Israel is a complicated electoral mash-up of many political parties reflecting the wide ideological, national, and religious spectrum of Israel’s population. Though Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, after interviewing all the Israeli political party heads that won at least 3.25 percent of the voting (the requirement to earn Knesset seats) on Sunday charged Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the Yashar Party and the 4-party Zionist anti-Netanyahu bloc to form the next government. Though Eisenkot got the most recommendations by the leaders of Israel’s successful political parties (Jewish and Arab) equaling 67 Knesset seats (out of a total of 120 seats), his success in forming a governing coalition is not a “slam dunk.”

For casual observers of Israeli politics from afar, especially from the United States, it is wrong for us to project our political assumptions based on our unique federal, state and local governing traditions onto Israel.

Therefore, the questions include – what does the Israeli election mean and what will be necessary in forming a ruling governing coalition?

In the past week, two outstanding analysis pieces (among many) have appeared that I believe can help us understand the challenge facing the former army chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, in his effort to form a new ruling coalition government:

The first is the In These Times Podcast interview hosted by Rabbi Ammi Hirsch of the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in New York City of David Horovitz, the founder and head of Israel’s daily Times of Israel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z4rzGxzouo

The second is an article in The Jewish Telegraphic Agency – “Eisenkot moves closer to ousting Netanyahu. Here’s what could come next – There are several different paths the Yashar party leader could take – but all of them have obstacles,” by Tomer Almagor, November 7, 2026 – https://www.jta.org/2026/11/06/israel/eisenkot-moves-closer-to-ousting-netanyahu-heres-what-could-come-next?utm_source=JTA_Iterable&utm_campaign=JTA_DB&utm_medium=email.

After listening to and reading these pieces, a number of things will be clear: Israel remains a vital parliamentary democracy, but with substantial weaknesses – forming a ruling coalition government will not be easily done – the process will take time, perhaps months – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost 25 percent of his political strength in this election for a number of reasons, discussed in the conversation with David Horovitz – a historical record high of 80 percent of Israeli citizens voted – there is no perfect solution to Israel’s political challenges – compromise will be necessary to form a coalition government – should Eisenkot or Netanyahu be unable to form a government, new elections will be necessary.

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:

1. Recognition of Israel as a Jewish, democratic, liberal, and egalitarian state;
2. Commitment to the values of Israel’s Declaration of Independence;
3. Advocacy for equal obligations of military, national, or civilian service for all Israeli citizens;
4. 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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Israelis went to the polls on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 in record numbers, with turnout reaching 77.7 percent, the highest since 1999. The ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Netanyahu dramatically lost about 22 percent of its coalition mandates in the Knesset and now represent about 53 mandates. Votes are still being counted and the numbers may change. Israel, however, despite past threats to its democracy, remains a pluralistic and democratic Jewish state.

The following are a few statements worth considering as Israeli President Isaac Herzog decides which party is most likely to form a new ruling coalition government and invites either Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose Likud Party was the largest vote-getter (about 27 mandates), or Gadi Eisenkot (a former army chief-of -staff) whose broad anti-Netanyahu voting bloc far outnumbered the current government coalition to equal between 66 and 68 mandates. 61 mandates out of the total of 120 Knesset seats are required to form a majority parliamentary government. However, minority governments have been formed in the past with the tacit agreement of the Arab parties. That is an option for Eisenkot this time given that his group of anti-Netanyahu parties totals about 48 mandates and Arab mandates total between 18 and 20 mandates.

It will take many weeks for the process to play itself out before we know exactly what the new Israeli government looks like. Many in Israel, however, are saying that it would work against Gadi Eisenkot’s and the “change bloc’s” advantage to go to new elections:

“Netanyahu’s Likud emerged as the largest party, performing significantly better than many of us had expected. This is the bad news which is very hard to comprehend – a prime minister who failed on all accounts receives 20% of the votes.…Netanyahu’s coalition depended on the ultra-Orthodox parties and the far-right parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Their influence has shaped government policies on military service, public funding, religious freedom, and judicial independence, as well as Israel’s approach to the West Bank and Gaza.… Despite Netanyahu’s personal success, the election results reflect a significant desire for political change.” (Orly Erez-Likhovski, Director of the Reform Movement’s Israel Religious Action Center)

“…despite the impression he is trying to create through his loyalists in the media, the prime minister did not win this election. … The ‘bloc of change’ entered this week’s election under ideal conditions, with four parties safely passing the electoral threshold. Surplus-vote agreements were signed between them, and the election saw a massive turnout of voters from overseas. However, all this did not translate into a clear political victory.” (Amos Harel, Haaretz op-ed)

“We can no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist distinction between Jewish and Arab votes.” (Reserve General Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats party)

“The outgoing government does not have, and has not had, a majority in the Israeli public in the past four years, and not even a majority in the Zionist public. The October 2026 elections – which were largely a referendum on the past four years – proved this conclusively and unequivocally…. The solution is cooperation between the Zionist Change Bloc parties and the Arab parties. The Joint List and Ra’am achieved a historic result in the 2026 elections. Arab voters did indeed flock to the polls to replace the government that had oppressed them, and under whose rule and neglect violence raged in Arab communities, Jewish rioters ran amok in the West Bank, and the IDF left unimaginable destruction in the Gaza Strip…. Something amazing and unimaginable has been happening in Israel in the past 24 hours: The Arab parties are reaching out to liberal Israel and saying: You cannot win the fight for Israel’s image without us. Cooperate with us and we will help you save Israel.” (Zman Yisrael – Doar Hayom, by Amir Ben David, October 29, 2026)

Finally – there is no perfect political solution in this post-election period. What is clear, however, is that for a ruling coalition (or even a minority coalition supported by the two Arab parties – the Joint List and Ra’am) to form a government will take vision, courage, and the spirit of compromise that includes the rights and concerns of all of Israel’s citizens, Jewish-Israelis and Arab-Israelis.

I listen daily to the Times of Israel Podcast, the weekly Haaretz Podcast hosted by Allison Kaplan Sommer, and the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast with Rabbi Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. I also read daily the English language edition of Haaretz, the Hebrew newsletter called Zman Yisrael – Doar Hayom by Amir Ben David (you can get an immediate translation to English on the site) and the J Street Daily Substack. It is a lot to listen to and read, but if you choose to do any of it, you will gain a clearer understanding of what is happening in Israel from the political middle-right to middle-left in this dramatic post-election period.

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.