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For author Ben Moser, writing about anti-Zionism is an act of sanity
Benjamin Moser thinks that Theodore Herzl, the acclaimed founder of political Zionism, was mentally ill and that his delusional ideations underlay his theory of the Jewish state.
Lest anyone think that this startling claim emanates from a crank or an antisemite, it’s worth noting that the last time Moser wrote about someone’s life, including its warts, his subject was Susan Sontag and the book won a Pulitzer prize. His new book opens with harsh critiques of Herzl. Then it progresses to biographies of a dozen Jewish anti-Zionists, none of whom Moser considers crazy. As a Jew and staunch activist in the international movement for Palestinian rights, he sees his writing about Jewish anti-Zionists as an act of imminent sanity.
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History is barely out, but it has already racked up critiques, including a review in The New Yorker that accuses him of being ahistorical about different periods of Zionism; and of sloppy, even ideologically driven errors — particularly when he characterizes Zionists after Hitler’s rise to power as having worked with Nazis out of rank racism and opportunism.
The alleged errors may truly be errors. But in conversations that I had with Moser recently, after reading a review copy of his book, he entertained historical nuance regarding the one chapter we focused on. The events it describes in a small, obscure, American Jewish community were directly experienced two generations ago by members of both of our families. Those events, and the history they nod to, are now mostly mothballed from contemporary Jewish memory. They need airing out, far beyond our families.
This is what Moser and I share: Our immigrant, Ashkenazic great-grandparents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries settled not on the East Coast but instead in a tiny Jewish enclave in the South — in Houston, Texas. Later, their children — our grandparents — became members of Beth Israel, a local Reform temple. Like almost all Reform congregations back then, Beth Israel followed a national set of principles known as the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform. It denied that Jews were a nation or should become one. Instead they were deemed members of a religion, tasked by God to spread humanistic ethics and morality to all people everywhere.
But in 1943, Beth Israel suffered a schism that made national news, including in The New York Times. The congregation’s leadership wanted new members to sign a pledge opposing the creation of a Jewish state — and if they refused, they would be ineligible to vote on decisions affecting the temple. But some of the congregation by then were Zionists. Months of bitter fighting ensued, culminating in a temple-wide vote on the pledge requirement. When the anti-Zionists won handily, dozens of families bolted — including Moser’s grandparents and mine. In fact, my grandfather was a leader of the split. The renegades started a new Reform temple, Emanu El. My grandfather was a core founder, and my family lore has it that when Moser’s father was a little boy at Emanu El, his religious school teacher was my mother.
Moser devotes a chapter to the schism at Beth Israel, framing it through a biography of Hyman Judah Schachtel, the congregation’s rabbi at the time. Schachtel was then a national leader in the American Jewish Reform movement against Zionism — until, rather suddenly, he wasn’t. Almost immediately after Israel declared statehood, he publicly embraced Zionism.
But was that the end of the story, or even the whole of it? Moser’s grandfather had been a lawyer in Berlin before fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s, ending up almost randomly in Houston, marrying a Texan Jewish woman, having children including Moser’s father, and dying before Moser was born. Moser told me he assumes that both of these grandparents were Zionists. But, though he often spoke with his grandmother, who lived until he was in college, “I don’t remember her ever talking about Israel or Zionism,” he said.
I recall something more pointed than silence. Before he died in the late 1970s, my grandfather wrote in a memoir sketch that he had not broken away from Beth Israel because he’d been a Zionist. Rather, he’d felt offended by the idea of creating a membership apartheid, with anti-Zionists privileged over Zionists. He said he thought loyalty tests were undemocratic, especially among Reform Jews. Moser acknowledged that he’d seen evidence of the same attitude among Beth Israel members when he was researching the split. Meanwhile, I shared with him a total lack of memory of any of my large, extended Texas Jewish family talking about Israel during my childhood, much less going there to live or as tourists.
If there was an error in Moser’s account of the schism, I pointed out, it was one of omission. Though he devotes much space in his chapter about the split, he neglects to mention that by the time it happened, the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform was defunct. It had vigorously rejected the establishment of a Jewish state, but a revision in 1937 contained a hint of Zionism. It endorsed “the rehabilitation of Palestine” as “the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren.” And it cited “the obligation of all Jewry” to help Palestine’s “upbuilding as a center of Jewish cultural and spiritual life.” True, it spoke of a “homeland,” not a state. Still, it privileged the idea of Jews’ settling in what would later become Israel.
I asked Moser if the new platform had rendered Beth Israel’s anti-Zionist pledge requirement functionally obsolete by the time the fight broke out. Wasn’t the temple’s anti-Zionism by then a Reform dinosaur — particularly because of growing fear and horror among American Jews about the spotty news they were already getting in the early 1940s about what would later be revealed as a genocide?
He said he thought the Reform movement nationally in the 1930s had been “trying to kick the can [of the Zionism controversy] down the road” and that “After Israel was created, everyone went over to the Zionist side. Because it was already there.” His chapter about Rabbi Schachtel in Houston is instructive, he said, “because he shows what happened nationally. Among Jews a huge controversy about Zionism raged for 50 years. Then, after 1948, the temperature got turned down, and after the 1967 war the Reform movement formally scrapped anti-Zionism altogether. To me, the story is about how Zionists wrested control of the institutions that organized American Jewry, and how that made it possible for me to grow up in a world where we didn’t even know that anti-Zionists had existed.”
So what was it like, I asked him, to be a child and teenager amid this historical amnesia, including, in Houston, at Congregation Emanu El where he’d been bar mitzvahed? He called being at Emanu El “a waste of time.”
“I remember drawing pictures of menorahs — way past the time I should have,” he said. “It was age inappropriate. It felt anti-intellectual. I remember wondering, ‘What is there of substance about Jews?’ In retrospect, if I was going to answer the question, ‘‘What were we really doing at Emanu El?’ I would say, ‘Learning about the Holocaust.’ Though we did that in my regular, secular school, too.”
“When I was writing the chapter about Beth Israel and Rabbi Schachtel,” Moser added, “I was reading all this Reform history from the 19th century. I was fascinated. It seemed so smart. It was a real ideology. At Emanu El there was no ideology. People weren’t religious. I knew people who on Yom Kippur regretted an email they’d sent: ‘Gosh, what have I done bad this year? Well, I should have called Marjorie on Tuesday.’ But consider what Yom Kippur is, if you really do have a religious background.
“Emanu El was just a cultural community which didn’t have more than that. And because there was no ideology, it was kind of empty. So you could fill it up with nationalism. With Zionism.” Meanwhile, he said, “Nobody ever told me that the majority of Jews historically have been anti-Zionist, and for a very long time.”
As a child at Emanu El a generation before Moser, I recall no lessons whatsoever about the Holocaust (I discovered The Diary of Anne Frank by accident in my dad’s study when I was nine years old; I found US military photos of Buchenwald and Auschwitz in a book on his shelves and told no one I’d read any of this.) I abandoned synagogue attendance when I left for college — before the Six Day War — and didn’t go back for decades.
Still, I think I got something from my childhood at Emanu El. A lot, even. And looking at Moser’s book I thought I saw some of that inheritance in him. His epigraph page features twelve quotations from the Old Testament: from Leviticus, Jeremiah, Amos, Obadiah, Malachi, Zephaniah, Nahum, I Chronicles, and Habakkuk (example: “Because you have plundered many nations, all the remnant of the peoples shall plunder you.” ) Wasn’t finding and honoring this material a legacy of his Reform upbringing?
He wasn’t having it, though he did give a nod to Jewishness. “I studied Hebrew in college,” he said. “I love Biblical Hebrew and reading the Bible in Hebrew. The Hebrew of religion, and poetry. And I love, love reading the prophets.”
“You can go on practically every page of the prophets,” he added, “and see that the idea that we have now, that Jews are uniquely virtuous — which a lot of Jews, as well as Christians, think — is completely foreign to Jews. The Jewish idea is, “We got it comin’.” Meaning, “If you don’t watch your step, you’re going to get kicked out of the land.” For Jews today, he said, the secular translation is that if we do not work for equality and against racism, we, too, have it coming.
So what can be done to prevent that vengeance? I reminded Moser that on his Substack he has written about the disastrous situation in Israel vis-à-vis Palestinians: “What can we do about it?” he asked, then answered his own question: “Nothing…except insist on using real words.”
What, I asked, does he hope that the words in his book will do? Even if those words meet with corrections? Or rancor?
“First of all,” he said, “give Jews a sense of their genealogy with anti-Zionism so they can realize, ‘I’m not the first person to think this way.’ And I hope to strengthen the people who are doing all sorts of work in all sorts of ways. We still don’t have the organization. We don’t have the AIPAC. We certainly don’t have the White House and the Pentagon. We’re just people who are fighting a sense of outrage, of futility that is demoralizing and depoliticizing. If you say, ‘Oh, there’s nothing you can do,’ it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
He said it was hard to pick the 12 people who ended up in his book, ranging from a long dead, 19th-century rabbi in Eastern Europe to New York City photographer Nan Goldin, who is alive and politically active: “There have been so many anti-Zionist Jews in history. I wanted them to be chronological. I wanted a fair representation: Latin Americans, women, gays, and other kinds of people,” he said. “I wanted everybody to have a different take on anti-Zionism. I wanted to tell the story of what happened in Iraq, for instance. In Houston. Johannesburg. I wanted Orthodox people to read it, feminists, people whose background is Sephardic or Mizrahi and not just Ashkenazic or Reform. I wanted people who don’t know this story to have a way into it.
Moser said he hopes that readers can use his book to “say to the people who are claiming that they’re doing this to the Palestinians in Jews’ name, ‘No, that’s not true.’ By creating a Jewish voice against that claim, eventually we can maybe stop sending bombs to Israel, maybe stop killing people. Everybody’s probably going to be dead by the time that happens. We might not live to see it. But it does matter. And we’re still working.”
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Ossoff vs. Collins: The choices facing Jewish voters in the Georgia Senate race
(JTA) — Georgia Jews will choose between a Democratic politician who wants to limit arms sales to Israel and a Republican with ties to white nationalists when they head to vote Tuesday in a Senate race that will help determine which party controls the chamber.
The race pits incumbent Jewish Sen. Jon Ossoff – widely expected to be a 2028 presidential contender – against GOP Rep. Mike Collins. The Republican challenger has received a good deal of media attention, as well as attacks by his opponent, over family members’ and former employees’ far-right political views. Ossoff, meanwhile, sparked outrage among some in the Jewish community when he became one of the earliest Senate Democrats to vote to halt certain arms sales to Israel.
Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has invoked the Jewish Bolsheviks conspiracy theory propagated by Nazi Germany that blamed Jews for atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. He has also complained about Holocaust education and media on the subject.
“They don’t tell us the history of Germany before World War II,” Scheer said in a YouTube video last year, titled “I’m NOT a Judeo Christian.”
He continued, “All we’re told is Germany bad, Hitler evil, don’t ask questions. Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust. Here’s 50 movies every year about the Holocaust and why it’s so bad.”
In the same video, Scheer also said that “Jewish executives run the entire mainstream media complex” as well as “homosexual propaganda, they run all of the fraudulent banking systems and insurance scams. They are behind this orchestrated downfall of what was once the most prosperous nation in the world.” Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that Scheer apparently lives in a house built on property owned by Collins.
The Collins campaign did not return the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment. But elsewhere Collins has addressed Scheer’s statements by saying, “I don’t believe or support those views.”
Scheer did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, a former Collins staffer had posted Nazi imagery and an image of what appeared to be himself in KKK robes, The Washington Post reported in August. Collins replaced another staffer — his chief of staff Kip Talley — in 2024 after Slate reported that he was in a group chat with streamer Nick Fuentes, widely accused of being one of the internet’s foremost antisemites, and white supremacist Richard Spencer. Slate reported that the chat was dedicated to trying to help Charles Johnson, who has been accused of promoting Holocaust denial and was in jail at the time.
In a statement, Talley told Slate that he acted “solely in my personal capacity after hearing concerns that an acquaintance I have known for years was being mistreated in custody and denied basic medical care.”
The Georgia congressman also appeared at last year’s New York Young Republican Club gala, which drew controversy as it hosted white nationalists and a number of officials from Germany’s far-right AfD party. Fuentes said that he received an invitation that was later rescinded, and Jewish New York City Council member Inna Vernikov backed out of the event and suggested the decision was connected to antisemitism on the right.
Collins has responded to questions about his connections to these white nationalist elements by saying he condemns “all forms of antisemitism” and hate, and citing his support for Israel.
J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group, homed in on Collins’ far-right connections in a 15-second ad released last week that ended with the message, “Mike Collins: Dangerously extreme for Georgia.”
The attack ad was the first released in J Street’s $3 million campaign this year to take down six Republican candidates who are backed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC. In a piece for the Atlanta Jewish Times, Collins wrote earlier this month that he supports Israel “because my faith tells me to and because it is the right policy for America.”
Ossoff, meanwhile, has long targeted Collins over his white nationalist ties, calling him a “notorious bigot, antisemite and extremist” in June. Ossoff told Collins during a debate that he “hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office.”
The quip drew some pushback. “Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up,” said The Atlantic’s center-right staff writer David Brooks, during a PBS NewsHour conversation about personal attacks in this year’s U.S. Senate races. “That’s just not what we do here in this country.”
Meanwhile, Collins’ Jewish supporters have said that Ossoff’s status as a Democrat — a party that increasingly includes strident anti-Zionist voices — is more damning than the headlines around Collins.
“At a time of rising antisemitism, at a time when Jewish Americans need friends, Mike Collins has been a friend to the Jewish community,” Sam Markstein, spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA. He said that Collins was “a friend to the Jewish community in the aftermath of Oct. 7” and pointed to his voting record on Israel.
Eric Levine, an RJC board member, said he has not been involved in this particular race but that extremes “must be condemned” on both sides.
“It is never a good thing to have ties to antisemitic/far-right figures,” he told JTA in a text. “I will also say, it is never a good thing to have ties to antisemitic/far left figures like Hasan Piker, [New York Mayor] Zohran Mamdani, [Michigan Senate candidate] Abdul el-Sayed and much of the DSA/Democratic caucus.”
Piker, an anti-Israel streamer who has campaigned with some left-wing Democratic candidates, has drawn heat for remarks about American Jews’ connection to Israel. Earlier this year, he named Ossoff positively as a “dark horse” contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Ossoff later distanced himself from Piker and has said he will not run for president in 2028. Ossoff endorsed El-Sayed after he won the Democratic nomination in Michigan.
Ossoff has also come under fire for his decision to vote to block certain arms sales to Israel during the height of the Gaza war in November 2024, a position that he has generally stuck to since then.
In July 2025 he voted to block a sale of rifles to Israel, citing mass starvation in Gaza caused by “the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government,” but voted against a resolution that would block an air-to-ground munitions sale.
Ossoff wrote at that time that the U.S. “must continue to support the Israeli people, who face the persistent threat of rocket and missile attack and have been subjected to intense aerial bombardment from Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen.”
Though Ossoff called his commitment to Israel’s security “ironclad” in a Senate floor speech ahead of the arm sales vote, some Jewish voters and organizations said it rang hollow.
Michael Morris, publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, penned an open letter this August blasting Ossoff for “lying to me and your constituents” about his support for Israel.
Ossoff’s first vote against weapons in November 2024 spurred another critical letter from several Georgia Jewish organizations including synagogues, Jewish schools, the local Anti-Defamation League chapter and other groups. His vote also drew the attention of AIPAC, which released 30-second ads attacking U.S. senators — including Ossoff — who had voted to block weapons sales.
Asked about Collins’ far-right ties, Morris told JTA he did not believe they were disqualifying.
“Most of the complaints about him are about his son-in-law who is a virulent antisemite,” Morris said in a text. “But his son-in-law does not get to vote, and as a father of 4 girls I can tell you that we do not get ANY say in who our girls marry, so from that standpoint, I am not concerned.”
Morris also said that neither President Donald Trump nor President Joe Biden condemned the most extreme among their voters, and opined that when it comes to Collins’ own extreme backers, he “can maintain their support without taking in their position.”
A number of readers disagreed with Morris’ sharp criticism of Ossoff, however, and wrote letters to the editor expressing their disapproval, as well as their concern about Collins.
“Mike Collins has peddled antisemitism. He has surrounded himself with bigotry while refusing to denounce white supremacy,” wrote a reader named Richard Mitchell, who said he is from Atlanta. “These values do not represent Georgians and are fundamental to why I will not be supporting Collins this election.”
Halier Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which has endorsed Ossoff, wrote in a statement to JTA that her organization recognizes Ossoff’s “steadfast support for Israel’s security and future as a Jewish and democratic state.”
“Georgia voters should remember that a vote for Mike Collins is a vote for Donald Trump, and Collins is one of the most extreme candidates on the ballot,” she wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Arab parties have rarely been full partners in governing Israel. It’s time to let them into the tent of Abraham.
Like a goal-line pileup in football, with half the players signaling a touchdown and the other half celebrating a defensive stop, everyone is claiming victory in Israel’s election. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu points to Likud’s status as Israel’s largest party. His opponents point to the loss of his governing majority. Did Netanyahu win? Did the opposition win? Those of us watching from the stands are waiting for the referee’s signal, unsure of what exactly is going on in the field.
The arithmetic is straightforward. In Israel’s 120-seat Knesset, a governing coalition needs 61 seats. Netanyahu’s bloc won 53. The principal Jewish-led opposition parties won 48. Israel’s Arab parties won an unprecedented 19 seats, nearly doubling their previous representation. Neither major bloc can govern alone. The election is over, but the overtime game of coalition politicking has just begun.
There are several paths forward. Netanyahu and his opponents could form a national unity government. Alternatively, either bloc could seek cooperation with Arab parties. The difficulty is that political leaders have drawn red lines against both possibilities.
Herein lies one of the most uncomfortable paradoxes of Israeli democracy: Arab citizens have exercised their democratic rights in extraordinary numbers, yet the very parties whose votes could break the political deadlock are those whom much of Israel’s political establishment refuses to consider as governing partners.
Arab parties have rarely been full partners in Israeli governing coalitions. During Israel’s early decades, Arab lists affiliated with the ruling party participated but enjoyed little autonomy. In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin relied on Arab parties from outside his coalition. In 2021, Mansour Abbas and his Islamist Ra’am party became the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli government. Ironically, Netanyahu himself had explored cooperation with Abbas earlier that year.
Since Oct. 7, political boundaries have hardened. The attack, the hostages, the war, the continuing grief and fear have shattered trust. Many Israeli Jews now regard cooperation with non-Zionist parties with profound suspicion. These anxieties cannot be dismissed; there remains a trauma through which much of Israeli society sees its present and future.
The predicament has been called a “dilemma from hell.” Either politicians find a way to cross red lines or Israel risks another election, another round of recriminations, another deepening of its internal divisions.
At the heart of this political dilemma lies a question as old as the Jewish people itself: Can the Jewish family make room for those who do not share its Jewish identity? Can we affirm our own destiny without excluding another?
The biblical precedent
This is not the first time the Jewish people have confronted the question of whether there is room in the Jewish family for those who do not share its identity. The question goes back to the very first Jewish family. In the biblical account, Abraham and Sarah are blessed with Isaac, their long-awaited son. But Isaac is not Abraham’s firstborn. Years earlier, Sarah had given her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abraham, and Hagar had borne Ishmael. When Isaac arrives, Sarah perceives Ishmael as a threat. Biblical commentators debate her motivations: Was Ishmael behaving dangerously? Was Sarah concerned about inheritance? Whatever her concerns may have been, Sarah’s demand is unequivocal: “Cast out that woman and her son.” Despite Abraham’s distress, Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the wilderness.
The first Jewish family could not find a way to live together.
Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions have long associated Ishmael with the ancestry of Arab peoples. It raises the question. What if Isaac’s covenantal destiny had not required Ishmael’s expulsion? What if Abraham’s tent had been large enough for Isaac to remain Isaac, Ishmael to remain Ishmael, and both to know they belonged?
We cannot rewrite Genesis. But given the crossroads Israel faces today, we can ask whether its tragedy must remain ours.
Three considerations make this moment worthy of serious political imagination.
First, consider Israel’s internal political health. Imagine what cooperation across entrenched political divisions might communicate to Israeli society. Coalition politics have always required compromise: Religious parties negotiate military-service exemptions and yeshiva funding. Why should negotiations with Arab parties be categorically unthinkable?
Not all Arab parties are alike, and their differences matter. Mansour Abbas condemned the atrocities of Oct. 7 and has acknowledged Israel’s Jewish character. Surely the “Start-Up Nation” can devise an agreement that safeguards Israel’s security and Jewish character while giving Arab representatives substantive governance over the issues affecting their communities.
Second, consider Israel’s international standing. Israel faces mounting criticism and accusations of discrimination and apartheid. Arab participation in government would not resolve the Palestinian question or erase existing inequalities. But imagine the Jewish state’s democratic promise expressed not only through Arab citizens voting, or the oft-cited presence of Arab pharmacists, but through Arab representatives sharing responsibility at the highest levels of government. What happens in Israel does not stay in Israel. Those of us who defend Israel in the public square understand the significance such an arrangement could carry.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, consider Israel’s Arab citizens. Their communities face violent crime, inadequate policing, infrastructure deficiencies, housing shortages and educational disparities. Effective representation matters. As the saying goes, nobody brings a rental car to the car wash. People invest in institutions in which they have a stake. Giving Arab representatives governing responsibility would strengthen the sense that Israel belongs to all its citizens.
An Israeli friend offered a simple observation this week: “If everyone keeps their pre-election promises, we’re going to have another election.” His comment reminded me of hatarat nedarim, the Jewish legal institution for annulling certain vows. Judaism takes promises seriously. Yet Jewish law also recognizes, as reflected in the tradition of hatarat nedarim and the familiar words of Kol Nidre, that commitments made without full knowledge of future circumstances may, under prescribed conditions and for the greater good, be reconsidered. What good could be greater than the future welfare of the Jewish state?
Jews love invoking Abba Eban’s famous observation that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I can’t help but wonder if this is a moment that future generations will turn that observation back on us.
Perhaps what appears to be a dilemma could become an opportunity to break political deadlock and reconsider entrenched patterns of exclusion – a moment calling for political imagination across the spectrum.
It is the great “what if” of our people, from the first Jewish family to the present day. What if Abraham had found a way to keep Ishmael in the fold? Israel’s leaders now have a chance to recognize possibilities that have longed seemed out of reach; its citizens have a chance to give those leaders the political room to act, and together the opportunity to summon the courage and collective imagination to build a Jewish and democratic state capacious enough for all who seek a place within the tent of Abraham.
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American Jews have fought BDS for 20 years. Israel’s election just handed them the winning move.
For decades, the American Jewish community has battled the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. Now, in the aftermath of the election there, it has the opportunity to deal it the biggest blow yet. All it has to do is send one clear message to the Israeli opposition leaders: Join with the Arab parties.
Many Israelis, such as The Democrats party leader Yair Golan, are making the same argument. Arab Israelis voted in historic numbers in this week’s national election, winning a total of 19 seats with all votes counted. Together Zionist and Arab parties would, with 67 seats, become the country’s ruling coalition and bring an end to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot pledged not to bring Arab parties into his coalition, and doing so would be no easy task. But if pressure builds at home and abroad — and if he gets cover and encouragement from Jewish leaders around the world — he might find a way. It’s a big ask of Eisenkot and more conservative opposition members, but it’s the right ask.
Breaking that one promise would enable Eisenkot to keep many more. He could pass his top legislative priorities, including an independent inquiry into Oct. 7, a crackdown on Jewish terrorism in the West Bank and a restoration of democratic norms.
Those are the immediate — and sufficient — Israeli reasons. There is a more basic one: a democracy shouldn’t treat the votes of 20% of its citizens as treyf. And from abroad, there’s an added benefit, one that could have a long-term impact on Israel’s well-being: Undermining the BDS movement.
For a generation, the movement to boycott, divest and sanction the Jewish state has called on governments, businesses and institutions to pull their investments from Israel, cancel Israeli academics and performers, and ban the import of Israeli goods.
It hasn’t succeeded — yet. Israeli international exports surged to $169 billion in 2025, the highest ever, and more than 35 states have passed anti-BDS laws. But BDS has been notching some major wins: In June, United Auto Workers delegates voted — barely — to divest from Israel bonds, the first major union to do so. Internationally, at least 50 universities, institutions and academic groups ended cooperative programs with Israeli universities, and there have been more than 1,000 cases of academic boycotts, cancellation of student exchange programs and research grants.
Some of that is in direct response to the Gaza War, but the BDS movement has built the infrastructure that turned outrage over the war into concrete actions.
The BDS movement has also normalized, or tried to normalize, the idea that entities that do business with Israel are complicit in apartheid, that Israel is a sham democracy and that Zionism is racism. BDS supplies the vocabulary of anti-Israel diatribes on social media.
Now Israel’s election provides a historic opportunity to prove BDS wrong, to take the steam out of a movement that shows no sign of slowing. Bringing together Jews and Arabs in a ruling coalition would be the single greatest blow to BDS.
For decades, American Jewish leaders and organizations have lobbied government officials, organized counter-petitions and worked to stem the BDS tide.
That job can now either get much easier, or immeasurably more difficult. A Jewish-Arab ruling coalition that acts on the issues of crime and under-investment plaguing Israel’s Arab communities would belie BDS advocates’ claim that a Jewish state and democracy are mutually exclusive.
That same Jewish-Arab partnership would have to work toward resolving Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza disaster — but those enormous tasks will be much easier with a strong majority and in a country not facing constant international pressure.
And if those 19 Arab seats amount to nothing? If the Jewish parties do all within their power to disempower Arab citizens who turned out in historic numbers?
Try arguing against the BDSers then. Try defending Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” when 20% of its citizens were just shut out of national representation.
Of course, there are other good reasons to bring the Arab parties into the government. One of them is written into Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which promises Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel, “full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”
For decades many Arab Israelis didn’t believe that sentence because they didn’t experience it. They stayed home, many because they refused to participate in a system that they believed would never truly serve them. This time, enraged by the Gaza War, fearful of violence in their own community and disgusted by the overt racism of Netanyahu’s Kahanist cabinet ministers, they chose to vote.
“I also wanted to show that Palestinians can participate when we choose to, and that our exclusion cannot be blamed on our refusal to enter the political arena,” wrote the journalist Nagham Zbeedat in Haaretz.
Seeing Arab Israelis dance in celebration when the election results were announced is a testament to the power of democracy and the hope it brings.
I know that what gives hope to American Jews like me instills fear in many Israelis. Palestinians from Gaza came over a border and slaughtered their loved ones.
But Palestinian citizens of Israel did not join the terror — something Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar counted on them doing. Arab Israelis were killed alongside their Israeli Jewish neighbors. And in many cases, they rescued Jews under attack.
American Jewish institutions need to step up and fight as hard for including Israeli Arabs in a new government as they do against boycotting Israel. Because fighting for democracy and fighting against BDS — it’s the same fight.
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