In May 2022, a few months after Russia invaded Ukraine, I wrote a column in these pages warning that Israel could one day find itself facing Russian-style sanctions.

The world was imposing the most sweeping sanctions regime in decades on Moscow, targeting thousands of individuals, companies, banks, and government entities. And while back in 2022 it seemed far-fetched that something like this could one day happen to Israel, there were already voices being heard on the fringes asking whether similar tools could one day be used against the Jewish state.

There was a politician in Colombia, someone on the far Left in Britain, a few pundits in Europe and the United States. It was not overly significant, but it was something.

My argument then was simple: Eventually, there would be another war in Gaza. Israel would do what it believed necessary to defend itself, and images of Palestinian casualties would fill television screens and social media feeds. Despite Israel’s efforts to minimize civilian casualties, public opinion would turn against it.

No one knew then that just 17 months later, Hamas would invade Israel on October 7, and that despite suffering the worst attack in its history, Israel would find itself experiencing the greatest diplomatic isolation since its establishment.

Which brings us to what happened this month.

On September 8, Britain, France, and Canada announced plans to impose restrictions on trade with Israeli settlements – an import ban on settlement goods, as well as measures targeting companies and individuals providing construction, infrastructure, financing, and other services that facilitate settlement expansion. British legislation is expected to take several months to implement.

For now, these measures are designed to distinguish between Israel within the Green Line and Israeli activity beyond it. Indeed, the British government has explicitly said that its planned import ban is supposed to avoid affecting Israel within its recognized borders.

But sanctions have a way of expanding.

Imagine that after the October 27 election, the next Israeli government decides to formally annex part of the West Bank. It does not have to be all of the territory or even all of Area C, where the settlements are located. It could just be the Jordan Valley, a strip of land that even opposition parties believe should belong to Israel.

What happens then? How difficult will it be for countries that have already imposed sanctions to move the dial another click? Today it is a company building homes in a settlement. Tomorrow it could be a company building a highway serving that settlement. Then the bank financing the project. Then the financial institution underwriting the bank.

Earlier this week, I drove along Highway 60 toward Psagot and got stuck in traffic because work was underway to expand the West Bank highway. Now imagine that a construction company doing that work risks sanctions, or the bank that is financing it, as well as the American or European company that is supposed to supply the bulldozers and trucks.

Impossible? Sadly, no.

There are those who claim that America would never do that to Israel. The problem is that the line was crossed in 2024 when the Biden administration imposed sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violence and destabilizing activity in the West Bank. While Donald Trump rescinded those sanctions immediately upon taking office in January 2025, the taboo has been broken, and what Biden did paves the way for a future Democratic administration.

There was also a time when the idea of Western governments imposing sanctions on Israeli cabinet ministers would have sounded absurd. But that has happened as well, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have been sanctioned by the UK and parts of Europe.

So why would anyone confidently assume that what we see today is the end of the process rather than just a taste of what can still come? We need to remember that a comprehensive sanctions regime would not merely mean that a few politicians cannot travel to London, or that a few settlers would have their bank accounts frozen. A genuinely broad sanctions regime would strike at the foundation of Israel’s economy.

International companies would need to ask themselves whether maintaining operations in Israel is worth the legal exposure. Israeli tech companies would most likely decide to relocate abroad. Foreign investment would drop. The brain drain that Israel already worries about would accelerate.

And even if America were to remain outside such a sanctions regime, Israel cannot simply shrug and claim that Europe does not matter. The European Union is Israel’s largest trading partner. In 2025, trade in goods between Israel and the EU totaled €43.3 billion. The EU accounted for 33.1% of Israel’s imports and 29.4% of its exports.

Losing significant access to that market would not be an inconvenience – it would fundamentally change the Israeli economy.

So what can Israel do? On the one hand, it needs to diversify its trade and diplomatic ties. It should expand trade and diplomatic relationships in Asia, particularly with countries where Gaza and the Palestinian issue play a smaller role in determining economic ties. Israelis are innovative – supply chains can be rebuilt, and new trading partners can be found.

Israel would survive, but it would become a different country.

It would be more isolated, more expensive to live in, less attractive for investment, and increasingly disconnected from the Western economic and diplomatic system, of which Israel has spent decades playing an integral part.

None of the above means that Israel should allow foreign governments to dictate its decision-making. A sovereign country must make decisions even when they carry costs, and there will always be moments when Israelis decide a particular policy is essential to their security and are willing to pay that price.

But we should at least understand the price and stop the habit of dismissing every warning as meaningless.

Our politicians tell us that Europe doesn’t matter, that the United Nations is a waste of time, and that the International Criminal Court is irrelevant. The problem is that none of this is true. All of these institutions matter – just ask Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who cannot travel to Europe anymore – and their decisions actually affect lives here in Israel.

In this context, Netanyahu addressed the UN on Thursday. As I wrote this column, the prime minister was making his way to New York, where he was expected to give a powerful speech. Whatever one thinks of him, Netanyahu remains one of Israel’s most talented communicators, a gifted orator who understands the theater of the UN better than almost any Israeli leader before him.

There may be a prop, and there will almost certainly be a memorable line. But none of it will solve the problem, because a speech, no matter how good, cannot reverse three years of diplomatic deterioration. Israel’s public diplomacy has been neglected throughout this war. For more than two years, Netanyahu failed to appoint a permanent head of the National Public Diplomacy Directorate. Ministers have repeatedly been allowed to say whatever they wanted without considering the diplomatic consequences.

Settler violence has been treated as a nuisance rather than as a strategic threat that hands Israel’s adversaries ammunition on a silver platter.

And only now, after years of accusations against Israel and the IDF, has the military finally decided to establish a multidisciplinary team to respond to false claims and distortions about its conduct, due to a film that received a standing ovation in Venice.

So, yes, Netanyahu stood at the UN and made Israelis proud. But speeches are not a strategy. Israel faces a campaign today being waged on several fronts: on the battlefield, in international institutions, in the information arena, and now through economic and financial pressure.

Does anyone seriously believe we are ready for what comes next?

Published in The Jerusalem Post

The post Israel is fighting a new war on the financial front – and it is not ready first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Ursula von der Leyen made a striking proposal in Strasbourg on September 16. With Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in attendance, the European Commission president opened the door to Canada becoming what she called the European Union’s first “associate member.”

There is only one problem. The European Union has no such status.

Associate membership does not appear in the EU treaties. There is no established package of rights and obligations attached to it, no predetermined place for an associate member in the Union’s institutions, and no agreement about how much access to the Single Market it would entail. Von der Leyen supplied a name before Europe had designed the institution.

But Brussels does not need to start with a blank sheet of paper.

It should look at Israel. Canada may indeed become the first country formally granted whatever new status the EU eventually calls “associate membership.” But it would hardly be the first country to inhabit the space between membership and an ordinary third-country relationship. Israel has spent nearly seven decades constructing one version of such a relationship: integration without membership.

The story began almost as soon as the European project itself. In April 1958, only months after the Treaty of Rome entered into force, Israel became the third country, after Greece and the United States, to request the establishment of a diplomatic mission to the European Economic Community in Brussels. Full diplomatic relations followed in February 1959.

And Israel wanted more than trade.

From the beginning, Israeli policymakers sought association with the emerging Community. The Israeli ambition was substantially political as well as economic. Israel eventually accepted agreements that fell short of association, but the larger objective was to secure a recognized place alongside the developing European project.

What Israel was asking Europe in the late 1950s sounds surprisingly familiar in 2026: how close can a non-member country come to the European project without actually joining it?

The answer emerged gradually rather than through grand constitutional design.

Over the decades, Israel and Europe built their ties layer by layer. The 1995 EU-Israel Association Agreement, which entered into force in 2000, established the central institutional framework. The European Neighbourhood Policy later added an Action Plan intended to bring Israel closer to European policies and programs. Cooperation expanded into research and innovation, aviation, pharmaceuticals, education and regulatory cooperation.

Israel’s largest trading partner

Today those ties reach remarkably far. The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 31.7% of Israel’s trade in goods in 2025, worth €43.3 billion. Israel participates in Horizon Europe. The EU-Israel aviation agreement connects the Israeli and European aviation markets, while another agreement facilitates trade in pharmaceuticals. Israel also participates in the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean system of rules of origin.

This is not EU membership. But neither is it a conventional relationship between two separate markets. Nearly two decades ago, Joel Peters and I described the logic behind this arrangement as “integration without membership.” We proposed a Euro-Israeli Partnership that would sit deliberately below full membership while moving beyond the existing Association Agreement. It envisaged deeper political cooperation, Israeli participation in European agencies and programs, gradual convergence with relevant parts of the European acquis, and greater access to the Single Market.

The objective was not to prepare Israel for eventual accession. It was to recognize that European integration need not end at the Union’s formal borders.

Israel is not the only precedent. Switzerland offers the EU’s most developed example of sector-by-sector integration outside membership, with extensive agreements connecting it to large parts of the Single Market and numerous European programs. But Switzerland is geographically and economically embedded in Europe. Israel offers a different lesson: a country outside geographical Europe, with no realistic membership perspective, can nevertheless become deeply connected to selected parts of the European system.

That distinction suddenly matters far beyond Israel.

Carney has ruled out Canadian EU membership. What Ottawa is seeking instead is what he has called a “unique alliance,” extending across trade, defense, technology, energy, and critical minerals. Canada has already moved closer to European defense structures through its participation in the EU’s SAFE defense program. Here the analogy with Israel has limits. Israel’s integration has developed overwhelmingly through economic, regulatory, scientific, and sectoral cooperation. It does not provide a blueprint for the defense and security dimension that Canada and the EU are now considering. If associate membership eventually encompasses defense procurement and strategic coordination, Brussels will be constructing something new.

But the Israeli experience does offer a model for how such a relationship can be constructed.

Closer ties do not have to be all or nothing. They can proceed sector by sector. Research systems can connect without political membership. Aviation markets can open. Regulations can converge in selected areas. European programs can admit non-member states. New areas of cooperation can be added as political circumstances and mutual interests change. None of that necessarily requires the full institutional rights of an EU member state. The Israeli case also cautions against romanticizing such arrangements. EU-Israel relations are currently experiencing a period of severe political strain. EU institutions have debated Israel’s compliance with the human-rights provisions of the Association Agreement and possible restrictions on parts of the relationship over the war in Gaza.

That does not invalidate the model. It demonstrates something important about it. Deep institutional ties do not eliminate political disagreement. They create structures within which cooperation, conditionality, and conflict can coexist.

Canada has, therefore, exposed a gap in the EU’s institutional architecture. There are countries that may want much more than a trade agreement without seeking membership. Switzerland demonstrates how far that principle can extend within Europe. Israel demonstrates that it can extend beyond it. Canada may now add a strategic and defense dimension neither model fully provides. Canada could still become the first country formally designated an EU associate member. But it would enter territory Europe has been exploring for decades.

The Canadian question is how a country can move much closer to the EU without becoming a member of it.

The name may be new. Much of the model is not.

Published in The Jerusalem Post

The post A new EU status for Canada? Israel has lived the model for decades first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Within a few days in late August, the world learned of the deaths of three giants of global culture: Dolly Parton, Péter Nádas, and Yayoi Kusama.

An American country singer, a Hungarian Jewish novelist, and a Japanese avant-garde artist. There is no obvious reason to place them together. They belonged to different generations, countries, artistic traditions, and cultural worlds. Yet the news of their deaths arriving within days of one another offers a reminder of something increasingly precious: culture can create common ground – and open a door into unfamiliar worlds – without requiring us to become alike.

I saw this quite literally at a Dolly Parton concert in Toronto in 2016. There were unmistakable groups: men in cowboy-style outfits, a visible Evangelical presence, and large numbers of gay and lesbian fans. Whatever else divided them – politics, religion, sexuality, social background – they all adored Dolly.

For a few hours, Parton created a community among people who might otherwise have had very little to say to one another. She did not resolve their disagreements. She did something more modest and perhaps more valuable: she gave them something they could love together. I am Jewish. I do not share Parton’s Christian faith. But I do not need to share it to understand the image at the heart of her music, that human beings need something that gives them wings and something that keeps their feet on the ground; faith and humility.

Péter Nádas represented a radically different cultural universe. By coincidence, I finished The End of a Family Story three days before his death. It is an uneasy book – difficult, claustrophobic, and unsettling. Nádas was Hungarian and Jewish, and the Jewishness of his writing is integral, not incidental.

In The End of a Family Story, family, faith, politics, and memory become entangled with the violent history of 20th-century Europe. People inherit worlds they did not choose and histories they cannot simply discard.

What Europe means for Jews

For Jews, and certainly for Israelis, Europe is rarely only a geographical place. It is also memory. Sometimes longing. Sometimes fear. Sometimes culture. Sometimes a family story whose beginning we no longer know and whose ending remains unfinished.

Then there is Yayoi Kusama. I first encountered her work in person on the Japanese island of Naoshima in 2017. I later attended her major retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Again, the crowd was part of the experience. There were secular Israelis, families with children, and a large, visible group of Arab Israelis. Some had come to see the work of one of the most important artists of the past century. Others were drawn to the mirrors, dots, and pumpkins. Children seemed delighted by a universe that required no explanation before entering it. Kusama could speak to all of them for entirely different reasons.

That is what great culture can do. It does not require everyone standing before the same painting, reading the same novel, or listening to the same song to understand it in precisely the same way. It creates common ground without demanding uniformity.

That ability feels particularly valuable now. We are living through a period in which the boundary between culture and politics is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve.

Israelis experience this with particular intensity. They want to know what the singer said about Israel. Whether the writer signed a petition. Whether the artist supports a boycott. Whether the university severed relations with an Israeli institution. Whether the country voted for us or against us. These questions are not imaginary. Sometimes they matter enormously. Since the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, Israelis have learned that cultural, academic, and artistic institutions that appeared universal can suddenly become places where belonging feels highly conditional.

But allowing politics to become our only language for encountering other societies carries its own danger.

Jewish experience offers another possibility. For centuries, Jews wrote in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Yiddish, Ladino, German, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, and English. They borrowed melodies, literary forms, philosophical ideas, and languages from the societies around them. They participated in surrounding cultures while stubbornly refusing to disappear inside them.

That tension between belonging and particularity became one of the great creative forces of Jewish life. Israel should understand this better than most. The Jewish state was not created so that Jews could stop encountering the world. It gave Jews a sovereign home from which to encounter it. That distinction matters today. Israel sometimes feels extraordinarily alone. Its relationship with parts of the cultural world has become strained. Israelis arrive at international encounters wondering whether they will be welcomed as individuals or judged first by the passport they carry.

The understandable response is to retreat. To stop listening. To divide everything between those who are with us and those who are against us. We should resist that temptation.

The cowboys, Evangelicals, gays, and lesbians in Toronto did not become one another when Parton walked onto the stage. The secular Israelis, Arab Israelis, and families with children in Tel Aviv did not need to experience Kusama in the same way. Nádas did not make the contradictions of Jewish and European history disappear; he turned them into literature.

Perhaps that is what these three artists, whose deaths entered the news so unexpectedly close together, have in common. Great culture does not erase the boundaries between people. Nor does it require agreement. It gives us permission to cross into unfamiliar territory, to become curious about lives unlike our own, and even to discover something of ourselves there.

Three artists. Three distinct worlds. And three reminders that sharing a culture does not require sharing politics, a religion, or a history.

Published in The Jerusalem Post

The post What three cultural giants can teach us about finding common ground first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

How many people in Israel, or even around the world, could name the winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last year? Probably almost no one.

Venice is one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, but it is an industry event – a place where filmmakers, directors, and producers showcase their latest projects, generate buzz, and hope that distributors and critics take notice. Most of what happens there never reaches the wider public.

Then came NAZA, the documentary by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor that won the Special Jury Prize at Venice this weekend and almost immediately became the center of a political and public storm in Israel. The film examines allegations surrounding Israeli military targeting in Gaza, including anonymous testimony from purported soldiers and intelligence officers claiming that the IDF permits “mass killing” with AI-powered tools.

And if the goal of the Israeli officials attacking the film was to prevent people from seeing it, they accomplished exactly the opposite. Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar’s announcement that he would seek to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship only increased the world’s attention to the film. He can be sure that now viewer numbers will go up exponentially.

What Zohar fails to understand is that this is not the way to counter the false allegations raised in the movie. Like Zohar, and almost everyone else attacking the film, I have not seen it (it is not available yet in Israel), and so it is hard to start to dissect the details.

Nevertheless, we can argue about the general way the IDF fights – in my view, in one of the most humane ways in modern warfare – and against the perverse claims of genocide that have been leveled for the last three years against Israel. In other words, you can hate the film, believe it is distorted, unfair, or even defamatory. You can challenge every allegation and even take the filmmakers to court and sue them for libel. But threatening to strip Israelis of their citizenship because they made a film critical of their country is something else entirely.

Not only does such a move not make Israel look stronger, but it creates the impression that we have something to hide and are afraid of criticism. It makes it seem like we fear to stand up for our truth and what we believe in.

Doing this undermines one of the basic values Israel has always insisted distinguishes it from its enemies: that as a vibrant democracy, we allow people to say things that the government – and many citizens – might find outrageous.

This is not how a side confident in its case should behave. Someone wants to make a movie accusing the IDF of war crimes? Then fight back. Explain why the claims are wrong. Show how the combatant-civilian ratio is historically low when compared to any urban warfare conflict with remotely similar conditions. Produce a film showing your truth and the other side of what happened in Gaza. Make the case. But don’t try to silence the criticism. Confront it head-on.

But the political response was only one part of the problem. Then came the IDF’s response.

Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir ordered the establishment of a multidisciplinary, interorganizational team led by the head of the IDF Planning Directorate to develop ways to counter what the military described as false allegations against the IDF and its soldiers.

I read that announcement and had one question: Where has Zamir been for the last three years? Did nobody in the IDF, the Prime Minister’s Office, or the Foreign Ministry read an American or European newspaper over the last three years? Did nobody watch CNN or the BBC? Did nobody see the way Israel and the IDF were being portrayed around the world?

Now, because of a movie, the IDF is creating a multidisciplinary team? This should have been done years ago. Israel needed a coordinated effort to collect facts, release information, quickly investigate accusations, and challenge false claims in real time.

A responsible country doesn’t wait for a movie to come out before realizing it has an information problem. It identifies the problem early on (the massive protests around the world should have helped them wake up) and builds the tools needed to confront it. But even if Israel had handled the public diplomacy surrounding the war perfectly, NAZA would still raise a deeper and far more uncomfortable question – one that Israelis need to confront regardless of whether the movie itself is accurate, distorted, or something in between.

It is a question about Gaza itself.

A few months into the war, in a meeting with a senior executive at one of Israel’s leading television stations, I asked her a simple question: Why don’t we see on the evening news what is happening inside Gaza? She answered that we did, since almost every night there was footage from IDF operations there.

I explained that what I meant was not what the IDF was doing in Gaza but what was happening to Gaza.

To her credit, she paused before answering.

“We have limited time on the news,” she said. “We have hostages, dead soldiers, evacuees from the north and the south, and protests across the country. We can’t show everything.” I was not arguing that Israeli television had some ideological obligation to generate sympathy for Gaza. My point was simpler: Israelis were forced into a war that they did not want and were now fighting in one of the most just wars in the nation’s history.

In addition, what was happening in Gaza was Hamas’s fault. They embedded themselves in civilian infrastructure since they wanted Israel to attack and kill as many civilians as possible. It was for this reason that Israel, for almost 20 years, held back from launching such an operation despite fighting a conflict almost every two years since the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

But none of that meant that Israelis should ignore the full scope of the war. We can believe that Israel was 100% justified in responding the way it did to October 7 and in fighting Hamas with the aim of its elimination, while also recognizing the consequences of that war. To understand the conflict we are fighting, we also need to understand what it has done to the people living on the other side. War is terrible. That we know. It is why we tried for so long to avoid it. But understanding a war means looking not only at why it was fought and what our soldiers were asked to do, but also at what happened as a result.

Importance of recognising the suffering of the other side

Our sympathy will obviously be first and foremost for ourselves. That is the way it should be. But that does not mean we should ignore what is happening on the other side, including the pain and suffering there as well. That, too, is part of the story.

Recognizing that does not mean accepting the accusations against Israel. It does not mean agreeing with claims that Israel committed genocide or deliberately targeted civilians. I have repeatedly explained why I believe those accusations are baseless and false. But rejecting those accusations does not require us to deny what happened in Gaza. It simply means recognizing what happened.

We can believe that the war was forced upon Israel by Hamas and that Hamas bears responsibility for the devastation because of the way it fights and embeds itself in civilian infrastructure. We can believe that after October 7, Israel could no longer tolerate a genocidal terrorist army on its border with a declared desire to carry out another massacre. We can remain committed to the mission that has yet to be accomplished to ensure that Hamas no longer exists and at the same time, we can look at what happened in Gaza and acknowledge the tragedy.

Those two thoughts can coexist.

In many ways, that tension helps explain why NAZA has touched such a raw nerve. Whatever one thinks of the film itself, it forces Israelis to look directly at something that, as a society, we have largely managed not to look at for nearly three years.

Our own suffering has understandably dominated our consciousness since October 7. We suffered the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, saw entire communities destroyed, people killed in the worst ways known to man, and hostages starved in complete darkness inside tunnels.

That trauma is real. But recognizing what subsequently happened to civilians in Gaza does not diminish it. It does not create some moral equivalence between October 7 and the war that followed. It simply requires us to look at the full picture.

Part of the reason that has been so difficult is leadership. Israeli political leaders do not speak publicly about Palestinian suffering during the war. Even acknowledging it is viewed as an admission of guilt rather than a recognition of the human consequences of war. But leadership is only part of the explanation. There is another reason Israelis have struggled to look at Gaza: For much of the public, the war does not feel over.

All of the hostages, living and dead, have returned home, but Israeli soldiers remain deployed in Gaza, and Israeli strikes continue. Hamas has yet to disarm, and significant parts of President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza remain unfinished. The objective of the war – Hamas’s destruction – has yet to be met.

As a result, the wound of October 7 therefore remains open, and when your own wound is still open, it is difficult to look at somebody else’s.

But eventually Israel will have to. Part of recovering from October 7 will mean confronting what was done to us: the failures that allowed the attack to happen, the trauma that followed, the lives that were lost, and the damage this war inflicted on Israeli society.

Recovery will also require something else: the confidence to look honestly at what happened on the other side without believing that doing so somehow weakens our own story. What it means is understanding that a country can believe deeply in the justice of its cause and still recognize the consequences of the war it was forced to fight.

Israel is strong enough to do both.

Published in The Jerusalem Post

The post Israel can reject NAZA’s claims without ignoring Gaza’s suffering first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Recently, voices from across Israel’s political divide – from Bennett’s Beyachad party to the Movement for Quality Government – have proposed placing the Declaration of Independence at the opening of Israel’s future constitution, thereby elevating it to the apex of the country’s normative legal hierarchy. Former Supreme Court chief justices, Meir Shamgar and Aharon Barak, have expressed similar views. Is this appropriate?

The impulse is easy to understand, even compelling. The Declaration is an Israeli canonical text – without equal. For decades, Israelis have recognized the almost miraculous significance of the broad consensus reached by the leaders of the pre-state Yishuv. At the very moment the state was being born, with its survival still in doubt, they managed, through words, to give form to the Israeli spirit of a Jewish people renewing its life in its homeland.

The Declaration tells our story at the singular turning point when the Jewish people returned to history as a people. It is a capsule of distilled Israeli DNA, implanted in our national bloodstream by the founding generation as a gift to those who followed. It would therefore seem only natural to give it pride of place at the head of our future constitution.

But we should not.

Anyone who wants to preserve the Declaration’s exalted status above Israel’s political disputes must recognize the distinction between two very different kinds of discourse: one of identity and one of rights. The Declaration belongs to the first. It should serve as an instrument for forging shared identity. It is Israeli identity’s home port – the place from which Israelis set sail into the riptides of disagreement and to which they return to recover a sense of common belonging. Its success in fulfilling this historic role depends on broad popular support, both emotional and intellectual.

That support, however, will not survive if the Declaration is transformed from an identity-defining national canon into a legal instrument for determining rights. Dragging it into the discourse of rights will damage it, because that discourse plays out through judicial rulings, with winners and losers. When one side seeks to defeat the other by invoking the Declaration, it pushes its opponent toward rejecting the Declaration itself – thereby diminishing its value as a shared identity asset.

That erosion of the Declaration’s symbolic, educational, and identity-building power has already begun. During the dramatic Supreme Court hearing on the “reasonableness standard,” the lawyer representing the government challenged the Declaration’s importance, arguing that it had been drafted by an unrepresentative group, written in haste, and is old and anachronistic. He later clarified and softened his remarks, but the damage had been done: the Declaration had been deeply scarred.

At the other extreme, a Supreme Court justice, in a supremely activist lone opinion in the case concerning the “Tiberias Law,” held that the Declaration is the fundamental norm on which the entire Israeli legal system rests. He thus set in motion an intellectual and legal project that seeks to turn the Declaration into a legal trump card – one that could serve as the basis for judicial review even of Basic Laws.

The justice reiterated this position in a ruling handed down last week on the law freezing the arrests of Haredi draft evaders. In his view, the law “was enacted outside the scope of the Knesset’s authority and is therefore void,” because it infringes the right to “full equality” enjoyed by all citizens by virtue of the operative legal force he attributes to the Declaration.

Those seeking to incorporate the Declaration into a future constitution are embracing this justice’s position – and taking it a step further. In doing so, they risk turning the Declaration from a cultural asset into a legal weapon. Their well-intentioned effort to elevate its status could end up, paradoxically, destroying the very value it holds for all of us.

We suffer from a toxic syndrome: the Israeli public conversation repeatedly gravitates toward the discourse of rights while neglecting the discourse of identity. We choose to shift the center of gravity of our cultural disputes away from the public arena – ideology, politics, and the marketplace of ideas – and into the judicial arena, where binding decisions are handed down. Those who cherish the Declaration must resist placing it in the legal arena. The debate over judicial review of ordinary laws and Basic Laws should not be decided by invoking the noble words of the Declaration of Independence.

We live on shifting sands. Precisely for that reason, we have an urgent – even existential – need for a fixed point of consensus capable of holding us together. The closest thing we have to such a fixed point – our one secular sacred text – is the Declaration of Independence.

We must not squander the founding generation’s gift.

Published in jns

The post Israel’s Declaration: A Secular Sacred Text, Not a Legal Weapon first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

It would be more fun to write a feel-good column on the promise of a much better year. But reality points the other way. A convergence of trends and events – some global, some local – threatens to turn 5787 into a “perfect storm”: several forces coming together, each likely to confront us with challenges even greater than those we have already endured.

At home: political instability, intensifying internal conflict, accelerating net emigration, and continuing security threats. Abroad: artificial intelligence; a climate spinning out of control; instability in the international system and intensifying great-power competition; and, as a result of all these, the continued rise of antisemitism, which, true to form, blames Jews for every ill.

I hope I turn out to be wrong. But I may not.

The problems facing Israel in the new year

Let’s start in Israel. Elections will be held shortly after the holidays. Months of polling, including surveys conducted in recent days, point to a political deadlock. Like two wrestlers in the ring, the political “blocs” have each other by the throat, with neither able to prevail. If that holds, we can expect a replay of the election years of 2020–2023 and prolonged instability. This time, however, the social reality is more extreme – most Israelis identify the social rift as the greatest risk facing Israel –despite the immense challenges of the security environment. As conditions deteriorate, more Israelis are leaving the country, including many who are part of the backbone of the economy.

The security and foreign-policy fronts are also unstable – and in some respects, worsening. Israel has failed to achieve a decisive victory on any front. The IDF is stretched to the limit in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, while another “round” with Iran looms as a very real possibility. The security burden on military personnel and the Israeli economy is enormous – almost unprecedented.

The international outlook is no brighter. On the eve of the new year, Britain – once a close Israeli ally – imposed unprecedented sanctions on Israel. Eleven other European countries have followed suit, including major EU members. Israel’s standing in the United States is deteriorating as well. On both sides of the political divide, rhetoric toward Israel and Jews is becoming more extreme. Israel has already become a major issue in the midterm elections – not to its advantage – and as the 2028 presidential race heats up, the situation is likely to worsen. Public support for Israel is at a historic low. Then there is antisemitism. In Europe, this is old news – and the situation is bad. But over the past year, antisemitism in the United States, together with denial of Israel’s right to exist, has also surged and gained legitimacy, with such views now openly voiced by influencers and politicians. Antisemitism and rejection of Israel have become intertwined, threatening Jewish life in the Diaspora and becoming a national-security challenge for Israel itself.

Added to these are global challenges that will significantly affect Israel. The first is artificial intelligence. Many experts now expect AI to advance faster than previously thought – and to reshape our lives sooner than expected. There will be benefits, but the labor market and global economy also face the real prospect of a severe crisis – one that could last until economies and governments adapt to this new environment. Israel, whose economy is driven by its technology sector, is especially exposed.

Over all of this hangs the climate crisis. On its own, it might not drastically alter the international system. Combined with other pressures, however, it could become a major factor. Together, these trends intensify instability in the international system and sharpen great-power competition – both with consequences for Israel.

Some of these trends are beyond our control, and Israel has little influence over them. That does not exempt Israel from confronting them and preparing for their effects. Others – those directly involving Israel – are much more within our power to shape. Some result from government policy; others from external forces. But in both cases, we can do more to address them. The challenges awaiting us in 5787 could coalesce into a perfect storm. But this outcome is not inevitable; the choices we make can soften the blow. Despite it all – happy new year!

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post The Perfect Storm: Why this Rosh Hashanah May Start Israel’s Most Challenging Year Yet first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

“We are getting dangerously close to a violent, multifront confrontation. According to reports from the security establishment, the number of warnings in Judea and Samaria is unprecedented.

“The ones who will pay the price are our children, who will once again have to enter the Jenin refugee camp, once again go into Gaza, and perhaps once again into Lebanon. The ones who will pay the price are our parents, who will once again have to sit in their safe rooms.” These words sound like something that could have been said yesterday. They were, however, spoken by Yair Lapid, the head of the opposition, three years ago this month, on September 20, 2023 – just a couple of weeks before the Hamas invasion on October 7.

Lapid later explained that he decided to go before the cameras with such a stark, dire warning after receiving one of the regular monthly security briefings given to the opposition leader by the prime minister and his military secretary. During that meeting, Lapid said, he was shown some of the most sensitive and classified intelligence collected by Israel’s security establishment. The message, as he understood it, was clear: Israel’s enemies were watching the deep divisions tearing through Israeli society over the government’s judicial overhaul. They saw weakness and vulnerability. And they believed there might be an opportunity to strike.

That was why, on the eve of Yom Kippur in 2023, Lapid issued his warning. He could hardly have been more prophetic. Two-and-a-half weeks later, Hamas invaded Israel. Our children were sent to fight in Gaza, Jenin, and eventually Lebanon. Our parents – and the rest of us – were sent running to bomb shelters and safe rooms.

October 7 to play a role in next election

From the moment elections were called for the end of October, it was obvious that October 7 would play a central role in every political party’s campaign. What was less obvious was the extent to which the disaster would become the subject of manipulation, distortion, and outright fabrication, particularly by members of the governing coalition determined to deflect criticism and wash their hands of responsibility for the greatest catastrophe to befall the Jewish people since the Holocaust, a catastrophe that happened on their watch.

That is how we need to look at the interview that Sara Netanyahu gave this week to Channel 14 in which she attempted to tarnish the reputation of Yair Golan, the leader of the Democrats Party, who famously put on his uniform on the morning of October 7, drove south, and helped rescue Israelis from the killing fields around the Supernova music festival.

Like so many heroic Israelis who saw their fellow citizens in mortal danger that morning, Golan did not wait for orders. A former deputy IDF chief of staff, he took his sidearm and headed toward the fighting, repeatedly entering an area crawling with terrorists to rescue people and bring them to safety. Yet Sara Netanyahu insinuated that Golan must somehow have had advance knowledge that something was about to happen, because he put on his uniform that morning – while her husband, the prime minister, had not been woken by the heads of the security establishment.

It was a disgusting accusation. It not only suggested some sort of conspiracy against Benjamin Netanyahu, but cast suspicion on a man who risked his own life to save others. To question the integrity, courage, and motives of Israelis who voluntarily entered a combat zone that morning is appalling.

While her comments were rightly condemned across the political spectrum, Sara Netanyahu is not really the story. She is the prime minister’s wife, not an elected official, and her comments should not consume too much of our attention.

The more important story is the coalition itself, which continues to do all it can to evade responsibility.

While Sara was in the headlines, Netanyahu was also pushing his new claim – had he been woken at 4 or 5 a.m. on October 7, he would have made decisions that could have prevented the Hamas invasion. Why wasn’t he woken? Because, he suggested, the security chiefs knew that he would force them to act, and they did not want him to.

There are several problems with this argument. The first is that it is highly unlikely Netanyahu would have done what he now claims.

Had he been woken, he would have heard from IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director Ronen Bar, and Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva. All three would have given him essentially the same assessment they themselves mistakenly believed as they analyzed the little intelligence that was coming in that night: Hamas was probably not preparing for a major attack, and if something was going to happen, it would be limited in scope.

With every senior security official presenting essentially the same assessment, does anyone seriously believe Netanyahu would have ordered Israel to launch a war against Hamas at 4 or 5 in the morning? Far more likely, he would have instructed them to remain vigilant, continue monitoring the situation, and reconvene a few hours later.

That, essentially, was the catastrophic mistake that Amir Bohbot and I describe in our book While Israel Slept. The warning signs were there, but they were interpreted through an intelligence framework that assumed Hamas did not want a major war.

But Netanyahu’s political objective now is to portray October 7 as exclusively their failure, a tactical intelligence breakdown that had nothing to do with him, his policies, or the strategy he pursued toward Hamas for years. That strategy included containing Hamas, allowing Qatari money to flow into Gaza, and repeatedly deciding against using the IDF to remove Hamas from power.

Keeping the national debate focused narrowly on the intelligence and operational failures of the night of October 6 and the early hours of October 7 serves Netanyahu politically. It keeps attention away from the much larger question of strategy: how Israel reached a point where Hamas was able to build an army on the other side of the border, prepare an invasion for years, and convince Israeli leaders that it had no intention of using it.

The second problem with Netanyahu’s argument is even more fundamental.

It is a wrong illustration of leadership. Leadership is supposed to mean understanding that subordinates will sometimes make mistakes – even catastrophic ones – and that ultimate responsibility rests with the person at the top.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened politically had Netanyahu chosen a different path after October 7. What if he had gone to the funerals of those murdered and visited their families during shiva? What if he had stood before the families and heard their yells and criticism, had appeared before the Israeli public and said something simple: I failed. What if he had publicly grieved for the 1,200 people massacred on his watch and accepted even a measure of responsibility for what happened? Perhaps it would even have helped him politically. Perhaps showing compassion, humility, and accountability would have won back some of the Israelis who turned away from him after October 7.

It is an interesting thought experiment, but that is all it is. Because Netanyahu’s political doctrine has long been clear: never accept responsibility, never admit failure, and, above all, never say sorry.

The tragedy is that nearly three years after October 7, Israel is not only still fighting over who was responsible for the failures of that day. It is heading into an election in which those failures are being rewritten in real time.

And a country that cannot honestly confront how it reached October 7 will have a much harder time ensuring that another one can never happen.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Israel cannot prevent another October 7 if Netanyahu keeps rewriting the first one first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

In every case, the same principle is being established: when a man’s beliefs collide with a woman’s presence, the woman is the one expected to move.

In the ancient world – as in parts of our own world today – women were often seen as dangerous: seductive, destabilizing, their very presence liable to lead men into forbidden terrain.

One way of dealing with this imagined threat was to erase the woman. Cover her up. Restrict her movement. Keep her at home. Make her less visible in public. That, for example, was common in the Roman world.

But there was another possibility.

In the sermon attributed to Jesus in the Gospel according to Matthew, a man who looks at a woman with lust is told: if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out.

The image is extreme, of course, but the principle matters: responsibility for desire lies with the person who desires – not with the woman he is looking at.

That is an enormous moral distinction.

Even if you subscribe to a worldview in which the presence of a woman poses a sexual or religious challenge, dealing with that challenge is your responsibility, not hers. You do not get to turn her into an object to be moved aside so that you can comfortably maintain your way of life.

I, of course, reject the premise altogether. Women are not first and foremost sexual objects, any more than men are. We are human beings – thinking and acting subjects, researchers, soldiers, students, drivers, and doctors.

But I am liberal enough to let you think otherwise.

What I am not prepared to “accommodate” is a situation in which accommodating your beliefs means making me disappear. If looking at me threatens you, look away. If sitting beside me is too enticing, do not sit beside me. If my presence in public threatens your worldview, it is your responsibility to find a way to live with that threat. Stay home. Wear opaque glasses.

Or, in Jesus’s version, pluck out your eyes. But do not demand that I disappear so that you can remain. Avoiding a woman’s handshake because it is more than just a handshake. A woman’s face on a billboard is not just a picture.

Demands that women not teach in a particular classroom, or not serve alongside men, are not a random collection of minor “accommodations” for a religious population.

Turning the language of accommodation around

In every case, the same principle is being established: when a man’s beliefs collide with a woman’s presence, the woman is the one expected to move. And once that principle is accepted, the next demand is never far behind.

If it is legitimate to insist on a male lecturer, why not a male prime minister? If we can create a course of study “free” of women, why not a military unit?

And if a woman’s presence is considered a legitimate reason to refuse to participate in a university program, why should it not also justify refusing to serve alongside her in a Namer, one of the IDF’s armored personnel carriers?

This is precisely how the language of “accommodation” gets turned on its head. Coexistence does not mean one side gets to live according to its beliefs while the other is expected to shrink itself so as not to interfere. Pluralism is not the right to dictate who may be visible in the public sphere.

And liberalism does not require me to tolerate people who demand that I disappear.

Liberalism means accepting, at the deepest level, that people who live differently from me are entitled to a full place in our shared society. A full place. Not behind a partition. Not outside the classroom. And not outside the Namer.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post When women are asked to disappear first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

After three years of war, with many Israelis having served hundreds of days in the reserves and the IDF – especially its regular-service soldiers – under unbearable strain, public tolerance for blanket military exemptions has all but vanished. A large majority of Israelis want Haredi men to serve, and polls show broad support for their conscription even among supporters of the current government.

To preserve his alliance with the Haredi parties while reassuring his own supporters, Netanyahu is now offering a formula: “Haredi men who do not study will be drafted.” In practice, the formula is both morally distorted and fundamentally false. Only a universal service obligation will actually bring large numbers of young men from the community into the IDF. Any politician who promises less is effectively giving up on meaningful enlistment. Throughout its term, the Netanyahu-led government has done almost nothing to advance enlistment from the Haredi community. On the contrary, it has invested enormous effort and political capital in promoting a law that would entrench draft evasion, at the unyielding insistence of the Haredi parties. But elections are approaching, and no one reads polls better than Netanyahu. Given Likud’s weakness and the growing demand – including within his own camp – that the burden be shared more equally, Netanyahu and other coalition figures are changing course: away from an evasion law and toward a new formula – “Those who study will be exempt from service; those who don’t will be drafted.”

For Netanyahu and coalition supporters, many of them traditional or religious, the formula sounds ideal. It lets them have it both ways: protect Torah study while expanding the ranks of those who serve. Problem solved.

Except it isn’t. The formula is a convenient illusion that falls apart on closer inspection.

First, there is no moral justification for exempting every Torah student from service. Torah study is an important value in a Jewish state, but it is not an automatic substitute for military service. One can study and serve. Thousands of religious young men do exactly that. Some spend years in yeshiva, perform meaningful military service, return to their studies, and continue to shoulder the burden in the reserves.

Nor is the formula practical. “Those who don’t study will be drafted” requires the state to decide who is really studying Torah, effectively turning the government into the supervisor of the yeshiva world. How exactly is that supposed to work? Will inspectors roam the yeshivot? Take attendance morning and afternoon? Administer Talmud exams? Check who is working off the books after the afternoon study session? And when a finding like that could mean lost funding and years of military service, what incentive would a yeshiva have to report that one of its students is not really studying?

The answer is obvious. Before long, we will discover that “your people are all righteous.” Everyone will be studying Torah. Even the most notorious yeshiva slacker will suddenly become a full-fledged student. There will be lists, certifications, attendance records, and oversight mechanisms. The state will inspect, the yeshivot will report, politicians will tout “enforcement” – and in the end, almost any young man determined to avoid service will find a way to be classified as a “Torah student.”

Anyone familiar with the state’s dealings with Haredi education has seen how this works. For years, the state has struggled to enforce even basic core-curriculum requirements in institutions it funds. To believe that an airtight oversight system will suddenly materialize when military service is at stake is naïve at best.

And that is precisely why the slogan is dangerous. It offers Israelis – especially right-wing voters who want broader military service but also want to preserve the political “bloc” – a comforting solution. One can say, “I support Haredi enlistment,” while simultaneously backing an arrangement that, in practice, perpetuates draft evasion.

There is only one real solution. The next government must adopt a simple principle: everyone serves. Military service can and should be adapted to the needs of the Haredi community. Appropriate frameworks can be created, and a very small quota of exceptional Torah scholars can be allowed to continue their studies. But they must be the exception. Everyone else must serve.

TOI

The post Netanyahu’s false promise of ‘study or serve’ first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.