Each year, the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) examines the condition and trajectory of the Jewish people – in Israel and in the Diaspora – across six pillars: geopolitics, cohesion, resilience, identity, demography, and the Israel–U.S. relationship. The Annual Assessment is compiled not just as a chronicle of the year that was, but as a policy instrument: an argument about which trends are strengthening us, which are weakening us, and where intervention is still possible.
The military ledger is, on the one hand, impressive when measured against Israel’s enemies – Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran – but, on the other hand, while they have been weakened, they have not been decisively defeated, and their future capacity to challenge Israel is shrouded in uncertainty. Between the two wars – the one in June 2025 and the one that began in February 2026 – Iran’s nuclear program and military infrastructure have been significantly degraded even as the regime holds on, controls the Strait of Hormuz, and continues to toy with the West. Whether the coming year brings a negotiated arrangement, a quiet reconstitution, a no-war, no-peace stalemate, or repeated rounds of strikes remains open, and each path carries a distinct risk. But the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran demonstrate, as the Ukrainians first showed against Russia with inexpensive but lethal drones, the power of asymmetric warfare against a more powerful military force – a lesson Israel and the United States must take to heart.
Hezbollah’s offensive arsenal has been degraded and its forces pushed back from southern Lebanon, but the outcome of the pilot program agreed between Jerusalem and Beirut for the Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah remains unclear. Hamas is a shadow of its former self, and the remaining hostages all came home. A new agreement announced in early August about Hamas’s disarmament will be tested repeatedly in the year ahead, with an uncertain outcome at best. But Hamas and Hezbollah are deeply embedded in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively, and will be difficult to fully dislodge.
The American front is also deeply concerning. Structurally, the military partnership has never been deeper: the joint operation against Iran, the presidential intervention that helped bring the last hostages home, and defense technology cooperation advanced through the National Defense Authorization Act. Politically, it has never been more fragile, even though President Trump has been strongly supportive of Israel. The Iran war has exposed a significant rift between the president and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both in their relationship and in their goals. Anti-Zionism has hardened on both flanks – the progressive left and the isolationist right – as reflected in New York City Mayor Mamdani’s election, in Democratic defections in the Senate and particularly in the House of Representatives, where over 100 Democratic members voted to cut all military support for Israel, and in the Tucker Carlson–Candace Owens conservative, isolationist axis.
Just as Americans, including American Jews, do not realize the profound psychological shock to the Israeli psyche of Hamas’s brutal massacre of innocent Israeli civilians and the taking of hundreds of hostages, we fear that the Israeli public does not fully appreciate the significance of the drop in U.S. public support for Israel.
Largely as a result of Israel’s retaliation following Hamas’s massacre of innocent Israeli civilians on October 7, public support for Israel has dramatically slipped, most sharply where the long-term damage is greatest: among younger Americans and Democrats, where two-thirds disapprove of Israeli government policy and large majorities express more support for Palestinians than for Israel, and also among young Republicans and evangelicals once assumed to be permanently in Israel’s column. The perception that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pressured President Trump into the unpopular war with Iran has contributed to the decline in public support for Israel.
The fundamentals of shared interests and shared values have never been more in question, and the challenge now is to try to lock in cooperation in whatever form it can be institutionalized, so that it depends less on any given congressional vote or any given president. This will be difficult, and it will be critical for Israel to stop writing off the Democratic Party as lost, which alienates the pro-Israel moderates who remain Israel’s most valuable allies within the party but who are now very much on the defensive.
Even more troubling is the rift between Israel and the Diaspora. A Washington Post poll last year found that over 60% of American Jews believe Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, and almost 40% say Israel is guilty of genocide. While we strongly disagree with this characterization, this is a sign of the difficult state of relations between American Jews and Israel.
The work to repair the situation has already begun in earnest at JPPI. We recently launched a new program that will convene groups of experts and officials in both Israel and the United States around what we call the “triangular relationship” – one connecting Jerusalem, Washington, and American Jewry. Each leg has for too long been managed separately: Israeli governments often focus just on the U.S. administration, American Jewish organizations handle their own communities, and no one holds the triangle as a whole. Yet the three sometimes function as a single system. American Jewry’s standing can help shape what Washington can do to support Israel; Israeli decisions shape the conditions in which American Jews live; and Washington’s posture shapes both. It will be no easy task at this point, but building a shared strategic vocabulary across the three – before the next crisis forces one – is among the most consequential investments available this year.
The sharpest deterioration is in the safety and standing of Jews outside Israel, in the U.S. and in Europe. Antisemitism has shifted from a landscape of occasional threats into a systematic environment, a change that runs deeper than any incident count.
The French Jewish community has adopted a policy of encouraging French Jews to move to safer areas of Paris. Many Parisian Jews have taken down their mezuzahs. In the 1990s, many European countries provided visible extra security at synagogues, day schools, Jewish community centers, and even cemeteries. None of this was needed in the U.S. Now, virtually every major American Jewish institution has guards.
Two years of war have also prompted Diaspora Jewry to reconsider what Jewish power means and how it should be used. The dominant note is ambivalence: pride in Israel’s military capability alongside deep discomfort at the Gaza war’s human toll, and a refusal to accept the labels “supporter” or “critic.” Most striking is the erosion of the frame that long anchored the bond: fewer Diaspora Jews, across denominations, see Israel as a moral exemplar or a light unto the nations.
At home, Israeli society tells a genuinely mixed story. Israelis agree more than they did on fundamentals such as democracy and equal rights, but feel further apart from one another. Political alignment has become the dominant fault line; the share naming the religious–secular rift as the most threatening has risen sharply; and 78% remain worried about social cohesion. Most troubling is a spreading mutual suspicion that the other camp will not accept the results of the coming election – a danger of a different order, self-fulfilling by nature and more corrosive than any single dispute over judicial reform or the draft. An election year is the worst possible moment to discover that both sides have decided in advance not to concede.
This is the vacuum a constitution is meant to fill. Israel’s polarization is not only a clash of values; it is the absence of agreed rules for adjudicating that clash. JPPI’s thin constitution project proceeds from the conviction that Israelis will not soon agree on the deep questions – religion and state, national identity, the character of the state – and do not need to in order to agree on the rules of the game. A thin constitution would settle the essentials: the relations between the branches of government, a core of basic rights, and the procedures by which the rules themselves may be changed. It is not a complete cure, but the alternative is what we are watching now – a society in which every dispute becomes constitutional and every election becomes existential.
The demographic picture is stable but changing shape. The global Jewish population continues to grow. At the same time, for the first time in its 78-year history as a sovereign Jewish state, emigration from Israel has risen sharply: the Israeli population abroad has climbed, with Israelis now constituting 7–15% of the Jewish populations of Britain and Germany, revitalizing aging communities and reshaping them along Israeli lines, but depriving Israel of some of its brightest and best people.
There are reasons for hope. Even if the prospect of expanding the Abraham Accords has receded, it is remarkable that the Accords have held – especially in the face of Iranian missile and drone attacks against the UAE and Bahrain. The solidarity that October 7 awakened has not dissipated; many younger Diaspora Jews are re-engaging, and in communities feeling the pressure of antisemitism, interest in Israel as a destination rather than only a cause is rising. This assessment urges Israel to prepare for that possibility now – to build absorption scenarios for 10,000, 50,000, and 150,000 immigrants over 24 months, with the housing, credentialing, schooling, and employment infrastructure to match – rather than improvise when the moment arrives.
In conclusion, Israel enters this year with a favorable military balance of power but almost no settled outcomes in its conflicts with Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran, and has never been so isolated internationally. Iran’s program is set back but not over. Washington remains committed but less reliably so. In fact, the Iran war and the resulting strain with America’s Arab allies have led many Middle Eastern leaders to seek other forms of security protection beyond those historically provided by the U.S. This explains the impetus behind the new Turkey–Pakistan–Saudi Arabia mutual defense pact. Jewish life abroad is more exposed than at any point in living memory, and Israeli society heads into an election with each camp doubting the other will accept the result.
The challenges are daunting, but there are possibilities as well. If the coming year is spent converting battlefield achievement into durable architecture – a regional order and a candid strategic dialogue with Europe; a constitutional settlement at home over the rules of the political game and the distribution of burdens; a strategic triangle that treats Jerusalem, Washington, and American Jewry as one system rather than three; and serious investment in the cognitive and communal infrastructure of Jewish life abroad – this will be remembered as the year the shadow of October 7 began to lift.
If it is not, Israel may find that it won every battle but lost the strategic war. That is the challenge – and the opportunity – at the heart of this year’s assessment.
Amb. Stuart Eizenstat and Amb. Dennis Ross,
Co-Chairs
Prof. Yedidia Stern, President
