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Israel’s Ethiopian asylum seekers fight deportation efforts
(JTA) — This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
TEL AVIV – When Endalkew Yemani Tesma fled Ethiopia in 2005, he did not know what awaited him on the way to Israel, nor that once he arrived, he would spend nearly two decades without permanent status.
He passed through Sudan, then Libya, then Sudan again, and reached Israel in 2008 by way of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. There, Yemani Tesma said, he was held captive and abused by Bedouin traffickers, treatment that refugee rights organizations in Israel have documented extensively among those who crossed the same route.
After claiming asylum due to civil unrest in his home country, Yemani Tesma was given a 2(a)5 visa, the renewable permit that lets asylum seekers stay while their claims are pending. He settled in Jerusalem, married a fellow Ethiopian asylum seeker and started a family. His children have grown up in Israeli schools and, by every measure that matters to them, as Israelis. Although they are not Jewish, their first language is Hebrew, and they learned Israeli history alongside Jewish traditions and holidays.
Yemani Tesma works at a hummus restaurant in Jerusalem, the kind of job he described as paying the bills and supporting his six children, but nothing beyond that. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ate there once, Yemani Tesma recounted, “And he didn’t even try to deport me.”
But Yemani Tesma and his family are still in danger. A High Court decision last December allowed their group protection to be revoked. After years of feeling that they had found an oasis of safety, the family now faces the possibility of deportation. To prevent that from happening, a Jewish organization originally founded to help Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms is taking the Israeli government to court.
Few given refugee status
Israel’s asylum approval rate is roughly 0.1%, or about five people a year, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
It’s so low that Sigal Rozen, the public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli NGO she helped found in 1998, can name those whose applications have been approved by first and last name. In the European Union, by comparison, 39% of asylum decisions in 2025 were approvals.
She claimed that the bureaucracy, and the deferral of decisions on some files for years, is deliberate. “They want to make life as difficult as possible, so that people give up and leave,” she asserted.
According to Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, 1,334 asylum applications from Ethiopian citizens are currently pending. And Ethiopians are just a sliver of the asylum-seeking population. Roughly 30,000 asylum seekers live in Israel, a country of just over 10 million people. Most of those asylum seekers are Eritrean and Sudanese who crossed the Sinai before Israel completed its border fence with Egypt in 2013.
Eritreans still hold group protection that shields them from deportation, because Israel accepts that conditions in the country are too dangerous for them to return, and most Sudanese have obtained status through the courts, as Israel does not have official diplomatic relations with Khartoum and cannot deport them there. Ethiopians have no such shield.
Israel had granted group protection to Ethiopian nationals in light of the civil war between the Ethiopian armed forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front back in November of 2021. In January 2024, Israel’s then-Interior Minister Moshe Arbel withdrew it, citing advice that the security situation in Ethiopia was sufficiently stable for nationals to return. Arbel declined to be interviewed for this story.
In December 2025, the High Court upheld that decision, rejecting an appeal by the Hotline, HIAS Israel and the Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel. The three-judge panel gave them four months to prepare to leave.
The Population and Immigration Authority has since begun pulling individual case files — some untouched for years — to the front of the queue in order to reject them, telling asylum seekers to leave the country or risk deportation.
Ethiopians whose claims have been rejected can now be detained if they come to a government office for any reason, Shahar Mandil, policy advocate at the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations in Israel, said. Some do not know they have been rejected, as notices were sent to email addresses they no longer use or to lawyers who no longer represent them.
“A decision on an asylum application is delivered through the contact channels provided by the asylum seeker,” the Population and Immigration Authority told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It is the asylum seeker’s responsibility to keep those contact details updated,” adding that every asylum seeker whose application is rejected is asked to leave the country.
The Population and Immigration Authority’s position is that conditions in Ethiopia no longer justify group protection, and that asylum seekers can return to the country’s capital of Addis Ababa even if other areas remain unstable.
Under international refugee law, a state can reject a claim of asylum by arguing that the applicant could move somewhere safer within their own country (known as an internal flight alternative). But that argument carries a requirement, said Nimrod Avigal, director of legal aid at HIAS Israel: “You need to show that this specific person can actually move within the country.”
Yordanos, who declined to give her last name for fear of deportation, said it was not possible to go elsewhere in Ethiopia. “We can’t move from one place to another,” she explained. “Any police checkpoint can stop you, depending on who you are and where you’re from.” When it comes to Addis Ababa, she continued, “Even if it were safe, it’s not possible. You can’t bring 130 million people to live in Addis,” referring to the entire population of Ethiopia.
Yordanos reached Israel in 2022 after securing a visa for a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, another route that many Ethiopian asylum seekers described taking to JTA. She and her husband hold advanced degrees and once ran a business that took them to more than 11 countries. In Israel, she cleans houses.
Israel historically backed refugee rights
On Sept. 22, the district court in Tel Aviv will hear a case seeking a new way to prevent the deportation of non-Jewish Ethiopians currently in Israel. A petition from HIAS Israel argues that the government has never created a mechanism for asylum seekers to claim protection from deportation under the principle of non-refoulement, which bars states from returning people to countries where they face danger.
HIAS was founded in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to help Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire. It spent the following century assisting Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust. As Jewish migration slowed in the 2000s, the organization expanded its work to non-Jewish refugees, including Syrians, Afghans, Ukrainians and Somalis, dropping “Hebrew” from its name in 2014. Its Israel branch now represents non-Jewish asylum seekers, with the government of the Jewish state as the defendant.
Israel was among the first countries to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, and Israeli jurists helped write it, including Jacob Robinson, a Lithuanian-born legal adviser to Israel’s UN delegation who was a central figure in its drafting. The treaty’s cardinal principle is non-refoulement, that no state may return a person to a country where they face serious danger. Israeli courts operate on what Anat Ben-Dor, a clinical instructor at Tel Aviv University’s Refugee Rights Clinic who is currently handling several Ethiopian cases, called an interpretive presumption: “Unless there is clear contradictory legislation, the government should be assumed to abide by international law.”
James Loeffler, the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, who studies the Jewish role in building the postwar human rights system, said the people who wrote those rules would not recognize what Israel is doing now. Robinson and his contemporaries “were committed to non-refoulement. They would have seen that as the cardinal principle above all and would be gravely disappointed by a situation in which Israel is sending thousands of people back to a country where they still face serious peril,” Loeffler said.
Not everyone sees the low asylum recognition rate as a failure, however. Yonatan Jakubowicz, founder and executive director of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, which advocates for tighter immigration controls, argues that Israel has struck a deliberate balance between “maximum compliance with the principle of non-refoulement” and restricting long-term settlement and the “pull factor” it creates for mass migration.
Israel, he notes, is the only developed country with a land and sea border with Africa, apart from the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, into which roughly 70,000 people crossed from Morocco in a matter of days last month, prompting an emergency EU meeting.
Israel’s granting permanent residence to Ethiopians, Eritreans and Sudanese “could collapse its immigration policies, triggering a massive influx of illegal and mixed migration” over the Egyptian fence or by sea, “followed by a wave of family reunification requests.”
The route he described has been effectively closed for more than a decade; crossings from the Sinai all but stopped after the border fence went up. Most Ethiopians reached Israel by other means – on tourist or work visas or, like Yordanos, on visas for religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem – and applied for asylum after arriving.
Jakubowicz’s arguments are echoed elsewhere in the Western world. Earlier this month, a U.S. district judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians, after the Department of Homeland Security announced in December that conditions in Ethiopia “no longer pose a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Ethiopian nationals.” The language is nearly identical to the advice Israel’s former interior minister, Arbel, cited in Jerusalem two years earlier.
Mola, who asked to be identified by his first name only as he still has family in Ethiopia and also fears deportation, worries that Israel will follow the U.S. lead and step up deportations of Ethiopian asylum seekers ahead of the national elections scheduled for Oct. 27 as a campaign victory for the right-wing coalition now in power.
“Every time there’s an election, asylum seekers suddenly become a target,” said Mandil of the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations. “Because there are many groups, in many parts of the Israeli public, and it’s both the coalition and the opposition that make promises, trying to convince people to vote for them if only they can take care of this situation.”
In addition to repeating common tropes in the developed world tying migrants to theft and violence, Israelis who support cracking down on immigration often invoke another argument: demography. They worry that letting asylum seekers stay permanently in Israel would erode the Jewish majority of the Jewish state.
“The logic is, if we allow groups of non-Jewish people to stay here, they could, God forbid, marry Israelis, and that threatens Jewishness, the Jewish majority,” Mandil said. Loeffler traces the same anxiety to Israel’s unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Non-Palestinian refugees, he said, have “absolutely gotten caught up in that struggle,” because Israeli leaders resist any move they fear “might open up more opportunities for Palestinians to make legal claims.”
Sivan Carmel, country director of HIAS Israel, calls the numbers argument a non-starter. “Israel has a population of about 10 million, this is 50,000, 60,000 people. It doesn’t make a dent in the demography of the country,” she said.
A clock that keeps ticking
The children of asylum seekers have long been a focus of civil society organizations working on their behalf. They argue that the state should treat them as cases separate from their parents and that even if Israel tries to deport the parents, the children are a different question. Mandil has spent years making that case in the Knesset.
“How can they be asylum seekers when 94% of them were born in Israel?” she said. Asked whether they speak Hebrew, she answered: “Completely. Better than I do.” Yet they are classified, she noted, not as asylum seekers but as infiltrators. “How can you be an infiltrator when you were born in Israel?”
Ethiopian asylum-seeking parents who spoke with JTA described a particular kind of parenting, shielding their children from what their lack of status would eventually cost them, while preparing them for the moment they turned 18 and found out.
Yemani Tesma likened it to a “a clock that keeps ticking. I know the alarm will ring, and I have to decide what to do by the time it does.”
Eventually, the time came.
When his son turned 16, his classmates began preparing for the military draft. His son, however, was left out. No call-up notice, no aptitude test, none of the photographs with families at the recruitment office. So he asked his father why.
“It is because you are not Israeli, and cannot become Israeli,” his father told him. His son shut his bedroom door, Yemani Tesma said, and did not open it for a day.
Israel, like most countries outside the Americas, does not grant citizenship on the basis of birth alone. A child’s status is derivative of a parent’s, said Ben-Dor of the Refugee Rights Clinic. Courts will occasionally make exceptions – for a child with a disability, or one whose integration into Israeli society is exceptional, say – but the government, she said, is wary of any principle suggesting that being born in Israel could confer legal status.
Ben-Dor is representing two Tigrayan mothers of children with special needs whose humanitarian applications cannot be considered at all because the Interior Ministry demands Ethiopian passports the women do not have in order to process their claims.
In early 2012, then-interior minister Eli Yishai lifted collective protection for South Sudanese nationals, clearing the way to deport 1,500 people. The first flight left Tel Aviv for Juba on June 17 of that year, in an operation the government called “Returning Home.” Civil war broke out the following year.
“Children who had studied in Israeli schools found themselves drawing water from wells in South Sudan,” HIAS Israel’s Avigal said. “These are Hebrew-speaking children.”
Why did we come here?
Most asylum seekers in Israel hold a 2(a)5 visa. “It’s a specific visa whose only function is to say you can’t be deported,” said Mandil. The visa is stamped “This permit is not a work permit.” Asylum seekers are able to work, however, because the state promised the High Court it would not fine their employers.
“Every right, every basic right, every social service, we have to fight for,” Mandil said. “They aren’t eligible for anything, not a driver’s license, not the ability to leave the country and come back, not health insurance, not higher education. Certain professions are closed to them because they have no status.”
That has left many Ethiopian asylum seekers in a cycle of poverty in the country where they sought refuge. Now, with a deportation deadline already behind them, 18 years after Yemani Tesma arrived and raised a family here, some are asking why they came at all.
Mola is a community leader and translator and spends his unpaid hours helping asylum seekers file petitions with the Interior Ministry.
“When I am not doing my backbreaking work,” he told JTA, “I do all I can to help asylum seekers fill out paperwork.” He once worked as a project coordinator and Amharic translator at the Canadian Embassy in Israel.
“Anyone who has had the option or ability to leave Israel for a third country has done so. Everyone who is left here has nowhere else to go,” he said.
In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, it seemed there might be an opening for the Ethiopian asylum seekers to cement their place in Israel.
As Israel’s largely foreign agricultural workforce was evacuated and Palestinian work permits were suspended, some of the people the Interior Ministry is now preparing to deport went to farms along the Gaza border to pick fruit.
Members of the Ethiopian asylum-seeking community bought supplies at supermarkets and delivered them to Israeli soldiers, Mola said.
Multiple busloads of asylum seekers traveled to farms in the envelope to harvest crops that would otherwise have rotted. None of them were paid. “After Oct. 7, we saw asylum seekers volunteering to assist people in the south, distributing food, volunteering in agriculture. I’ve seen it with my clients, and I’ve seen it with groups of asylum seekers,” Avigal, of HIAS, said.
Three months later, the Interior Ministry revoked their protection from deportation.
Asked whether any of this had left him bitter toward Israel, one Ethiopian asylum seeker, who asked not to be named for fear of deportation, rejected the premise. “I don’t hate,” he said. “Bless Israel.”
Told that someone else in his position might feel differently, he answered, “No. What we hate is the decision.”
Avigal added, “What we say at HIAS is, we used to help people because they’re Jewish, and now we’re helping people because we’re Jewish.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel’s Ethiopian asylum seekers fight deportation efforts appeared first on The Forward.
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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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