There is a number in the latest Palestinian public-opinion poll that sounds wonderfully encouraging: 56%.

That is the share of Palestinians who, according to one increasingly common reading, support a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.

Wonderful. Someone alert the Nobel Committee.

There is only one small problem: that is not actually what the poll says.

The August 2026 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) is an unusually valuable window into Palestinian opinion after the Gaza war. Taken as a whole, it tells a fascinating story. Palestinians have changed their minds substantially about how to pursue their national goals. What is far less clear is whether they have changed their minds about what those goals ultimately are.

Start with those two states.

PSR first asks the straightforward question: Do you support or oppose the two-state solution? No details, no embellishment.

The result: 44% support it and 50% oppose it.

Then PSR asks a different question. Respondents are presented with three possible arrangements: “the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders,” “a confederation between the two states,” and “a single state with equal rights for both sides.” Given those three choices, 56% prefer the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, compared with 14% for a confederation and 10% for a single state with equal rights. Another 20% choose none of them.

That is an interesting result.

It just is not the same result.

If I ask whether you want chicken for dinner and you say no, and then ask whether you would prefer chicken, sardines, or boiled cabbage, your selection of chicken does not retroactively become an enthusiastic endorsement of chicken.

More importantly, neither question asks what Israelis actually need to know:

Would Palestinians accept two states as the permanent end of the conflict?

That is where things get more complicated.

Means and ends

The most dramatic development in the August poll has little to do with two states.

It is the collapse in Palestinian confidence in armed struggle.

In September 2023, just weeks before October 7, 53% of Palestinians said armed struggle was the most effective way to end the Israeli occupation and establish a Palestinian state. Only 20% chose negotiations. Today the numbers have almost reversed. Forty-four percent choose negotiations and only 27% armed struggle.

That is a remarkable transformation.

But there is a problem with interpreting it as evidence that Palestinians have embraced peace.

Negotiations are a method. So is armed struggle.

Neither tells us what the negotiator or the fighter hopes to achieve.

And on that question, Palestinian attitudes have been remarkably durable.

For years, PSR has asked Palestinians to rank four “vital national goals.” One option is “Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

Another is “Obtain the right of return to refugees to their 1948 towns and villages.”

This is not a vague question about sympathy for refugees or compensation. It says their 1948 towns and villages – places overwhelmingly located inside Israel. And roughly three in ten Palestinians have consistently chosen that as their first national priority. Since 2012, the figure has remained remarkably stable, ranging from 28% to 33%.

In the August 2026 poll, PSR reports that 43% identify Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital as the highest priority, while 28% prioritize the right of return.

Think about what that means.

The question does not allow respondents to say that ending the occupation and returning refugees are equally important. They have to rank them.

In 2022, 40% said the highest national goal should be ending the Israeli occupation in the territories occupied in 1967 and building a Palestinian state. But 32% chose return to the refugees’ 1948 towns and villages instead. In other words, nearly a third of Palestinians were explicitly saying that return to homes inside what is now Israel was a higher national priority than ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state.

And when respondents were asked for their second goal, another 37% chose return.

That is not a footnote to this conflict.

It may be the conflict.

The refugee question that supposedly is not a question anymore

There is a comforting argument one hears frequently in discussions of the peace process.

Yes, Palestinians continue to speak about a right of return. But everyone serious understands that millions of Palestinian refugees are not actually going to move into Israel. Palestinian negotiators understand this. American negotiators understand this. Arab governments understand this. Various negotiating rounds contemplated compensation, resettlement in a Palestinian state and third countries, and some limited number entering Israel with Israeli consent.

Perhaps Palestinian negotiators do understand all of that.

But there is an enormous difference between saying Palestinian negotiators understand what a final agreement would require and saying the Palestinian public has accepted it.

Fortunately, PSR has asked Palestinians something quite close to the real thing.

In 2013, respondents were presented with a detailed refugee compromise modeled on the Clinton Parameters and Geneva Initiative. Refugees would have unrestricted residence in the Palestinian state and territory transferred to it. Residence in Israel, third countries, and existing host countries would depend on those states’ decisions. Israel would determine how many refugees it admitted. All refugees would receive compensation.

The result?

Forty-six percent supported the compromise. Fifty-two percent opposed it.

The previous year, 41% supported it and 56% opposed it. PSR’s longer historical series is more revealing still. Between 2003 and 2013, this sort of refugee compromise never received majority support in the surveys reported there.

That does not prove Palestinians will never compromise.

It does mean we should stop treating the compromise as something the Palestinian public has already made.

Do Gazans want Gaza to be home?

Which brings us to the Board of Peace.

The Board’s ambition extends considerably beyond arranging a ceasefire. Its roadmap talks about Israeli withdrawal, Palestinian governance, reconstruction, economic development, demilitarization, and eventually a credible path toward Palestinian self-determination and statehood.

This is an admirable objective.

But there is a conspicuous issue missing from the agenda: the refugees.

Not the Gazans displaced during this war. I mean the descendants of the refugees from 1948 and their claim to return to towns and villages inside Israel. That omission is puzzling because the whole project depends, at some level, on a simple assumption:

Not merely a place where they live until the next war. Not a territory whose political future remains subordinated to an unresolved claim over Jaffa, Ashkelon, or the communities from which their families came.

The territory in which Palestinian national aspirations can be realized while Israel remains Israel on the other side of the border.

If that is what most Palestinians want, then we have the foundation for something enormously important. But if a large portion of the population believes that Palestinian statehood in Gaza and the West Bank is only one stage of a continuing claim to territory and homes inside Israel, then we have solved a very different problem.

We may have figured out how to rebuild Gaza without figuring out how to end the conflict.

And that matters because the Board of Peace is not merely trying to stop the shooting. It is trying to build a sustainable future for the people of Gaza. There is little point in spending billions of dollars building permanent homes without knowing whether the people who will live in them regard Gaza as their permanent home.

What did the war actually change?

The latest polling does contain reasons for cautious optimism.

Only 20% now say Hamas won the Gaza war; 60% say neither side won. Half of Palestinians agree that armed resistance failed to protect Palestinians or end the occupation and instead brought destruction. Among Gazans, 65% agree with that assessment. And negotiations have gone from the preference of one Palestinian in five before October 7 to the preferred strategy of more than two in five today.

That matters.

Taken together with the historical polling, it suggests something important about Palestinian attitudes toward violence:

Support for armed struggle appears to be highly instrumental.

When Palestinians believe violence works, support for it tends to rise. When they conclude that it has failed, support falls.

That is good news.

But it is not necessarily the news we think it is.

The Palestinian public may have reconsidered the road without reconsidering the destination.

And that distinction should matter enormously to Israelis deciding how much risk to take for peace.

The question we should actually ask

I am not arguing that Palestinians do not want peace.

I am arguing something simultaneously more modest and more important:

We don’t know.

At least not from the statistics normally invoked to prove it. We know how many Palestinians support the vaguely defined “two-state solution.”

We know how many, when given three choices, prefer “the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders” to “a confederation between the two states” or “a single state with equal rights for both sides.” We know whether they currently think negotiations or armed struggle is more effective.

But those are not quite the questions on which the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict turns.

The question is something like this:

Would you accept a sovereign Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank alongside Israel as the permanent end of the conflict; relinquish any general right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to Israel; and agree that neither side would thereafter have further territorial or national claims against the other?

Ask that question.

Ask it in Gaza.

Ask it in the West Bank.

Ask it repeatedly.

If a clear Palestinian majority says yes, Israelis should know that. It would be one of the most consequential findings in the history of the conflict.

And if a clear majority says no, Israelis should know that too.

Because “Do you support two states?” and “Are you prepared to end the conflict with Israel?” sound like the same question.

After a century of conflict, it might be worth checking.

Published in TOI

The post Two States – and Then What? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

I, too, was caught by surprise when rockets began flying from the Gaza Strip toward Israel at 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7, even though I was then serving as a lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate and commanding the branch responsible for strategic analysis of Hezbollah and Lebanon. Only hours later did the scale of the catastrophe inside Israel become clear: 1,200 people had been murdered, more than 250 abducted, and scenes of unimaginable destruction had unfolded in communities across southern Israel. Hamas had launched a brutal surprise attack, and Israel had not seen it coming. The IDF and the entire Israeli security establishment had failed in their most basic mission: protecting the country’s citizens.

Hamas inflicted on Israel the greatest disaster the Jewish people had suffered since the Holocaust. And the State of Israel—the start-up nation, home to the strongest military in the Middle East and one of the world’s most highly regarded intelligence communities—had neglected to prevent it. The gulf between Israel’s perceived strength and the magnitude of its failure was incomprehensible to me. Yet I devoted the first hours, days and months of the war to understanding Hezbollah—making sure that a strategic surprise would not come from that front as well—stabilizing our analytical work, and restoring confidence among the intelligence officers after the failure in Gaza had shaken the entire system.

Only months later was I able to turn to the causes of the failure. After I retired from military service in early 2026, the subject became an obsession: I needed to understand what had happened to Israeli intelligence and explain it to the Israeli public. I believed then, as I do today, that this was my responsibility as someone who had served for 18 years in the Military Intelligence Directorate and witnessed its inner workings firsthand.

To confront the challenge, I returned to two lessons from aviation. The first came from the commission that investigated Israel’s 1997 helicopter disaster, which stressed that “accidents do not simply happen; they are caused.” The second came from the study of aviation accidents, which shows that disasters usually result not from a single failure but from a chain of failures that compound one another until they produce a catastrophe. The parallel to Oct. 7 was unmistakable: This was the result of a preventable chain of failures.

At the heart of the disaster were three cumulative failures—intelligence, military and political—that reinforced one another. The military and political failures will be discussed elsewhere, one hopes by an independent state commission of inquiry. Here, I will focus on the realm in which I worked for years: intelligence.

The Military Intelligence Directorate, Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) and Mossad all failed to grasp Hamas’s strategy; the concrete preparations that preceded the attack; the organization’s military capacity to carry out a large-scale ground assault; its perception of its own strength relative to Israel; and the lessons it had drawn from previous rounds of fighting—foremost among them, that a deliberately initiated surprise attack was a prerequisite for any future campaign.

How did the intelligence community come to understand events in Gaza so differently from reality itself?

First, it refused to learn from the past in the way Hamas had. Had it done so, it would have learned that surprise attacks can happen to anyone, even great powers, and can confound even the brightest and most capable people. It would have learned that no defensive line is impenetrable, along with a lesson or two in humility about the imbalance of power between Israel and its enemies. History, as the saying often attributed to Mark Twain goes, does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Israeli intelligence, however, looked only forward, never backward.

The failure also reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of Hamas’s nature. Over the years, the intelligence community convinced itself that Hamas, while a despicable terrorist organization, cared above all about preserving its rule and was prepared to make significant compromises to maintain its standing in Palestinian society. It later became clear that governing the Gaza Strip was secondary to the ideological, murderous and antisemitic worldview that shaped the organization—and its leader, Yahya Sinwar, in particular.

To realize his messianic vision, Sinwar was prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of Palestinians and even Hamas’s own rule in Gaza. Intelligence analysts struggled to understand a leader and a movement operating according to a radically different set of values and priorities. Within the prevailing framework, increasing the number of Gazans allowed to work in Israel was therefore seen as a restraining influence, while Hamas’s decision to sit out rounds of fighting between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad was treated as evidence that it had been deterred.

At the same time, a collective attitude of contempt took hold in Israel, leading officials to underestimate Hamas’s capabilities in a way they did not underestimate Hezbollah’s or Iran’s. On several occasions, I personally heard Hamas dismissed as “stupid Palestinians” distracting Israel from what truly mattered—the Shi’ite axis. Sinwar recognized this perception and worked hard to reinforce Israel’s belief that Gaza posed no real threat.

Even the security establishment, which warned the prime minister several times before Oct. 7 of the growing potential for war, believed that trouble would come from the north—from Hezbollah or Iran—and did not view the Palestinian arena as an immediate danger.

This contempt also affected the security and intelligence resources Israel devoted to Gaza before Oct. 7. The Lebanon arena was covered by a stable and sophisticated network of analysts and collection specialists who challenged one another’s assessments. The Gaza arena was entrusted to a small group of people on whom Israel depended for its understanding of Hamas and its intentions.

The system was also dominated by a deeply rooted strategic assumption: that Israel’s enemies were highly unlikely to launch a deliberate attack because they understood both the vast imbalance of power and the strength of Israeli deterrence. Across every arena, the prevailing belief was that war could erupt because of a miscalculation, an escalatory dynamic or even greater risk-taking by an adversary; however, not as the result of a large-scale offensive resembling the Yom Kippur War or, in a very different context, the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That helps explain why Hamas’s plan to seize the communities surrounding Gaza was dismissed as fantastical. What enemy would dare attempt such an operation against mighty Israel?

Meanwhile, the intelligence community turned inward. It refused to allow outside voices to influence its thinking. In a closed system with little room for unconventional thought, challenging an entrenched conception becomes exceedingly difficult. When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks as they should.

The Military Intelligence Directorate—and with it the broader intelligence community—excelled at recruiting outstanding people, but of a very particular kind. The door was thus closed to those who thought differently, and on the eve of Oct. 7, the intelligence community had become hierarchical, formulaic and one-dimensional.

Too often, voices that challenged the dominant view were immediately dismissed as irrelevant, tedious, unprofessional or insufficiently experienced. The intelligence community also openly discounted dissenting views from outside the system, whether they came from government ministers, academics or foreign intelligence services. The unspoken message was clear: What could they possibly understand? They’re not experts like us.

Information overload

This problem was compounded by a distinctly modern challenge: information overload. Before the Yom Kippur War, the intelligence community received a limited number of warning indicators pointing to an intention to go to war.

Today, the volume of information flowing into the Military Intelligence Directorate is almost unimaginable. This offers many advantages, but its most serious drawback is that anyone already captive to a false conception can easily find information that confirms it. In a world in which billions of pieces of information enter the intelligence community’s systems every day, how can analysts filter out the noise, determine what is credible, and decide what is more or less alarming?

So it was in the period before Oct. 7: The warning signs were swallowed by a mass of other information that appeared to contradict them. Confronted by such a powerful conception, those signals struggled to command enough attention to influence decision-makers, especially when other indicators seemed to reinforce the prevailing view.

Professional safeguards were supposed to address precisely this problem, but they, too, had eroded across the intelligence community over the years. In a gradual process, the fundamentals of the profession—the insurance policy meant to protect against catastrophes such as Oct. 7—were neglected. The system elevated speed and efficiency over professional rigor and thoroughness, and basic principles of intelligence work fell away because they were deemed “too time-consuming.” The essential mechanisms for preserving institutional knowledge and learning lessons also deteriorated. As long as there was no unmistakable and glaring failure, there was little incentive to “return to basics.”

The relentless pursuit of efficiency also displaced efforts to look beyond the horizon and identify potential dangers. The Military Intelligence Directorate was so confident in its assessments that it saw too little need to adhere to practices that had served intelligence professionals for generations. The intelligence community should have operated like the aviation industry, with multiple layers of redundancy reflecting the severity of the risk.

Instead, it operated like a publicly traded company determined to cut costs. The Military Intelligence Directorate behaved as if the danger were a bad quarterly report, not a strategic catastrophe.

The entire intelligence community also depended to an astonishing degree on a very small number of intelligence sources in the Gaza Strip. As a result, it viewed the arena through a narrow lens that produced the false conviction that Hamas was restrained and did not want war.

This was partly connected to the dominant status of Unit 8200 and the belief that Israel’s technological superiority allowed it to understand every move its enemies made. These technological capabilities have made an enormous contribution to Israel’s security, but they are not sufficient on their own.

Diversify your investments

The Military Intelligence Directorate failed to follow the most basic rule taught in any introductory lesson on financial markets: Diversify your investments. Instead of combining a broad range of collection capabilities, the intelligence community became addicted to a particular kind of source and assumed it offered a complete picture of reality. This helps explain why the reports of the female surveillance soldiers stationed along the Gaza border were given so little weight: Why take them seriously when Israel possessed extraordinary technological capabilities that appeared to contradict them?

The failure was especially conspicuous in the realm of open-source intelligence.

On Sept. 12, 2023, Hamas itself released a propaganda video showing a large-scale exercise in Gaza, including a seaborne raid toward the coast, militants breaching the border fence in white pickup trucks and simulated abductions. I first encountered the video only a few months ago and quickly skipped past it because I assumed it was yet another clip from Oct. 7. It is difficult to convey my shock when I realized it had been published less than a month before the massacre.

Hamas had handed Israel a gift—a glimpse of how it would attack just weeks later—and Israel had buried its head in the sand. The intelligence community had no systematic mechanism for monitoring publicly available information and integrating it into intelligence assessments.

Hatzav, the unit responsible for open-source intelligence, had been shut down in 2021, reflecting the attitude then prevalent in the Military Intelligence Directorate: If it isn’t Unit 8200, then it isn’t interesting.

The role of intelligence in national decision-making also demands examination. In a properly functioning system, intelligence is not supposed to predict the future or give senior leaders a false sense of certainty. Its role—ironically displayed in enormous letters at the Military Intelligence Directorate’s headquarters in Tel Aviv—is to help decision-makers think about the future.

Yet over the years, and because of its immense power and prestige, intelligence became a kind of crystal ball that instilled confidence in policymakers. The political leadership demanded answers, and intelligence supplied them: confident judgments, complete certainty and categorical assertions, both about what was happening and what would happen next—the very opposite of the humility required of every intelligence analyst.

This created an informal bargain between intelligence professionals and decision-makers: reality was whatever the intelligence community presented, and anything absent from its assessments did not exist. Under this unwritten agreement, intelligence could not be wrong about the fundamental questions.

And perhaps this was the gravest weakness of all: the fervent belief that Israel’s intelligence community was the best in the world and that its people were the most talented. I remember well the slogan of Havatzalot, the flagship program for training intelligence officers where I trained: “Making the best even better.” Intelligence officers learned to operate much like their counterparts in Israel’s start-up community: to believe in their ability to succeed beyond all imagination.

That quality is immensely valuable in many fields. But in intelligence analysis, excessive self-confidence impairs the ability to listen to other views and adopt them when warranted. The Military Intelligence Directorate should instead have sanctified humility, doubt and the asking of difficult questions—and promoted people who embodied those qualities. It did precisely the opposite.

During my visits to schools and pre-military academies, I often hear the word “conspiracy.” But there was no conspiracy. Many people also point, with justification, to negligence by some military intelligence officers on that night, and during the weeks and months that preceded it.

Expression of the system

Yet neither conspiracy nor negligence can explain the depth of this systemic failure. The disaster resulted from fundamental shortcomings that accumulated over years until they reached a breaking point.

It would be comforting if the gulf between perception and reality could be explained by a conspiracy or the negligence of a few individuals. The truth is far more disturbing: The failure was embedded deep in the culture, structure and working methods of Israel’s intelligence community. It was the direct result of profound problems left unaddressed for years. This was not an isolated bug in the system; it was an expression of the system itself, and of the way it had learned to think and operate.

Still, Israel must not throw out the baby with the bathwater. It has no other intelligence community, and these are the same organizations that achieved extraordinary intelligence successes against Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. Israel’s intelligence community is a national asset, but it must undergo fundamental change if it is to become more resilient to future surprises.

That is a responsibility it owes to itself, but above all, to Israel’s citizens and to those who sacrificed everything in this war. The path forward must include an independent state commission of inquiry that examines the full range of failures—intelligence, military and political—and formulates the necessary recommendations.

Israel has no alternative, and its enemies will not wait. Now is the time to ensure that the lessons of Oct. 7 are learned and that the risk of the next strategic surprise is reduced as much as possible. Our enemies are already learning the lessons of Oct. 7. The question is whether we are, too.

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The post I was caught by surprise on Oct. 7 first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

In recent weeks, Yemen’s Houthis (officially known as Ansar Allah) have returned to the international agenda. A string of territorial gains by the group has strengthened their position along the Red Sea and around the Bab al-Mandab Strait, giving them greater ability to threaten one of the world’s most important maritime trade routes.

They have also renewed missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is seeking help, but neither its traditional ally (the United States) nor its new partners under the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement (Pakistan and Turkey) appear willing to join a military campaign against the Houthis.

At the same time, U.S. officials have reportedly met with Houthi representatives in Oman, where the Houthis offered assurances that American vessels would not be attacked—underscoring Washington’s reluctance to enter the conflict.

That reluctance is understandable. The Trump administration is focused on a prolonged campaign against Iran, the midterm elections and an economy strained by inflation and high energy prices. It is also wary after its costly 2025 campaign against the Houthis, which ended without eliminating the threat. Washington would prefer to set the Houthi problem aside and focus on its other troubles. It is a perfectly understandable approach, and a profoundly mistaken one.

The Houthis are not merely a local problem for Saudi Arabia, as Washington would like to believe. The movement’s official slogan, emblazoned on its banner, pointedly omits Saudi Arabia and instead declares: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.” The enemies it names—and their order—capture key elements of the movement’s worldview: anti-Americanism, antisemitism and jihadism.

Having seized control of much of the Yemeni state and its resources, the Houthis now possess the means to act on that worldview. Their leader has repeatedly described the movement’s struggle as a jihad against the enemies of Islam, foremost among them America and Israel; rhetoric that echoes that of other enemies of America, including al-Qaeda and the Iranian regime.

The danger lies not only in the Houthis’ extreme intentions but in the formidable capabilities they have built with substantial Iranian assistance. In the past decade, they have evolved from a local militia into one of the region’s most capable non-state armed forces, fielding ballistic and cruise missiles, attack and reconnaissance drones, unmanned vessels and naval mines.

The immediate danger is clear: Missiles and drones with demonstrated ranges of at least 1,250 miles give the Houthis the ability to threaten U.S. forces and interests, as well as American allies across the region, while seaborne raids allow them to disrupt global trade whenever their leaders choose.

The longer-term danger may be greater. Control of territory and demonstrated domestic missile and drone production capacity could support still longer ranges and raids far beyond Yemen. Over time, those same resources could support operations well outside the Arabian Peninsula.

Although the Houthis cooperate with Iran, they are not subordinate in the conventional sense. Their growing autonomy could give them a larger role within what remains of Iran’s regional “axis of resistance.” Weakening Iran, difficult as that is, therefore offers no guarantee of dealing effectively with the Houthis.

Thus, ignoring the problem means sacrificing the medium- and long-term for the short-term. It would amount to accepting a heavily armed, ideologically hostile organization as a permanent fixture in the region. Such a movement cannot safely be assumed to remain contained.

The alternative is not an open-ended American war against the Houthis. It is a long-term strategy that steadily weakens the movement, constrains its ability to threaten shipping and neighboring states, and creates conditions for more moderate Yemeni alternatives to replace Houthi rule.

Much can be done without direct American military intervention. The Houthis’ exploitation of humanitarian aid has become both an instrument of rule and a potential vulnerability. Billions of dollars in assistance have entered Yemen during the war, much of it destined for Houthi-held areas, where nearly 80% of the country’s humanitarian needs are concentrated. By controlling distribution and seizing aid and equipment, the Houthis convert relief into revenue, patronage and political control.

Beyond aid, the Houthis depend on vulnerable external supply routes, while their adversaries have yet to forge a coherent Yemeni opposition. Thus, better coordination among Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates is in order, as these nations have struggled, for different reasons, to form a unified and effective coalition.

Their strategy should begin by mapping and exploiting the group’s vulnerabilities. Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi’s exceptional personal importance to the movement makes weakening his command structure and the system built around him an essential part of any long-term plan. Humanitarian aid must continue, but its delivery needs reform, independent oversight and mechanisms that reduce the Houthis’ ability to seize it. Another pillar should be disrupting supply routes from Iran, including networks running through Oman and Africa.

Economic pressure should target the group’s other lifelines, weakening its ability to terrorize and control millions of Yemenis who are not part of the Houthi movement but live under its rule. To turn that pressure into political change, the coalition must also build Yemen’s political and military opposition so a more moderate force can replace Houthi rule when the opportunity arises.

Above all, the United States cannot mistake inaction for strategy. The cost of delay will only rise.

Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 offer a common warning: Ideological hostility should not be underestimated when it is paired with proven military capabilities and a willingness to use them. The Houthis’ renewed confrontation with Saudi Arabia should serve as a similar warning.

Washington still has time to choose a strategy rather than improvise in reaction to the next crisis. It should use that time before the Houthis leave it with fewer choices.

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The post The Houthi threat cannot be swept under the rug first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

While we celebrate Sukkot in Israel, with our eyes turned inward to our own wars, our own divisions and our own future, something odd has happened in France. Maybe nothing. Maybe a great deal.

For now it’s a noise, not a signal. But some noises announce historic shifts before anyone alive has understood what they heard. Israeli journalists keep asking me the same thing: How can Europeans watch political Islam gain ground, immigration strain institutions and demographic change accelerate, and do so little about it?

Maybe we’re looking for the reaction in the wrong place. A civilization doesn’t always start by voting differently. Sometimes, it starts by remembering that it has something to hand down, and therefore, something to lose. That may be what France just showed us. On Sept. 25, several hundred young people set out in procession from the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the burial place of France’s kings, and made their way to the Stade de France, where 80,000 young people joined Pope Leo XIV for a prayer vigil.

The symbolism was hard to miss. Saint-Denis is a working-class city shaped by immigration and home to a large Muslim community. Its mayor, Bally Bagayoko, is a Muslim, a member of the left-wing La France Insoumise Party and the son of Malian immigrants. He openly champions the “new France” that immigration has created.

So, a procession rooted in France’s Christian inheritance, setting out quite literally from its kings’ tombs, passed through one of the country’s emblematic multicultural cities on its way to a packed stadium. The next day, the scale changed. Roughly 800,000 people gathered in central Paris, from the Place de la Concorde up the Champs-Élysées, for the pope’s mass.

That doesn’t mean France has become Catholic again or that its politics have shifted. But in one of the most secular countries in the West, a public turnout like that deserves a second look.

It matters all the more in a country where troubled neighborhoods struggle with drug trafficking, black-market economies, violence and weakened state authority. Saint-Denis packs many of France’s social tensions into a few square miles.

It would be wrong, however, to cast Leo as the pope of closed borders. Like his predecessor, Pope Francis, he defends welcoming and integrating migrants. But he adds another question: What is Europe, exactly? What should it pass on if it wants to welcome others without dissolving?

In Metz, at a gathering on Europe’s roots, Leo said that one cannot speak of Europe without speaking of Christianity. French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking before him, described Europe as having a “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian foundation.” Athens, Rome and Jerusalem are a civilizational vocabulary that is returning to a Europe that had gotten used to talking about markets, rights, regulations and procedures.

The message isn’t “shut the door.” It’s subtler: You can welcome the other without ceasing to be yourself. The awakening in question isn’t electoral, and it isn’t necessarily religious. It is first of all an awakening to vulnerability.

Europe has been here before. The word “Europe” is ancient, of course. But after Constantinople fell in 1453, with the Ottomans advancing, the future Pope Pius II, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, increasingly invoked “Europa” and even the idea of “Europeans,” to name a community worth defending. Old Christendom was becoming a European consciousness. Threat gave identity its density.

Identities come into focus when they feel exposed. Sometimes, we discover who we are when we imagine that we might cease to be. France is not Europe. But the French episode reads differently next to what’s happening farther east.

War has returned to the continent. Russia has reminded Europeans that borders aren’t just legal lines. The Baltic states live with a concrete military threat. The Czech Republic maintains unusually close ties with Israel. Slovenia has recently renewed political and economic dialogue with Jerusalem. These countries don’t agree with Israel on everything. But those who feel vulnerable may grasp certain Israeli reflexes more easily.

This is where a possible European awakening gets interesting for Jews.

The postwar project of European integration was built in part on distrust of unconstrained nationalism. After the catastrophes of the 20th century, borders, military power and collective particularism became suspect. The European project was partly about taming national passions through law, trade and shared institutions.

Israel, born at almost the same moment, drew nearly the opposite lesson. For Jews, the century hadn’t proved that the nation-state should be transcended. It proved that the Jews needed one of their own. Survival demanded sovereignty, defended borders, military strength and the handing down of a particular identity.

Some of the friction between Israel and Western Europe may spring from that gap. What some European critics saw as an Israeli anachronism—attachment to land, military power, sovereignty and a specific national memory—Israelis saw as the bare minimum for staying alive. But vulnerability changes how you look at things. When war seems impossible, an army looks quaint. When borders feel permanent, someone who wants to defend them seems obsessive. When your own identity feels safe, another people’s particularism looks archaic.

Then comes the day you learn that none of it is guaranteed. A border can be crossed. A population can be attacked. A culture can discover that its continuity is not automatic. An identity survives only if someone decides to pass it on, and it survives an attack only if someone is willing to defend it.

Israelis have never really forgotten that. Some Europeans may be relearning it.

So, is Europe waking up? It’s far too early to say. Some 800,000 people in Paris don’t erase decades of secularization or the continent’s demographic transformation. A papal visit isn’t a political revolution.

For now, it’s just a faint stirring. But if that stirring heralds a Western Europe rediscovering that civilizations are mortal, then Europe might one day look at Israel differently. Not as the awkward relic of an age of borders, armies and national identities Europe thought it had outgrown, but as a people who grasped, before Europe did, that an identity you don’t defend can vanish.

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The post Is Europe waking up? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Israelis are a nation of heroes. That might sound like a slogan, but every so often something happens that reminds us how true this is.

Of all the extraordinary stories to emerge from Wednesday’s flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, the one that stands out is the courage of the passengers who realized something had gone terribly wrong, forced their way into the cockpit, and helped subdue the co-pilot, who had allegedly stabbed the captain and appeared to be trying to bring down the plane.

The aircraft plunged thousands of feet; there was chaos onboard, and the passengers had no way of knowing exactly what was happening or whether they had minutes, seconds, or no time at all.

And they acted. They didn’t wait for someone to rescue them or see if everything would resolve itself on its own. They took the initiative and saved lives: not only of the passengers on board, but whatever else the plane could have taken down with it.

When we remember aircraft that have been hijacked or crashed over the years, it is difficult not to appreciate what happened aboard this flight and how there is something deeply Israeli about it. It is part of this country’s culture: not to stand by and watch events unfold, but to run headfirst into the fire, battle, or the storm and do whatever can be done to save lives.

We have now heard some testimony from passengers aboard the flight. It is frightening and disturbing, particularly as investigators are still trying to understand what exactly happened and what the co-pilot’s motive was. But there is also something heartwarming in hearing how people responded in those terrifying moments.

They literally took charge, and, when we think about it, it is a characteristic we know all too well. Next week, Israel will mark three years since October 7. That terrible day will be seared into our collective memory as one of the greatest failures and tragedies in Israeli history. But, like with the airplane, it too was filled with stories of some of the greatest courage this country has ever seen.

There are many different kinds of heroism, and there is no need to rank them.

But it is impossible to forget the people who woke up that morning, heard that something incomprehensible was happening in the south, understood that people were in desperate need of help, and got into their cars. They took whatever weapons they had, if they had any, and drove straight into the battle.

They did not know what they would find. They did not know how many terrorists had crossed the border, where the army was, or whether they themselves would make it home. They just went. That, to a large extent, is the story of Israel: a small country whose people are repeatedly confronted with danger and who, when the moment comes, stand up, fight and lead the charge.

A nation prepared to fight

It is worth thinking about that now, just weeks before Israelis go to the polls on October 27.

This election will help determine the direction Israel takes after three extraordinarily difficult years. And whichever government ultimately emerges, it will inherit a country confronting a series of strategic challenges, almost none of which have truly been resolved.

Hamas still controls part of Gaza and retains weapons and military infrastructure. Hezbollah remains a threat to Israel’s north. And Iran remains locked in confrontation over its nuclear program and its wider regional capabilities. It is true that three years after October 7, Israel has achieved amazing accomplishments, but victory, as we know too well by now, is not measured only by what an army destroys – it is also measured by what a country builds in its place.

And that is where a striking discrepancy has emerged.

Israel’s leaders have been given an extraordinary gift: a population willing to fight, to endure difficult years, and send its children to war knowing the risks and knowing, painfully, that some will not return.

Consider the family of Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter. His son Neria was seriously wounded last week in a ramming attack on Route 443 while serving in the reserves. His brother, Moshe, was killed fighting in Gaza in 2023.

Neria had every reason not to continue serving: his brother had been killed, and his family had already sacrificed enough. He could have remained home with his wife and children. He could have spared his parents the anguish of once again worrying about a son fighting on the front.

But he did not. He continued putting on his uniform. He continued reporting for reserve duty. And he continued serving. Without people like that, Israel would not survive. But courage cannot only be demanded of soldiers and civilians; it must be demanded of politicians as well.

Political courage is different. It is not about charging a cockpit or running toward gunfire. It is about making difficult decisions, accepting risk, challenging traditional assumptions and, most importantly, telling the public where you actually want to take the country.

That is the question Israelis should be asking as they prepare to vote: What is the vision? Is the future being offered to us simply one of hunkering down, a kind of super-Sparta, stronger and better armed than everyone around us but condemned to fight one war after another?

Or is there another possibility, one that recognizes the threats Israel faces, takes them seriously, and preserves overwhelming military strength, but also searches for a path toward greater security, stability, and eventually something else?

Israel looking for brave leaders

Last week in New York, for example, the US-backed Board of Peace unveiled an ambitious plan for Gaza. Senior officials acknowledged the enormous obstacles standing in the way, including the unresolved dispute over how Hamas will disarm and how Israel will withdraw.

Considering everything that would have to happen for this plan to succeed, skepticism is more than understandable. Is it ambitious and hard to imagine? 100%. Three years after October 7, with the situation in Gaza still dire – both for its residents and for Israel’s security – this is a thoughtful plan that offers a real chance to change reality on the ground. Considering all the alternatives, isn’t it worth a shot?

But here is the catch: Israelis were not even in the room.

That is what this election campaign should be about. Instead, too much of Israeli politics remains focused on what candidates are against. This person will sit with that party; that person cannot be trusted; this bloc is dangerous, and that bloc is illegitimate. But what are these politicians for? Where do they want Israel to be in five years?

What is their plan for Gaza? For Lebanon? For the Palestinians? For Israel’s increasingly strained relationship with parts of the Western world? What does victory realistically look like?

Israelis have demonstrated time and again that they are prepared to take extraordinary risks for this country. The people who stormed the cockpit this week did not wait to be asked. Neither did the Israelis who drove south on October 7. They saw danger. They understood that someone had to act. And despite having no guarantee of what would happen next, they moved forward.

Israel’s political leaders do not need to storm a cockpit. But they do need to show some of the same courage. Instead of spending the next few weeks telling Israelis what they will never do, whom they will never sit with, and why everyone else is dangerous, they should tell us where they want to take this country.

The Israeli people have already shown that they are prepared to be brave. Now they deserve leaders brave enough to offer them a future.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Israel is a nation of heroes – time for the gov’t to show courage too first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

In a political first, Israel’s opposition leaders have presented a common set of principles for the government they intend to form. Four issues top the agenda: equal sharing of the national burden, establishing a state commission of inquiry into the failures of October 7, instituting term limits for prime ministers, and adopting a constitution.

Resolving these issues is a matter of paramount national interest. Without equal sharing of the burden, Israel will struggle to function militarily, economically, and socially; without a state commission of inquiry, we will neither learn how to prevent similar failures in the future nor fulfill our most basic obligation to those who paid a heavy price as a result; term limits are needed to inject fresh thinking into national leadership and reduce the risk of government corruption; and a constitution is an indispensable social and legal framework for safeguarding the stability of Israeli democracy.

These issues are not all alike. The first three can be implemented swiftly through legislation and raise no especially complex professional questions. Adopting a constitution, by contrast, is a complex legal, cultural, and social undertaking – perhaps the greatest challenge a legislature can face – and will therefore take considerable time.

The first three measures also enjoy relatively broad public support in Israel. In-depth surveys indicate that even some supporters of the coalition back the opposition’s positions on these issues. Opinions differ over how equal sharing of the burden should be achieved and how far it should go, but the general direction is supported by a large majority.

The idea of a constitution also enjoys broad support – but only in the abstract. Once the Knesset seeks to translate it into concrete provisions, disagreements among the identity groups that make up Israeli society will erupt in full force. The record is clear: Israel has seen many serious attempts, both inside and outside the Knesset, to propose a constitution, and all have failed. Israel is more polarized today than it was then; the challenge has only grown.

There is another important difference. Arrangements governing the first three issues can be enacted by an ordinary coalition majority, however narrow. By contrast, constitutional arrangements require broader public support.

A constitution provides stability

A constitution has a stabilizing effect only if it is entrenched, so that it cannot later be amended by an ordinary coalition majority. But if the present generation is to constrain the legislative freedom of future coalition majorities, the constitution itself must be adopted by broad support. Without such support, the constitution’s legitimacy is called into question, and instability may actually deepen.

Even so, the opposition leaders are entirely right to put the constitutional challenge on the national agenda. The question is how, in practice, to advance a constitution after the election – and what, in principle, the proper path should be.

A full constitution addresses three fundamental questions: the state’s core identity (who are we?); a bill of rights (what do we believe in?); and the institutions of government (how do we manage our shared life?).

Given Israel’s polarization, broad agreement on the first two questions is unattainable. Even if the “reform parties,” as they call themselves, reach agreement on these matters, they would lack the professional and public legitimacy needed to entrench those arrangements so that future changes would require a larger majority than the one that enacted them.

Would opposition leaders accept constitutional provisions adopted by the current coalition requiring a supermajority – say, 80 MKs – for any future amendment? Hillel the Elder and Immanuel Kant taught us not to impose on others what we would not accept for ourselves.

There is, however, a way to stabilize Israel through a partial constitutional settlement – a “thin constitution” focused on the third question: relations among the branches of government. The fierce struggle over judicial reform shows that disagreement is intense here as well, but the prospects for broad agreement are comparatively greater because these are not questions of identity.

Most Israelis – including supporters of the opposition parties and members of the liberal camp – favor measured changes in the relationship among the branches. A thin constitution that sets rules all sides would regard as fair and effective when viewed from “behind a veil of ignorance” – without knowing whether they will find themselves in the coalition or the opposition in the future – could command broad support.

That is how Israel can achieve the reform it needs.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Israel needs a thin constitution to bridge its political divide first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Of all the fault lines dividing Israeli society, none is more dangerous – or more misleading – than the supposed divide between “Jews” and “Israelis”: the notion, aggressively promoted by some, that the Right represents the “Jews” who keep the flame alive, while anyone who is not on the Right is merely “Israeli” – estranged from Jewish tradition and in thrall to global “progressivism” and its values.

This is a distorted picture of Israeli society. Israeli identity itself embraces Jewish values and traditions; Jewish tradition and its values are foundational to Israeli-Zionist identity. The data, too, tell the opposite story. The overwhelming majority of Israelis are deeply Jewish – in identity, values, and practice.

The false narrative of “Jews” versus “Israelis” has antecedents at both ends of the political spectrum. Its intellectual roots reach back to the fringes of the Canaanite movement and later to the post-Zionist Left, both of which sought to sever Israeli statehood from its Jewish inheritance.

The narrative as a political weapon

But the Right turned the idea into a popular political weapon. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whispered into Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri’s ear that “the Left has forgotten what it means to be Jewish,” he was articulating a strategy designed to brand the entire liberal public as “Israelis” hostile to Judaism and its expression in the Jewish state; to give the right-wing and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) bloc a monopoly on Judaism; and, above all, to bind it together as a cohesive “Jewish” bloc.

But anyone who looks squarely at reality can see this for the distortion it is. Data from recent years consistently tell a very different story. Jewish Israeli society is not split between “Jews” and “Israelis.” Most of it falls within what might be called “Israeli Judaism” or the “traditionalist sphere.”

In this broad middle – which encompasses most of Israeli society, including most of the political Center and part of the Left – the two identities do not compete; they reinforce each other, in self-understanding as well as in practice.

The Jewish identity of Israelis

Consider the numbers. Roughly 80% of secular Israelis say it is very important to them that their children grow up as Jews. The share of Israelis who attend a Passover Seder, light Hanukkah candles, affix a mezuzah at home, and circumcise their sons consistently exceeds 90%. Even on Yom Kippur, three out of four Israeli Jews fast either fully or partially, and almost all car owners refrain from driving. Two-thirds of Israeli Jews (67%) keep kosher fully or in part, and 70% do not eat hametz on Passover.

Israelis in the Center and on the Left, along with substantial segments of the Right, oppose religious coercion. Most support civil marriage, limited public transportation on Shabbat, and a more equal sharing of civic burdens.

They object to the politicization of religion, in part because they refuse to surrender their Judaism to the Chief Rabbinate – an ossified political institution focused on the sectoral and economic interests of its insiders. But opposition to the rabbinate’s monopoly is not opposition to Judaism.

The real debate in Israel is not between “Jews” who care deeply about tradition and “Israelis” who supposedly reject it and want to strip the state of its Jewish markers. The debate is over the Jewish character of the state.

Participants in that debate include people on the Left whose concern for the state’s Jewish character – and for the character of Judaism within it – is no less profound than that of the Jews on the Right. The attempt to portray the liberal camp as having lost its Jewishness is a dangerous political lie. It is time to root it out of our public discourse.

Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. It is also deeply Zionist and Israeli. At their best, these identities coexist, complement one another, and draw strength from one another. There is, of course, tension among the different values that constitute Israeli identity. The debate over their place in the public sphere and the institutions of government is real and has accompanied the country since its founding.

But at the deepest level of identity, most Israelis are also Jewish. The Jewishness of those on the Left and in the political Center is no less real than that of right-wing Jews. This narrative may serve the political extremes and the campaigns of cynical politicians, but it threatens Israeli society with yet another fault line – one built on a lie.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post The ‘Jews vs Israelis’ lie: Right does not own Judaism, and the Left has not abandoned it first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

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.