established and raised on “the crisis narrative” of Jewish history. The Holocaust hovered as a dark shadow over my childhood and has been a defining existential experience that taught Jews that when we are powerless, we are vulnerable to destruction. I was raised with the understanding that Israel could not lose a single war and that it had to fight for its existence over and over again. It had to have the strongest military and maintain its qualitative military and technological edge over every other Middle East nation. Since the founding of Israel in 1948, its survival has been the number one priority for Israelis and world Jewry and the need for security the number one policy requirement of every Israeli ruling coalition government.

We come to this crisis mode honestly. We Jews are a traumatized people from experiences ancient and modern. Our wounds are deep and our memories are long. Our closets are filled with ghosts of antisemites past and present. We understand that Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Palestinian extremists are foes committed to Israel’s destruction.

The crisis narrative has served to unify world Jewry and propel us to activism on Israel’s behalf. However, the crisis model is no longer adequate by itself to assure the loyalty and commitment to Israel of many diaspora Jews who do not respond well to traditional aggressive Israeli advocacy. They are less worried about overt military threats and delegitimization, and are more concerned with social justice, equal rights, religious pluralism, and the compassionate treatment of those on the periphery of Israeli society: the Palestinians of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Israel’s poor, its Arab citizens, women, and immigrant workers.

Dr. Tal Becker, an associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, has written:

“The conventional [crisis-based] narrative is both narrow and shallow. Narrow, in that its focus is on the physical existence of the Jewish people in their homeland, not on the breadth of what this sovereign project might offer for the collective Jewish experience. Shallow, in that it pursues Jewish survival for its own sake but tells no deeper story as to why that survival is important and worth fighting for.”

Dr. Becker argued for a values-based conversation about Israel that differs in four ways from the crisis narrative that has dominated discussion about Israel since 1948.

First, the values-based conversation asks what it will take to address Israel’s challenges and build a moral and just society that reflects in policies our liberal values as a people and the democratic Jewish state. In a crisis-driven narrative, how minorities are treated is unlikely to be addressed unless these minorities are a threat to Israel’s survival or a propaganda weapon for Israel’s opponents. But in a values-based conversation, the way a Jewish society relates to its minorities is an independent question that commands our attention.

Second, the crisis model always turns on the measures the Israeli government and military need to repel the dangers Israel faces. However, Judaism deals with values and reasoned argument. In a democratic society we have to be able to accept the Jew who questions the propriety of Israel’s forceful response against Israel’s enemies and its West Bank settlement policies and not presume that such a person is committing an act of betrayal against the Jewish people, any more than the Jew who supports these policies without a second thought is guilty of moral bankruptcy.  

A Jew’s intent, however, is a critical element in this conversation. Criticism of Israeli government policies from love of the country, its people, and respect for and support of the Zionist project is far different than criticism from hate and rejection of the right of the Jewish people to a state of our own in our historic homeland. The vast majority of North American Jewry, according to polls, believes that one can be loyal to Israel and critical of its government policies just as they can be critical of their own government and remain loyal to their country.

Third, a values-based conversation focuses on the meaning of one’s criticism of Israel. In a crisis model, any criticism of Israel and its policies is problematic. If the only focus of Israel’s policies is on confronting the external dangers, public Jewish criticism is regarded as demoralizing and fodder for Israel’s enemies. In the crisis model, the plurality of Jewish voices is regarded as a mortal danger to the survival of Israel and the Jewish people. A values conversation, to the contrary, supports the plurality of voices if criticism comes from love and not hate.

The love-based argument is nothing new to the Zionist project and Judaism itself. However, in recent years intolerance of diverse opinions has grown dramatically within Israel and has bled into discussions about Israel in North America.

Put in a different way, for those operating from a crisis-mindset, Jewish unity is defined narrowly by the common threats we face as a people and nation. A values narrative regards Jewish unity in terms of a common moral and social justice engagement that unites our people, not because we agree with each other or because the one overriding issue is survival but based on a shared commitment as Jews and supporters and lovers of the Jewish people and state to engage together in a complicated, divisive, agonizing, and exhilarating process of writing the next chapter of Jewish history in a way that is worthy of our tradition and experience as a people.

Fourth, the moral imperative of the values narrative is Kedoshim tihiyu – holiness. If the conversation shifted out of the crisis mode to a values mode, a new Zionist paradigm reflecting a new stage in Zionist, Israeli and Jewish history would emerge. This new stage, per Dr. Becker, is “Aspirational Zionism.”

Aspirational Zionism asks these questions:

How do Jewish values augment Israel’s democratic and pluralistic society? How do the moral aspirations of the biblical prophet and the compassionate impulse of the rabbinic tradition interface with contemporary ethical challenges? How do Jews in Israel and around the world fight the sinister intentions of our enemies bent on our destruction without sacrificing our moral sensibilities? How do we as a people genuinely pursue peace and diplomacy as a moral and quintessentially Jewish obligation despite the threat of war and terrorism? How does Israel respond ethically in an era in which the Jewish people have reclaimed sovereignty and power for the first time in two thousand years in our historic homeland? And how do we support our Israeli brothers and sisters while advocating on behalf of the equal rights and dignity of Israel’s minorities and the Palestinian people?

It is distressing that inside Israel, many pressing moral issues have been set aside by successive governments operating in the crisis mode. They argue that the crisis necessarily dictates the choices the government and security forces make. When the crisis subsides, they say, Israel will be able to deal with the growth in poverty, the second-class treatment of Israel’s Arab citizens, the abuse of Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the soul-crushing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Ironically, it seems that the Jewish world’s obsession with a crisis-based approach is creating its own crisis. The lack of sufficient attention to values is alienating many diaspora Jews, young and senior, and is harming Israel’s image and legitimacy on the world stage.

In reading the words of Bialik, I am struck by how true a statement it was when he uttered it in 1926. We need a new focus in Jewish life relative to Israel – a new kind of Zionism, aspirational, moral, liberal, and democratic that emphasizes Jewish values beyond crisis, beyond the vagaries of war, terrorism, and occupation, and beyond the exigencies of the moment that fulfills the raison d’être of the Jew in history, to be a just and compassionate people in our historic homeland.

This blog is edited from a chapter in my book Finding Your Moral Compass – Jewish Values for the 21^st Century (Toronto: University of Toronto New Jewish Press, 2026), 255-67.

Fifty years ago, I was working (as a rabbinic student) on the programming staff of the Reform Jewish movement’s summer Camp Swig in Saratoga, California. As I recall, all of us were planning to celebrate with our campers the 200^th anniversary of the United States on 4 July. We had heard, however, about what had happened a week before on 27 June and discussed how to teach our campers about what was taking place.

An Air France Airbus with 248 passengers was hijacked by members of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to Entebbe, Uganda, that was governed at the time by the dictator Idi Amin. The entire awful story of that hijacking and the extraordinary Israeli response and rescue can be read here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid

The plane departed from Tel Aviv and carried 246 mainly Jewish and Israeli passengers with a crew of 12. The plane flew to Athens, Greece, and picked up an additional 58 passengers, including the four PFLP hijackers and two German revolutionaries. The flight was on its way to Paris, but soon after take-off, it was diverted to Benghazi, Libya and then to Entebbe, Uganda where it was greeted happily and warmly by Idi Amin who had, in his earlier years, trained in Israel.

As noted in the resource above, the hijackers “demanded the release of 53 Palestinian and pro-Palestinian [terrorists], 40 of whom were prisoners in Israel. They threatened that if these demands were not met, they would begin to kill all the hostages beginning on 1 July 1976.”

The hijackers did a “selection” of the Israelis and Jews from everyone else, reminiscent of what the Nazis did in the death camps. The account reads as follows:

“On 30 June, the hijackers released 48 hostages. The released were picked from among the non-Israeli group – mainly elderly and sick passengers and mothers with children. Forty-seven of them were flown by a chartered Air France [jet] out of Entebbe to Paris, and one passenger was treated in hospital for a day. On 1 July, after the Israeli government had conveyed its agreement to negotiations, the hostage-takers extended their deadline to noon on 4 July and released another group of 100 non-Israeli captives who again were flown to Paris a few hours later. Among the 106 hostages staying behind with their captors at the Entebbe airport were the 12 members of the Air France crew who refused to leave, about ten young French passengers, and the Israeli group of some 84 people.”

What the Israeli government secretly ordered, however, under the command of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on 3 July was what was a very risky but ultimately a successful rescue attempt of all but one of the hostages (an elderly Jewish woman) under the nose of Amin and the terrorists that resulted in only one Israeli combat death, the commander of the rescue team, Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of the current Prime Minister. Israelis and the Jewish world were exultant when it was reported that the plane carrying the remaining hostages lifted off and was on its way out of Entebbe.

That event eclipsed for us at Camp Swig the celebration of the 200^th anniversary of the United States, but we celebrated both events. The Entebbe rescue remains one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of the State of Israel.

So much has changed during these past 50 years in Israel, the Jewish world, for the Palestinians, and the United States. To list here those changes would take volumes, and indeed, volumes have been written and are still being written. However, on that 200^th anniversary of the United States (4 July, 1976), my memories of what Israel did to save Israelis and Jews remain uppermost in my heart, mind and pride.

Introductory note: The following is an edited presentation I made on February 5 to Congregation Beth Torah, a Reform synagogue in Ventura, California.

The trauma of October 7^th remains palpable in Israel and for so many of us in the Jewish Diaspora despite the official end of the war in Gaza, though fighting continues there and there’s growing violence in the West Bank. Israeli society is struggling to absorb the horrors of that deadliest and most traumatic day for Jews since the founding of the State of Israel and the Holocaust. Border communities still bear the scars of destruction and displacement. The trauma of war affects virtually every Israeli. To have seen the starving and tortured faces of some hostages as they were released recalled the old black and white photographs taken when the camps were liberated in 1945.

Israelis now find themselves at a crossroad in their history, and so too do we American Jews. For the first time in American Jewish history since the founding of Israel, many liberal American Jews are shaken not only by what happened on October 7 and being blamed by anti-Israeli antisemites for the attack starting on October 8, but by Israel’s overwhelming military response against Hamas that killed tens of thousands of Hamas terrorists and tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians.

American Jews must understand that this longest war in Israel’s history was a legitimate response to Hamas’ butchery of Israelis in the south and what the Israeli government and the IDF most feared might happen immediately after October 7, that they were fighting for the existence of the state itself. They knew Hamas intended to expand its attack and cruelty, that there were realistic threats as well by Hezbollah and Iran to join the war, and that a sympathetic uprising could ignite in the West Bank forcing Israel to fight simultaneously on three fronts. It was unclear whether Israel could meet those threats.

The IDF was disorganized and its command believed it had to distribute its authority to a far lower level of officers than it had ever done before, a decision that reduced the IDF’s customary safeguards to protect Palestinian civilians who were being used by Hamas as human shields. They believed that Israel had to fight with overwhelming fire power to disrupt Hamas’s chain of command and reach its leaders hiding everywhere in more than 400 miles of tunnels everywhere under homes, apartment buildings, schools, community centers, hospitals, and mosques. If Israel didn’t succeed in disrupting Hamas immediately and demonstrating to Hezbollah and Iran how capable the IDF still was, Israel’s leadership feared that tens of thousands of Israelis could be killed.

Both Israelis and American Jews are only now beginning to ask about the impact this war has had on Israelis and Palestinian civilians and what long-term psychological damage has been done to both peoples. We’re trying here in Diaspora communities as well to figure out where we stand as American Jews and how much we want to say publicly about our fears and moral concerns in relationship to the war, the illiberal social and ethical trends that have grown in Israel, and the growth of antisemitism on the far right and far left.

Taking a 10,000-foot view, the significance of this period in Jewish history is unparalleled in the modern era except for the three years from 1945 to 1948 when the Jewish people went from our lowest nadir after the Shoah to the establishment of the Jewish State. That wide swing of the pendulum is testimony to the Jewish people’s durability and ability to survive, adapt and thrive after catastrophic events.

It will take time for Israelis, most especially, to heal from the losses and trauma of the war. Whatever happens, however, there must include a pathway to a demilitarized Palestinian state of some kind in Gaza and the West Bank in the context of a larger Middle East peace agreement that includes Israel and Saudi Arabia and all of Israel’s moderate Arab neighbors. The vast majority of Israelis, however, are no longer speaking about the viability of a Palestinian state. They fear, legitimately, that any such state could well be taken over by Islamic extremists bent on Israel’s destruction.

The war, in part, solidified for now the hold that right-wing Israeli political parties and the extremist settler movement have on Israeli politics. Should those extremist and messianic forces have their way in the next Israeli election in October, more terrorism and war with the Palestinians and Islamic extremists will be inevitable and Israel’s democracy will be threatened.

Israelis are facing many significant challenges including what to do about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the lack of a consensus about the role of the Palestinian Authority in the future governance of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s severely damaged international standing, what we in the American Jewish community think and feel about Israel and Zionism, and the dramatic rise in antisemitism around the world.

Among the greatest and immediate internal challenges facing Israel is that it has yet to set up an objective state commission of inquiry into what happened leading up to October 7 and Israel’s conduct in the war. Israel needs a power-house independent authority to undertake this inquiry to restore the people’s confidence that every lesson has been learned, that leadership failings are exposed, conclusions are drawn, and whether military excesses and war crimes were committed.

In considering Israel’s culpability, we Jews in the Diaspora who love Israel have to be able to distinguish between two kinds of criticism leveled against Israel’s conduct of the war. There’s criticism from Israel’s friends that the IDF went too far, bombed Gaza too heavily, and that Israeli commanders and soldiers, in the heat of battle, crossed red lines against international moral and legal standards of war. Israelis and right wing American Jews need to address this legitimate criticism from Israel’s friends and not characterize it either as anti-Israeli or antisemitic.

The second kind of criticism comes from those who believe that the Jewish State has no moral legitimacy to exist, that it is a colonial and foreign entity in the heart of the Islamic Middle East, and no right to defend itself. That criticism is not only anti-Zionist and anti-Israel, but is antisemitic because it denies to the Jewish people what is the right of every people in the world, to define ourselves and our narrative, and to have a nation state in our historic Homeland.

Despite the loss of a thousand young Israeli soldiers in the war, the murder and suffering of surviving hostages and their families, and the massive carnage and loss of life and property in Gaza, there are a few positive things for Israel and the Jewish people that have come from this war.

Immediately after October 7, Israel’s civil society came together from across all political and religious lines to support one another. In Diaspora communities $1.4 billion was raised for Israel representing the single largest set of contributions on behalf of Israel in our history, and 300,000 Jews and friends of Israel convened in Washington, D.C. in solidarity with Israel, the largest Jewish demonstration since the 1987 Soviet Jewry rally on the Mall.

Many American Jews felt a reconnection to Zionism, Israel, and their Jewish identity. More than 70% of Jewish Diaspora adults feel emotionally attached to Israel, and 60% said Israel make them proud to be Jewish. 70% said that it is sometimes hard to support actions taken by Israel or its government. 74% of American Jews between 18-49 support self-determination for both Israelis and the Palestinians, and 88% believe that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.” But, 14% of Jews ages 18 to 34 identify as anti-Zionist, an increase from 8% five years ago.

In the early weeks and months of the war, many American Jews sought out the organized Jewish community for identification and support, began reading books about Israel, attending classes and on-line seminars on Zionism, Israel, Middle East history and politics. Non-Jews chose to convert to Judaism in numbers greater than we’ve experienced in a generation.

However, too many American synagogues have become unsafe spaces where rabbis and congregants are unable to discuss civilly the wide range of views concerning Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, the war, the Israeli government, illiberal trends in Israeli and American Jewish communities, and the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts.

It ought to be clear to everyone that we North American Jews and Israelis are in a significant transformative era. Whereas in years past, Israelis were happy simply to take Diaspora Jewish dollars and welcome American Jewish political support in Congress and the administration for Israel’s security needs. In a recent Israeli poll, 80 percent of Israeli Jews now feel strongly that the Israel-Diaspora relationship is important to them personally.

Though we Jews are one people, there exists today a wide chasm between most Israelis and most liberal American Jews. That reality requires us American Jews to understand that since October 7, Israelis as a whole have thought of themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, as victims who responded to Hamas from a place of fear, anxiety, rage, hostility, and a desire for revenge. From that embattled position many Israelis have justified themselves morally in responding militarily in Gaza to whatever the Israeli government and the IDF did. In the initial months of the war, I felt as Israelis felt. Feeling victimized perhaps explains why the vast majority of the Israeli media did not focus throughout the war on the destruction of Gaza and the huge loss of life there, and why Palestinian society has historically tolerated and embraced terrorism as a legitimate response against Israel and the Jewish people.

Consequently, Israel has lost the affections of a small minority of the American Jewish community, especially among our young people. At the beginning of the war, a colleague called me distraught because his college-age son had joined the Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Israel and anti-Zionist Jewish organization. His son claimed to want no part of Israel in his life and even said that Israel should never have been created. My colleague was deeply upset and asked me what I thought he ought to say to his young adult son. A number of my congregants called me as well with the same question about their college age and twenty-something sons and daughters.

I responded this way:

“First – these are your kids. Your relationship with them is what’s most important now. Don’t say or do anything to alienate them from you. Love them a lot, which means listening to them without having to instruct or correct them. Recognize that we’re all struggling in this new era of American Jewish history. Remember that they’re at the beginning of their adult journeys as Jews and they likely will evolve and change their thinking just as we’ve done over the course of our lives. You’ve instilled in them liberal Jewish values focused upon justice, compassion, and peace. This is not the end of their engagement with Jewish life or in their relationship with Israel. They already know how you feel and what you believe about Israel. If they’re open to reading about why Israel matters to the American Jewish community, to our identity and security in the Diaspora, and what liberal Reform Zionism has to offer them, there are books that deal directly with these challenges.”

The greater question confronting us now is how to better educate ourselves and our young people about Israel and Zionism. The best thing is to go there and meet Israelis face to face from the right, left, and center, with Palestinian-Israeli citizens and Palestinian Arabs living under occupation in the West Bank, with Israeli and Palestinian journalists, members of the Knesset, and our Israeli Reform movement rabbis and leadership, including the leadership of the Israel Religious Action Center, the social justice arm of Israel’s Reform movement, who advocate daily before the Knesset and courts and in the media on behalf of pluralism, equality, inclusion, and democracy in Israeli society.

There are many questions all Diaspora Jews, young and senior alike, need now to be asking:

• What does it means for us to belong to the Jewish people and have a Jewish state?
• How ought we to respond to those who feel we Jews are colonialists and interlopers in our historic Homeland?
• How do we rebuild trust in our Jewish institutions, clergy and teachers who many young people regard with suspicion and distrust because we haven’t been honest enough about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when they grew up?
• How do we understand anti-Zionism, anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism today?

Our message as American liberal Zionists and lovers of the people and State of Israel has to be clear and unrelenting – DON’T GIVE UP ON ISRAEL. We have a moral and Jewish duty to fight for Israel despite her imperfections just as we have a moral duty to fight for American democracy despite its obvious imperfections.

As Reform Jews, we have the duty also to join with our growing Israeli Reform movement in its fight for religious pluralism, democracy, inclusion, and equality in the Jewish state, and to pursue with those Israelis who believe in the necessity of creating a new pathway to peace with the Palestinians, the Arab and moderate Muslim world.

My Zionism grew from a particular time in history. I was born a year after the State was established and was raised on “the crisis narrative” of Jewish history. The Holocaust hovered over my childhood and formative years and has been a defining experience affecting the post-war Jewish psyche. The Shoah taught Jews everywhere that powerlessness risks death and the State of Israel is our surest protection against deadly forces that would destroy us.

By the time I was 17, Israel had fought three wars. When I was 23 and living in Jerusalem, Israel was nearly overtaken by Egyptian and Syrian forces in the Yom Kippur War. I understood then that Israel could not lose a single war on the battlefield, that her security and survival must be the number one priority for Israelis and world Jewry, and that to ignore the real threats to the Jewish people can never be an option.

Though I grew up with the “crisis narrative” of contemporary and historic Jewish experience, that narrative is no longer sustainable despite what happened on October 7.

I agree with Dr. Tal Becker, an associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, who writes that the crisis narrative “is both narrow and shallow.” It’s narrow because the singular focus on survival keeps us from talking about “the breadth of what this sovereign project [on the land] might offer for the collective Jewish experience.” And it’s shallow because “it pursues Jewish survival for its own sake but tells no deeper story as to why that survival is important and worth fighting for.”

Dr. Becker argues that to achieve a vision of Jewish unity behind an Israel that we can support, we need to focus on values and ask what it will take to address Israel’s challenges and build a moral and just society in which the policies, politics, and culture reflect our liberal Jewish values, tradition, and experience as a people.

For those operating strictly out of the crisis mindset, Jewish unity is defined narrowly by who stands with us against common threats. But the values narrative defines Jewish unity in terms of a moral engagement that we share – not because we agree or because the one overriding issue confronting us is survival, but because we’re committed to engage in a process of writing together the next chapter of Jewish history.

It’s difficult to find the balance between our particular Jewish interests—the concerns and identity we have as a nation and “tribe”—and our concerns for democracy and the wellbeing of all. Yet the tension between the particular and the universal, the tribal and the humanitarian, runs throughout Jewish tradition and history. A values-based discussion about what Israel should be can bring about a new Zionist paradigm.

“Aspirational Zionism” evokes these questions that can take us to the heart of a democratic nationalism:

How do our liberal Jewish values augment Israel’s democratic, diverse, and pluralistic society?

How do we bring the moral aspirations of Judaism into contemporary challenges like Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians and Arab-Israeli citizens?

How do we fight our anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and antisemitic enemies without our sacrificing our Jewish moral sensibilities and democratic values?

How do we genuinely pursue peace as a moral obligation despite the threat of terror and war?

How do we preserve a Jewish majority in Israel while supporting social justice, a shared society with Arab-Israeli citizens, and the human rights of all?

Nationalism has become shorthand for self-interested exclusion, oppression, and supremacy, but democratic nations are what we make them. In this spirit we can insist on and fight for an Israel that lives up to its founding principles of democracy, justice, and peace; an Israel that reflects the best of Jewish culture and tradition.

We liberal American Jews can be fully Zionist even as we ask the hard questions like those above. That’s the Israel and the Zionism I support and grew up with, and our support for our Reform Zionist movement in the United States and in Israel in our Israeli Reform movement’s synagogues, youth programs, pre-army educational programs, kibbutzim, and social justice work are what give me hope for Israel and the Jewish people.