For some time now, right-wing Zionists and left-wing Anti-Zionists have been mirror images of one another, both insisting on a one-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. To be sure, the visions are different: one is of a Jewish-dominated ethnostate with a permanently subjugated non-Jewish minority, the latter either a utopian democratic fantasy or a violent, forced reversal of 1948.

As different as they are in some respects, though, both visions are delusions.

Clearly, many on  the left still want to reverse 1948, to remove the “settler-colonialist Zionist entity” from the land and return control of it to its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. (Never mind that the boundaries of Palestine and their demarcations of identity are, themselves, relics of colonialism.)  Setting aside the virtues of these goals, it would be entirely unprecedented for a state to self-destruct in this way.

The model, of course, is apartheid-era South Africa. But whatever similarities Israel does or does not have to that state, there are critical differences as well. Most importantly, apartheid ended because of a combination of factors: international pressure (the original Boycott / Divestment / Sanctions campaign); the moral leadership of figures like Nelson Mandela; but also the fact that, by the late 1980s, nearly half the white South African population was itself opposed to apartheid, and elected a leader, F.W. de Klerk, who pledged to end it and did.

There is no analogue in present-day Israel. The upcoming Israeli elections are about many things, but the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state is not one of them. Nor is the maximalism, ferocity, and one-sidedness of the left likely to somehow persuade Israeli Jews that erasing the Jewish state would be a good idea. Quite the contrary.

Which means that the only way to return to 1947 would be by force: an international  military campaign against a nuclear power that has no intention of removing itself from the map and whose population believes it has nowhere else in the world to go. Needless to say, this scenario is as implausible as it is evil.

Of course, BDS advocates would claim that economic sanctions, the suspension of foreign aid, and international opprobrium would be enough to cause the Jewish state to voluntarily evolve into a non-Jewish, binational democracy. But the vast majority of Israel’s seven million Jewish citizens are resolutely opposed to such a change, and without military force, externally-mandated ‘regime change’ rarely happens: just look at Iran, North Korea, and occupied Tibet.

And what about the Palestinians?  Does anyone truly believe that seven million Palestinians, most of whom understand themselves to be occupied, displaced, subjugated, and repressed by the state of Israel, are interested in joining hands with the same Israelis who have oppressed them for seven decades to create a new state free from ethno-nationalist trappings?  Of course not. They want a state of their own, which they deserve. They, like Israelis, want to be in charge of their own destinies, to promote their own cultures, to build a society that reflects who they are and who they aspire to be.

Now, ‘two states’ may take many shapes: geographical contiguous entities, or a confederation of two governmental authorities, or others. But in some form, Palestinians and Israelis must be in charge of themselves.

This may not be an ideal arrangement, but it is the only pragmatic one. In principle, I am sympathetic to the arguments that any kind of ‘special’ nationalism, including ethno-nationalisms like Zionism, will inevitably lead to the extremism we now see in much of Israel, Europe, and the United States. In the Israeli world, such arguments were made by Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Adin Steinsaltz decades ago, and were recently discussed in a fascinating online back-and-forth between Shaul Magid and Irwin Kula. Perhaps, in retrospect, a ‘thick’ patriotism like Zionism was a mistake and Israel should only have aspired to be, as many of its initial founders wanted, a state like any other.  Maybe, as soon as Zionism became religiously significant (to Israelis and non-Israelis alike), the stakes became too high.

But as the Talmudic rabbis said, avar zmano batel korbanо — basically, the horse has left the barn. Israel as a Jewish state is a reality and the overwhelming majority of Israelis want it to continue. It is not South Africa, and the dream of one democratic state from the river to the sea is a pipe dream with no tether to the actual realities of the 14 million people who live there.

And then there’s the fantasy on the Right, which is even darker.

The Right, too, wants one state from the river to the sea, only this state is an ethno-nationalist, non-democratic Greater Israel built on repression and minority rule. And (as Abdul El-Sayed aptly noted) unlike the Left, it has been building that reality on the ground for three decades now, most recently in its sociocide of Gaza and its policy of hachraah (compulsion) in the West Bank, which a recent BTzelem report describes as an “elimination project.” As B’Tzelem leader Yuli Novak put it in a recent New York Times op-ed,  these policies are creating “a new phase of the political project to make Israeli Jewish control permanent while dismantling the conditions for Palestinian collective life.”

Here, too, it is hard to adjudicate between implausibility and immorality, but I’ll focus on the former. Already, Israel has lost the support of around a quarter of Americans, and a clear majority of American Jews disapprove of Israeli policies even as they do believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state. Do the likes of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich really believe that the world will simply stand by and watch Israel ethnically cleanse the West Bank without, at the very least, disastrous economic and political consequences?

Israel is a small state that, for now at least, depends on American foreign aid and the (limited) support of the world community. Even if it were militarily and morally possible to institute formal apartheid in Greater Israel, it is simply unrealistic to believe that the world will simply allow Israel to do so. Nor do half of Israeli Jews want such a dreadful, dystopian, and endlessly violent future.

These fantasies on Left and Right are not idle delusions. They are impeding the real work that is necessary to move, however slowly, toward sustainable coexistence.

First, Israelis will hopefully soon elect a new government that will rein in the extreme nationalists and take a more realistic, ethical, and constructive stance toward the Palestinians. There is not an Israeli-Jewish majority that is ready for an independent Palestinian state tomorrow. But there is, it seems, a majority that wants the ethnic cleansing, ultra-nationalism, and settler-extremist vigilantism to end, and that, at least, is a step toward coexistence — a step toward normalization.

Will the next Israeli government be as progressive as I, personally, would like?  Almost certainly not. But will it be more progressive, or at least less regressive, than the current one?  This is what I pray for.  Contrary to what the Left and Right insist, there are many kinds of Zionism. Even if only for pragmatic reasons, I support the more progressive, just, and coexistence-oriented kind.

But American one-staters on both sides have obstructed it.

On the Right, hundreds of millions of American dollars have put thumbs on the Israeli-electoral scales for decades, while AIPAC and others have obstructed reasonable steps toward coexistence, such as conditioning military aid on Israeli compliance with international legal norms.

Meanwhile, on the Left, the insistence that all Zionism entails racism, colonialism, and genocide makes pragmatism more difficult, as any deviation from the anti-Zionist line renders progressive politicians treyf. And then, of course, is the rhetoric: blood libel, genocide, antisemitism, apartheid. Everyone on the other side is evil: musicians, politicians, artists, filmmakers, rabbis, and activists are all either Jew-haters or genociders, with no other options in between.

I think I speak for a majority of American people and American Jews when I implore everyone to tone it the f—k down.

If it isn’t clear by now, reasonable, non-hateful people profoundly disagree about how to understand what happened in Gaza, how it relates to what happened on Oct. 7, and how to negotiate living with people who strongly disagree with one another.

And I think a majority of American Jews are sick to death of the extremism. I’ve been canceled by both sides, personally, and I can testify to the exhaustion. I think we are sick of both sides’ ignorance, intolerance, and the inability to listen to multiple narratives.

We’re sick of the Left ignoring Israeli security and the Right only talking about Israeli security. We’re sick of the Left talking only about Palestinian safety and the Right never talking about Palestinian safety. We’re sick of the Right failing to acknowledge Palestinian dispossession and the Left failing to acknowledge the UN resolutions of 1947, the Holocaust, or the ancient Jewish ties to the land. We’re sick of the Right refusing to watch videos and films about Gaza, and the Left refusing to watch them about Oct. 7. (And no, we’re not trying to compare, equate, or measure the horror in one way or the other.)

Closer to home, we’re sick of the hypocrisy, hysteria, and weaponization of overheated rhetoric on all sides. We’re sick of how the Right refuses to call out (in the last month alone) concentration camp imagery, Islamophobia, and actual genocidal rhetoric on its side while harping on any insufficiently-apologetic apology by an accused antisemite. And we’re sick of how the Left refuses to call out voices who say that supporters of Israel are making themselves into targets of violence or that Bibi Netanyahu is an Emmanuel Goldstein-George Soros style puppetmaster of everything wrong with the world. Everyone in this rhetorical battle is living in glass houses and throwing stones at the other side.

Most of all, we’re sick of the incitement, the self-righteousness, the certainty, the maximalism, the rage-bait, the bullying, the demonization, the good guys/bad guys narratives, the harassment, the ‘de-normalization’ and the inability to tolerate disagreement. All, again, on the Left and the Right alike.

Most of us know that the Israeli government has behaved appallingly over the last few years. What happened in Gaza began as a defensive war but became a war of annihilation, with horrifying amounts of death and an aim, among some at least, to destroy Gazan society. But most of us also know that Israel is not a colonialist enterprise because Jews have no home country to which they can return, that Hamas is evil, that Jewish ties to the Land of Israel date back thousands of years, and that the Jewish state, for better or for worse, has been a reality for almost 80 years and is not going to self-destruct.

At the end of the day, whatever some left-wing activists or right-wing billionaires might like to happen in the Middle East, neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere. Eventually, in ten years or a hundred, these groups will have to live alongside each other, in one form or another. The clock cannot be turned back. Coexistence is the only way.

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(JTA) — TORONTO – Doug Warren, 56, was attending Kol Nidre services at the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ontario on the eve of Yom Kippur on Sunday. Prayers were just about to begin when he heard the gunshots.

“The rabbi had just started to call us into the sanctuary. We were stepping inside, and we heard this loud bang, and we all stopped,” Warren, a member of the congregation, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It sounded like someone was banging the window or the door.”

It was a 29-year-old former Canadian soldier exchanging gunfire with a police officer stationed outside the synagogue. The shooter, Sean Ward 29, of Quinte West, Ontario., died from his wounds on Tuesday. The officer, Const. Jeff Smith, a 13-year veteran of the force, remains in the hospital in critical condition.

Little is known of Ward, who served in the Canadian military from 2017 to 2022, and was never deployed.

“We knew this was going to happen,” Warren, a member of Sons of Jacob and a resident of Belleville. told JTA. “We’ve been saying as Jews that we’re very concerned with the rise of antisemitism. What did you think was going to happen? People weren’t taking it seriously.”

As the gunfire continued, congregants scrambled to find safety. “Some people suggested we should go to the basement, others said we should go out the back door,” he recalls. “At the same time, you’re just frozen because you don’t know what’s going on or what to do. Eventually the shots stopped.”

Warren said the congregation is extremely grateful to Smith, who was stationed outside the synagogue in an unmarked vehicle. “This guy’s a hero. I can tell you the gunman was coming for us inside, and he was trying to take out our armed protection first,” he said. “We’re praying for [Smith’s] recovery.”

Once police arrived at Sons of Jacob, they instructed everyone to wait inside until the area was clear. Congregants were then taken to the Belleville police station, where they were offered donuts and coffee, which Warren said they politely declined on account of fasting for Yom Kippur.

Richard Marceau, General Counsel and Senior Vice President of The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, echoed Warren’s concerns. “I wish I could say that I was surprised or shocked, but I was not,” says Marceau. “Unfortunately, in 2026 in Canada, we’ve come to expect this type of thing. It just tells us that the promise of Canada has been broken.”

The Belleville shooting came two days after the arrest of 19 year-old Alexander Parfitt after posting online threats to shoot up a synagogue in Southern Ontario.

Marceau said that Canadian politicians have not sufficiently addressed the threat of antisemitism. “There has been an all-level failure in the political sector and in law enforcement,” he said. “It is a failure to understand the threats that Jews are facing.”

According to Marceau, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist discourse have also contributed to rising antisemitism and endangered Canadian Jews. “Anti-Zionism is driving violence against Canadians, and the double standard against Israel is playing a role,” Marceau said. “Politicians need a clear plan, not just to talk about extremist ideologies, organizations and foreign state actors. There needs to be a meeting of all levels of government to ensure that the extremist networks are disrupted.”

Anti-Israel sentiment was a point of contention Sunday evening. Canadian Jewish politician and leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) Avi Lewis posted on X shortly after 8 p.m. that on Yom Kippur he was “reflecting on the fact that we have not done our part to stop an ongoing genocide being committed in our name.”

About an hour earlier, Ward opened fire outside Sons of Jacob. It was not clear whether Lewis knew the shooting had occurred when he had posted. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Canadian Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather responded to Lewis’ post, stating that “holding Canadian Jews and Jews across the world collectively responsible for events over which they have no control is despicable.”

Lewis said in an post the following day that the attack “is yet another reminder of the work that remains to create a Canada that is truly safe for people of all faiths, including Jewish people – to worship, to come together, to live without fear.” In a press conference he rejected claims that he was collectively blaming Jews for Israel’s actions.

Despite the events Warren witnessed on Sunday evening, he remains assured in the resilience of his local Jewish community. Unable to access their synagogue, Warren says the Sons of Jacob congregation gathered at a Best Western hotel on Monday evening for services.

“We want to keep going, but we know it’s not going to be easy. We might get emotional when we first get back inside the synagogue, and we’ll just have to work through that,” he says. “This will not stop us.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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(JTA) — Rabbi Albert S. Axelrad, a Reform rabbi, community leader and political activist who headed Brandeis University’s Hillel Foundation for 34 years, died on Sept. 18. He was 87.

Starting in 1965, Axelrad sought to ensure that students and faculty from all Jewish streams received the logistical support and resources needed to live the fullest of Jewish lives at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian, Jewish-sponsored college or university in the United States.

“Al didn’t just preach pluralism. He lived pluralism,” said Rabbi Peretz Rodman, who first met Axelrad as an undergraduate and later joined his Hillel staff while a graduate student. “For example, there hadn’t been much of an Orthodox presence on campus until the mid-1970s, when he hired an Orthodox rabbi and provided space for that minyan.”

Although dedicated to egalitarian prayer that offers equal roles for men and women, Axelrad often attended Orthodox and other non-egalitarian services, Rodman said. “He would quip that he davened in an egalitarian minyan before praying with the Orthodox minyan, so he’d be ‘yotzei’” — having fulfilled his own religious requirements as a liberal Jew.

Axelrad’s commitment to egalitarian prayer led him to cofound the non-denominational Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts. A lay-led, independent congregation that drew on aspects of the counterculture, it served as a model of egalitarianism for what became known as the havurah movement.

A native Brooklynite, Axelrad attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush and earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Columbia University. In 1965 he received rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Soon afterward, he moved to Massachusetts to become the Hillel director and chaplain at Brandeis.

His first years at Brandeis coincided with the movement opposing the war in Vietnam, and Axelrad, a member of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, counseled students who were weighing whether to become conscientious objectors. He also advocated for divesting from South Africa as a means to end apartheid.

But Israel and Jews remained at the center of Axelrad’s activism. He was an early supporter of the “two-state solution” through Breira, the first national Jewish organization to advocate for an independent Palestinian state, and passionate about the struggle of Jews locked beyond the Iron Curtain and punished for practicing Judaism.

He ensured that activism to free Soviet Jews was a central part of Jewish life at Brandeis, and traveled to the Soviet Union on two occasions to meet Jewish refuseniks. His 1985 book “Refusenik: Voices of Struggle and Hope” chronicles his first visit. In 1984 he wrote “Meditations of a Maverick Rabbi,” in which he explained, among other things, why he performed interfaith marriages.

Axelrad is credited with creating, in the 1970s, the first bar- and bat-mitzvah training programs for Jewish adults who missed out on the ceremony in their youth. These programs became a mainstay in many American synagogues. The annual Jewish Arts Festival he introduced was adopted by other Hillels.

Axelrad became the founding director of the Center for Spiritual Life and adjunct professor of religion at Emerson College in Boston after retiring from Brandeis in 1999.

Upon learning of Axelrad’s death, hundreds of former Brandeis students — many of them now rabbis themselves — took to social media to recall Axelrad’s pluralistic, the-door-is-always-open style of leadership and the effect he had on their lives. Many called him a bridge-builder and a “mensch.”

Rabbi Bob Carroll, who worked closely with Axelrad as a student board member of Brandeis Hillel and, later, as its president while an undergraduate, said he owed Axelrad “a huge debt of gratitude.

“Probably more than anyone else in my life, when I waver over whether I should have the courage to speak out about something demanding moral courage or sacrifice, to risk my own position or reputation, it is his example and memory that I see in my mind’s eye,” said Carroll, an Orthodox rabbi.

“I haven’t always lived up to his standard. But because of him I at least knew what I should have had the guts to do, or to say. And I was a better human being and a better Jew because of him. Even when our paths diverged.”

Rabbah Riqi Kosovske, the rabbi of the Beit Ahavah Reform synagogue in Northampton, Massachusetts, said Axelrad had a “huge impact” on her life from the moment she became a Brandeis undergraduate.

“One of my earliest memories was singing in the student circle with him at 12:15 p.m. every day at the daily vigil when he was on the hunger strike for divestment [from South Africa], and I would cry watching him as I worried and cared so much for him and was so inspired by him,” she said. “I am grateful for his kindness and the impact he had on me.”

Rabbi Ron Kronish was a sophomore when Axelrad began his position at Brandeis. Kronish, who became the student head of Hillel during his senior year, described Axelrad as “a great listener. He would look you in the eye. He was fully present.”

Kronish, who later became a Reform rabbi and an interfaith activist in the United States and Israel, said Axelrad always looked at life through a Jewish lens and that his opposition to the Vietnam war and his involvement in civil rights “came out of his understanding of what it means to be Jewish.”

Larry Sternberg called Axelrad “a consummate mensch — kind, gentle, caring — a good listener, a strong allyand a principled leader.” He first met Axelrad in 1973, when he began his graduate work at Brandeis. Sternberg later served on the faculty at Brandeis and as executive director of the university’s Hillel from 2004-2013.

“He acted on his passions and beliefs, reflecting a commitment to rabbinic activism. At times I found him infuriating,” Sternberg said, “but that never resulted in tension between us. Our bond was strong because Al knew that disagreeing did not diminish our respect for one another. While many rabbis aspire to inspire others, Al was the real deal.”

Axelrad is survived by four children and several grandchildren. Berta Axelrad, his wife of 63 years, died in December 2024.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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